T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 282

Cattowater 23. VII. 29 Dear Wavell I move to Calshot tomorrow, and send you this thing as I move. The original MS. is on loan : this typescript came to me unexpectedly, from its owner. I have read it; correct it, and now forward it on: your opinion; if you have time, I should value from you. It puzzles me. There is a fastidiousness about its prose, a power & drive, (almost a heat) about it which it's carved cherry-stone, compared with the Seven Pillars, which was a picture of a race at war : but perhaps my gifts lie more towards the small, better done, better written, better proportioned, than the Seven Pillars, I think. It also shocks & grieves me, that I should be so feeble, and have so given myself away. One lives decently, and keeps the lid on - to what end, if one takes the lid off; and spills the pot into a book? Parts of this thing are horrible : and I'm a worm, nearly all through. You may be astonished at the language, which is more used than recorded, as a rule. Only I don't ever use it : so it seems to me not worse to write it than to say it. The ranks talk and live & feel (I fancy) very much as I have shown them. The book is photographic in its truth. Of course it is only part of the picture. I think that Hoare & Trenchard did ill to the R.A.F. when they threw me out, and so broke the continuity of my experience. The Tank Corps intervened, and the desire to make back the freshness, and sense of the desert, sand the gesture to make back the freshness, had gone out of me. I had meant to write a "big" book (not in size : in matter) about that life has never been done. Depot R.A.F. The corporate life has never been a short grim introduction: here you have its 50 sections, which would have boiled down to 20 pages: its then there was to be the Air life, properly told, as I then there was never to be. I'm sorry. I love it. Now that will never happen, unless as a gift worth making to the R.A.F. think it would have been a gift worth making to the R.A.F. I fire tried to balance the account, slightly, by putting in a few pages about the happiness of Cranwell : but they lack deliberateness : are book-making. So they lack weren't done deliberately, as book-making. So they lack orderliness : are scrappy.