T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 331

To H.Williamson Ozone Hotel Bridlington Yorks 11.Xll.34 Dear H.W. I have so much the better of you: for when I want a talk, it is just putting out an arm and taking a book .. book from my shelves. That's as it should be, at least; but just for I live in this house with a jesting dame (here to watch the gate of ten R.A.F. huts for next season's work on the bombing range) and for a word with you, grasping, I had to go to York and lay out three days' pay on The Curio....which I have been dipping in- to, with satisfaction, all this too rough Sunday. Too rough for a walk from lodgings. No clothes, poor fire for drying. What a sentence for No l!'s! Do you find it hard to begin... books? Let me take down your heckles by two quotes from the Linney; bad sentences. I.67 "...low heat and the floating algas...takes"....I.96 "many old bucks are caught in gins which otherwise would eat young rabbits." It isn't fair, for I would like to write like you, easily or grudgingly but copiously, able to make a sent- ence of all you see and do, with a catching intimate air, speech, like a man in slippers. For a mannered ... writer, you have the best manners in the world. Don't vex yourself over Walpole or Shanks or Hanks or Banks: or vex yourself only because they discourage your book-buyers. Or do they? The best way to sell a novel was to persuade the Bishop of London to preach aga- gainst it. I can conceive Hugh Walpole being second-best, if so wrapped up Hi their own sort of I fancy writers get all variations from it bad. At writing, tho' they find all variations from it bad. At least, they seem to me to make poor critics of contempor- ary stuff. You write a book disarmingly well. You write better than Richard Jeffries, splendid fellow though he was. Better for me, that is: I feel more heart and see less eye, in you. You look for the unusual,