T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 495

To Hogarth 27.viii.27 I've been through much of Doughty, of late, and checked Fair- lie's book on him. Adam cast forth is splendid. As for the lack defies the last ...form which would have ruined a less great ..an.. work: but otherwise I cannot see more than great effort and great failure in his poetic work. Doughty's imagination was rich; his sense of style faultless; and he had no sense of ...sign. Arabia Deserta remains wonderful, because there his weak imagin- ation had only to select from an array of thronging facts: his sense of scale had a whole desert for its province: his sense of design could express itself only in the simpleness of his wander- ings, and not in confusing the record of his wanderings. Dawn in Britain, is like the trace of Doughty's journeys in Arabia, with Arabia left out. So I conclude that the parts of your book which will matter most are 1) Any further light his letters throw on the making of him before he settled in Italy to write A.D. 11) Your dissection of his notebooks. and "2" is infinitely the more important of these efforts. If you can set side by side parts of the notes & parts of the fin- ished text, and indicate how the notes were made, & how far they all went into the text, or if there was abridgement, or selection, & "What the incident is... that you will be doing a very great thing. A.D. is one of the mystery-masterpieces of the world: and people who ever write will always be grateful to you for making plain how it grew. There is no laxiety in studying the works: I should have liked to have had a chat: that walk of it, myself.... but it was out of the question that I should ever write anything again. I think you may manage to get ...e set to something. He will crash himself, sooner or later, I suppose, and then we will all be sorry for not having prevented what lay in himself to do or leave undone. The clerk at our local post office seems to have a postage-due stamp, which he perhaps puts each week on enough letters or post- cards to bring his meagre pay up to what he considers the right .. standard. Unfortunately he (or apparently) considers he is due .. for proputtion, whereas we want to sack him. So R.A.P. Truck Road now hands him back such properly-stamped letters as he tries to make an extra profit on. ...as explains the fate of your post-cards. Books on Arabia are no good to me now. There has been another post-card since. Do you refuse them all, too, like ..ac the P.O. will see that the game lacks profit. Did you see A.T.W. kick his heels in the air, over me, th'other day? Silly ass. Old P-C.K. in the King. Journal, too, found me too "indecent for young minds. When they were in Baghdad ...ey Corps had the troops stopped from entering the city in "shorts". They were indecent too? I only hope nobody on my behalf enters the knock-about lists.