T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 595

The rance and proportion of head, neck and supports are apparently exact. I'd have liked more difference in surface treatment between hair, flesh and clothing - especially the last two. The shoulders are very good, in their conventional-ity; but the neck of the tunic has a little too much work in it. I've cut out the button and slapped the whole of it over with a very wet hand-edge or knife blade, to give it a jagged or dashed surface. About the hair I can't make up my ... mind. ...ted the effort is a "knock-out ..... but should hair, a flimsy accident, administer a knock-out as severe as that of the bony structure of the skull itself? The short hair is admirable: the longer hair almost too good. I fancy that it is precisely at this point that the plaster contributes most to the confusion of my judgment. There is a terrific shadow under the top-look of hair, and a blinding frontal bone, and jaw. By the way the structure of the forehead seems to be one of the very best things in the whole and it is very difficult to flick the head up into detail. It hangs tightly together as a most convincing portrait of a person very sure of himself. I'd like to bet that you were playing up to my supposed feeling for sculpture, as much as I was trying to correct your interest in psychology. Yet I can't remember much about the sittings except that I went off into a day-dream whenever we were left alone: and that I was usually dog-tired before I ever came. It was such a pity that I had to leave your sittings to the bitter end of my last month and it was no end of a bitter month. Chalk that on to the tail of the score of the Seven Pillars. The tail of the score! I'm an optimist if I think that the worry and shame of that book aren't only just beginning. Your picture-show must be going forward fast, to judge by a telegraphed paragraph headlined in the papers here a day or two ago, in which C.B.S. suggests my being offered Bachelor quarters in Blenheim, and other sad things. It's a pity people don't generally realise that I can make the most lovely bubble and squeak of a life for myself, without their contributing any ingredient at all. However. The cat's away. T.E.S. Intentionally C. is not mentioned in this letter. I hope she is over it, well. Did you get 4 well-bound copies of the Seven ...lars?