T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 607

14. 8. 28. Dear X. You have this time gone to the heart of the matter, any way. Simplification will go no further. That is a tremendous challenge to the audience: or to the spectators, in this case. They have got to put in all the rest. Impossible to judge from photographs. There is, I can see, apparently a perfect fitness between your figures, and the pylon against which they stand, and the dees carved behind their heads. Your "architecture", that's to say, is it. And I think you have brought the other things off, I think. This isn't a literary device like the Battersea memorial. This is the plainest, starkest, sculpture. I wish I could see it, new and clean. In two of these photographs it looks superb. How tired you must be. I wrote out a fair copy of a diary I'd kept, years ago, at Uxbridge, for Edward Garnett. It was just copying. It left me drained like a lemon which had been de-piped on one of those glass cone things. Am still right empty. You will take six months to fill up; more perhaps. I think that wild rush against time is very often the spur to good work. And now what? England and a rest I hope. Is the world smooth enough for you to go to the cottage and roll to up and down the lawn? I hope so. Holly Lodge is the sort of place I long for, ever so often. Miranshah is a lost fort in the hills. We have fallen over the edge of the world, and cannot see it, or hear it, or remember it. I do not know why people want to have and to hold. Possession frightens me as much as would being possessed. Is it only women? It would be a good study, jealousy. I have always kept clear of it, or tried to. Home? April 1930, I hope: if that film is out and forgotten soon. Otherwise later. Oh, I shan't half be glad to get home. T.E.S. 339171 l/c Shaw R.A. Miranshah Fort, Waziristan, India.