T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 629

I'm afraid you will think me not qualified for your expensive present, by my manner of cold-bloodedly considering it. Yet to take it on the rush would not have done justice to the goodness of your offer. I shall be exceedingly grateful, and will put the old man to the best of all tests in liking large parts of him, greatly and on re-acquaintance. I once had a Mermaid (is it Mermaid?) Webster, & used to read in it very often. It will be rich to own him all; and I like "reading all a man Often at the v:ry end one suddenly seems to com...rehend him, then. Lately I have read the letters of Gertrude Bell; which were just the exact surface of Gertrude Bell; not once (yes, once perhaps,) did she touch gro.nd in them; and so they disappointed me: I used to gaze at her, in life, wondering what "her" was really like - either very secret, or very shallow; but I liked her so much, for her goodness and eagerness. Let's hope she was very secret, too. Also the Conrad letters. They show a real agony of effort. I wonder what the end was in his case. The Mirror of the Sea I feel is unqualified beauty; and I liked the Arror of Gold and Revenge, and parts of the Rescue and the personal recollections. The other books wearied me a little. There seemed no development of Joseph Conrad in them; and one does not wish to know an unchanging personality very well. But he was too hasty: Did he write too much? The output was enormous in those few years. Your second novel will not repeat your first; so here is to it. I hope it goes through. Parts of the first come back to my memory without warning at odd times as I lie about brooding. The Greece part, especially. You get a tense effect out of quite simple words strung together in an apparently simple sequence. I've looked at it, and cannot find out in what way they are different from other peoples' sentences. Yet somehow actual sentences have stuck to me; that I should remember scenes, I can easily understand. They were good. But how your non-purple passages carry their virtue...... Enough of this. You are a critic, and I'm not even that. Rsl...'s swears that my unwieldy hulk of a Seven Pillars contains some good stuff. I'd go so far as to think that some paragraphs in it were more or less adequate prose; but I'm hanged if I see any good in 99.6% of it. Did you ever have another bang at it? I gave E.L.T. a copy.