T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 73

To John Brophy, Kelvin House, King Edwards Road, Ruislip, Middlesx. Mount Batten Plymouth. 8/2/30. Dear Brophy I'm sorry -- for your sake -- that the miscellany is off. I had, as I told you, no intention of writing for it, or for anything else. THAT represents my last essay in publishing things! People shouldn't write unless they have something especial to say. It should be forced out, against the grain. These wanting-to-write authors are a nuisance. I read the window. Your satire rather passed me by, as I go out so little, and therefore am ignorant of the demitasse. The satire that fetches me is Quixote, or Gulliver or Rabelais, which deals more with natures than with dress. Bates is so-so. Partridge on the mother he prosti...ing: -- as was ...rol (published as a "pamphlet by Pater). Lately I read with delight and astonishment a book called "Her Privates We" and thought it much the best picture of the English soldier ever produced. So humorous, so dimly discriminating, so truthful. A very delicate, though hurried, bit of writing by a man for whose prose I have had admiration ever since he published his first book of imaginary portraits. I never, ...cate, though, to hope that so essentially delicate a man could write so robustly about real people. He was bookish, before the war. I'd have called the oscillations between reality and formality in the Silver Tassie not a mixture of oil & water -- which doesn't mix, but a lovely mingling of sharp and lush, like bacon and eggs. I disliked Laughton, & the two comic Irishmen; and thought the loss of Jessie nothing to get peeved about. Yet the second act was unspeakably good. My time to leave the R A F is 1935; so the post- corporals will be my guardians for very long yet. India ink is the only stuff for proof-correcting, or indeed for any kind of correcting. I use it in a fountain- pen (sold only by Reeves at Cheaping Cross Rd.) and find it an unlimited blessing. You have to use a Bourgeois ink, then: but unless you are a communist, that will not hurt your feelings. It lasts for ever. Y S