T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 81

- 2 - As for slices of life, and the digestive juices of imaginative reflection: I do not think we are really different. I want a diary, or record of events to be as near slices-of-life as or. . imaginations drag in such in-stances. In poetry too, slice-of-life jars, because their province is the sublimation of the theme. See the difference 'tween Sgt. Bourgeois and ... and Piaget: or better, ... Sir. the Return of the Brute. One is eye-witness or ear-witness, and the other creative mind. In the first the photograph cannot be too sharp, for it's the sense which records: in the second you need design. Any care for design renders the record infect. Yours T.E.Shaw I've had a long day, and want to sleep: so here's good night." Mount Batten Plymouth 8/3/30. "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. 1937 represents my last essay in publishing things! People shouldn't write unless they have something especially 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 fashions. The satire that fetches me is Quixote, or Gulliver, or Rabelais, which deal more with natures than with manners. Bates is so-so: Partridge on the war books was worth reading: as was Streeter (published as a pamphlet by Faber). Lately I read with delight and astonishment a book called ... Faries, and thought it much the best picture of the English soldier ever ... though hurriedly, so fitfully distorted, so truthful. A very delicate, admiration ever since ... published his first book of imaginary portraits. I never dared, 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 and water - which doesn't mix, but a lovely mingling of sharp and blunt, like bacon and eggs. I disliked Laughton, and the two comic Irishmen: and thought the lots of ... ... nothing to get peeved about. Yet this second act was unspeakably good. My time to leave the RAF 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 of Charing Cross Road) and find it an unlimited blessing. You have to use a Bourgeois ink, that will not hurt your feelings. It lasts for ever. Yours, T.E.Shaw"