T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 83

Mount Batten Plymouth 13.6.33 "Dear J.B. Thanks for the Gold Falcon - and this morning a copy of it arrives from Faber & Faber, a luxury book, in vellum and gold! So H... is not ashamed of it. No, candidly, am I. Let me confess that I got a good deal of laughing pleasure out of it. You will think me very decadent, but this disintegrated, exclamatory style fits its subject, and keeps the whole book in movement. It is not so good as "Dream of Fair Women": but is remarkably witty, of the armistice sort ... but is is probably a not-too-wild picture of the literary New York that he knows. As for his contemporaries, he is hot against Priestley - but all the long writers get their ... Admittedly he including me, if I am a writer at all - and he praises all the others, has quoters of mine, but such harmless plain phrases. My memory has forgotten them: yet they are likely to be authentic. No room for objection, from me. So on the whole I sum up favourably. There is no growth in the book: and the climax is a surrender to an impossible dilemma: a weariest but there is much activity, some good pictures of town and country, two (at least) characters. Pros and cons. Not a favourite book, nor a well-selling book, but not despicable. You are overheated, I think. Yours, T.E.Shaw." (P.S. "It seems ever so hard to write books to order - witness Pocohontas. By that I don't mean that anyone ordered it, but David Garnett feels it's up to him to find a subject for his next book, within six months of his last - and that's a pity. In W. Forster chooses the better way. I will read your prose book as soon as I can, and say what I think about it. T.E.S." Mount Batten Plymouth 25.3.33 "Dear J.B. Of course I agree with your argument: but I question the premises. Neurotics cannot write about themselves except with that sense of the inside that you deplore: and cannot write about others than themselves. You would never have them leave rating alone: but the literature of diseases is more interesting to me, than all the healthy books. Dostoevsky v. Galsworthy! Like you, I put Williamson very high as a writer. He can make pubs and purples interesting.