the Letters of T.E. Lawrence
Letter 352: To E.M. Forster, April 16, 1928 ...from Karachi, Pakistan..... " Dear E.M.F., Forgive the pencil. I am inkless this afternoon. Don't cut me off from anything you may write in future, because you've sent me one supremely good thing.* I've liked everything you've written: some of it very much, some of it less: but I liked it all. I've tried to write, myself, and know that a man doesn't ever succeed in mating sound and sense and expectation. We land, always, other than we meant to land. That's presumably the fun as well as the vexation of writing. Your less-good work is very helpful to me, as an amateur of writing: for our minds are parallel enough for me to see your intention behind the expression, (or to flatter myself that I do partly and in some senses see it...oh shades of Henry James in this style of letter!) and just because it may not completely come off, so I may be able to see the works inside it more clearly. " {*footnote, an unpublished story}
From 'the sea, the sea' by Iris Murdoch
Quoting from letter from Lizzie to Charles:
If I came to see you like you want, just coming because you feel in the mood to see me, to sort of try my company again, I would fall straight back into the old madness....you didn't love me enough, and now - I don't believe in miracles....Charles, I've been in hell and I've come out of it and I don't want to go there again..... My love for you is quiet at last. I don't want it to become a roaring furnace.
the Letters of T.E. Lawrence
Letter 205: To Lionel Curtis, dated March 19, 1923. .........."There again, perhaps there's a solution to be found in multiple personality. It's my reason which condemns the book (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and the revolt, and the new nationalities: because the only rational conclusion to human argument is pessimism such as Hardy's, a pessimism which is very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees, about us. Our camp on its swelling in this desolation feels pustular, and we (all brown-bodied, with yellow spots down our front belly-line), must seem like the swarming germs of its fermentation. That's feeling, exterior-bred feeling, with reason harmonising it into a picture: but there's a deeper sense which remembers other landscapes, and the changes which summer will bring to this one: and to that sense nothing can be changeless: whereas the rational preference or advantage of pessimism is its finality, the eternity in which it ends: and if there isn't an eternity there cannot be a pessimism pure."
the Letters of T.E. Lawrence
Letter 234: December 19, 1923. To Subscribers to 'Seven Pillars' postmarked at Clouds Hill, Moreton ...............[On May 31st, 1923, Bernard Shaw wrote a private memorandum to Mr. Baldwin, then Prime Minister, expressing his great concern at Lawrence's poverty. 'Clearly this is a bad case of Belisarius begging obols in an ungrateful country...the fact remains that he is serving as a private soldier for his daily bread: and however much his extraordinary character may be accountable for this, it strikes all who know about it as a scandal that should be put an end to by some means. They feel that the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery and are amazed to find that Lawrence is not in a position of a pensioned commanding officer in dignified private circumstances.' Bernard Shaw sent the letter to Hogarth, who corrected some of his statements, before sending it to the Prime Minister. Shaw did not rest content with a refusal but continued to press Mr. Baldwin, and afterwardes Mr. MacDonald, on the subject of a pension for Lawrence, but without success. From several of Lawrence's letters it would appear that he would have accepted a pension, had one been offered him, but I cannot think he would have been pleased that the sentence 'the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery' should be read by Mr. Baldwin]