T. E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett

13.6.25.

You asked me long ago how I was correcting the old text... since when I've had nothing convenient to send you. Here at last is a section (Book VI) ready for Pike, to whom please forward it when you have looked at it. (if you want to trouble yourself still with the rake's progress of this deplorable work).

This, being the best written section, is less cut about than any yet: and has lost fewer lines: only a bare 15%: though a good many lines usually come out in the next stage (galley) and in the first page-proof which succeeds the galley. So not all that I have now left will survive to the end. My judgment gets furry, by dint of staring at the familiar pages.

What muck, irredeemable, irremediable, the whole thing is! How on earth can you have once thought it passable? My gloomy view of it deepens each time I have to wade through it. If you want to see how good situations, good characters, good material can be wickedly bungled, refer to any page, passim. There isn't a scribbler in Fleet Street who wouldn't have got more fire and colour into every paragraph.

Trenchard withdrew his objection to my rejoining the Air Force. I got seventh-heaven for two weeks: but then Sam Hoare came back from Mespot, and refused to entertain the idea. That, and the closer acquaintance with The Seven Pillars (which I now know better than anyone ever will) have together convinced me that I'm no bloody good on earth. So I'm going to quit: but in my usual comic fashion I'm going to finish the reprint and square up with Cape before I hop it! There is nothing like deliberation, order and regularity in these things.

I shall bequeath you my notes on life in the recruits camp of the R.A.F. They will disappoint you.

Yours

T.E.S.

Post Office closed. So the stamps are put on at a venture.