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T. E. Lawrence to Sydney Cockerell
22.3.28
Dear Cockerell
It is very good of
you to have kept me so in touch with the passing of the great man. I'm
touched that he should have put my bust on his wall. It has there kept
better company than any other photo of mine has done.
I hope Mrs Hardy
will console herself with time and her friends. The correcting that big
book on T.H. will be hard for her: all digging into the past. I was
puzzled by the will. It seems to me she may not be well off. The
royalties (after a spurt this year and next) will run away very small in
the following 20 years: I gather that beyond that she has only £600 a
year. I am glad her mother is reprieved for the moment.
Somebody said there
was another volume of T.H. poetry to appear: yet the old man told me
once that he thought everything worth while had been printed. I wonder
if there was stuff he kept back for any reason except that of
insufficient goodness. However you are safe to destroy anything of his
which does not come up to your standard and his. He was so generously
large a poet that his individual lines are of small value.
As regards the D.G.H.
book on Doughty, we've agreed to leave it to Billy Hogarth, for the time
being. He will probably put it straight himself, being no inconsiderable
writer: and I think that he is much the fittest person to do it, if he
will.
I confess the Martin
Armstrong project does not please me. I do not see what a biography has
to do with criticism. The biographer's job is to present the facts of
the man's life and work, so far as they have a bearing on the shape of
the man's character or person in output: not to appraise him critically.
In the case of Doughty the important things would seem to be the
collation of the notes on Arabia with the text of Arabia Deserta:
and the discovery of the roots of Doughty's style (I think they are
ultimately pure Swedish: but it may be older: Icelandic even) and the
motives which led him to tackle Dawn in Britain, Adam, and
the Cliffs, Clouds, Titans, Mansoul
subjects.
These lines would
show the man: and the goodness of the poetry (very great, I think,
despite the superficial affectation) would be left for the taste of the
future to read or reject, as it pleased.
I shall be very glad
to be excused doing anything to the book. I feel inclined only to lie
down and sleep for ever, as all the best people are doing. Do you think
I dare have printed and circulated a card 'to announce cessation of
non-business correspondence' to every address in my memory?
Yours
T. E. Shaw
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