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T. E. Lawrence to Henry Williamson
Extracts, 530 words omitted
[2.4.28]
Back to Tarka: the worst thing
about the war-generation of introspects is that they can't keep off
their blooming selves. As you saw, I'm glad to say, by the length and
elaboration of my remarks, the book did move me, and gratify me,
profoundly. It was the real stuff. I shouldn't, if I were you, attempt
to re-do it; the non-successes, the gritty stuff, of real people, are
altogether topping as examples of how things come and grow; it's like
sculpture: the brokenness of the Venus de Milo is the main virtue of
that sentimental but very lovely work. I like best of all the books in
which fallible men have burst themselves trying to be better than they
can be. Tarka, to anyone who's tried to write, is a technical
delight, all the more perfect for being imperfect, here and there. If
you write it out again, and make a rounded and gracious thing of it,
you'll rob us of the object lesson, and deprive us of what might have
been a new and very lovely book, on another subject.
- - -
Now a confession. In the R.A.F. we
live in a communism which is voluntary and real. So as soon as the old
stag arrived he disappeared. I haven't an idea who has him, out of the
seven hundred fellows of us in camp. He will infallibly return, after a
few days, or after many days; nothing ever goes wholly astray, nor is
anything wasted. They are like townees on a desert island, longing to
taste all the book fruit they see on the shelves of all the shops, but
afraid to taste, without some guide to tell them what's what.
- - -
Being almost book-blind, themselves,
any guide is welcome. So they assume that all my books are eatable. I
suffer, once in a way, as now; but generally I'm delighted that they
should find me of use. I like these fellows enormously. We are really
the same kind of creature - or would have been if I'd had a natural
life, and not a mort of extravagant experience - and the nearer I can
creep back towards them the safer I feel. They give one a root in the
ground.
- - -
The Arab business was a freak in my
living; and if I did the wonders they ascribe to me, then, it was wholly
by accident, for in normal times I'm plumb ordinary. I don't believe the
yarns they tell. Only it seems conceited to refuse to accept public
opinion about oneself.
- - -
I wonder what you will do about money.
Tarka will not have made much, and the more carefully you write
the less you are likely to earn. Do you notice how the writers who are
very widely sold are so often careless writers? Dickens, I'm thinking
of, and Tolstoi, and Balzac: though Balzac rewrote all his novels in
proof, but he wasn't thinking about their form, so much as of the forms
of the characters in them. I wish I could think clearly enough about all
the writers of the world, and see if it's more than blind chance which
makes one seem good and another bad: if only there was an absolute
somewhere: the final standard by which everything could be measured. At
present we have ever so many surveys of literature: but they aren't so
much surveys as sentimental journeys across it. For a survey you must
have a measured base: and instead of that we have just opinions and
opinions.
Note:
Extracts, printed in GOF out of sequence but in the correct
sequence here. Full text, 1,114 words, in Letters Vol. 9 pp. 45-8. In GOF
the passages above are printed with a final paragraph that comes from
Lawrence's letter of
11 December 1928.
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