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T. E. Lawrence to Peter Davies
Thursday, 28 Feb 35
Dear P.D.,
On Tuesday I took my
discharge from the R.A.F. and started southward by road, meaning to call
at Bourne and see Manning: but to-day I turned eastward, instead,
hearing that he was dead.
It seems queer news,
for the books are so much more intense than ever he was, and his dying
doesn't, cannot, affect them. Therefore what has died really? Our hopes
of having more from him - but that is greed. The writing them was such
pain - and pains - to him. Of late I had devoutly wished him to cease
trying to write. He had done enough; two wonderful works, full-sized:
four lesser things. A man who can produce one decent book is a fortunate
man, surely?
Some friends of
mine, in dying, have robbed me; Hogarth and Aubrey Herbert are two empty
places which no one and nothing can ever fill. Whereas Doughty and Hardy
and Manning had earned their release. Yet his going takes away a person
of great kindness, exquisite and pathetic. It means one rare thing the
less in our setting. You will be very sad.
My losing the R.A.F.
numbs me, so that I haven't much feeling to spare for the while. In fact
I find myself wishing all the time that my own curtain would fall. It
seems as if I had finished, now. Strange to think how Manning, sick,
poor, fastidious, worked like a slave for year after year, not on the
concrete and palpable boats or engines of my ambition, but on stringing
words together to shape his ideas and reasonings. That's what being a
born writer means, I suppose. And to-day it is all over and nobody ever
heard of him. If he had been famous in his day he would have liked it, I
think; liked it deprecatingly. As for fame-after-death, it's a thing to
spit at; the only minds worth winning are the warm ones about us. If we
miss those we are failures. I suppose his being not really English, and
so generally ill, barred him from his fellows. Only not in Her
Privates We which is hot-blooded and familiar. It is puzzling. How I
wish, for my own sake, that he hadn't slipped away in this fashion; but
how like him. He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was.
Yours ever
T. E. Shaw
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