Contents lists
T. E. Lawrence to G. W. M. Dunn
Plymouth
15.XII.32.
Dear Dunn,
I got to my cottage last Sunday and in turning over the pile of books, lit upon the Blunden 'Owen': so I dragged it down here and duly posted it off to you.
Owen is a very beautiful technician, with great power of saying, (not to mention seeing) things. [2 lines omitted] Sassoon has told me a lot about him. Owen was a decent fellow, very modest and not tolerant.
I hope it makes up for the Eliot essays. they went to you because they are interesting, I think. I did not read them all, because many of them have already passed my eye in other publications. He writes freely for the Criterion and other papers, you know. His Dante I have as a small book. It is excellent.
Many of the other essays are not good. He has a confused and knotty mind, and makes more mess of a simple subject than any other conceived human being. I don't know any critic who more darkens the mists and confuses the faults of his authors. After an hour of Eliot I thank God for Arnold Bennett!
Bertrand Russell is foolish, I think. Silly. A fat-head: but
there was his book stuck in my locker, and it did help to pack out the
Eliot parcel. Poor Owen went off lonely, by himself. I nearly sent
you Figgis Children of Earth - an Irish novel of great scale: but I
feared your mind was above novels.
Music? We have none here. Wireless is a very false-toned
caricature of music, I think. Gramophone is my stand-by, and a
magnificent stand-by, surely. A Ginn gramophone which broods over my
cottage and fills it with the sound of strings, when I want. Mostly
old stuff: Beethoven quartets and concertos by anybody.
Yours,
T.E.S.
Source: | DG 756-7 |
Checked: | jw/ |
Last revised: | 21 January 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset