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Selected Letters of T.E. Lawrence
This paperback edition of Malcolm Brown’s seminal selection contains 470 of the most insightful, revealing and historically relevant letters written by Lawrence between 1905 and 1935. His remarkable epistles to contemporaries such as Lady Astor, Noel Coward, Robert Graves, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw disclose both the inner man and the political and military visionary often obscured behind the mystery and myth of "Lawrence of Arabia.” Among the letters is a wealth of intriguing correspondence that divulges the true nature of Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt, his anxieties about his illegitimacy, and his secret feelings on women and sexuality. In their entirety, these letters describe a remarkable but tragic life and provide ample proof of a gifted literary mind.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1941
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About the author
T.E. Lawrence
278 books376 followersBorn Thomas Edward Lawrence, and known professionally as T.E. Lawrence, though the world came to know him as Lawrence of Arabia. In 1922, Lawrence used the name John Hume Ross to enlist in the RAF; after being discovered and forced out, he took the name T.E. Shaw to join the Royal Tank Corps (1923). He was eventually let back into the RAF (1925).
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September 14, 2018
This was one of the more fascinating reading experiences I've had in some time. T. E. Lawrence is a very interesting person, with very interesting friends, and he spent a lot of his time writing letters to his family, and those friends, and to various military powers-that-be and political leaders.
For crying out loud, the guy had George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Robert Graves and E. M. Forster reading and critiquing his manuscripts!!!
This has letters from his archeology days in the Middle East, from his Lawrence of Arabia days, from the years working with Winston Churchill to try to gain something for the Arabs out of the Post-WWI mess, and then his years of attempted obscurity. Those last years are the most psychologically interesting, and also filled with famous people.
Basically, Lawrence was wildly talented, and most things he touched turned to at least high-quality silver, and some to gold. But he was rather like Greta Garbo, in that while he did like the access that fame gave him (like to other famous people), he did not actually care much for the adulation and hero-worship. He wanted to contribute, he wanted to do his duty as a human, but he also wanted to be left alone. He felt ashamed of British and French perfidy in World War I, and he was ashamed of the needless deaths in his part of the war, and of the way that folks like Lowell Thomas tried to make it out that Lawrence had won the Arab Revolt, not the Arabs. So as soon as Damascus fell, he asked permission to leave, and it was granted. He tried to disappear, but Winston Churchill and others dragged him into the Versailles and subsequent negotiations, where he tried to get as much as he could for Hussein and Feisal and the Arab tribes. That accomplished, he dropped out of sight, changed his name, and enlisted in the RAF.
Unfortunately, the Press discovered his whereabouts, and made it front page news. This so irritated his bosses, that they tossed him out. He was allowed to transfer to the Tank Corps of the Army, which he hated, but which he was determined to make a go of.
Meanwhile, he realized that he was the only literate person who could really report on what had happened in the Arab Campaign and the Arab Revolt. The key Arabs were illiterate. The key English hadn't been in all the sub-theaters, the way Lawrence had; and most of them didn't know any Arabic. So Lawrence wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, had it printed in an expensive exclusive edition so that the powerful could read it, and then tried to suppress it otherwise. He refused to make any money on it. He set the subscriptions so they would pay the expenses, and give some gifts to survivors of the war dead, and very little more. He felt that making money would be blood money. Shaw, Hardy, Forster and others, though, said he really needed to counteract Thomas by publishing an abridgment, and so we got the international bestseller, Revolt in the Desert. Again, he allowed the publisher to make a reasonable profit, and then stopped any further editions. He directed the profits to charity, basically.
He was finally allowed to slip back into the RAF, and was posted to India. For the guy who went all over the Middle East as an adventurer, his behavior seems rather odd. Rather PTSD. His first post was outside Lahore, and he never went into the city. His second post was in Waziristan, near the Afghan border, and he seems never to have left the compound. He was essentially the company clerk for an Air Force squadron. But there was a revolution in Afghanistan, and the Press found out Lawrence was stationed nearby, so he was front page news again, accused of masterminding the Revolt.
The government of India demanded Lawrence be removed from Indian territory, and he was sent packing back to England. There, to his good fortune, he was posted to a base that had amphibious planes. There was a crash. (An idiot officer insisted on taking the controls of the plane and trying to land it, and people died.) Lawrence was on the spot, and quickly took control of the rescue effort. There is some indication that his commanding officer froze, and Lawrence (who had no rank) acted as an officer. One of the problems with the rescue was that they had to use naval whaleboats to get out to the crashed plane, which was too slow. In the aftermath, Lawrence joined with others to say that the RAF needed to have its own boats, and because he was Lawrence of Arabia, people listened. He ended up as a speedboat designer and mechanic, which he seems to have been very good at, and became a world leader in speedboat design.
Until he had to retire, and soon thereafter he was dead in a motorcycle accident.
Meanwhile he does a famous translation of the Odyssey, a novel (copyrighted, but only circulated among friends until after his death), and some other famous bits of writing, as well. His light just kept peeking out from under the bushel.
One of the odd, sometimes annoying things, is that he seems mostly aware of the flaws in his writing. He procrastinates, he overedits, he moans, he despairs. He's writing one of the hundred greatest books in the English language, and he keeps deriding it in his letters. (see below) On the other hand, he keeps asking favorite writers to give the manuscript a look. Does he have fear of success?? Sure thing. Does he have reasons to fear success?? Yep. The results of his gifts were a very mixed bag for Mr. Lawrence.
The letters are witty, well-composed, cover an enormous variety of subjects and go to a LOT of interesting people, many of them famous. I found this really, really engaging and fascinating.
Extracts: "The everlasting effort to write is like trying to fight a feather-bed."
G.B. Shaw asked Lawrence's advice for his play Too True To Be Good (which had a caricature of Lawrence in it), because he wanted the jargon to be right. Lawrence responded in a letter to Shaw's wife, giving all the info, but then said, "These squalid accuracies should not affect G. B. S. He must write so that the audiences will comprehend."
To G.B.S. from India, trying to explain why he had chosen to hide among the enlisted: "I haven't answered your last line 'What is your game really?' Do you never do things because you know you must? I just can't help it. You see, I'm all smash, inside: and I don't want to look prosperous or be prosperous, while I know that. And on the easy level of the other fellow in the R.A.F. I feel safe: and often I forget that I've ever been different."
A letter from the War years contains: "This is an idiot letter, and amounts to nothing except a cry for further change; for I change my abode every day, and my job every two days, and my language every three days, and still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front, and I hate being back, and I don't like responsibility and I don't obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet like a purge, and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to."
This is an excerpt from a letter to George Bernard Shaw, in which Lawrence asks Shaw (they'd met once, briefly, at this point) if he would read the proof manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is certainly one of the best hundred books in the English language. It pretty much reflects how most writers feel once the thing has been finished and combed over a dozen times...
"....The punctuation is entirely the compositor's fancy: and he had an odd fancy, especially on Mondays.
That's the worst to be said on the material side. ...I'm not a writer, and successfully passed the age of 30 without having wanted to write anything. I was brought up as a professional historian, which means the worship of original documents. To my astonishment, after peace came I found I was myself the sole person who knew what had happened in Arabia during the war: and the only literate person in the Arab Army. So it became a professional duty to record what happened. I started to do it plainly and simply, much as a baby thinks it's easy to talk: and then I found myself bogged in a confusion of ways of saying the easiest things, and unable to describe the plainest places: and then problems of conduct got fairly into it, and the job became too much for me. Your first book was not perfect, though it was a subject you had chosen for yourself, and you had an itch to write!
In my case, I have, I believe, taken refuge in second-hand words: I mean I think I've borrowed expressions and adjectives and ideas from everybody I have ever read, and cut them down to my own size, and stitched them together again. My tastes are daily mailish [This was a populist newspaper of the time.], so there's enough piffle and romance and wooliness to make a realist sick. There's a lot of half-baked thinking, some cheap disgust and complaint (the fighting fronts were mainly hysterical, you know, where they weren't professional, and I'm not the least a proper soldier): in fact all the sham stuff you have spent your life trying to prick. ... This might make you laugh, if the thing was amusingly written: but it's long-winded, and pretentious, and dull to the point where I can no longer bear to look at it myself...
You'll wonder, why if all this is true (and I think it is) I want any decent person still more a person like yourself to read it. Well, it's because it is history, and I'm shamed for ever if I am the sole chronicler of an event and fail to chronicle it: and yet unless what I've written can be made better I'll burn it. My own disgust with it is so great that I no longer believe it worth trying to improve (or possible to improve). If you read it or part of it and came to the same conclusion, you would give me courage to strike the match: whereas now I distrust my own judgement, and it seems cruel to destroy a thing on which I have worked my hardest for three years.
I will add that Brown's footnotes and historical narratives are not intrusive, but very useful. I learned a lot, and I've read biographies of the guy.
Strongly recommended.
For crying out loud, the guy had George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Robert Graves and E. M. Forster reading and critiquing his manuscripts!!!
This has letters from his archeology days in the Middle East, from his Lawrence of Arabia days, from the years working with Winston Churchill to try to gain something for the Arabs out of the Post-WWI mess, and then his years of attempted obscurity. Those last years are the most psychologically interesting, and also filled with famous people.
Basically, Lawrence was wildly talented, and most things he touched turned to at least high-quality silver, and some to gold. But he was rather like Greta Garbo, in that while he did like the access that fame gave him (like to other famous people), he did not actually care much for the adulation and hero-worship. He wanted to contribute, he wanted to do his duty as a human, but he also wanted to be left alone. He felt ashamed of British and French perfidy in World War I, and he was ashamed of the needless deaths in his part of the war, and of the way that folks like Lowell Thomas tried to make it out that Lawrence had won the Arab Revolt, not the Arabs. So as soon as Damascus fell, he asked permission to leave, and it was granted. He tried to disappear, but Winston Churchill and others dragged him into the Versailles and subsequent negotiations, where he tried to get as much as he could for Hussein and Feisal and the Arab tribes. That accomplished, he dropped out of sight, changed his name, and enlisted in the RAF.
Unfortunately, the Press discovered his whereabouts, and made it front page news. This so irritated his bosses, that they tossed him out. He was allowed to transfer to the Tank Corps of the Army, which he hated, but which he was determined to make a go of.
Meanwhile, he realized that he was the only literate person who could really report on what had happened in the Arab Campaign and the Arab Revolt. The key Arabs were illiterate. The key English hadn't been in all the sub-theaters, the way Lawrence had; and most of them didn't know any Arabic. So Lawrence wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, had it printed in an expensive exclusive edition so that the powerful could read it, and then tried to suppress it otherwise. He refused to make any money on it. He set the subscriptions so they would pay the expenses, and give some gifts to survivors of the war dead, and very little more. He felt that making money would be blood money. Shaw, Hardy, Forster and others, though, said he really needed to counteract Thomas by publishing an abridgment, and so we got the international bestseller, Revolt in the Desert. Again, he allowed the publisher to make a reasonable profit, and then stopped any further editions. He directed the profits to charity, basically.
He was finally allowed to slip back into the RAF, and was posted to India. For the guy who went all over the Middle East as an adventurer, his behavior seems rather odd. Rather PTSD. His first post was outside Lahore, and he never went into the city. His second post was in Waziristan, near the Afghan border, and he seems never to have left the compound. He was essentially the company clerk for an Air Force squadron. But there was a revolution in Afghanistan, and the Press found out Lawrence was stationed nearby, so he was front page news again, accused of masterminding the Revolt.
The government of India demanded Lawrence be removed from Indian territory, and he was sent packing back to England. There, to his good fortune, he was posted to a base that had amphibious planes. There was a crash. (An idiot officer insisted on taking the controls of the plane and trying to land it, and people died.) Lawrence was on the spot, and quickly took control of the rescue effort. There is some indication that his commanding officer froze, and Lawrence (who had no rank) acted as an officer. One of the problems with the rescue was that they had to use naval whaleboats to get out to the crashed plane, which was too slow. In the aftermath, Lawrence joined with others to say that the RAF needed to have its own boats, and because he was Lawrence of Arabia, people listened. He ended up as a speedboat designer and mechanic, which he seems to have been very good at, and became a world leader in speedboat design.
Until he had to retire, and soon thereafter he was dead in a motorcycle accident.
Meanwhile he does a famous translation of the Odyssey, a novel (copyrighted, but only circulated among friends until after his death), and some other famous bits of writing, as well. His light just kept peeking out from under the bushel.
One of the odd, sometimes annoying things, is that he seems mostly aware of the flaws in his writing. He procrastinates, he overedits, he moans, he despairs. He's writing one of the hundred greatest books in the English language, and he keeps deriding it in his letters. (see below) On the other hand, he keeps asking favorite writers to give the manuscript a look. Does he have fear of success?? Sure thing. Does he have reasons to fear success?? Yep. The results of his gifts were a very mixed bag for Mr. Lawrence.
The letters are witty, well-composed, cover an enormous variety of subjects and go to a LOT of interesting people, many of them famous. I found this really, really engaging and fascinating.
Extracts: "The everlasting effort to write is like trying to fight a feather-bed."
G.B. Shaw asked Lawrence's advice for his play Too True To Be Good (which had a caricature of Lawrence in it), because he wanted the jargon to be right. Lawrence responded in a letter to Shaw's wife, giving all the info, but then said, "These squalid accuracies should not affect G. B. S. He must write so that the audiences will comprehend."
To G.B.S. from India, trying to explain why he had chosen to hide among the enlisted: "I haven't answered your last line 'What is your game really?' Do you never do things because you know you must? I just can't help it. You see, I'm all smash, inside: and I don't want to look prosperous or be prosperous, while I know that. And on the easy level of the other fellow in the R.A.F. I feel safe: and often I forget that I've ever been different."
A letter from the War years contains: "This is an idiot letter, and amounts to nothing except a cry for further change; for I change my abode every day, and my job every two days, and my language every three days, and still remain always unsatisfied. I hate being in front, and I hate being back, and I don't like responsibility and I don't obey orders. Altogether no good just now. A long quiet like a purge, and then a contemplation and decision of future roads, that is what is to look forward to."
This is an excerpt from a letter to George Bernard Shaw, in which Lawrence asks Shaw (they'd met once, briefly, at this point) if he would read the proof manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is certainly one of the best hundred books in the English language. It pretty much reflects how most writers feel once the thing has been finished and combed over a dozen times...
"....The punctuation is entirely the compositor's fancy: and he had an odd fancy, especially on Mondays.
That's the worst to be said on the material side. ...I'm not a writer, and successfully passed the age of 30 without having wanted to write anything. I was brought up as a professional historian, which means the worship of original documents. To my astonishment, after peace came I found I was myself the sole person who knew what had happened in Arabia during the war: and the only literate person in the Arab Army. So it became a professional duty to record what happened. I started to do it plainly and simply, much as a baby thinks it's easy to talk: and then I found myself bogged in a confusion of ways of saying the easiest things, and unable to describe the plainest places: and then problems of conduct got fairly into it, and the job became too much for me. Your first book was not perfect, though it was a subject you had chosen for yourself, and you had an itch to write!
In my case, I have, I believe, taken refuge in second-hand words: I mean I think I've borrowed expressions and adjectives and ideas from everybody I have ever read, and cut them down to my own size, and stitched them together again. My tastes are daily mailish [This was a populist newspaper of the time.], so there's enough piffle and romance and wooliness to make a realist sick. There's a lot of half-baked thinking, some cheap disgust and complaint (the fighting fronts were mainly hysterical, you know, where they weren't professional, and I'm not the least a proper soldier): in fact all the sham stuff you have spent your life trying to prick. ... This might make you laugh, if the thing was amusingly written: but it's long-winded, and pretentious, and dull to the point where I can no longer bear to look at it myself...
You'll wonder, why if all this is true (and I think it is) I want any decent person still more a person like yourself to read it. Well, it's because it is history, and I'm shamed for ever if I am the sole chronicler of an event and fail to chronicle it: and yet unless what I've written can be made better I'll burn it. My own disgust with it is so great that I no longer believe it worth trying to improve (or possible to improve). If you read it or part of it and came to the same conclusion, you would give me courage to strike the match: whereas now I distrust my own judgement, and it seems cruel to destroy a thing on which I have worked my hardest for three years.
I will add that Brown's footnotes and historical narratives are not intrusive, but very useful. I learned a lot, and I've read biographies of the guy.
Strongly recommended.
May 12, 2021
Lawrence was a tormented soul- a rather harrowing read at times. I was shocked to learn that he hired a guy to come and beat him up. His obsession about writing - and his hyper-critical view of his own efforts was also surprising. He predicted his death by motorbike, in a letter to the manufacturer a year before he died.
March 9, 2011
First I should mention that I am a "ho" for "Letters" compendia. That being said, TE was a really fascinating dude. And what a prolific letter writer...! He wrote to everyone about almost everything. You hear him talking to his mom, bros, pals, professional colleagues. My objective in reading this book was to learn more about how-guys-talk-to-guys, with the idea that this could help me improve my relations with the male cast at my work (boss & colleagues). (It was a helpful read in this respect, FYI.) Anyway, the breadth of to:'s makes this basically like a very well-written autobiography. Any historian would appreciate the descriptions of the world at that time.
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