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CATALOGUE

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Works

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Complete 1922 Text
Military Report on the Sinai Peninsula
The Mint, 1928 text
The Mint, 1955 text

Translation

The Forest Giant

Letters

T. E. Lawrence Letters series
Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw
Correspondence with Henry Williamson
Correspondence with E. M. Forster and others
Letters from Carchemish

View complete catalogue

  Page updated
 12 November 2008

 

T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with Henry Williamson

Edited by Peter Wilson
With a Preface by Jeremy Wilson
and a biographical Prologue and Epilogue by Anne Williamson

T. E. Lawrence Letters, Volume IX

First edition, limited to 702 numbered copies

PROSPECTUS
(June 2000)

T. E. Lawrence was fascinated by the art of creative writing, and by creative writers. This fascination drew him into friendships with poets and novelists such as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster. When Lawrence read Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter in 1928, he recognised that its author had extraordinary descriptive power: 'I put Williamson very high as a writer,' he later wrote.

From this beginning grew a correspondence that lasted until Lawrence's death in 1935. The two kept one another’s letters, and the series printed here is largely complete.

Until now, the principal published accounts of their relationship have been those by Williamson, notably his contribution to T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), and his book Genius of Friendship (1941). In this volume, we are able to read both sides of the correspondence for the first time. From this it becomes clear that Williamson's version reflects a personal view which Lawrence, on his side, almost certainly did not share.

Nevertheless, even though their friendship may have seemed more important to Williamson than it did to Lawrence, it is easy to see why Lawrence kept in contact. Williamson's letters provide a fascinating insight into a novelist's mind, and it is not difficult to imagine that Lawrence valued them as greatly as he valued, for example, his letters from Robert Graves.

The parallel with Graves is relevant, because in some ways the two friendships followed a similar path. As Williamson became better established and more confident, he had less need of Lawrence's helpful criticisms and encouragement; or at any rate Lawrence felt that there was less that he could usefully offer. Gradually, their evident differences became more significant than the interest in the craft of writing that had drawn them together.

Just as Graves, while drafting Lawrence and the Arabs, had offended Lawrence by pandering to commercialism, so Williamson damaged the relationship in 1933 by including 'G. B. Everest', unasked, as a character in The Gold Falcon – even quoting from his letters. Lawrence made light of it; but since he dreaded publicity he may well have feared that a closer friendship with such an unpredictable novelist would be a risk as long as he wished to remain in the ranks of the RAF.

Later, he was nonplussed when Williamson told him about the complications that had arisen from extra-marital entanglements (here again there is a parallel with Robert Graves). It is tempting to read into Lawrence's silence some kind of personal inhibition; but in truth, friendships often falter when one party or the other makes an unwarranted assumption of intimacy.

Despite these reservations, there really was an unusual quality in their relationship. Williamson is revealed here as a skilful and supremely observant writer, but nevertheless a man who was introspective, egocentric, insecure, and intensely lonely. Exactly the same words could be used to describe Lawrence, and the similarity that Williamson sensed was real. He was writing to someone he knew would understand.

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