T. E. Lawrence to Frederic Manning

Mount Batten
Plymouth

25/2/30.

Dear Manning

No, it wasn't Rothenstein: and I cannot get up to London this week. Now-a-days I'm lucky to fetch London once in three months, and it is only a month since I was there. As for the authorship of the book - the preface gives it away. It is pure Scenes and Portraits. How long, I wonder, before everybody knows? You need not worry at their knowing. It is a book everyone would have been proud and happy to have written.

Of course I'm ridiculously partial to it, for since 1922 my home has been in the ranks, and Bourne says and thinks lots of the things I wanted to have said. But don't imagine that I'm anything like so much of a lad as he was. The R.A.F. is as gentle as a girl's school, and none of us drink.

I have read too many war books. They are like drams, and I cannot leave them alone, though I think I really hate them. Yours however, and Cummings' Enormous Room and War Birds seem to me worth while. War Birds is not literature but a raw sharp life. You and Cummings have produced love-poems of a sort, and yours is the most wonderful, because there is no strain anywhere in the writing. Just sometimes you seem to mix up the 'one's' and 'his's': but for that, it is classically perfect stuff. The picture about 2/3rds through of the fellows sliding down the bank and falling in preparatory to going up for the attack, with the C.O.'s voice and the mist - that is the best of writing.

I have read Her Privates We twice, and the Middle Parts of Fortune once, and am now deliberately leaving them alone for awhile, before reading them again. The airmen are reading the Privates, avidly: and E.M. Forster (who sent me a paean about the Privates) has The Middle Parts. Everyone to whom I write is loudly delighted with the Privates. I hope the sales will do you good.

Peter Davies is trying to use my dregs of reputation as one more lever in the sales. Do not let that worry you. Adventitious sales and adventitious advertisements are very soon forgotten: the cash will remain with you, and your book be famous for as long as the war is cared for - and perhaps longer, for there is more than soldiering in it. You have been exactly fair to everyone, of all ranks: and all your people are alive.

This is not a very sensible letter: I am very tired, and this weather gets me down: only I owed it to you to thank you for the best book I have read for a very long time. I shall hope to meet you some day and say more - and bore you by saying it - for what is so dead as a book one has written?

Yours

T.E. Shaw