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T. E. Lawrence

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:4,000.00 - 6,000.00 USD
T. E. Lawrence

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Auction Date:2016 Apr 13 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:236 Commercial St., Suite 100, Boston, Massachusetts, 02109, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
Fantastic ALS signed “T. E. Shaw,” three pages on two adjoining sheets, 4 x 6.75, December 11, 1928. Letter to writer Henry Williamson, written from Miranshah. In full: “Thank you for Rutter’s books on Mecca and Medina. They are most modestly good: very human, and fair, and fresh. The entire absence of great-mindedness is very charming. I wonder who he is? Some very queer fish, probably, who has lived for a long while on the wrong side of the world. The public are (so Cape says) swallowing the Pathway avidly. I have sent for a copy: but so out of the way is this place that I’d not heard of its being out till Cape’s letter, the post before yours with the Rutter books. You say the Pathway is unhappy stuff. Well, so is all my writing. Let not us impotents be shy of our impotencies, behind the licked envelopes of letters. You’ll laugh to hear that I still pick up Tarka often, read a few pages, and lay it down. I find it holes more than I thought, even at first: and what I said the first time was ‘pemmican’: a variety, I’m told, of pressed beef. The public pressure on you to write another book before you feel inclined to think of a pen seriously, must be horrid.” In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope addressed in his own hand. Published in volume nine of The Letters of T. E. Lawrence and excerpted in Williamson’s Genius of Friendship: T. E. Lawrence.

Rife with commentary on Williamson’s noteworthy novel Tarka the Otter, reflections on his own writing, and a closing line embodying his disillusionment with fame, this is an ideal Lawrence letter. At the request of his publisher, Williamson had forwarded Holy Cities of Arabia, a two-volume work by Eldon Rutter that had come out recently and was received enthusiastically and compared in several reviews to Lawrence’s writing. Williamson, who would soon win the Hawthornden Prize for Tarka, had himself just released The Pathway, the final volume of his tetralogy The Flax of Dream. Although Williamson wrote prolifically—apparently embracing the “public pressure” that Lawrence disdained—none of his other works surpassed the popularity of Tarka. A simply superb example with remarkable content.