CURRENT LITERATURE
T. E. LAWRENCE TO HIS BIOGRAPHERS By Robert Graves and Liddell Hart
These two very finely produced volumes (Faber, to5s.) contain a great mass of information about T. E. Lawrence —some new, some already known, some amending or qualify- ing earlier statements—which Lawrence himself gave to Mr. Graves and Captain Liddell Hart, who wrote books about him during his lifetime. This information was given in letters, in written answers to questions, in conversations, and —most interesting of all—in the alterations which Lawrence made in the drafts submitted to him by his biographers. The books are intensely interesting to anyone acquainted with Lawrence's work and character, and though, like every other book about Lawrence, they leave the final mystery of his nature unsolved, they certainly allow us to see the contradic- tions in him in new and revealing detail. Lawrence was never the same to any two people, and seldom always the same man even to one. That is why his nature as a whole comes out clearer in his letters than elsewhere, and one gets a better idea of him from Mr. Garnett's edition of his Letters and these two books than from any of the other books about him. It is amusing to imagine Lawrence's feelings had he lived to see these volumes published—vanity at seeing himself made a matter of historical fuss balanced by rage at such a violation of his intended solitude. But whatever he might have thought about the taste of Mr. Graves's speculations about the identity of " S. A.," to whom the Seven Pillars were dedicated, or of the revelation of the turn his political sympathies might have taken, there is no doubt that he would have appreciated the impeccable appearance of these books.
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