T.E. LAWRENCE, CORRESPONDENCE WITH BERNARD AND CHARLOTTE SHAW 1929-1935 by T. E. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Charlotte F. Shaw ( 9781873141496 )

Item Details

Title:

T.E. LAWRENCE, CORRESPONDENCE WITH BERNARD AND CHARLOTTE SHAW 1929-1935

By:

T. E. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Charlotte F. Shaw

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£125.00
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ISBN 10:

1873141491

ISBN 13:

9781873141496

Publisher:

J AND N WILSON

Pub. date:

1 December, 2009

Edition:

First edition, limited to 475 copies.

Series:

T. E. Lawrence Letters 4

Pages:

304

Synopsis:

This final volume of T. E. Lawrence's correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw covers five and a half years - a longer span than any of the previous volumes. For Lawrence, it was a period of new activities and commitments, and of new and revived friendships. The letters in this volume describe his arrival at RAF Cattewater in March 1929 and, as the weeks passed, his increasing commitment to service duties. Cattewater was a seaplane station, so the workshops dealt with both aircraft and the boats used as tenders. Boats were an unexpected pleasure. In the autumn of 1929 Lawrence became part-owner of an American speed-boat. This seems to have vied with his motor-cycle as an outlet for his love of speed. The value of speed for rescue was demonstrated in February 1931, when a flying boat crashed just a few hundred yards offshore and quickly sank. Help arrived too late to save many of the crew. Soon afterwards Lawrence was sent to Hythe, on Southampton Water, as part of a team that would oversee trials of a new, faster type of launch for the RAF. From his first days at Cattewater it was clear that he would be working much longer hours than at Miranshah.Completing his translation of Homer's 'Odyssey' had to take precedence over correspondence, so his letters became shorter and less frequent. He finished the translation in August 1931 and put off the idea of any new writing project so long as he remained in the RAF. Instead, he became deeply committed to work on high-speed boats. Testing hulls and engines was physically and mentally tiring. In the evenings he felt little inclination to read or to write letters. He discouraged Charlotte from sending books. As a result, their correspondence slowed. Without the parcels of books, there was no need for letters discussing them. Nevertheless, for a biographer, Lawrence's letters to Charlotte between 1929 and 1935 are an invaluable source of information. In itself, the weakening of this long-standing friendship says much about the degree of his commitment to work on boats. It is difficult to assess the role of Bernard Shaw in this relationship. Knowing and occasionally meeting Shaw was doubtless, at the outset, Lawrence's main motive for accepting Charlotte's friendship.Yet to Shaw, who was so deeply involved in the wider worlds of theatre, politics and the arts, Lawrence must have seemed little more than a curious misfit. Shaw's comments about Lawrence were so often inaccurate that it seems unlikely he ever gave Lawrence serious thought. He called Lawrence an actor. After Charlotte's death, he read her correspondence with Lawrence and was surprised - perhaps disagreeably - by its intimacy. She had confided private thoughts to Lawrence that she had never confided to him. As others have noted, Shaw's comments about Lawrence in later years seem coloured by antipathy. The Shaw letters - Lawrence's largest known post-war correspondence - fill four of nine volumes of his correspondence with writers in this series. Each volume has an index by Hazel K. Bell. The Letters series is part of the scholarly fine-press edition of Lawrence's writings published for subscribers by Castle Hill Press. The Shaw volumes were issued to subscribers between 2000 and 2009.They are no longer sold separately, but are available as a 4-volume set, either in the quarter-cloth series binding by The Fine Book Bindery (ISBN 9781873141052), or a full-cloth library binding (ISBN 9781873141526). These sets are issued without dust-jackets.

Illustrations:

Photographs

Publication:

Imprint:

Castle Hill Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

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'THE MINT' AND LATER WRITINGS ABOUT SERVICE LIFE (HB)

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BOATS FOR THE R.A.F. 1929-1935 (HB)