I.E.

THE LETTERS OF!. E. LAWRENCE--Edited by David Garneft--Doubleday, Doran ($5).

T. E. LAWRENCE To His BIOGRAPHERS--Robert Graves & Liddell Hart--Doubleday, Doran (Two vols. $20).

Two boys on bicycles meandered along a Dorsetshire lane. Suddenly over a dip in the road roared a motorbike, doing about 55. To avoid the boys its rider swerved violently, skidded, lost control, catapulted over the handlebars. Six days later, without regaining consciousness, he died. So finished, at 46, the man known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia.

That was in 1935. Already the public reaction against Lawrence the Hero had begun to set in. Already there were those who said his reputation had been a gigantic puff, that it was not worth the newspapers it had been written on. By last week, however, the world and his wife were willing to admit that Lawrence was what is known as a Great Man.

Almost all the evidence is now in. To add to his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's trustees have now released his official Letters, and his friends-and-biog-raphers, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, have each published the letters T. E. wrote to them. Only remains Lawrence's account of his years in the R. A. F., The Mint (TIME, Dec. 14, 1936), which will not be published till 1950. The sum of all this testimony does not change the verdict on Lawrence that his generation has already brought in; but it does add some slightly distorting, some slightly coarsening, some slightly endearing details.

Some of them: Lawrence, who changed his name (to Ross, to Shaw) was not really named Lawrence at all. In a letter to Robert Graves he says: "My father took name of Lawrence (not even my mother's name) when he left Ireland." He was never letter-perfect in Arabic; says he: "Feisal called my Arabic 'a perpetual adventure.' "

Lawrence took no interest in women but was sometimes friendly, usually polite. But Liddell Hart tells of his sitting at dinner next a French duchess who gushed about the marvelous nights in the East. "Sweaty, aren't they?" said T. E.

Most men give themselves away in their letters, and T. E. was no exception. The final casting-up of his complicated, restless, unfrank character is well done by Robert Graves: "He had all the marks of the Irishman: the rhetoric of freedom, the rhetoric of chastity, the rhetoric of honour, the power to excite sudden deep affections, loyalty to the long-buried past, high-aims qualified by too mocking a sense of humour, serenity clouded by petulance and broken by occasional black despairs, playboy charm and theatricality, imagination that overruns itself and tires, extreme generosity, serpent cunning, lion courage, diabolic intuition, and the curse of self-doubt. .. ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.