Letter of the Week

Every week, on this page, we will show a different letter from a selection of letters from Paul O'Prey's books on Robert Graves correspondence In Broken Images and Between Moon and Moon.

Date: 15 JAN 1936

Recipient: Liddel Hart, Basil (1895-1970)

Location: Canellun

* * *

15 January 1936

Dear L.H.

. . . .

Now, your comments and suggested cuts and queries. In 9 cases out of 10 I have accepted your suggested cuts. They were a great help. Wherever possible I have shortened the quotations from my own book. I have made two or three notes: e.g. to the 1,000,000 dead Armenians, and to his self-identification with Hippoclides, pointing out the difference between Gallio's non-caring and H.'s. (You remember H. in Herodotus?) 'Tell Shawm' is one spelling used by T.E. Shawm is one of the few Arabic words I learned in Egypt, and it only this moment occurs to me that it is also Biblical. 'Harp' is the meaning. The Bible spells it Shawm.

(3 people who think. T.E. stopped thinking. Had already stopped, I think, when I wrote. The other 2 were Basanta Mallik, an Indian philosopher who was 12 years at Oxford and was the Nepalese foreign minister mentioned -— he thwarted Curzon by drawing up that treaty (in 1906 or something) on international law lines. (He was tutor to the King's children and happened to be an authority on international law so was made Foreign Minister for the nonce.) Then sent by the grateful King to England to learn all he could about international law and politics. Instead, he took to philosophical thinking and shortly after our invitation to Nepal resigned his political connexions as inconsistent with philosophy. His thinking, however, was Indian and in the end led to a stand- still.

The third person was Laura Riding. She continues. I have met nobody else who makes a practice of thinking; not since I wrote this in 1927. I use the word in a very special sense, which I won't try to define here conversationally except to say that it implies a complete unification of the mind, and the person along with the mind. (There may be more. I myself am only a partial thinker.) T.E. had to give this up and to fall back on good old human nature, which is the denial of thought.)

Yours ever,

Robert