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: MAR 1954

Recipient: Liddel Hart, Basil (1895-1970)

Location: Palma

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To Basil Liddell Hart

Palma

No date

My dear Basil:

You are being as noble as industrious; and I am most grateful for the pre-view of the Aldington book.

I think that, on the whole, it had after all better be published, because it is perverse and sneering and contains all the muck that an industrious rogue could rake together in three years; and should certainly not be corrected or modified by you or anyone else to modify its nastiness but left to its critical fate. A 'debunking' was obviously due one day; better that it should come now, and in its most unpleasant form, while it can be dealt with faithfully by survivors who know the facts. The only objection I have is to the bad taste of smearing Mrs Lawrence, whom I admire and love, before her death. Yet this bad taste will be more damaging to A. than anything else.

I can disprove the bastardy complex: T.E. was not informed of the 'guilty secret' until he was so emancipated that as he told me: 'My mother was shocked that we weren't shocked at her news and that we took it so lightly.' The facts about S.A. are that she was a woman and that I accidentally and honestly saw a letter she wrote him in 1927 signed 'Jehanne' — unless (as is most unlikely) there were two S.A.'s in his life. I only read the first lines, saw it was private and desisted (in 1927 T.E. had asked me to read and destroy all female fan-letters sent him c/o myself; and this was onel).

The facts about his sex-life are, so far as I can make out, that he was made impotent by the flogging at Deraa: I recorded this in print in 1950. Since then, curiously enough, I showed a letter of his to the most gifted graphologist I know — 100% accurate — who came to me in a flutter and said: 'I may be wrong or mad or riff-colour, or something, but this writing is that of a man who has been made impotent by some great shock and, instead, enjoys fantastic sexual orgies in his mind.'

About military facts I can't of course speak; my job in Lawrence aid the Arabs was to condense 7 Pillars (in the Oxford version) for Cape to sell, and I had only 3 months to do it in. But all the people I consulted, including Philip, who was in charge of the Turkish Order of Battle and at the Cairo receiving end, testified to T.E.'s accuracy.

About Lowell Thomas - Arnie, a gay young schoolboy (or undergraduate? I forget) stuffed him up good and proper when he visited 2 Polstead Road.

One test of T.E. (as of all people) is the 'fragrant memory test'. The inferior or bad worsen with the years. T.E., for all his internal sufferings and manifest failings, remains a warm, generous, essentially truthful (meaning that he had an Irish twist to his character) friend. All his naughty tricks are forgiven absolutely.

You misread, or I miswrote: my Cambridge job is next October, so let's hope to meet. No: Kathleen will never grow old; she has the inner fire. Our love to her.

Yours ever

Robert