[Lawrence of Arabia: unpublished personal recollections of Henry Williamson, author of ‘Tarka the Otter’.] Autograph Typescript by Williamson, with one Autograph Manuscript emendation, of passage from memoir.

From the Henry Williamson papers. The present text does not feature in Williamson’s 1941 memoir of Lawrence ‘Genius of Friendship’, and appears to be unpublished. (According to Williamson’s entry in the Oxford DNB, the publication in 1927 of ‘Tarka the Otter’ ‘attracted the attention of T. E. Lawrence, whose letter of praise started a correspondence and friendship between the two. Indeed, Lawrence's fatal motorcycle crash on 14 May 1935 occurred as he was returning from a trip to the post office to send a telegram to Williamson’.) Eighteen lines of typewritten text, single-spaced, on one side of a 20 x 17 cm piece of laid Partridge & Cooper Ledger paper cut from the lower part of a leaf. Lightly aged and spotted, with one punch hole in margin. Two folds. Autograph emendation of the word ‘jerk’ to ‘turn’. Two paragraphs, the first (and shorter) reading: ‘There are several characteristic gestures of his that I can see vividly. One of them, his expression and action in turning his head upon a speaker when an idea has taken sudden root in his head from what has been said. He would turn his head sideways at an angle of 15º, give the person a quick glance and then frown, and as it were, set his eyes upon the other person’s eyes with a swift jerk, as though to strike a line through the other’s brain, to clear a way through thought-confusion to sky-clarity beyond.’ The second paragraph discusses ‘the hidden springs of his tact’, ‘difficult to convey in a screen version of his life’, with reference to ‘a George Arliss film’. Ends: ‘The real thing, indeed, as Lawrence knew and used it, is terrifically better theatre. It is the basis of all religion.’