Beschreibung:

Property of a Distinguished Collector T.E. Lawrence Autograph letter signed ("TES"), to B.E. Leeson pleading with him to ignore press reports of his misogyny ("...Please believe that I don't either love or hate the entire sex of women. There are good ones & bad ones, I find: much the same as men & dogs & motor bicycles..."), also hoping to arrange to meet in London, 1 page, 4to, RAF Cattewater, Plymouth, 18 April 1929, with autograph envelope Lawrence's complaints about the "foul imagination" of journalists in this letter are typical of his attitude towards the press; he admitted in another letter of the same day (to H.A. Ford) that "they make me retch - and that's neither comfortable nor wholesome." That said, his behaviour was hardly likely to dampen curiosity about his attitude to sex. In yet another letter written on 18 April 1929, he wrote to Eddie Marsh of his disappointment at Lady Chatterley's Lover ("...Surely the sex business isn't worth all this damned fuss? I've met only a handful of people who really cared a biscuit for it...") Lawrence's correspondent, B.E. Leeson, was a veteran of the Arab Revolt and former airman. He had joined 14 Squadron of the RFC in January 1917 as an Observer with the rank of Lieutenant. The squadron was then providing aerial support to Arab and British forces from Rabigh, north of Mecca in the Hejaz, and later from Wejh. Leeson's personal connection with Lawrence came in late April, when the two men had been part of a small group who spent a week exploring a remote valley, Wadi Hamdh, to recover a crashed B.E.2c biplane. The temperature was 118° in the shade, the country was waterless, and their car constantly had to be cut free of thick dry brushwood. Leeson was subsequently invalided out of Arabia. The two men had remained in contact but had not met for twelve years. LITERATURE:Brown, T.E. Lawrence: Selected Letters, pp.417-18 PROVENANCE:Phillips, 14 March 1996, lot 398A