IS IT POSSIBLE?

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 23, 28 January 1936, Page 18

IS IT POSSIBLE?

CLAIM OF T. E. LAWRENCE

25,000 WORDS IN 24 HOURS

"SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM"

"One of the points upon which publicity is often and effectively made concerns the tjme that the author has spent upon his work," writes Mr. Henry Leach, drawing attention to a statement by the late Colonel T. E. Lawrence concerning Book VI of "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," "and hers are wide contrasts, for, while sometimes we hear that the writer's travail has been agonising and his finished work represents years of effort with much rewriting, others tell us of the fine frenzy with which they were seized, and how they could scarcely eat or sleep until their story was completed, almost in record time.

"This is the age of speed, and one imagines that some confessions in the matter of writing act nothing against appreciation of the work. "It happens that one of the most surprising statements of this kind eve;: offered to the readers is made by the author, now dead, in reference to parts of a work that in many respects must be considered as the book of the year. "It appears from his remarks—claiming no 'records,' and not boasting or seeming to think he had done anything wonderful —that he had written about twenty-five thousand words in twentyfour consecutive hours —a thousand words or more in every hour for all that very long time! This statement seems to have been overlooked; it was only in passing from it that its significance appeared, and I turned back. AN EXPERIMENT. "It is important. Any reader who feels interested can make for himself a satisfying experiment. Let him take a set of words that he has memorised perfectly—the Lord's Prayer, perhaps —so that he need not hesitate for an instant anywhere, and write it out at his very fastest, preserving a fair but not immaculate legibility, and he may be satisfied if he maintains a speed of about forty-five words a minute with all in his favour, no thinking to be done, and more than the average of short words in this selection. "Let him then write at his fastest a passage dictated to him from a book, so that his mind in listening has another care—though the least exacting—than that of simple penmanship, and he will probably find his average fall by fully fifteen. But if he should hesitate occasionally for what seems no more than half a second, he may find his average descend to twenty. "If he pauses sometimes for a moment's, thought, his .average drops heavily, and more heavily when he hurriedly corrects a word already written; while if there is a halt to consider the working of a plot or the argument of an essay, or if the writer, being greatly conscientious or an artist in words, searches long and anxiously, often painfully, for the mot juste, as Flaubert, George Moore, and some others notoriously did, the speed collapses to the neighbourhood of zero. "The editor of a highly-popular and celebrated daily newspaper that everybody reads sometimes, and more than a million people always, in arguing upon such matters with me once, said that in his experience he had only known one writer who, in the most favourable circumstances, could be depended upon to fill with good English a well-leaded (spaced) column of serious matter, to be thought upon as he wrote, but all the facts and arguments ready in his mind and waiting to slip along his pen, in one hour, such column consisting of about a thousand words. The man was the late Charles Whibley, scholar and essayist of great repute. "iSTow upon the case, just presented, of the man who says he wrote twentyfive thousand words —and all of it was literature —between one sunrise and the next; if that is what he really meant, and he performed that feat, it seems to represent the greatest achievement of its kind in the entire history of literary production. "Moreover, it is associated with one of the mo.st remarkable books of the time, and believed by wise discerners to be for ever a respected classic. One needs to be careful, with saving clauses, in these remarks, for the author in question was T. E. Lawrence, the 'Lawrence of Arabia,' and the book is 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom.'

"In the course of his preface, which has interested me as much as anything in the book, Lawrence, referring to an earlier form of his work, says: 'The other yen books I completed in less than three months, by doing many thousand words at a time, in long sittings. Thus Book VI was written entire between sunrise and sunrise.'

"A careful examination of Book VI, as presented in the volume lately issued to the public, shows that it consists of sixty-seven pages, divided into thirteen short chapters, and on counting the words on three of these pages an average of 427 is found, so that, with allowances for short pages, we are sure of at least twenty-five thousand words in all, and one might add that they are as good and as important as any others in the volume.

"What then? Even if other considerations did not, after all, hinder us from saying that we think the author must be confusing some of: his remembrances and was mistaken about his performance."