#a collage

Reverse Redfield legacy.

this is SO SATISFYING 

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” ― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

You say you want to read the seven pillars...

I’ll hope to have your critical opinion, when you end it. It matters to me, for I put months, years, of work into it.

Some writers have called it good.

Others have said that far from being good, it is very very bad: perverse, dishonest, pretentious.

I suspect they are right, though I did try, with the better side of me, to play fair and clean in the writing of it.

Whatever it is, don’t imagine that it is great literature. It isn’t.

I write better than the majority of retired army officers, I hope; but it is a long way from that statement to literature.

I let myself go in The Seven Pillars and gave away all the entrails I had in me.

It was an orgy of exhibitionism.

Never again.

The Seven Pillars is one of the best dressed imitations of a book you’ll ever see.

It was an effort to make history an imaginative thing.

The result was rather a flop.

It is a rotten book, a dull book, hysterical, egotistical and long.

It is a sort of introspection epic,

the self-argument of a man who couldn’t then see straight: and who now thinks that perhaps it did not matter: that seeing straight is only an illusion.

The personal revelations should be the key of the thing : and the personal chapter actually is the key, I fancy: only it’s written in cypher.

Isn’t it just faintly possible that part of the virtue apparent in the book lies in its secrecy, its novelty, and its contestability?

Please, tell me what you think.

Yours sincerely,