Bastille Day over, and now Bloomsday over; we’re girding our loins for Idaho, via Washington. Yesterday the Road King’s tail light was replaced, and today its left side rearview mirror. We toured East and North Portland (thriving – lovely neighborhoods full of art stores & cafes with sidewalk tables), had an ice cream at Travis’ workplace, the Cool Moon ice cream store, and walked around Powell’s, the giant bookstore at the heart of Portland. A propos Bloomsday, the rare books room at Powell’s had a 1922 first edition of Ulysses, the celebrated ‘green one’ (I’ve always wondered – did the publisher intend to evoke a murky sea-green, the ‘snotgreen’ sea of the book?), tattered (and not all that rare) but still $1000.00 to purchase. Beyond price (to me at any rate) was an edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of a quite beautiful limited edition of 60, with a letter, inside, from General Allenby, T.E.’s former commander, to ‘Nathan Shaw,’ in New York, maintaining Lawrence’s military alias and thanking him for New Year good wishes, which he returned. Embossed on the cover: crossed Arabian swords and between them the jaggedly handwritten motto, ‘The sword also means clean-ness + death.’ Or perhaps ‘in death,’ though it looks like a ‘+’. Lawrence’s handwriting, presumably. And the source (Arabic?), unless it’s T.E. himself?
Pickings
Returned with Kara and Victor to their home, and picked raspberries growing wild in their yard, always a compulsive pastime ever since I spent summers with John Mills (later Sir John) and family (including little Hayley, whose fame in time eclipsed her father’s) and roamed the fruit cages in their Rickmansworth garden, outside London. When harvesting even the most desirable fruit I’ve always found acquisitiveness overwhelms gluttony (this is not meritorious, and defies common sense), and I can’t eat a single berry, for fear of diminishing the pile I’ll be bearing triumphantly home. Since the picking of the raspberries (now being made into a pie by Sonia), the blessed internet has unlocked the riddle of the T.E.L. cover: the phrase, with the ‘+’ meaning ‘&’ as it did for so long – ‘clean-ness & death’ – comes from one of Lawrence’s letters, talking of the Arab cause. But this is a small step on the road to a true riddle, the identity of ‘S.A.,’ dedicatee of the Seven Pillars. Was it Salim Ahmed, a ‘donkey-boy’ whom T.E. loved? Did it stand for Sword of Arabia? Did it stand for both (Lawrence loved riddles and cyphers)? Much ink has been spilt, as we used to say, on the matter.
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