Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Meanwhile, he applied for a scholarship at St John’s College – here his elder brother Bob was already studying medicine – but was unsuccessful. The following January, though, he succeeded in obtaining a Meyricke Exhibition at Jesus College – available to him because of the accident of his Welsh birth – which provided £50 for the study of Modern History. Jesus was very much a Welsh college, and during Easter 1907 he felt compelled to make a cycling tour of Wales – which he had never seen – to acquaint himself with his country of birth. His letters home from this tour show a new fluency, a factor Lawrence may have owed to John Ruskin, whose book The Stones of Venice he had read the previous year. Ruskin, a poet, was one of the founders of the Victorian Gothic Revival, and was concerned with the way in which architecture mirrored the human spirit. He believed that the fineness of true medieval Gothic stonework was a consequence of the fact that the workmen of the age had been allowed more freedom of expression than the modern artisan, condemned as he was to be a cypher on the production line. Ruskin’s writing, considered a beau ideal of Victorian mannered prose, stimulated Lawrence into imitation: ‘I now have some conception of the right way to study architecture,’ he wrote on first reading Ruskin, ‘and how to draw the truest lessons from it.’16 One of the most frustrating moments on the trip, though, was when he overheard the young landlady of the Pelican Hotel at Kidwelly discussing him with her family. Few of us would have been able to refrain from listening, perhaps, but Lawrence, whose inner lack of self-image gave him a lifelong craving to know how he appeared to others, strained desperately for every word: ‘It really was awfully funny,’ he reported, ‘… he family council ended by deciding I would probably “be” something – rather a pointless conclusion I think.’17

  Lawrence went up Jesus College on 12 October 1907, but he continued to live at Polstead Road for most of his time as an undergraduate, taking rooms for only one term – Trinity 1908 – to comply with college rules. Theo Chaundy, who entered Christ Church in the same year, admitted that he and his peers had been surprised to see Lawrence up for a scholarship – not because of any lack of intellect, but because they doubted that he had the commitment required for an academic life. Lawrence later claimed to have attended no lectures while at Jesus, and to have spent all his time in private reading – often reading which had little connection with his subject. In history, anything after 1500 bored him anyway, and his concept of the Middle Ages was much more the chivalrous world of Morte d’Arthur than the down-to-earth one of serfdom and the Plague. L. C. Jane, a rather neurotic but brilliant tutor who coached Lawrence for his Repositions, felt that he was not a scholar by temperament, and observed that the only books he would read were those which were out of the ordinary: books, in other words, which appealed to his sense of self-mystification. Jane noticed Lawrence’s aloofness, and his habit of making provocative statements in order to test his personality. Ernest Barker, a history don, believed that Lawrence had chosen to study history simply because it was a hurdle to be jumped, and saw him as a knight girding himself for action. The more observant Midge Hall, who was at Jesus with Lawrence, though, realized that he was, in fact, ‘a wanderer for wandering’s sake’ with no settled purpose other than to escape. Reginald Lane Poole, Lawrence’s tutor in medieval history, thought him a romantic, though noted, obversely, that he would begin his essays with some challenging statement – a technique he had acquired from the advice of Sir Charles Oman, whose theories on medieval castles he would one day set out to refute. Once, when Lawrence wrote Poole a note apologizing for missing a tutorial, his tutor riposted with rapier-like wit that it was unimportant since it ‘had given him time for an hour’s useful work’.

  Lawrence played little part in the life of the college, and drew attention to himself by his very solitariness. His refusal to join in sport raised some eyebrows, but he was too subtle to argue the toss with college hearties, preferring to lampoon them by following them through the streets on their way to the sports field or rowing club, making fun of their physical characteristics. There were other abstentions too. He did not smoke, he did not drink, he rarely attended official meals in hall. He explained to one fellow undergraduate, A. G. Prys-Jones, that he did not sit on chairs if he could avoid it and took no breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, no tobacco or strong drink: ‘… fact,’ said Prys-Jones, ‘he did nothing which qualified him to be an ordinary member of society.’18 Once, he burst into Midge Hall’s room with a grotesquely distorted face and began firing a revolver through a window into the Turl below. Hall realized that the shots were blanks, and concluded, probably correctly, that Lawrence was play-acting, though Lawrence claimed to be letting off steam after a marathon forty-five-hour work-session without food or sleep. In Trinity Term 1908 he took rooms in the inner quadrangle of Jesus, overlooking the covered market, and above the college kitchen whose stale cooking smells drifted miasmically through them. Late at night, when everyone else was retiring, Lawrence would come alive, ‘like a cat’, prowling the dark streets on his bicycle or merely tramping the quadrangles alone. A. T. P. Williams, an undergraduate who would later become Bishop of Winchester, recalled meeting him there often: ‘I do not know when he went to bed,’ he wrote, ‘some nights, I’m pretty sure, not at all, certainly seldom till well on in the small hours.’19 His sleepless tramping eventually piqued the curiosity of a third-year undergraduate named Vyvyan Richards, who went to investigate the solitary freshman and immediately fell in love with him. Richards, a sharp, angular, sensitive man, was the son of a Welsh inventor and his American wife, who had spent his life gaining distinctions, and sneering at art, history and literature. His fascination with Lawrence took him abruptly into a very different dimension, a world of old things: ‘castles, churches, memorial brasses, pottery and books-books-books’.20 The two young men could not have been more different: Richards, sporty, snobbish, unintellectual, critical, orthodox: Lawrence, mercurial, whimsical, unconventional, super-cerebral, wrapped up in antiquity and romance – and yet, on their first meeting, Richards would write, ‘some deep and quick affection took hold upon us whose vividness stirs me still after thirty years have passed away’.21 Richards became obsessed with his love for Lawrence, offering him boundless affection, subservience and sacrifice, but his passion went unrequited. Lawrence was not attracted to him, and though he enjoyed his company and was flattered by his attentions, never gave the slightest hint that he understood the nature of his friend’s interest. He recognized that Richards was a difficult and complex personality, inclined to be dismissive of what he understood poorly, and with a horror of vulgarity, which he euphemistically referred to as ‘professionalism’. He liked Richards’s latent artistic talent and enjoyed helping to nurture it, and he could not ignore the tremendous energy Richards sent his way, which he turned to their mutual advantage. He loved Richards’s directness and experienced with him an intimacy which he had never known before. Much to Richards’s disappointment, though, that intimacy remained chaste. Years later, he claimed that Lawrence was ‘sexless’, and his conviction that he had ‘neither flesh or carnality of any kind’ echoes Clare Sydney Smith’s view that ‘Lawrence’s presence was hardly a physical one’. Neither understood that Lawrence was a masochist whose sexual feelings were closely tied up with his fear of pain. Though he preferred men to women and his later writings show a fascination with the idea of homoerotic sex, he had a horror of the reality of physical intimacy, which was directly connected to his early relationship with his mother: ‘The disgust of being touched revolted me,’ he would write, ‘…perhaps because one … terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact.’22 He would tell E. M. Forster that he was ‘funnily made up sexually’, and as regards the homosexual act, would write: ‘I couldn’t ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me.’23

  Richards later told Robert Graves that after he had moved to digs outside the college, Lawrence would frequently visit him after
midnight, and once, he said, he had asked Richards to join him on a bizarre bathing trip – they would dive through the ice on the frozen Cherwell to find out whether it was thin enough to let them in and out again. Richards dismissed the idea as ridiculously dangerous, but Lawrence went off to do it alone, and repeated it several times later. Richards explained that his friend’s pleasure in these strange outings derived partly from the astonishment he saw on the faces of orthodox people such as himself. It is a key observation, for while Lawrence’s fasting, dieting, and denial of sleep were expressions of his masochistic nature, they were also aspects of his reverse exhibitionism. If he had been simply ‘hardening himself for the ordeal to come’ in the classical ‘heroic’ sense, an audience would have been unnecessary, but Lawrence had no penchant for ‘suffering in silence’: his ordeal must be witnessed. It was characteristic of him throughout his life, Richards said, to seek some private gallery for his exploits.

  Together, Lawrence and Richards explored the world of William Morris, the colossus of Victorian art and design who would influence Lawrence for the rest of his life. It is not clear when Lawrence first became aware of Morris (not to be confused with the industrialist William Henry Morris – Lord Nuffield), but living in north Oxford during the 1890s he could scarcely have avoided hearing about him, since Morris’s pomegranate wallpaper designs were de rigueur in the houses of university dons. Morris was precisely the kind of polymath that Lawrence would have liked to be: a poet of distinction, novelist, master craftsman, designer, printer and painter who had pioneered the art of brass-rubbing, toured Gothic cathedrals in France in the 1850s, trekked through the cold deserts of Iceland, rediscovered Malory’s classic Morte d’Arthur, inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, espoused radical socialism, helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and set up the famous Kelmscott Press. Morris’s inspiration, like Lawrence’s, was the medieval period, and his objective was to revive the spirit of individual craftsmanship which he believed the industrial Victorian era had lost. This made him a giant in Lawrence’s eyes, for as a youth he was always engaged in some kind of handicraft – if not brass-rubbing, then poker-work, stone-carving, metal-work, wood-carving or even sewing. While Richards admired the diligence with which Lawrence worked at his crafts, he rarely admired the results. Lawrence once showed him an electric lamp he had hammered out of brass, modelled on a Moorish lantern in Holman Hunt’s engraving The Light of the World. Richards thought the lamp poor, but was more impressed with the griffon-figure Lawrence once carved on the bar of a table in his room. Bob Lawrence wrote that even as a child Ned had a great aptitude for improving and fixing household appliances – an ability Lawrence would later boast of as his ‘faculty for making and repairing things’.24 Though Ned called himself ‘a wanderer after sensations and an artist of sorts’, Arnie thought his brother more of a craftsman than an artist, and believed he had a craftsman’s appreciation of sound work in sound material irrespective of artistic merit.25 Later, in his writing career, Lawrence would behave as if there were a craftsman’s technique to literary expression, which, if it could only be learned, would enable one to create a masterpiece ‘by numbers’ as it were. He was adept at learning technique, but discovered with some bitterness that great literature lay not in mastering ‘tricks’, but in the power of creative vision. The truth was that the dominating force in Lawrence’s psyche – that supreme will he had built up against the barbarian hordes which were ever hammering and sapping at the frontier of his consciousness – was inimical to creativity. If it kept out maverick emotions it also attenuated the originality of vision those emotions entailed. Lawrence was too controlled, too mechanistic, too rational, ever to be a poet or an artist. The great tragedy of his life was the discovery that creativity was in reality the outpourings of the dark side which he had spent his life trying to suppress.

  It was Morris who inspired Lawrence with the idea of setting up a hand-press, for printing seemed the ideal occupation for the kind of artistic dilettante he saw himself becoming in the future. When he thought of a career, he could not tolerate the idea of being pigeon-holed into one profession or another. Moreover, printing seemed to have a mystique about it which appealed to him: ‘Printing is not a business but a craft,’ he told his mother later. ‘We cannot sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than a picture could be painted on that system.’26 Like Morris, Lawrence was also attracted by the sensual quality of a well-produced book, not merely the aesthetic appeal of the type-face, but the feel of the paper and the texture of the binding. His letters are full of esoteric references to the merits of vellum or the intricacies of obtaining fine purple from the Levantine murex. While rooms in Hammersmith Mall had been good enough for Morris, however, for Lawrence and Richards only a proper ‘medieval hall’ would suffice. This notion might have come to them on a pilgrimage they made to a sort of Morris shrine at Broad Campden, where a couple called the Coomeraswamis had converted a fourteenth-century chapel into a house packed with Morris memorabilia, including a copy of the exquisitely bound Kelmscott Chaucer, ‘the prince of modern printing’. Here they were also privileged to see the actual press Morris had used in his Kelmscott studio, which was still functioning, and Richards took pains to record that their reaction was not merely sentimental: ‘ … it was a notable stimulus,’ he wrote, ‘to the practical enthusiasm which was taking root in our minds. We, too, would print, and would get enough by it, we hoped, to live without bowing to any form of professionalism.’27 The visit also stimulated Lawrence to read Morris’s novel The Roots of the Mountains, a fantasy about Gothic mountain tribes who lived communally in halls, slept in ‘shut-beds’, held ‘folk-moots’ and fought gallantly in battle. Roots led him to other novels: The Well at the World’s End, The Wood Beyond the World, Sigurd the Volsung – each transporting him into a fabulous, heroic world. While his feeling for more celebrated authors waxed and waned, his taste for Morris would last all his life: ‘I suppose everybody loves one writer unreasonably,’ he would tell Charlotte Shaw. ‘I’d rather Morris than the world.’ ‘My reason tells me he isn’t a very good writer: but then, he wrote just the stuff I like.’28 Lawrence thought the idea of a medieval hall more authentically Morris than Morris’s own ‘Red House’ at Upton, and once dragged Richards over to look at a disused stone chapel near Weymouth which he considered buying. It had, said Richards, a ‘naked simplicity’ which appealed to Lawrence. The Morrisian fantasy – for Morris’s ‘medieval’ was no more truly medieval than Lawrence’s – exerted enormous power over him. There is more than a hint of the communal halls of Roots of the Mountains in his later attachment to the life of the barrack-room, and as Richards himself pointed out, for Lawrence ‘the desert tents of black goats hair were many pillared dark halls too’.29

  Lawrence’s excursions while at Jesus College were not exclusively into the intellectual and aesthetic spheres, however. In the summer of 1908 he asked Richards to join him on a peculiarly urban adventure – the running of the Trill Mill Stream. This is the first image we have of Lawrence the organizer and man of action – a persona he frequently sought to deny in later years. He had always been interested in boating and canoeing, and in his first year at Jesus had discovered references to a medieval watercourse – the Trill Mill Stream – which now passed beneath the city. After some careful local detective work he came to the conclusion that the stream began at the mouth of a sewer near Hythe Bridge, and he determined to discover whether it debouched into the Isis at Folly Bridge as he suspected. Richards was only one of a group of friends he gathered together in three canoes for the adventure, the others being Midge Hall, Theo Chaundy, A. T. P. Williams and H. E. Mather – the water enthusiast with whom Lawrence had made the unsuccessful ascent of the Cherwell in 1906. On the appointed day the canoes were lowered into the sewer at Hythe Bridge, lit with candles and acetylene lamps. The tunnel was very narrow and the young men had just enough room to crouch forward in the canoes with their arms touching the sides. It was no place for the
victim of claustrophobia. Lawrence remarked that it would be interesting to see which of their light-sources would expire first as the air became foul, and wondered aloud what the attitude of the incumbent rats would be. ‘Anyway,’ he said, as the canoes slipped into the darkness, ‘there’s no room to turn back.’30 Lawrence was electrified by an exquisite thrill of fear, which had once again prompted him to bravado. Secretly, he was terrified that the water might flow through a grating, in which case the canoes might be stuck, or that a sudden shower outside might raise the water-level and drown them. Fortunately there were no obstacles or hitches of any kind, and Lawrence camouflaged his relief by firing blanks from his pistol under the gutter-gratings to attract the attention of pedestrians above. The canoes shot out into the daylight near Folly Bridge only twenty minutes after setting out.