Lawrence’s public policies were indelibly stamped with his private prejudices. As a romantic Tory, he was entranced by the traditional, natural and seemingly timeless order of Middle Eastern society, which he hoped could be preserved through the institution of monarchy. This view remained constant: in 1934 he wrote to his old friend George Lloyd and speculated on what might have happened if he had joined him in Cairo during his term of office as High Commissioner in Egypt. ‘Your dignity, with a merry devil of an assistant on the Staff’, could have generated an agrarian movement among the Egyptian fellahin ‘which would have sidetracked politics’, by which Lawrence meant the clamour of the urban, educated nationalists who demanded Britain’s disengagement from their country.21 As during the Arab Revolt, Lawrence the medievalist dreamed of an alliance between lord and peasant to stem the alien forces of capitalism and democracy.
Lawrence was also an imperialist who, like so many others of his generation, embodied the internal dilemma of this creed. He represented the British Empire as a benign force which would broadcast enlightenment, and he prophesied the emergence of self-governing coloured states within the Commonwealth. Yet this seemingly benevolent institution ultimately rested on force, and he strongly urged the application of the most modern technology of war to coerce its less biddable subjects.
Beyond the sphere of politics, Lawrence offered his countrymen an intoxicating but deceptive vision of the Middle East. He wrote about an empty land peopled by romantic warrior chieftains, about their codes of honour and their hosts of fighting men. He inspired Sir James Lunt to follow a career in the Arab Legion. Like others who followed him and served as professional soldiers or civil servants in the Middle East, Lunt felt drawn by his hero’s ability to establish a peculiar personal rapport with the Beduin. Lawrence’s colleague Kirkbride, recalling how Glubb Pasha, the Arab Legion’s commanding officer, had been able to penetrate the mind of his soldiers, remarked that, like Lawrence, he was a Celt. This was understood by the Arabs, who believed that the Celts possessed some mysterious quality which made for an easy empathy between their two races.22 Be this as it may, Lawrence glamorised the nomadic Arabs and left a lasting impression that they had a distinct affinity with the British. Moreover, he insisted, Britain had some kind of moral debt to these people, a claim which still exercises a strong hold over many Foreign Office officials.
To return then to the 1980s and to Lord Carrington, who believes that Britain has a special part to play in the affairs of the Middle East: this conviction owes much to Lawrence, who, through his life and writing, taught his countrymen that they could command the affection and trust of Arabs. Those who now travel across the Middle East are following in Lawrence’s footsteps and their habits of mind have in some way been shaped by his. As for Lawrence, he said goodbye to the Middle East when the going was good. He once described its history as a succession of tidal waves, one of which he ‘raised and rolled’ towards Damascus. What he never understood were the deep and strong eddies which flowed beneath the wave. In time, these became a flood which has swept away the dykes and breakwaters he had helped build.
III
Man of Letters
Lawrence wanted to be a respected figure of English letters; E.M. Forster believed that his literary ambitions surpassed all others. Robert Graves mockingly warned him against deliberately making himself an ‘Eminent Literary Person’, one of that breed of master wordsmiths whose style wins academic approval but little else. Lawrence was unmoved. He saw himself as an artist: words were his pigments and a masterpiece his goal. He revealed his priorities to Liddell Hart, to whom he once remarked, ‘I think that why you write must be because you really have something to say.’1 For Lawrence, content took second place to style.
For this reason, his output was limited. Seven Pillars of Wisdom appeared in a private edition in 1926 and, abridged, as Revolt in the Desert the following year. The initial field work for The Mint, his worm’s-eye view of the RAF rankers’ world, was undertaken during 1922–3. The project was discarded, and then taken up again in 1927 when a final draft was produced. In accordance with his wishes, and in deference to Lord Trenchard and the current laws of obscenity and libel, it was not published until 1955. Between 1928 and 1932, he translated The Odyssey, which appeared as a lavishly printed limited edition in Britain and a public edition in the USA. Apart from a manual of motorboat engine maintenance, this was Lawrence’s last full-length work.
The gestation of the Seven Pillars and The Mint was slow and painful. Lawrence started work on the former early in 1919 while he was attending the Paris Peace Conference and, by April of that year, he was showing draft chapters to Meinertzhagen. This version was completed by November, when the manuscript was stolen while Lawrence was changing trains at Reading station. Perhaps injudiciously, he carried the draft in a bank messenger’s case, which tempted a thief. Some people, Robert Graves among them, cynically imagined that Lawrence, deeply dissatisfied with what he had written, had jettisoned the manuscript and concocted the theft story.
Almost immediately, Lawrence launched himself into a second draft, much of which was composed while he was undertaking his official duties in the Middle East or in a Barton Street attic room that had been placed at his disposal by his architect friend Sir Henry Baker. The second Seven Pillars was completed by the spring of 1922. Remembering the misadventure which had befallen the first, he prudently had six copies of the new draft printed and bound by the Oxford Times. These were circulated among his former brothers-in-arms and literary friends for comment, criticism and correction.
Save for Rudyard Kipling, who strongly disapproved of the book, Lawrence’s first readers were impressed and urged him to publish. He procrastinated, protesting that the book was wretched and unworthy. Finally, at the end of 1923 and under pressure, he relented and agreed to a small private edition of 400 copies, finely printed, elegantly bound, richly illustrated and very expensive. Artists (non-Academicians at Lawrence’s insistence) were commissioned and he proceeded to make cuts and revisions to the text. The costs soon ran out of control and he had to settle a bill that finally totalled £13,000, of which £7,000 was borrowed. Lawrence agreed to undertake an abridgement, and Revolt in the Desert was published by Jonathan Cape and serialised in the Daily Telegraph.
There was no question of publication for The Mint, although Edward Garnett, Lawrence’s friend and editorial adviser to Jonathan Cape, wanted to produce a bowdlerised edition. Trenchard, fearful of the harm the book would do to the RAF, successfully persuaded Lawrence to postpone its appearance until 1950. Cape were fended off with an absurd demand for a £1 million advance and Lawrence’s anxieties about a pirated American edition were dispelled by a legal stratagem: a run of fifty copies of The Mint was printed, of which ten were offered for sale at a wildly prohibitive price. In Britain and in the United States a number of typescript copies circulated among Lawrence’s circle.
Underlying these elaborate procedures, which incidentally stimulated much press curiosity, were Lawrence’s recurrent misgivings about his talents as a writer. He was also deeply apprehensive at having revealed so much of his inner nature and conflicts in the Seven Pillars. ‘It is not for present publication,’ he told Gilbert Clayton in August 1922, ‘partly because it’s too human a document for me to disclose, partly because of the personalities, partly because it is not good enough to fit my conceit of myself. The last is a weak point, but the first in my mind: though it’s difficult to judge one’s own work.’2 Would Lawrence’s ambitions outstrip his talents and the gap be exposed by general publication? The question tormented him throughout the six years he took to complete the Seven Pillars. ‘Hitherto,’ he told Edward Garnett, ‘I’ve always managed, usually without trying my hardest, to do anything I wanted in life: and it has bumped me down, rather, to have gone wrong in this thing, after three or four years of top-effort.’
It seemed worth the effort since Lawrence knew that ‘The story I have to tell is one of the most splendid ev
er given a man for writing,’ but he dreaded that it might prove ‘too big’ for him. He wanted to be more than a narrator of an exciting tale; he wished to stamp the book with his own personality and produce a psychological epic of one man at war, both with himself and with his country’s foes. Furthermore, this saga had to demonstrate the author’s accomplishments as an artist with language. Somehow he wanted to emulate his beloved Malory, who ‘passed all his stuff through the mill of his own personality, and gave us a miracle of goodness’.3 In the end, the Seven Pillars would stand comparison with the author’s chosen models, Melville’s Moby Dick, Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Another guide was Doughty: Lawrence admired him as a stylist, regarding his Travels in Arabia Deserta (published in 1888) as an artistic triumph and a literary classic. He had been introduced to the man and his book before his first journey to the Middle East in 1909 and, during the war, Travels in Arabia Deserta had been used as a handbook by the Arab Bureau. In 1919 Lawrence persuaded Jonathan Cape to reprint the book, for which he wrote an introduction, and he unsuccessfully asked Arthur Balfour to obtain a government pension for Doughty. Lawrence had much in common with him: both men aspired to be poets, cherished ambitions to write a literary epic and were obsessed with the form and structure of language. Trained as a geologist, Doughy had wanted to penetrate the deepest strata of language laid down by the Anglo-Saxons and Chaucer and adapt their usages to write an epic. Despising the language of his Victorian contemporaries, Doughty followed his quest in the wastes of Arabia and Travels in Arabia Deserta was the outcome.
Lawrence shared Doughty’s regrets about the direction taken by English prose. Reviewing the works of W.H. Hudson in the Spectator for 20 August 1928, he remarked that the Elizabethans had crippled Malory’s prose with dependent clauses, but he praised the ‘limpidity and simpleness’ of Bunyan, Swift and Defoe, all inheritors of the older tradition. Lawrence was fascinated and frightened by the demands of creative writing. He desperately wanted to find a style which was his own and which would convey the reality of his experience; he wished to evolve, like his heroes Malory and Doughty, the words and rhythms which would make his desert saga a masterpiece.
Lawrence craved success. In February 1920 he told General Murray that, while the Seven Pillars was ‘unfit for publication’, it was a long and often exciting story and ‘would enjoy success’ when offered to the public. Moreover viewed as pure history, he believed his version of what had happened in the Middle East ‘will probably last a long time, and influence other accounts in the future’. This was what he had intended in 1919 when he set down his first draft. His mood had been sour after what he considered to be the betrayal of the Arabs by the Allies, so much of what he wrote was polemical propaganda which exposed official chicanery and his unwilling part in it. This element remains in muted form in the 1922 and 1925 versions.
Yet it was as literature, not as history, that Lawrence wanted his work to be assessed. Shortly before his death, he told Robert Graves, ‘My aim was to create intangible things’ and he felt he had succeeded. ‘I know that it’s a good book: in the sense that it’s better than most which have been written lately,’ he added rather lamely. As ever, his confidence in his abilities as an artist was fragile.
Feelings of confidence and inadequacy ebb and flow through his letters from the moment he began writing the Seven Pillars until his death. This equivocation made life very hard for those he had chosen as critics, since Lawrence’s artistic self was inextricably bound up with Lawrence the human being determined to achieve perfection in everything he set his hand to. After a conversation at All Souls towards the end of 1919, L.P. Hartley felt sure that only a masterpiece could satisfy his pretensions.4 This was so, but Lawrence had no way of knowing whether what he had written was a masterpiece. Mrs Bernard Shaw, whose husband had been sent a copy of the 1922 edition of the Seven Pillars together with a sycophantic request for criticism, was puzzled by Lawrence’s diffidence. ‘If you don’t know it is a “great book”, what is the use of anyone telling you so?’ she asked. Then and later Lawrence desperately needed the assurance of those he thought fit to judge his work. He told an admiring Siegfried Sassoon that when he had completed the Seven Pillars he had been crushed by a sense of failure.
Lawrence’s approach to Sassoon was a reminder of the high store he set by poetry and the judgements of poets, whom he considered consummate artists with words. There was, Robert Graves believed, a boundary between poetry and prose which Lawrence, the worshipper of poets, would have liked to cross. Such a trespass would have angered Graves, who once wrote, ‘Anything that wanders between in an ambitious way and boasts about artistry and style makes me sick.’ It was an area where he and Lawrence could not agree. ‘The spavined team of T.E.’s literary friends’ and his preference for the ‘second rate’ which embraced D.H. Lawrence and W.H. Auden nauseated Graves.5 When Lawrence sought respect, criticism and friendship from other writers he was intruding on a world riven by faction, jealousy and backbiting.
It was natural for a writer, particularly one so ambitious as Lawrence, to seek out the company of men and women of letters. Conversations with poets, novelists and professional critics offered him the means to learn about the techniques of writing and the yardsticks needed to measure his own work. So, from the moment he returned to London in October 1918, he made it his business to chase and exploit contacts in the world of belles lettres. Excursions into Bohemia were a novel and not uncongenial task for a man whose previous society had been confined to those by and large his intellectual inferiors. His wartime experiences had taught him that for fighting men ‘conduct is a very grave matter’, whereas creative artists spurned rules and largely tolerated what he called ‘human oddness’.
He soon built up a wide and eclectic circle. His first base was All Souls College, Oxford, where he encountered Ezra Pound and Robert Graves. He had enthused over Pound’s verse before the war (he may have encouraged his brother Will to invite Pound to talk at St John’s in 1913), and had been reading Graves’s poetry since 1917. Graves became Lawrence’s intimate friend, poetic mentor (he helped him write the dedicatory verse ‘To S.A.’ for the Seven Pillars) and sexual confidant. Graves also gave him the chance to play the patron since, after Graves’s Boar’s Hill shop went bankrupt in 1922, Lawrence gave him £50 and two chapters from the Seven Pillars which were sold to an American magazine for £800. Lawrence was instrumental in getting Graves a lectureship in English at Cairo University and assisted him in preparing his biography T.E. Lawrence and the Arabs.
Through Edward (‘Eddie’) Marsh, Churchill’s Private Secretary and patron of the Georgian poets, Lawrence met Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon, who on first acquaintance could not believe he really was a colonel. By the end of 1922, he was on close terms with Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster and John Buchan.
Unlike other prominent literary figures, Lawrence avoided attachment to a specific group. While other writers banded together, frequented various haunts in central London or joined circles such as the Bloomsbury set, Lawrence remained, as ever, a freelance. As Christopher Caudwell observed, although he was part of contemporary ‘bourgeois culture’, Lawrence was an individual who prized his individuality and shunned labels. So, while he was admired by the younger generation of writers, such as Auden and Isherwood, his political neutrality kept him outside their coterie. The left held no attractions for him, nor did he give any attention to the social and economic problems of his own country, which increasingly occupied the thoughts of other contemporary writers.
In essence, Lawrence was a courtier in the ‘Palace of Art’ where those around him were a source of purely literary ideas and sometimes an appreciative audience. ‘All his life he remained an Oxford don,’ remarked Isherwood, who noticed his addiction to talking ‘shop’ and his severity towards those whose ignorance he uncovered. At gatherings of intellectual equals, his moods were unpredictable: he was by turns humble, arrogant or good-humoure
d. Noel Coward thought him an ‘inverted show-off’ who could talk ‘the most inconceivable balls’, a judgement which is supported by an extract from Lawrence’s review of Philip Guedalla’s A Man of Letters.6
Between page 1 and page 42 I could find no return for my labour; but the third line of page 42 was made up of the single word ‘No’. Succinct, as a judgement, everybody will agree: but also it was sufficient and final and witty and yet tender.
Yet, as Coward realised, ‘his legend was too strong to be gainsaid and I, being a celebrity snob, crushed down my wicked suspicions. He was charming to me anyhow.’7
From August 1922, when he first enlisted in the RAF, Lawrence became an intermittent exile from the society of artists and writers. He was a bird of passage who came and went as he pleased, calling unexpectedly on his friends and then leaving suddenly and without explanation. He was fortunate to have friends who accepted his irregularities without question or complaint.
Late in 1923, he found himself a new base, a dilapidated cottage at Cloud’s Hill, Dorset, conveniently close to Bovington, where he was then stationed, and to Thomas Hardy’s house at Max Gate, where he was a frequent visitor from April 1924 onwards. At first, he rented the cottage from a neighbouring squire, Henry Frampton, who by chance was a distant kinsman to his father. In 1929 he bought the property for £450 and four years later he undertook major improvements which included the provision of running water, a boiler and an iron bath. At Cloud’s Hill there were uncomfortable reminders of the self-inflicted Spartan regime of Lawrence’s youth and wartime camp life. Alcohol was banned and the cuisine was minimalist, with guests being offered tins of preserved meat and can openers. But black pottery cups were available for Lawrence’s own brand of China tea and there was a gramophone.
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