You know his story doubtless: it was a simple one. On behalf of the British Government he had promised the Arabs their freedom, if they would fight for it. They did so, and the Turks, with their help, were defeated. Then when he entered Damascus with Allenby and observed the way things were going, Lawrence saw that many of the Arabs to whom he had pledged himself were about to be tricked. Thereupon he threw in his hand. He resigned and withdrew. A litde later he decided that his name, which had been dishonoured, should be no more borne by him. So he shut his eyes, opened a telephone book, and put his finger on a name upon the page. Opening his eyes again, he found that his finger was resting upon the name 'Shaw'. And (apologizing, as he told me, to George Bernard Shaw for having made so free with his patronymic) he became Shaw and enlisted as such in the Air Force.
At a party once W. B. Yeats asked if we had heard what Lawrence had said about what he had done. He then delivered himself of what Lawrence had said, regarding this great affair, as it affected him personally. Lawrence was supposed to have said—in the grandiose brogue in which Yeat's obiter-dicta are so pleasantly if pontifically clothed :
'I was an Irish nobody.' (Pause.) 'I did something.' (Pause.) 'It was a failure.' (Pause.) 'And I became an Irish nobody again.'
This has to be rolled out, in slow-time, if you want to get the full savour of it, as it stands in the repertory of a great raconteur. Something of the sort Lawrence may have uttered certainly. But a less grandiloquent person never stepped. And, being an 'Irish nobody', he had no brogue, only a modest little Oxford accent.
I remember after the War the wife of a fashionable draughtsman saying to me, when Colonel Lawrence was mentioned, 'Lewis, I have heard that he is—well,' she lowered her voice, 'a traitor.' From this I assume that at the time his action was greatly resented by some people, who even went so far as to attribute to this 'Irish nobody' the traditional Irish role of traitor.
For my part, he seems to have acted very nobly in refusing to participate in a political fraud. For 'if you promise them ought, you should keep your promise/ whether they be Arabs, Englishmen, or whatnot. Had Lawrence been a 'traitor', on the other hand, he would have made much more fuss than he did about this betrayal, by the government he served, and whose instrument he had been. I am sure he should not have done so, seeing how much he liked the Arabs.
A man who knew him very well remarked to me that 'Lawrence did not know what he wanted'. I should amend that, and say that he did not want anything clearly. He was 'a failure' because he was wanting in the qualities that make the man of action. The society he had served so brilliantly betrayed him too, in a sense. Then, as a 'man-of-action', he should have called it to account. Not languished enigmatically in one of its camps as an 'aircraftsman', imperfectly incognito, as it were publicly neglected. I say he should have done this to sustain the part of the man-of-action since he had chosen it.
He held told me that Rudyard Kipling did not like what he had written, because he considered 'he had let the man-of-action down'. I should say that after his Arabian exploits he 'let down the man-of-action' far more than during them. For my own part I do not at all mind seeing the man-of-action let down. Je constate, that is all.
As to the Arabian exploits themselves it is quite clear what Kipling meant, and, according to his lights, Kipling was right. There was the episode, in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of the Arab boys who had to be executed, and none of the Arabs would do it. So Lawrence has to do it himself. He takes them up on to a sandhill (it is a long time since I read this, and I have not the book with me now), and shoots them with a revolver. Only he turns his head away to do it. There is a school-girlish touch in that, I think, which would hardly appeal to the author of Barrack Room Ballads. If you accept the role of executioner, you should at least look at your victims.
On one occasion Lawrence told me that his friend Lord Allenby wanted him to be Governor of Egypt: he wanted to propose this, and for Lawrence to agree to accept, if the governorship were offered him. I said, 'Well, are you going to do it?' He shook his head.
I asked him why he would not be Governor of Egypt. He answered that if he had to sit in judgement on another man, he would always feel that he should be where the accused man was, and the accused be in the judgement seat instead of him. For a man-of-action this was an umpromising attitude of mind, to say the least of it. And I could not help asking myself how he ever brought himself to blow up the Turkish troop train in the desert. But that was in the course of a war of liberation. That was the answer, possibly.
It is not necessary for me to say that The Seven Pillars off
Wisdom is not a great work of literary art. But it is a historic monument to the most distinguished of those engaged in 'the great adventure', as the World War was always referred to in the Press. It is a record of the doings of a very interesting man, of great ambitions paradoxically associated with great idealism. The ideals were English, the ambitions Irish. There was a further confusion of a more intimate sort, which disturbed the symmetry of his extrovert existence.
There seems no good reason, except accidental ones, why Arabia should have been the scene of Lawrence's activities. He had asked Doughty, you will recall, this same question which rises in the mind apropos of his Arabianism just as it does apropos of Doughty's. The latter said he went to 'the desert Arabia' in order to rescue English Prose from the slough into which it had fallen. The Arabs didn't really come into it. It was a matter of English prose-style. In Doughty's case this was probably true. Iceland (to which he originally intended to go) would have done just as well, and would have been nearer to the Sagas and the chronicles of seamen upon which Doughty founded his archaic but delightful jargon. But for Lawrence, would another race have done as well as the Arabs? The South African negroes, or the peones of the New World? Myself, I should say that they would. For abstract freedom was the essential thing, rather than the identity of the people who were to be made free.
The one-time Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, told me a lot about the period when Lawrence was in process of becoming 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Storrs was one of those associated with Lawrence at the outset of the War who reached himself some eminence in the course of it. He liked Lawrence. But others who started level with Lawrence, and at whose expense he took the lead and pushed himself into the position of a glamorous white-hooded paladin, did not like him quite so well.
This Irish adventurer, with the disarming urbanity of an Oxford intellectual, did not stand on ceremony with his duller colleagues. He must have stolen more than one march on them. Obviously he outmanoeuvred his colleagues before he outmanoeuvred the Turks.
There were more things than one about him, to cause him to play a lone hand. There is no egotism like the Irish. It shuts the Irishman up in the world of his own to a surprising extent. I know of no exception to this rule—it may be the secret of the political ineffectiveness of Ireland. It may be why the Irish have 'always betrayed their leaders'. They cannot tolerate a leader, unless it be themselves.
Yeats, Joyce, all, in one way or another, illustrate this. They all have the soul of the petty chieftain, jealous and superb. It even breaks through the cosmopolitan veneer of the late George Moore.
In discussing with me once the nationality of the hero of Ulysses, Joyce expressed surprise that many Jewish friends of his should have objected to him choosing a Jew for such an unheroic role as that of Leopold Bloom. He said that, for his part, he considered the destiny of Ireland not unlike that of Israel. But in fact there is all the difference in the world. For Jewish success is a triumph of organization, the subordination of the individual to the race. Whereas the unsuccess of Ireland can probably be traced, as I have said, to a total absence of this strange solidarity.
The Irishman is capable, however, of organizing himself. Very readily he becomes his own personal 'racket'. And if his 'racket' is successful, then he will become entirely inaccessible.
Lawrence had his full share of this egotism. And, apart from that,
one of the little touches of nature that make the whole world kin, namely the sexual appetite, was wanting in him. That would tend to isolate him, too.
Over his competitors, in the field of Arabian adventure, he would stand as one apart, and able to act without considerations of trammelling esprit de carps. All this suited the country, so to speak—or the isolations of the desert suited him, it would be better to say. Also as an Irishman—the national egotism apart, that makes them all little theoretic chieftains—he would not be overburdened with deference for the stately Government he was serving. He would even be inclined to think how this Government could be made to serve him. And it is quite certain that he would have far more respect for a Bedouin chief than he would have for Whitehall or the F.O. He in a sense would feel that he was stealing this bloated power to put it at the service of his friends of the Desert.—And then, at the end, this Power that he did not respect got the better of him, and his Arab friends suffered at the same time a disillusion—if they ever had any illusions which I think open to doubt.
As a companion he was delightful. For him I was 'the author of Tarr', and I did a set of drawings for his book—not so quickly as I should, and all of a sudden I heard it had appeared to my great disappointment. This group of designs I propose however shortly to publish, making the necessary arrangements with his executors to include some explanatory fragments of the text. When I was in the Atlas Mountains, among all those Arabian scenes which are the backgrounds of his great military exploits, I altered some of them. For there I was seeing at first hand what originally I had only drawn from the pages of his book or of Arabia Desert a. I was surprised to learn from him that 'kitchen arabic' was all he knew: but he certainly obtained a remarkable insight into the Arab nature, which, on the spot, the experience of the eye confirmed.
The 'uncrowned king of Arabia' eschewed, with an almost pathological intensity, all vulgar pomp. The traditional shyness of the Englishman was incarnated in him—in this small and shrinking figure. A great deal has been said about Lawrence's 'magnetism': how if he went into a camp of rough Bedouins as soon as they caught sight of him they would rush towards him and kiss his hand, or press their lips upon his cloak. As a matter of fact this was, I imagine, rather a tribute to his rank and renown and the power of the British Raj, than to himself. Very few people indeed possess magnetism of the order attributed to Lawrence. And Lawrence was not among them.
Moving about with a Berber guide, in the High Atlas, who was conducting me to a secluded Kasbah, we entered a field where a young sheikh was standing, supervising the operations of the harvest on his domain. My guide went up to him, dropped upon one knee, kissed his hand, and afterwards carried his hand to his forehead, with an air of religious abasement. He would doubtless have done the same thing to Lawrence, who,
for him, would merely be a great British sheikh.
In conclusion, there is the persistent notion of a bogus demise: that Lawrence did not die as was reported in the newspapers. When I was in Germany recently I was asked more than once 'if Lawrence was alive'. Why should he not be dead? I asked. The idea seemed to be that he was back in Arabia once more, working underground as an agent of the British Government. To what ends? No answer. All I could say was that I did not believe Lawrence would consent, at any price, to engage once more in Arabian politics. I may be wrong. If so, I quite misunderstood him.
CHAPTER 1
War and Post War
In this, the last compartment of my book, I am going to deal mainly with three figures; Eliot, Pound and Joyce. These three people are important, each in his own way: the three most important people I was associated with in the period I have chosen for this narrative.
If I were a politician, a doctor, a biologist or an engineer, then the people I have selected for this privileged treatment would be politicians, doctors, biologists, or engineers. But for me a book is more important than a party-cry, or a serum, or a theory of evolution, or an aeroplane-engine.
All books are obviously not important. Indeed most are not. But because so many are not, that does not alter the fact that a book can be just as important as anything else. So no one need be ashamed of talking about books, rather than poison gas, which wipes people out, or vaccines which may save them from death.
Plato's Republic for instance is important, so is Hamlet, so are the collected works of Moliere. In every period a very few books are important. Contemporaries are never agreed as to which these are. I may not have a trio of Platos or Shakes-peares to show you, but I've got as near that as I can, and I am quite certain no one can come any nearer than I have in the period in question. I've got a sort of Browning in my friend Ezra, the 'Dante of Dublin' in James Joyce, and Eliot is the highbrow hero of England and America still (though he has been joined now, in England, by Auden).
We were all in the post-war, but that period produced nothing but a lot of sub-Sitwells and sheep in Woolfe's clothing, and we were not of it. I call us here 'the Men of 1914'. Nothing occurred in England, the highbrow line to put up a challenge for the supreme highbrow laurel until Auden came along. He and his school (which was mixed up at first with T. S. Eliot's school) were the key men of the Depression, just as we were the literary big noises of the War and the 'waste' it left in its wake.
Nearly ten years ago, before Auden left Oxford, he came to see me in Ossington Street, and I got to know Stephen Spender at the same time. Spender, who is half a Schuster, and combines great practical ability with great liberal charm, showed me a lot of jolly poems, mostly about Auden—he said modestly, a much better poet than himself. And then Auden came himself. He was very crafty and solemn: I felt I was being interviewed by an emissary of some highly civilized power—perhaps over-civilized—who had considered that something had to be done about me and so one of its most able negotiators had been sent along to sound me. The author of The Dog Beneath the Skin is, I understand, Icelandic in origin. This causes him to be absurdly fair—or he was then, those blondes darken quickly: I always think of him as a rather psychic phenomenon. I should not be surprised if he were 'fey'.
For forty years Shaw and Wells had been Fabians first and literary artists afterwards. Even Wilde had been a great outcast first, and was never more than a minor poet. What I think history will say about the 'Men of 1914' is that they represent an attempt to get away from romantic art into classical art, away from political propaganda back into the detachment of true literature: just as in painting Picasso has represented a desire to terminate the Nineteenth Century alliance of painting and natural science. And what has happened—slowly—as a result of the War, is that artistic expression has slipped back again into political propaganda and romance, which go together. When you get one you get the other. The attempt at objectivity has failed. The subjectivity of the majority is back again, as a result of that great defeat, the Great War, and all that has ensued upon it. And as there are more Wars—bigger and better Wars—to come, that is that, I believe we must regretfully conclude.
All the same, we are out of the 'post-war', thank God. Nothing to-day stands much chance of settling down into a snug and unchallenged success, and this applies to the second-rate as much as to the first-rate. In a world where what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose there is always hope. And to-day that is eminently so. Therefore for the present we are all right. Nothing is going to set anyway, again—not for a century or two. But let us get back to the beginning of things, to the opening years of the present epoch, 1914-1926 namely.
CHAPTER II
The Period of' Ulysses', 'Blast', 'The Wasteland'
The men of 1914 were a 'haughty and proud generation', I quote Mr. Ford Madox Ford: the Joyces, the Pounds, the Eliots, my particular companions. Nineteen fourteen is the year I have selected for the commencement of this history, and as observed by Mr. Madox Ford, who has seen the generation of James, Conrad, and Hudson this new 'generation' was remarkable for its 'pride'.
If Mr. Ford was correct, what was the origin of this arrogan
ce? We were of course a youth racket—oh yes! among other things. This may have contributed to that impression of 'haughtiness', experienced at contact with us by the middle-aged observer.
It was scarcely our fault that we were a youth racket. It was Ezra who in the first place organized us willy nilly into that. For he was never satisfied until everything was organized. And it was he who made us into a youth racket—that was his method of organization. He had a streak of Baden Powell in him, had Ezra, perhaps more than a streak. With Disraeli, he thought in terms of 'Young England'. He never got us under canvas it is true—we were not the most promising material for Ezra's boyscoutery. But he did succeed in giving a handful of disparate and unassimilable people the appearance of a Bewegung.
It was Pound who invented the word 'vorticist': it was Pound who introduced Joyce to Miss Harriet Weaver—indeed thrust him down her throat—and thereby made a great many things possible which would not otherwise have been so: it was Pound who tirelessly schooled and scolded Eliot (as the latter is the first to recognize) and his blue pencil is all over The Waste
Land. Ezra was at once a poet and an impresario, at that time an unexpected combination.
Benjamin Disraeli was of course the first 'Youth' racketeer to make his appearance in England. But that was a political racket. It was named by him 'Young England', and he used it as an emotional lever to oust Peel, and to hoist himself into power. When Peel fell, Disraeli said that it was Young England that had done it, though in fact it was his own cunning old fingers and resourceful tongue that had done the trick. But Ezra was not a politician de metier, and his racket was merely an art-racket.
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