Hero

by Michael Korda

  There is also a passage that still has the power to shock. While Lawrence is on parade at Cranwell to mark the death of Queen Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII, he remembers a visit he once made to her, when he was a famous and decorated war hero. She was not “a Saint, a Paragon,” as the chaplain now describes her, he thinks, but “an unfortunate, a long-suffering doll.” Lawrence recalls her as a “mummified thing, the bird-like head cocked on one side, not artfully but by disease, the red-rimmed eyes, the enamelled face … her bony fingers, clashing in the tunnel of their rings.” This is one of the few times in the book when he refers to his previous life as the other persona he has left behind, “Colonel Lawrence,” and it is surely the cruelest passage in The Mint. Even today, when the attitude toward the British royal family has changed, it seems out of place, like an attack on the wrong person.

  Enlistment in the RAF had not been the only thing on Lawrence’s mind in 1922. He was as determined to storm the literary world as he had been to enter the RAF, and he was probably the only person to whom it would have seemed that the two ambitions were not contradictory. He had sent one set of the corrected galley proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the Oxford newspaper printers to Edward Garnett, a gifted editor who had worked closely with Joseph Conrad and championed the work of D. H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford, and John Galsworthy. Garnett was now working as a consultant for the new publishing house of Jonathan Cape. He was a sensitive and gifted reader, with a sure touch for literary quality and a first-class sales instinct (a rare combination); he was good at building careers too, and played an important role in the lives of his authors. Garnett at once wanted to publish the book, but Lawrence shied away, writing to say that Garnett was the first person to read the book—but adding that his friend the artist Eric Kennington was already reading it. He accepted Garnett’s handwritten list of notes, suggestions, and corrections, thus setting in motion an elaborate and long-drawn-out process of mutual seduction, as Garnett attempted to steer him to Cape. Garnett’s praise of the book was enormously welcome to Lawrence, who—as the author of a 300,000-word book on which he had spent four years of his life—thirsted for recognition and praise. He revealed to Garnett that he had already received a sizable offer, sight unseen, from an American publisher for an abridged version of 120,000 words, but had said, “Nothing doing"—although the idea of an abridged, “boy’s own” version of the book in fact intrigued him. Eventually, with much patient nudging and help from Garnett, he would produce such a version: the enormously successful Revolt in the Desert. Lawrence, despite his protestations of naïveté, had devised an extraordinarily successful way of dealing with book publishers: allowing them to read his book on the condition that they couldn’t publish it. Similarly, he would later create a tidal wave of publicity for Seven Pillars of Wisdom among the public at large by ensuring that it was a book everyone wanted to read, but nobody could buy. Certainly his correspondence with Garnett is remarkably shrewd; he demonstrates a practical knowledge of book publishing economics while at the same time insisting that the book isn’t for sale.

  In the meantime, Lawrence had set out in pursuit of bigger fish than Garnett. Taking advantage of his one brief meeting with Bernard Shaw, Lawrence had written to ask Shaw to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His letter was a perfect mix of flattery and modesty: “I’d like you to read it … partly because you are you: partly because I may profit by your reading it,if I have a chance to talk to you soon after, before you have got over it.” Nothing could have been more tactfully phrased, or more carefully baited, to lure Shaw into reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom; nor did it hurt that Lawrence, despite his modesty, was himself a celebrity. Shaw’s ego and vanity were world-class—indeed by wittily mocking his own weaknesses, he had made himself ever more famous, and by 1922 he was at the height of his formidable powers, both intellectual and theatrical. Perhaps more important, he had succeeded—as two previous Anglo-Irish playwrights, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde, had done—in turning himself into a “character,” whose doings and sayings were constantly publicized, and who was given wide license to say outrageous things because he was Irish and a self-proclaimed genius. As a theatrical reviewer he had been the talk of London for his wit and intelligence, and as a playwright he was, like Sheridan and Wilde, a huge success from the beginning, often confronting on the stage serious social problems that approached the limit of the lord chamberlain’s tolerance (the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was, until 1968, the official censor of the British stage). Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting is supposed to have said, as she emerged from the theater after a performance of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, shaking her head in disapproval, “How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.” Fiercely argumentative and intolerant of any opinion but his own, Shaw was the best known of the Fabian Socialists—he outshone Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with their compulsive gathering of statistics, and H. G. Wells, despite Wells’s enormously popular novels, as the most articulate spokesman for socialism and social reform in Britain.

  Shaw signified his willingness to read the book, so one copy was sent to him, and Lawrence, like any other author, chafed while waiting for his reaction. In the meantime, Lawrence had sent another copy to his friend Vyvyan Richards, who read it more promptly, and wrote a most confusing letter back about it: “It seems to me that an attempted work of art may be so much more splendid for its very broken imperfection revealing the man so intimately.” This was probably meant as praise—at least Lawrence took it that way—though on its face it seems to mean that the book’s faults revealed Lawrence’s strengths. Lawrence replied at length, to say that he knew it was a good book, but felt that “it was too big for me: too big for most writers, I think. It’s rather in the titan class: books written at tiptoe, with a strain that dislocates the writer, and exhausts the reader out of sympathy.” This is a more perceptive judgment than Vyvyan Richards’s, but luckily for Lawrence, he was a first-class writer about battle, and very good with the small, human dramas of war. When he stops trying to achieve the effect of a masterpiece, and lets his gift for description show through, his work rises to a level of its own, matched by no other nonfiction book on war in the twentieth century. In any case, Rich-ards’s praise, however qualified, was not what Lawrence was waiting for—he was awaiting Shaw’s, which was distressingly slow in coming.

  Doughty’s Arabia Deserta was also on Lawrence’s mind. He felt a great debt and affection toward Charles Doughty, and had been instrumental in getting the Medici Society and Jonathan Cape to bring that difficult and sometimes impenetrable classic, more often admired than read, back into print by agreeing to write an introduction for it—one of his best short pieces, and well worth reading for its own sake. Now, though he was a mere airman in training, Lawrence continued the campaign he had begun to obtain for Doughty a Civil List pension, reaching out to the prime minister, David Lloyd George. He wrote to Doughty, “Of the present Ministry three or four are Fellows of All Souls, and most of the others are friends of mine. The Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Salisbury, and Amery, and Wood and three or four others would be glad to serve you in any way you wished.” In this generous service, he was successful. Doughty, who was old—and mostly forgotten and impoverished until Lawrence took up his cause—was overwhelmed by Lawrence’s hard work on his behalf; and it says much for Lawrence’s courage and determination that he used none of these friendships on his own behalf, but simply went on, not so much “solitary in the ranks” as, for the moment, invisible in the ranks.

  But not for much longer.

  Edward Garnett, despite Lawrence’s reluctance to allow Seven Pillars of Wisdom to be published, was working painstakingly on the abridgment. This idea tempted Lawrence, both because it would remove from the book the more controversial passages he did not want the general public to read, and because it would almost certainly produce enough money to enable him to print a deluxe and very limited edition of the full text for his friends—someth
ing that Gertrude Bell had begged him to do while they were together in Paris during the Peace Conference.

  In the meantime, Lawrence had been posted to RAF Farnborough, thanks to Air Vice-Marshal Swann’s intervention, and arrived there on November 7, after a brief leave, which he cut short by two days, so anxious was he to get into the “real” air force. Farnborough was indeed the real air force—it was, among other things, home to several squadrons, and it contained research and experimental facilities and the RAF school of photography.

  If there was one specialty in the RAF for which Lawrence was perfectly suited, it was photography. His father had not only taught him everything there was to know about photography, but made sure that he had the best and latest equipment; and with his natural interest in technology and crafts of any kind, Lawrence quickly became an expert. Some of the photographs Lawrence took in the Hejaz, during the war, are amazing—they belong among the classic images of warfare by photographers such as Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan, and are all the more remarkable because Lawrence was a combatant, not a photojournalist, and because his equipment was by modern standards bulky and slow. His photographs of Feisal’s encampment at dawn and of the Bedouin advancing toward Aqaba are still the two most emblematic and famous pictures of the Arab Revolt. In addition, Lawrence was one of the pioneers in the use of aerial photography in mapmaking and military intelligence. He devised his own system of laying out aerial photographs in a grid pattern to use them as the basis for a map, and taught pilots how to take the pictures he needed. Lawrence could have taught the class in photography at RAF Farnborough—it is unlikely that any of the instructors there knew as much as he did, or had even a small fraction of his practical experience. Trenchard was not wrong—Lawrence’s refusal to accept a commission in the RAF deprived the air force of the opportunity of learning something from a master of irregular warfare, and from one of the few commanders who understood how to use aircraft to support ground troops or how to make practical use in the field of aerial photography.

  Still, the move to Farnborough was a happy one—so happy that it may have increased Lawrence’s confidence in the RAF to the point where he became incautious. Here there was no square bashing; the NCOs were mostly instructors; the airmen were either learning or carrying out their “trades,” as the RAF calls its different specialties. The predominant noise on the station was that of aircraft engines warming up, not the yells of drill corporals, the crash of boots on the parade ground, or the sharp, metallic clatter of hundreds of men performing rifle drill. During his leave Lawrence had purchased a motorcycle, a secondhand Triumph with a sidecar—a new stage in the lifelong love affair with motorcycles that would end only with his death. For the moment his duties at Farnborough were anything but onerous, a fact which very shortly got him into serious trouble.

  The November photography class had already begun, and in the usual rigid way of the air force it was considered impossible for Lawrence to join late and catch up with his fellow students, so he was put down for the next class, which began in January. The notion of wasting an airman’s time was not one that occurred to anyone in authority in the RAF—his time belonged to the RAF, to be wasted or used as his superiors and the station schedule determined. For Lawrence, however, sweeping floors or emptying the grate of the adjutant’s stove while everybody else was studying photography was insupportable. He wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, partly to thank Swann for getting him out of RAF Uxbridge early, and partly to ask Swann to get him into the November class, or even an earlier one, since, as Lawrence pointed out, “I’m already as good as the men passing out. My father, one of the pioneer photographers, taught me before I was four years old.” This was a mild exaggeration, but the letter exudes a certain overconfidence, as if Lawrence were writing to a family retainer rather than an air marshal, and can only have increased Swann’s dislike of his role.

  In the meantime, since nobody in authority in the RAF likes to see an airman sitting around doing nothing, Lawrence “was appointed to the Adjutant’s office as an orderly,” running messages and cleaning the office first thing in the morning—menial but not demeaning duty, for an airman without a trade. The adjutant of the photography school, Flight Lieutenant Charles Findlay, who seems to have been a decent sort, did not pay much attention to his new orderly: Lawrence did not seem to him in any way out of the ordinary. At some point Lawrence must have signaled his disapproval of this waste of his time to Swann, however, for about three weeks later the station commander, Wing Commander W. J. Y. Guilfoyle, called Findlay into his office to say that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had called to ask “why A/c2 Ross is not engaged in photographic training?”

  Findlay began to explain that the pupils arrived “in penny packets,” and had to be kept busy until there were enough of them to form a class, but the commanding officer cut him off short—he had already explained all that to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, but Swann “was not at all sympathetic,” and insisted that “Ross’s training must begin at once.”

  The two men were “frankly perplexed.” “Who is this Ross? What’s he like?” the commanding officer asked, and the adjutant suggested that he might like to see the airman himself. Ross was sent for, on the pretext of giving him a message to deliver. As Findlay described him, “His blue eyes were set in a long, finely chiseled face. His jaw was square. But the most outstanding features were his long, sensitive fingers.” He was trim, erect, short, and while crisply respectful, his face conveyed none of the awe in which a recruit AC2 might be expected to hold his commanding officer on seeing him at close range. On the contrary, Ross gave the faint impression of being in command himself.

  Once he had saluted and gone, the commanding officer “turned to the Adjutant with a look of amazement.”

  “ ‘Findlay! Do you know who I think he is? Lawrence!’

  ‘Lawrence?’

  ‘Yes, Lawrence of Arabia! I saw him once in Cairo early in the war, and this airman looks uncommonly like him.’ ”

  The two officers had no idea what to do next. Guilfoyle’s suspicion that AC2 Ross was Colonel Lawrence left him in the uncomfortable position of feeling that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had pulled a fast one on him, or had so little confidence in him that he had not seen fit to inform him of the real identity of one of his own airmen. Since he didn’t know what else to do, Guilfoyle ordered Findlay to start Ross’s instruction as soon as possible, even if he was in a special class of one, and to keep an eye on him for any clues as to whether he was really Lawrence. Lawrence immediately provided the clues. Recruits were given a mathematics test and were supposed to hand in their worksheets along with the answers to the problems. All Lawrence’s answers were correct, but he turned in no worksheets. When reprimanded by the instructor, he said that he had worked them out in his head, and when given another problem, he worked that one out in his head too, and immediately wrote down the correct answer. The instructor in optics complained to Findlay that Ross knew more about the subject than he did, and the same thing happened when he was put in the “Neg. Room.” As may be imagined, this did not make him popular with the instructors, and it added to the mystery surrounding Ross’s special treatment. Perhaps Lawrence would have been wiser to feign a certain degree of ignorance, rather than, to put it crudely, showing off.

  He made matters worse by replying flippantly to reprimands about his turn-out on guard duty, and by answering the orderly officer “in a foreign language,” presumably Arabic, since the orderly officer would surely have recognized French; all this was bound to increase curiosity. It seems clear that Lawrence was suffering from overconfidence, brought on by the ease with which he had prodded Swann into getting him into a special class, and perhaps also by good news on the literary front.

  For while Lawrence was astonishing (and provoking) his instructors, Edward Garnett was progressing rapidly with the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence was beginning, partly because of Garnett’s shrewd knowledge of how to handle authors, to come around to appro
ving the idea of an abridged volume of 120,000 to 150,000 words, preferably the former. Neither he nor Garnett had any doubt that the book would sell, so Lawrence was relieved of his worries about running up a considerable overdraft for an AC2 to pay the artists who were making the drawings and the paintings for the limited edition of the complete text, to which he was becoming more and more committed.

  At the same time, his approach to Shaw had paid off in a most surprising fashion. At the end of October, impatient at having heard nothing, Lawrence wrote a brilliantly self-depreciatory little note to the great man:

  Dear Mr. Shaw,

  I am afraid you are rather making a labour of it, or you don’t want to tell me that it’s rubbish. I don’t want to bore you (nice of me!), and if you say it’s rot I’ll agree with you & cackle with pleasure at finding my judgment doubled.

  Please laugh & chuck it.

  Yours sincerely,

  T. E. Lawrence

  Unlike most such letters, this one very soon produced a lengthy reply, urging Lawrence to be patient and revealing that Charlotte Shaw had read the book with great admiration and had urged her husband to read it—more than urged, in fact. In his absence—he was “road tubthumping round England” for the forthcoming general election—she read every word of the awkward six-pound book, and on Shaw’s return “she began ecstatically reading passages of it aloud to him.” Shaw’s letter to Lawrence, if allowance is made for the somewhat hectoring style he used to everyone, was thoughtful, encouraging, and full of advice, much of which Lawrence was to ignore, and it clearly opened up to Lawrence the possibility of friendship with the Shaws.