by Colin Wilson
***
Close study of T. E. Lawrence is made difficult by the fact that no reliable, unbiased biography has yet been published. Lowell Thomas and Liddel Hart treat him simply as a soldier; Mr. Aldington’s book is so hysterically biased against him that it has virtually no value except as a corrective to other books that treat him as a legendary Sir Galahad. Until an exhaustive, unprejudiced biography is published, we have nothing but the bare facts of his life, and the evidence of his own writing, to go on.
The facts of his life are briefly these:
Lawrence came of a fairly-well-to-do family; he was one of several brothers. At school he was brilliant at subjects he cared about, and had no energy to spare for the others. He always cared about history and literature. In his early teens, this developed into a passionate interest in medievalism; he read Malory and William Morris, and cycled around Oxfordshire taking rubbings of church brasses. He was always physically hardy and virile, though he never played competitive games. He cycled around in France looking at castles and cathedrals; later, ignoring the assurances of experienced travellers that it was an impossibility, he travelled through Arabia on foot and alone, examining Crusaders’ castles and collecting notes for his Oxford thesis. A year later, he accompanied Leonard Woolley and the British Museum Archaeological mission to Egypt. There he picked up some Arabic, and learned a great deal more of archaeology; he still read Malory and Morris, and made plans to buy a disused windmill when he returned to England, and use its power to drive a printing press which would print books on hand-made paper; they would then be bound with vellum that would be stained with Tyrian dye.
At the outbreak of war, Lawrence was posted to Egypt as a Staff Captain in the Maps Branch of the Intelligence service. He found it boring, and when an opportunity came to take a part in the rebellion being fomented by King Hussein of Mecca against the Turkish government of Arabia, Lawrence sailed for Arabia without bothering to tell his Intelligence chiefs what he intended to do. He quickly made himself indispensable in the revolt; as the advisor of Fiesal, King Hussein’s son, he steered it to success in a period of less than two years. His book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a record of those two years.
The war had given him new insights; he returned from it a wiser and in no way a happier man. We have already examined that leaking-away of the springs of motive that results from too much experience flooding an over-sensitive person, so we have no need to regard his conduct during the next seventeen years as part of a ‘Lawrence enigma’. He acted as we would expect an Outsider to act. After a three-years battle in the council chamber to establish the Arab right to their own country, Lawrence joined the Tank Corps as a private, and later the R.A.F. He did no more archaeology, and refused offers of various jobs from people who wanted to help him, including the Governorship of Egypt and the Secretaryship of the Bank of England. He appears completely to have lost belief in himself, although this loss of belief did not extend to the rest of humanity (as with Evan Strowde) and he had always an exaggerated respect for certain writers and artists who certainly had not a quarter of his spiritual power.
Later, he bought a cottage at Clouds Hill in Dorset, installed many books and gramophone records, and spent most of his spare time there. After The Seven Pillars he did no more creative work [The Mint is hardly more than a journal). He was killed in a motor-cycle accident in 1935, and even at the end, with his skull and ribs smashed beyond hope of recovery, his prodigious vitality kept him living for three days when another man might have died in a few hours.
This second period of his life is the most depressing to consider, for it is not difficult to see the causes that sapped his motive power, and to see that a few insights into these causes might have showed him how to harness his enormous willpower to creative activity. It is like considering some immense machine that is made useless by a small break in the circuit. The rest of this account of Lawrence must be devoted to a study of The Seven Pillars and Lawrence’s own diagnosis of his Outsider problems.
A letter to Edward Garnett (23 October 1922) makes this very clear. Lawrence writes:
I have looked in poetry everywhere for satisfaction: and haven’t found it. Instead I have made that collection of bonbons, chocolate eclairs of the spirit, whereas I wanted a meal. Failing poetry, I chased my fancied meal through prose, and found everywhere good little stuff, and only a few men who had tried honestly to be greater than mankind; and only their strainings and wrestlings really fill my stomach.
I can’t write poetry, so in prose I aimed at providing a meal for the fellow seekers with myself....
That Lawrence lacked the healthy conceit of the man of genius is one of the root causes of his tragedy of waste.
Before passing on to this, we can mention a revealing passage on Lawrence in the volume T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. Eric Kennington’s account of Lawrence is one of the best balanced articles in the book. A memorable paragraph tells how he showed a copy of The Seven Pillars to a strange, clairvoyant old schoolmaster.1 The schoolmaster’s comment was: ‘Reading this book has made me suffer. The writer is infinitely the greatest man I have known, but he is terribly wrong. He is not himself. He has found an “I” but it is not a true “I”, so I tremble to think of what may happen. He is never alive in what he does. There is no exchange. He is only a pipe through which life flows. He seems to have been a very good pipe, but to live truly one must be more than that.’ This comment not only penetrates to the roots of Lawrence; it is an accurate characterization of the Outsider. ‘He is never alive in what he does.’ This is Meursault and Krebs. ‘He is not himself is even more revealing, for it suggests that the Outsider’s business is to find a course of action in which he is most himself that is, in which he achieves the maximum self-expression.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the most important case-books of the Outsider that we possess. From the beginning, Lawrence’s interest in ascetic religious discipline is apparent. In an early chapter dealing with the religion of the Semitic peoples, he writes:
The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets.... Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible, passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. They lived there a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned, with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle; their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls to be set on fire. To thinkers of the town, the impulse into Nitria had been ever irresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that in solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them...Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach barrenness, renunciation and poverty.2
Throughout The Seven Pillars, Lawrence’s sympathy with these prophets reveals itself. The desert becomes a symbol of purity; of escape from the human:
The Bedouin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.... This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns. It was at once too strange, too simple and too impalpable for common use.3
The chapter on religion ends with an important affirmation of the basis of Lawrence’s ‘religion’:
They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end, nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water, would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves, they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of the flesh. Each wave was broken but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had bee
n, and God would move on the face of those waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised, and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus.4 [Italics mine.]
There are times, in later scenes of violence and bloodshed, when Lawrence seems to be driving home Hemingway’s conclusion, Most men die like animals, not men. There are even passages when the unemotional detachment seems to be callousness, or a disguised sadistic pleasure, and this would be difficult to reconcile with the picture of Lawrence drawn by his friends. It is then that passages like the one above provide the key to Lawrence’s attitude. His detachment is like Hemingway’s, a desire to “stand for truth’. But there is an element present that Hemingway lacks completely, that element of a religious creed that conditions his way of seeing. The violence and cruelty of the desert, and its contempt for the flesh, weigh equally in opposite balance-pans. The creed that reconciles them is the belief that the aim of life is the conquest of matter by spirit. The Arabs have the simplicity of violent opposites:
Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the earth (though not to heaven) by being shown the riches of the earth and the pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head, and who depended for his food on charity or the birds, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration.5
What becomes undeniably apparent in reading The Seven Pillars is that Lawrence did not regard himself as a soldier. It was as the prophet of an idea that he ‘raised the wave’; his power is the power of a man who can be possessed by an idea, and communicate his feeling to others. Again and again he repeats that the Arab war was a war of preaching, not of fighting. His frequent periods of misery and discouragement are due to a simple fact: he cannot believe in the idea that he is preaching:
If I had been an honest advisor of the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff....
In spite of this disbelief, the role of preacher and leader afforded Lawrence the self-expression he needed. Elsewhere he confesses:
I had one craving all my life—for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form....
This war affords him an insight into himself; like Krebs, times when he did ‘the one thing, the only thing’. It gives him a clear glimpse of that which is not trivial and unheroic.
His power of self-analysis is profound. He cannot see himself and his mind as a whole, but he can construct the picture in fragments, and in The Seven Pillars, none of the fragments is missing. His most characteristic trait is his inabihty to stop thinking. Thought imprisons him; it is an unending misery, because he knows the meaning of freedom, from such experience as this:
We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired after the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and of carefulness in creation no longer irritated.6
When asked to become Feisal’s advisor:
I said I hated responsibility... and that all my life, objects had been gladder to me than persons, and ideas than objects.7
The statements of those who knew him corroborate this. E. M. Forster wrote of him:
Though I was frank with him, he was never frank in return, nor did I resent his refusal to be so. This explains in part why he was a great leader of men; he was able to reject intimacy without impairing affection.8
Essentially, Lawrence was not interested in human beings:
The lower creation I avoided, as a reflection upon our failure to attain real intellectuality. If they forced themselves on me, I hated them. To put my hand on a living thing was defilement, and it made me tremble if they touched me or took too great an interest in me.... The opposite would have been my choice if my head had not been tyrannous. I... lamented myself most when I saw a soldier with a girl, or a man fondling a dog, because my wish was to be as superficial and as perfected, and my jailer held me back.9
And speaking of the Arabs:
Before me lay a vista of responsibility and command that disgusted my thought-riddled nature. I felt mean, to fill the place of a man of action, for my standards of value were a wilful reaction against theirs, and I despised their happiness. Always my soul hungered for less than it had, since my senses, sluggish beyond the senses of most men, needed the immediacy of contact to achieve perception.10
He transfers his own characteristics to the Arabs, crediting them with his own love of emptiness, or he generalizes to include himself:
We westerners of this complex age, monks in our body’s cells...11
But it was Lawrence alone who was a ‘monk in his body’s cell’, a man who could never achieve the ‘immediacy of perception’ because he could never stop thinking. He was a ‘pipe through which life flowed’:
It was a hard task for me to straddle feeling and action.
For such a person, the world is an unbelievably colourless place, without vivid perception of sights and tastes to remove the attention from human beings and their inanities. The result is a state of unending mental strain:
It was only weakness which delayed me from mind-suicide —some slow task to choke at length this furnace in my brain: I had developed ideas of other men... but had never created a thing of my own, since I could not approve creation.12 [Italics mine.]
This disapproval of creation is of the same nature as Oliver Gauntlett’s The ignorant, the deceived, the superficial, were the happy among us’, and consequently, the creative among them. It is dislike of human beings, ‘the mob’, ‘chattering, snivelling, scolding’.13
We can see that Lawrence combines the central characteristics of Roquentin and the Barbusse Outsider. Roquentin had said: ‘I was like the others—I said with them, the ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn’t feel that it existed.’ Lawrence’s inability to escape his ‘thought riddled nature’ has the same effect upon him; everything is unreal. And like Barbusse’s hero, he cannot be happy in society, because he ‘sees too deep and too much’. The desert war provided Lawrence with the same kind of peep-show into human suffering that Barbusse’s hero found in his hotel room. These experiences were necessary to him, as they were necessary to the Barbusse Outsider, because their violence left no room in his mind for the irrelevancies of a civilization based on compromise. Violence helped to dissipate the unreality. Whatever happened, Lawrence could have no truck with compromise: he describes his winning over of an Arab tribe that refused to join them on a raiding expedition:
... We put it to them ... how life in the mass was sensual only, to be lived and loved in its extremity. There could be no rest houses for revolt, no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit was accretive, to endure as far as the senses would endure, and to use each such advance as a base for further adventure, deeper privation, sharper pain. Sense could not reach forward or backward. A felt emotion was a conquered emotion, an experience gone dead, which we buried by expressing it.
To be of the desert was, as they knew, a doom to wage unending war with an enemy who was not of this world, nor life, nor anything, but hope itself; and failure seemed God’s freedom to mankind. We might only exercise this our freedom by not doing what it lay within our power to do, for then life would belong to us, and we would have mastered it by holding it cheap. Death would be the best of all our works, the last free loyalty within our grasp, our final leisure, and of these two poles, death and life, or less finally, leisure and subsistence, we should shun subsistence (the very stuff of life) in all save its faintest degree, and cling close to leisure. Thereby we would serve to promote the not-doing rather than the doing. Some men there might be, uncreative, whose leisure is barren; but the activity of these would have been material only. To bring forth i
mmaterial things, things partaking of spirit, not of flesh, we must be jealous of spending time or trouble upon physical demands, since in most men, the soul ages long before the body. Mankind has been no gainer by its drudges.14 [Italics mine.]
The importance of this passage cannot be overestimated. It shows Lawrence taking his stand in an extreme of Asiatic world-contempt, the antithesis of the modern Western spirit. Steppenwolf’s contempt for the bourgeois ideal reaches its logical end: anti-humanistic world-negation.