Exile, whether at Cloud’s Hill or on various provincial and Indian airfields, never left Lawrence in complete isolation from the literary world. He was a prolific letter-writer, although he thought correspondence a poor substitute for conversation. He distrusted accomplished letters which were the products of careful revision, so his were often a flow of uninterrupted consciousness, although he admitted that they aspired to literary merit. They ‘try very hard to be good’, but he doubted whether they or, for that matter, anyone else’s letters could ever be ‘an art form’. His own output of correspondence far exceeded his production of what he would have regarded as ‘art forms’ and, probably more than the Seven Pillars or The Mint, they later attracted readers keen to discover what sort of man Lawrence really was.
Neither the Seven Pillars nor The Mint fits comfortably into any literary category, although Lawrence never saw himself as an experimental writer. They cannot be considered fiction, since each is rooted in what the author had seen, heard and done. To this extent, they are autobiographical fragments, which is how Lawrence once described The Mint, but in neither does he reveal anything about his origins, upbringing or background. The Seven Pillars contains much history, which many readers have understandably accepted as authentic. ‘The book leaves from first to last an impression of absolute truth,’ concluded Hogarth, and such an endorsement from one who, like Lawrence, was at the heart of events has naturally led to the Seven Pillars being considered as an objective and exact historical record.
This it was not. Rather, what Lawrence wrote was closer in spirit to the history he had absorbed as a boy, that found in medieval chivalric chronicles where authors, such as Froissart, adapted and embellished the raw material of men and events.
When Lawrence had first encountered medieval romances, he had dreamed of producing them in beautifully printed editions full of rich illustrations. His ambition was fulfilled by the subscribers’ edition of the Seven Pillars. Decorative initial letters open paragraphs; woodcuts and pen-and-ink drawings are scattered through the text as chapter tailpieces and, in the manner of a medieval illuminated manuscript, there are full-page coloured pictures. While his overall intent was to create a book which would combine the richness of medieval illumination with the elegance of Renaissance printing, Lawrence deliberately chose modern artists such as Paul Nash, Eric Kennington and William Roberts as illustrators. The result is a book true to traditions of good printing and page design which is ornamented with abstract and cubist images, reminders that the subject and author are contemporary.
The abstract pieces complement metaphysical passages. Reading them, Siegfried Sassoon felt convinced that their author owned ‘one of the most intensely real minds of my experience’. Other critics concurred; Lawrence was a man of action and philosopher who seemed able to draw a universal significance from what he had done and discovered about himself. As he admitted, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra had been his philosophical guide when he had been writing the Seven Pillars.
Lawrence had much in common with his mentor. Both men, after a conventionally pious upbringing, had lost faith in God and a moral system based upon Christianity. Lawrence and Nietzsche were therefore forced to justify existence in purely human terms. Each replaced ‘I will’ for ‘Thou shalt’ as the mainspring of values and behaviour. In the dedicatory verse, Lawrence affirmed the power of his will, ‘I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.’ Later, in less assured mood, he confessed that this remarkable exercise had been accidental. ‘Always I grew to dominate those things into which I had drifted, but in none of them did I voluntarily engage.’
Although Sassoon regarded him as an ‘infallible superman’, Lawrence admitted that the costs of serving his will were unbearably heavy. At times he yearned to escape from a regime of hunger, isolation, extremes of temperature and ‘the beastliness of living among the Arabs’, but ‘there lurked always that Will uneasily waiting to burst out.’ It alone was the ‘sure guide’ along the path which ascended ‘from purpose to achievement’.
Such passages of introspection and their outcome, Lawrence’s urge for abasement, made H.G. Wells categorise the Seven Pillars as a ‘human document’, a judgement the author endorsed. So too did Laurence Durrell, although he had nothing but contempt for the human being who emerged from the pages of an otherwise ‘great book’. As its story unfolded, Lawrence was diminished: ‘He seemed nothing but a tedious adolescent applying the thumbscrews of denial to himself. Yes, a sort of nasty child. There’s not one healthy straightforward emotion or conviction in the whole thing.’8
All too aware of his own suffering, the Lawrence of the Seven Pillars seemed unmoved by that which he had helped to create. He appears unconcerned when faced with violent death. He is an accessory to the murder of Turkish POWs; an onlooker during other acts of brutality; he kills his servant Farraj to spare him a lingering death; and he is the executioner of Hamed the Moor, whom he shoots to forestall a blood feud. Conventional law and morality are suspended by war, but Lawrence appears untroubled by their absence. ‘Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it,’ he wrote, and the circumstances of the desert war, together with the purity of his own and his followers’ ideals, left no room for moral sensibility.
The humane reader, following Lawrence’s stark renderings of these horrific events, may feel that, like so many others who have recollected their feelings in war, he was simply revealing its barbarism. Moral indignation is superfluous since the deeds speak for themselves. There is no need for Lawrence to intrude himself when describing such matters. Even so, one might question the innate compassion of a man who could write:
Next a group of Austrians, officers and non-commissioned officers, appealed to me quietly in Turkish for quarter. I replied with my halting German; whereupon one, in English, begged for a doctor for his wounds. We had none: not that it mattered, for he was mortally hurt and dying.
There is a callousness here, but was it always present, or was it the product of war? The Seven Pillars offers no answer, since it contains no pre- or post-war portrait of Lawrence for guidance. Perhaps neither seemed necessary, for when he wrote Lawrence had in mind a limited audience, many of whom knew him intimately and could make their own judgements about how he had been changed by war. Those unable to make the comparison were disturbed by his lack of moral reaction, and wondered whether he was a spokesman for the new ruthlessness which was edging out whatever had survived of the old gentlemanly codes of war.9
Not that this mattered too much for Lawrence: his goal was a work of art, not a textbook of morality, strategy and politics. When he embarked on the Seven Pillars, he believed that in himself and his experiences he possessed raw materials equal to any available to Malory. All he needed was the technical skill to produce a masterpiece which would measure up to his own merciless standards. Having imposed his will on history, it was the turn of art. In war everything was secondary to the fulfilment of the imagined ideals of the Arab movement; afterwards he concentrated all his energies and will on the acquisition of literary skills and techniques.
One result of this single-minded pursuit of style is mannerism–self-conscious, exhibitionist prose–and there is plenty of that in the Seven Pillars. While writing about himself and the triumph of his own will, Lawrence was also telling the story of real men and events. The consequent blend of high style, imagination and reality creates a work which is aesthetically satisfying, but deceptive. This was understood by Professor Elie Kedourie, who in 1977 chose the Seven Pillars as the most overrated book of the century.
As history it is riddled with falsehoods, while as literature it is spoilt by high-flown conceits and modish preciosities. Lastly, in making popular and attractive the confusion between the public world of politics and the private dramas of the self, I judge it to be profoundly corrupting.10
None of this can be denied. And yet when, in July 1935 and less than eight weeks after Lawrence’s death, the Seven Pillars w
ent on public sale it became a bestseller and has remained in print ever since. Many, perhaps most, readers discovered and enjoyed an adventure story set in an exotic land and crammed with exciting incidents, all vividly recorded. There was also the challenge of a puzzle since the book could be taken as a coded document about an enigmatic man with clues as to the real Lawrence and plenty of false trails.
Lawrence thought The Mint was a better book than the Seven Pillars, although, characteristically, he had second thoughts. He started it at a time when he was disappointed with the Seven Pillars and he hoped that a new and totally different subject, service life, might redeem him as an artist. When he finished writing he thought it the equivalent to a second volume of his life, even though, as he warned E.M. Forster, it was ‘A bit of a come down’ after the first. Packed with ‘crude, unsparing, faithful stuff; very metallic and uncomfortable’, The Mint was saved by its ‘restraint, and dignity, and form and craftsmanship’. In other words, Lawrence felt he had at last achieved a technical masterpiece.
Before enlistment at the end of August 1922, Lawrence knew nothing of how ordinary servicemen lived beyond what he had observed at a distance during the war. Within two months he had begun to compile notes at night in his barrack hut, writing under a blanket and apparently unnoticed by his colleagues. ‘Artlessly photographic’ was how he described the result, which was a prose equivalent of cinéma vérité, an unedited sequence of scenes and voices. Its realism distressed Eddie Marsh, who after reading it complained of having been ‘battered and oppressed by the monstrous thudding hailstorm of gros mots’ (for example ‘fuck’). Anyone who has undergone National Service or worked on a factory floor or building site will not be surprised by the relentless flow of harsh sexual language but, for many of Lawrence’s circle who read The Mint, such places and what passed there were a mystery.
The Mint is the RAF depot at Uxbridge in west London where Lawrence and his brother recruits are the ore, melted down and refined in the furnace of training to emerge die-stamped as RAF personnel. This transformation from civilian to serviceman is minutely detailed in the first two parts of the book. The last takes up the adventures of one newly minted coin, Lawrence, when in 1925 he is posted to the officers’ training college at Cranwell.
By the time Lawrence finally completed his story in 1928 he regretted the harshness of his first impressions of the RAF, an institution he had since learned to love and where he now enjoyed contentment. His loyalty to the force and to its visionary fatherfigure, Trenchard, ruled out immediate publication. A bowdlerised version appeared in 1955 (‘shit cart’ became ‘garbage cart’) and an unexpurgated one in 1973, by which time the British public was all too familiar with words which twenty years before had been thought to be unprintable.
The Mint is Lawrence’s last major essay as a writer. When he had put the final touches to the typescript, he felt he had no more to say. There were no experiences left for him to exploit, although other subjects briefly presented themselves only to be abandoned. One was the possibility of doing something on his career between 1918 and 1922 which he called his ‘dog fight in Downing Street’.
Lawrence thought most seriously about writing a biography of Sir Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who had been tried, found guilty and hanged for treason in 1916 after his failed attempts to muster an Irish Legion from Irish POWs in Germany and to ship arms to Sinn Fein. ‘As I see it,’ Lawrence told Mrs Bernard Shaw in December 1934, ‘his was a heroic nature I should like to write upon subtly, so that his enemies would think I was with them till they had finished my book and rose from reading it to call him the hero. He had the appeal of a broken archangel.’ What stood in Lawrence’s way was lack of access to Casement’s diary in which he had recorded a string of homosexual encounters. The diary had been circulated by British intelligence to deflect efforts to secure Casement a reprieve, but Lawrence believed only a Labour Prime Minister would release it to the public. He was happy to wait. ‘I am only 46, able, probably to wait for years: and very determined to make England ashamed of itself if I can.’
With the Seven Pillars and The Mint Lawrence achieved his ambition to be recognised as an accomplished stylist. Other men of letters, both apprentices and masters, were sufficiently impressed to seek his opinion on their own work. Evelyn Wrench, on becoming editor of the Spectator in 1927, invited Lawrence to review books, which he did for eight months under the initials ‘CD’, which stood for ‘Colin Dale’, a name based on the last Underground station he had used before his departure to India. Since Lawrence was utterly preoccupied by style, his pieces were one-dimensional. For his first assignment he covered D.H. Lawrence’s novels and concentrated heavily on Lawrence’s language. ‘He is a poet, and a thinker, a man of planemodulation of the envelope of flesh,’ he concluded, without even a hint of how these qualities were reflected in the treatment of human emotions and behaviour. This was understandable since, in some ways, D.H. Lawrence was writing about worlds and human relationships which were beyond his ken. After reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he commented to Eddie Marsh, ‘Surely the sex business isn’t worth all this fuss.... I’ve only met a handful of people who care a biscuit for it.’
In considering material presented to him for consideration by others, including the playwright Noel Coward and the poet Maurice Baring, Lawrence showed himself a sensitive and constructive critic. By contrast, many of the literary judgements scattered through his correspondence were jejune stuff, no more than clever undergraduate fatuity. Richard Aldington and W.B. Yeats were ‘no good’, Pepys ‘a poor earth-bound lack-lustre worm’, and Disraeli’s novels ‘nearly as sad stuff as Chesterton‘s’. Belloc was castigated for having written for money (‘Caddish I call it’) and women authors were summarily dismissed in a letter of 1924 to Sydney Cockerell: ‘All the women who ever wrote original stuff could have been strangled at birth, and the history of English literature (and my bookshelves) would be unchanged.’
This may have been pure mischievousness coupled with the petulant partisanship which Lawrence quickly picked up from his new literary companions, but behind it lay his continuing urge to intrude his inner self into areas where dispassion was vital. This had always been his way; his private animosity to women as a species was so overwhelming that it was impossible for him to assess them as creative writers. The compass of his knowledge and his cleverness could not hide what others recognised as a symptom of intellectual immaturity. Bernard Shaw detected this, as did Isherwood, who discerned an ‘adolescent mind’ behind Lawrence’s brilliance.
IV
Gentleman Ranker, 1922-1935
On 28 August 1922, Lawrence presented himself at the RAF recruiting office in Henrietta Street near Covent Garden. According to The Mint, he looked like a man for whom enlistment was a final resort since his suit was frayed and his shoes worn out. He was nervous to the point where he had to hurry off to a nearby public lavatory where he relieved himself and his fears. Inside the office he was received by Captain WE. Johns, the future author of the Biggles adventure yarns who, alerted by a vigilant NCO, became suspicious. The odd-looking recruit was sent off to fetch some references while enquiries were made about him at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Somerset House. Here it was discovered that Lawrence’s nom de guerre, John Hume Ross, was bogus.
In the meantime, he had reappeared, accompanied by an Air Ministry messenger carrying an order for his immediate enlistment signed by Air Vice-Marshal Sir Oliver Swann. Johns was still uneasy and asked the advice of his immediate superior, who told him to do as he was ordered. ‘For heaven’s sake; watch your step. This man is Lawrence of Arabia. Get him into the Force or you’ll get your bowler hat.’ Johns obeyed, but there was more trouble when two doctors turned down Lawrence as unfit. A third was less scrupulous and Lawrence, certified fit for his new duties, was packed off to the training depot at Uxbridge where Johns had already alerted the officer in charge of recruit reception that Lawrence of Arabia was on his way.
> Nothing of this hugger-mugger affair appears in The Mint, where Lawrence’s passage from civilian to serviceman passes smoothly. So it would have done had the orders of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, the Chief of Air Staff, been properly carried out. Detailed arrangements for Lawrence’s induction had been left to his assistant Swann, but his instructions had been mislaid in Henrietta Street. This had caused embarrassment and Lawrence later apologised to Swann for his physical debility. ‘If I’d known I was such a wreck,’ he wrote, ‘I’d have gone off and recovered.’
The reasons for this elaborate charade were complex. Lawrence had first openly admitted an urge to join the RAF in March 1921 when he raised the matter informally with Trenchard during the Cairo conference.1 The exchange had been brief and inconclusive:
‘I’d like to join this air force of yours some day.’
‘And I’d be glad to have you.’
‘Even as a ranker.’
‘Certainly not. As an officer or nothing.’
There seemed no obvious explanation for this request, which Trenchard may have seen as a piece of typical Lawrentian whimsy. Certainly at Cairo and after, Lawrence was under Trenchard’s spell, sharing his dreams for the future of the RAF. During conference sessions, he argued strongly for Trenchard’s scheme of air control in Jordan and Iraq and he was fascinated by plans for trans-desert imperial air routes.
Lawrence’s intoxication with the air was part of a wider public excitement about the possibilities of aviation, both as a means of fast, efficient transport and as an instrument of war. During the 1920s and 1930s powered flight occupied a prominent place in the public consciousness in the same way as space travel would a generation later. For Lawrence, the conquest of the air was an exhilarating challenge and one which he wished to respond to, but in an unexpected way. As master and guide of the Arab movement he had, to use his own metaphor, ridden the crest of a wave. Now he wished to be a drop of water within another wave, a vital but submerged element within what seemed to him another great surge of history. Authority over men and affairs no longer attracted him since it brought unbearable burdens of responsibility and disappointment. Better, he thought, to be a cog in a machine.
Golden Warrior, The Page 50