In the course of our work I had been often astonished by the way he could fix the place and date of a desert photograph which looked to me indistinguishable from any other tract of the desert. His photographic memory served him well in the process of identifying, and describing on the back, these hundreds of scenes. My surprise led him to expound the theory that memory was like a film; everything was recorded on it and could be “seen” over again if one could get it running; his own memory had improved since he had passed thirty. As I hold that memorizing power is apt to decrease as creative power increases, I noted this comment as a possible corroboration of his own belief that he was unable to create.
Those days brought some other sidelights. Among the photographs we found an attractive engraving, and my wife put it aside for him to take away. But he said that he did not want it—if she liked it, she might as well keep it. When she chided him for such recklessness, he retorted—“I’d give everything away if I could—it’s too much bother to keep things—you’re more free if you have no possessions.” And added—“Besides, I like giving.” At this time also I had a letter about a crippled boy who had found in his hero-worship of Lawrence the inspiration to carry him through nights of suffering. I showed the letter to T.E., who writhed at such adoration, exclaiming that he wished it were possible to stop “this sort of folly.” Yet when I said that, moved by its genuineness, I had thought of sending the boy a copy of my book, just about to appear, T.E. at once agreed to my tentative suggestion that he might sign it, and wrote a “tonic” inscription.
Shortly before the publication of the book, he had written me—“Everything in your book seems to me very good, except the parts about me. I shall be glad when it’s out (and therefore passed by). We can then meet each other happily, as free men.” From then on, he overlowed with impish jibes that the book would not sell, that the public were suffering from a surfeit of him, and that I had thrown away its chances by not tearing him to shreds in Lytton Strachey fashion—“aha, that would have been a spectacle.” Yet when he dropped in to see me a few days after its publication, I was amused to find how thoroughly he had read the reviews, including some I had not yet seen. It seemed to me a sign that he was still striving to penetrate, through the aid of the impression made on others, the mystery of his own personality. It brought back to me that poignant confession of his—“The eagerness to overhear and oversee myself was my assault upon my own inviolable citadel.”
One of the reviews was by a talented soldier who had served with Lawrence in Palestine; it regretted that the book should be “spoilt at times” by a tendency to gird at professional soldiers, so different, the reviewer remarked, from Lawrence’s own attitude towards them. T.E. chuckled over this comment, saying that I was far more tolerant towards them than he had been. Dwelling on their limitations he remarked, “They do their best—not their fault, perhaps, it’s such a rotten best.” But such charity could not be extended to their “trades-unionism” which hindered the growth of knowledge and understanding—“They are dreadfully dishonest to each other, yet rally as one man against outside criticism.” He cited Winston Churchill’s sketch of Haig in the World Crisis as the most “deadly,” if subtly veiled, indictment of the best professional product.
T.E., however, hated what he called “niggling” criticism. A book of this kind upon Napoleon stirred him to a defence of Napoleon’s greatness which hardly tallied with his own rejection of the “great man” myth—besides being historically questionable. You could “pick holes in Napoleon at every point,” yet the fact remained that he had “remade Europe.” “He was like a structure in which every brick was cracked, yet the whole hung together”—and had grandeur. “How awful it must have been for him at Waterloo—to be beaten by a Wellington.” Another time, discussing modern dictators, T.E. remarked that Mussolini suffered from lack of an intellect—“You have only to see his books and plays!” “A lot of practical sense but no capacity for abstract thought”—I understood T.E. to imply that this deficiency set a limit to Mussolini’s practical achievement, and its lasting value. “Lenin was far the greater man”—the only man who had evolved a theory, carried through a revolution, and constructed a state in accord with his ideas.
The suggestion that a successful dictator needed a capacity for abstract thought struck an unusual note, if it seemed to accord with Plato’s view that the affairs of mankind were not likely to improve until the rulers became philosophers, or philosophers became the rulers. Pondering it, I recalled a previous conversation in which I had asked T.E. if he had any views on religion, to which his reply was that although brought up in conventional religion, he had long since discarded it, and did not notice the loss. He had gone on to say that speculation and meditation brought one no nearer the solution of abstract problems, although they were good as “an intellectual exercise.” His implication, as I conceived it, was that abstract thought might serve a purpose in developing the mind to deal with the complexities of practical problems—over which the purely “practical” man stumbled.
Another straw in the wind caught my attention one evening in June, 1934. He had come up to London to meet his old ally, the Emir Abdullah at the Newcombes’. Afterwards, I drove him back to Waterloo and on the way he complained of the way the newspapers hunted him. I told him that he had himself to blame; that when a man who had achieved a measure of reputation refused his normal share of publicity, he was bound to get much more than his share. T.E. laughed, and remarked that he might still want this—and even more than he had. For it was possible that his greatest activity might still lie ahead.
After some talk of approaches that had been made to him, and of the signs that there was a growing demand for a new lead, he swung back when I put the direct question whether he contemplated taking a lead in any movement. “No”—he still kept the intention of settling down in his cottage, to taste the joys of leisure. If he grew tired of it, however, there were many things he might do. This discussion strengthened my feeling that his outlook, if not his attitude, was changing more than he realized.
There were moments in this last year when I wondered whether the depths of his thought were as clear as they had been. Although I was accustomed to discount the extravagances of his humour, there were things said in apparent seriousness that seemed to conflict with the light that he had shed, I had to remind myself that his mind was too cosmic to be consistent. But it seemed, also, to be suffering from some growing pressure. Was a new urge to action disturbing the wisdom pined in reflection? Such a positive urge might cause the greater disturbance because reflection had carried him too far in negation.
The previous December I had shown him the final passage of my book, ending “He is the Spirit of Freedom, come incarnate to a world in fetters.” T.E. thereupon suggested that he did not so much respect the freedom of others as insist on his own—he was the “essential anarch”; the very opposite of a Socialist. I questioned this view of himself, asking how it could be reconciled with his immense understanding of others. To this, he retorted that such understanding was easy for him because of the conditions in which he lived—with most people it was clogged by wealth, possessions, houses, families, conventions. Taking a sheet of paper he wrote what he suggested I should insert as a postscript to my concluding note—“This paragraph, seeming to me very personal was shown to the object of it who remarked that probably he more resembled a very agile pedestrian dodging the traffic along the main road.” The jest was good, and had more than a flavour of truth. But I recalled a longer talk one night in October when we had discussed Hogarth’s view of him. Where Hogarth imputed callousness to him, T.E. suggested the impression was largely due to his manner; he dwelt on his profound “shyness,” and his dislike of giving himself away—surely a flaw, I suggested, in one so clearsighted. I went on to speak of Hogarth’s comment that if T.E.’s will decided on the end there was no morality about the means. To this T.E. demurred, saying that he “liked to appear careless of morality, but was not really s
o.” He agreed with my view that the means governed the end, ill means distorting the end.
If there were some things in his behaviour, and more in his talk, which did not tally with such a view, I believe that it was truer to his fundamental nature than what sometimes flashed on the surface, or the currents that moved just beneath it. He was as the sea to a pond compared with many simple natures, and the storms were proportionately rougher.
His attitude was more consistent than his words, or even than his action—and safer to trust. He was the Spirit of Freedom, but his spirit was incarnate in a complex physical organism. His mind was abnormally free from the conventions of the society into which he was born: it could not get free from the abnormal tensions of the body with which he was born. As he was all too conscious.
One may find some significance even in one of the lighter episodes of that last summer—produced by a man who had been representing himself as “Colonel Lawrence.” Such impersonations were not infrequent; sometimes they brought him letters from injured women who had succumbed too easily to the reflected attraction of mystery. But this one was of wider extent and longer duration. When it was brought to my notice I passed the news on to T.E., whose reply opened characteristically—“If you see the blighter do rub into him that I have never signed myself as Lawrence since 19 twenty something. He is years out of date. In fact he doesn’t sound the right sort of man at all.” After complying with his request to consult a legal friend of his, I had no further connection with the affair; but I heard the sequel from him a month later. In company with the lawyer and two detectives he had gone to a meeting that had been arranged. “We interviewed my imposure and persuaded him that he was not me. To my relief, he agreed at once. Had he stuck to his statement I should have begun to question myself.” As no money had actually passed, the impostor was let off, after he had written letters of explanation and apology to his various victims. After seeing the man T.E. did not find the impersonation flattering to himself, or to the intelligence of those who had been taken in. Among his achievements the man had persuaded a firm to publish some of his poems, and had condemned some of the camels at the Zoo as mangy. But “the unkindest cut of all,” as T.E. remarked, was that he had been “under observation as a case by the specialists of a mental institution, still under my former name.” What a safety valve was T.E.’s sense of humour.
To find unity in this medley of memories is hardly easier than to find it in such a manifold man. But as I look back, I seem to trace a thread running through that last year—the resurgent desire for creation. The philosophical negation that had formerly led him to say “I could not approve creation,” was itself denied by his self-confessed desire to be a creative artist, and by his efforts at its fulfilment—which had extended to the plastic and the pictorial as well as to the literary art. It was in depression with his failure to attain his own standard, or to find that ideal standard itself, that he had turned about abruptly and become “a cog in the machine.” But the creativeness he had sought to attain was “to carry a super-structure of ideas upon or above anything I made.” I thought he threw a further light on his ambition when one evening we talked of Freud, and he argued that, as in all new developments, the style itself passed but the thread remained—thus producing a difference in all thinking henceforward. He instanced Cubism—now past, yet its influence had permanently affected art. We could only see a facet at a time, but with each new facet seen there was enlargement of man’s thought.
Thus it was that he came to feel, I think, that the military art was one in which he had attained creativeness: perhaps the only one. To this realization I may have helped him, and if it was a sphere not large enough, a plane not high enough to satisfy him, he seemed to find a contentment within its limits that was beyond him elsewhere. Certainly, he showed a balance in discussion of it that contrasted with some of his talk of other spheres. And the last time we met he told me that the job he would take if offered was that of co-ordinating our defence system. But he did not deem such a chance likely, knowing that this is a sphere where the creative mind is viewed with more than normal distrust; so that it may be able to influence ideas but has rarely been allowed to take a hand in rebuilding the structure on which a super-structure of ideas can be consolidated. As a consequence the evolution of warfare has remained through the centuries no more than a “swing of the pendulum”—as he often reminded me.
To those who have a hunger for creation, architecture has a specially strong appeal; for which reason I have come to find significance in its long-standing appeal to T.E. It was almost his earliest passion, and remained with him throughout. Thanks to it, he found a channel of expression, and also another safety valve for the surging forces within him, in the rebuilding of his cottage in Dorset. It was “half a ruin” when he first rented these few acres of land from a distant kinsman; he set to work to slate the roof himself, and travelled round the country on his motorcycle, making acquaintance with builders from whom he “scrounged” slates—it surprised him that no less than nine thousand were needed. In the years that followed, he continued his work for its improvement inside and out, until he had created a little gem of domestic architecture, essentially unique, which most aptly expressed the nature of the occupant. Likewise did its location—lying on a remote heath, starkly bare, it was tucked away in a cluster of rhododendrons, secretive yet friendly, beneath the shoulder of a ridge whence one could see for miles in all directions; from the cottage itself there was a single vista—westwards to Dorchester Cathedral and the setting sun. Apt was its name, Clouds’ Hill.
As the term of his service drew to a close, T.E.’s thoughts seemed to focus increasingly on the prospect of rest in this quiet spot,—“my very beloved cottage.” Here he had the sense of community with the soil. Here he hoped to find balm for the soreness of the feeling that he was “just not good enough”—by a standard that found no consolation in comparisons.
At the end of August the last target-boat of the year’s program was finished, although he had still to deal with a new Diesel marine engine that was being installed for experiment. Its possibilities still kept alive an interest in his work on speed-boat developments that was palling now that he once again had the sense of a mission accomplished. His dominant note became one of tiredness, mental and physical: a tiredness, I think, increased by consciousness of new stresses within. In September he wrote me:
“Tired, very: and at the end of my motor-boat knowledge. Determined to work in these last six months to tie up all loose ends and so ensure my successor i/c Boats a fair start, without commitments—and after that six months no plans at all. What I feel like is a rest that should go on and on till I wanted no more of it—or wanted nothing else.
“The last thing desirable is activity for the sake of activity, i hope I have enough mind for it to be quietly happy by itself. So I shall not do anything until it becomes necessary: or at least that is my hope. Not a plan in my head, not an ambition, not a want: but a doubt that my saved capital may not be enough to keep me in peace.
“Enough or not enough, I’m going to have that rest, anyway!”
In October, after telling me of his task with the Diesel, he finished, “Clouds’ Hill, in the background, is the best part of the picture. How bored I’m going to be! Think of it: a really new experience, for hitherto I’ve never been bored.”
In a letter on New Year’s Eve, after urging me to pursue certain paths of study we had travelled together, he ended:
“For myself I am going to taste the flavour of true leisure. For 46 years have I worked and been worked. Remaineth 23 years (of expectancy). May they be like Flecker’s
a great Sunday that goes on and on
If I like this leisure when it comes, do me the favour of hoping that I may be able to afford its prolongation for ever and ever.”
Yet as the time drew near, spelling the end of the service that like all other pursuits he had felt as a servitude, a feeling of unease grew. Loosing the chains came to se
em like casting adrift. The prospect perplexed and disturbed him.
He took his discharge at Bridlington, and rode south on a “push-bike” visiting old haunts and friends in this old way. Thereby he hoped to tast the first sweet flavour of leisure, besides eluding the reporters and photographers who were in wait for a man on the famous motorcycle. Pat Knowles, his faithful retainer and friend, meantime laid a false trail at the cottage until the first wave of news interest had subsided. The ruse partially succeeded but some “free lance” photographers still hung about after T.E. came home, and continued to intrude on his privacy until ejected from the garden in a “rough and tumble” scrap. In revenge, they came back and threw stones at his roof, smashing some of the slates. He told me of this when he came to see me a few days later in London, where he had taken refuge from such annoyances. He also said that he had now taken to a “push-bike” for good, having come to the conclusion that, with an income of two pounds a week, he could no longer afford to run a high-powered motorcycle. I heaved a premature sigh of relief. Not many months before he had suffered another narrow escape—skidding on a tramline in Bournemouth the cycle fell over and a car had run over it, but he had jumped aside in the nick of time.
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