Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (87 page)

The combination of the cottage and Bruce made the army almost bearable for Lawrence, although he never grew used to wearing the hated khaki uniform or to the mindless violence and profanity of his fellow soldiers. He seldom spent a night in the cottage—he used it instead as a refuge during his ample spare time, and took a few friends there, like Bruce and Corporal Dixon. Over time, he added a phonograph, a radio, a library of books—in size, in austerity, and as a place to work it became the exact equivalent of the small cottage his parents had built for the young Lawrence in the garden of their house. It was not Lawrence’s home in any conventional sense—as E. M. Forster pointed out, “it was rather his pied-à-terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment, and found rest.” The army made few demands on Lawrence and he was thus able to devote a good deal of time to the project of printing a limited edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In addition he had his weekends free for a social life far more intense and well-connected than that of any other private soldier in the British army.

During this time, the Shaws became central figures in Lawrence’s life, and Robert Graves introduced Lawrence to Thomas Hardy, who lived near Bovington, in Dorsetshire—"Hardy country,” where many of his novels are set. The Hardys too became close friends, and their home, Max Gate, was another place of escape for Lawrence. Other friends in this period included the Kenningtons, the novelist E. M. Forster, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Lionel Curtis, and John Buchan. Any portrait of Lawrence that fails to reflect his extraordinary gifts for friendship, conversation, and correspondence fails to reflect the man. Monastic and self-punishing as he might be, Lawrence was the very reverse of a military version of a cloistered monk; he was instead constantly on the move, constantly engaged with people, invited everywhere. Hardy, like Doughty, he came to admire and love. “Hardy is so pale,” he wrote, “so quiet, so refined in essence: and the camp is such a hurly-burly. When I come back I feel as if I’d woken from a sleep: not an exciting sleep, but a restful one…. It is strange to pass from the noise of the sergeants company into a peace so secure that in it not even Mrs. Hardy’s tea-cups rattle on the tray.”

Still, it was not just the sight of the small, slim figure in khaki, puttees, and leather gauntlets arriving on his huge, glistening bike that alarmed his friends in 1923, but the impression he gave that he cared nothing for his life and was looking for a way to end it. The Kenningtons were disturbed by his “nihilistic” thoughts. Lawrence confided to Curtis, in a series of long, heartfelt letters, his “craving for real risk.” To Shaw he confessed, “I haven’t been in the mood for anything lately except high-speed motorbiking on the worst roads.” Of course motorcycles always appear suicidal to those who don’t ride one, and Lawrence was an excellent rider; nevertheless, he was riding perhaps the most powerful motorcycle one could buy in 1923, and boasted of the risks he took.
*
This was no pose. Lawrence’s unhappiness—intensified by intense feelings of guilt—was deepening into despair, and his friends feared that suicide was possible. He wrote alarmingly to Hogarth, and even more alarmingly to Curtis, about his dislike of all animal life, especially his own, and of his antics on his motorcycle, when he “swerved at 60 M.P.H. onto the grass by the roadside, trying vainly to save a bird.” Shaw was moved to write directly to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, urging him to give Lawrence “a position of a pensioned commanding officer in dignified private circumstances,” and put to an end the “shocking tomfoolery” of Lawrence’s service in the ranks, which he compared to “Belisarius begging for oboles in an ungrateful country,” and warning darkly of the embarrassing consequences if Britain’s most famous war hero took his own life. Baldwin was unable to do this; he took Lawrence’s case up with Trenchard, though he failed to change Trenchard’s mind about readmitting Lawrence into the RAF. Hogarth, who had been doubtful about the approach to Baldwin in the first place, wrote with slightly weary realism to Shaw: “Lawrence is not normal in many ways and it is extraordinarily difficult to do anything for him…. He will not work in any sort of harness unless this is padlocked on to him. He enlisted in order to have the padlocks rivetted on to him.”

What saved Lawrence in 1923 was work: not in the army, where his job—"half-clerk, half-storeman"—hardly taxed his ability, but on his ever more complicated and expensive plans to get
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
printed and published as he wanted it to be. Lawrence’s attitude toward his immense book alternated between a sense of failure and a glimmering of hope, sustained by those of his friends who had read it, and whose judgment resembled Siegfried Sassoon’s, who wrote to him: “Damn you, how long do you expect me to go on reassuring you about your bloody masterpiece: It is a great book, blast you.” E. M. Forster wrote to him in the same vein: “I can’t cheer you up over the book. No one could. You have got depressed and muddled over it and are quite incapable of seeing how good it is.”

In the latter part of 1923, hope took the upper hand. Lawrence decided to take on himself the printing and binding of a subscribers’ edition of 100 copies of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
aimed at “the ungodly rich.” The book would be lavishly printed and illustrated, and printed according to Lawrence’s frequently eccentric or antiquarian opinions, and each copy would be bound in a different material or style. The book would cost thirty guineas; it would be ready in a year and a half; and Lawrence estimated that the total cost of producing it would be about £3,000. Since each subscriber would have to pay his or her thirty guineas up front, the book would be self-financed. This was an outrageously optimistic business plan. In the end it would cost Lawrence about £13,000
*
to produce the subscribers’ edition, a crippling debt; and the number of copies went up considerably because he insisted on giving the book to those of his friends who could not afford the subscription and to people he loved or respected too much to accept money from them, such as Storrs, whose check he tore up. (Those who held on to their copies would have had a windfall—they could be resold instantly for many times thirty guineas, and the last one auctioned in the United States, in 2001, went for more than $100,000.)

For the next three years, Lawrence was constantly occupied with the problems of printing his book, as well as with elaborate subterfuges he concocted with the rival American publishers Frank Doubleday and George H. Doran (who would eventually merge in 1927 to form one company), intended to protect his copyright in the United States. Lawrence brought to his role as a publisher the same attention to detail and energy that he brought to everything he set his hand to, managing one of the most intricate and complicated jobs in the history of book production from his bunk in a barracks, or from the NAAFI reading room of a military camp. (The intricacy and complications were largely due to his own demands and prejudices about book design.) Of course, as is so often the case with Lawrence, he wanted to eat his cake and have it too. On the one hand, he wanted his friends to be able to read the book in the form of a sumptuous, private, limited edition; on the other hand, he wanted to avoid reviews and to prevent the general public from reading it at all.

Both Robert Graves and Bernard Shaw expressed concern about libelous material in the 1922 “Oxford” text—libel is always a big problem for authors in Britain, because of the strictness of British libel law as compared with that of the United States—but it does not seem to have been a fear of lawsuits that held Lawrence back from publishing his book in the normal way. Any British publisher would have had the text read for libel, and a solicitor who specialized in libel law might have suggested comparatively small changes that would have protected Lawrence and his publisher, rather than large cuts. More likely, the truth is that in writing
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lawrence had, like most authors of a memoir, expressed his own version of events, and was not eager to have it contradicted or debated in public. Much of the factual material in the book has since been confirmed by the release in the 1970s of many if not most of the documents, but throughout the book Lawrence, consciously or unconsciously, attributed to himself decisions and actions that were often initiated by others. No doubt, as he wrote, revised, and rewrote
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
getting with each revision farther away in time from the events, he made himself increasingly the hero of the book. He did not falsify events or invent them, as he has been accused of doing, but he put himself at the center of the story, and by 1923 he was not anxious to expose himself to criticism, or to objections from others who had served in the Middle East.

The solution—a brilliant one—was to limit the readership to those who were either friends (like Hogarth) or admirers (like Storrs and Allenby), and who would not rush to write long, disputatious letters to the
Times.
*
*
Lawrence often had contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he wanted to prevent
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
from becoming a collector’s item; on the other, by making almost every copy of the subscribers’ edition different in some way—with variations in binding, and in the number and placement of the illustrations—he inevitably produced a limited edition that would keep bibliophiles busy and puzzled for decades.

In early to mid-1923, Lawrence was still waiting for Shaw’s long-promised suggestions and corrections to the 1922 proof, and still circulating copies to those who had served with him and whom he respected for their comments. Colonel A. P. Wavell (the future Field Marshal) wrote back encouragingly, and the Hardys expressed their admiration. All this ought to have cheered Lawrence up, but failed to do so. He was weary of the book, sick of the Army (“A black core … of animality”), “brooding” on his own sense of dissatisfaction, unable to sleep more than an hour a night, and existing on one meal a day, usually breakfast; and although he was living in a hut with twenty-one other soldiers and a corporal, he felt as lonely as he had been in the attic on Barton Street in London. In an effort to keep his mind occupied, and produce an income beyond the army’s two shillings nine pence a day, he asked Cape about the possibility of doing some translation from the French, estimating that he could probably produce about 2,000 words a day—a figure that was seriously overoptimistic. Cape proposed that he should translate J. C. Mardrus’s 4,000-page
Mille et Une Nuits (The Arabian Nights),
a formidable task. In preparation for this, Lawrence agreed to translate a French novel,
Le Gigantesque,
about a giant sequoia tree, a book he came to dislike more and more as he translated it. He persisted with it, however—it was eventually published by Cape as
The Forest Giant
—but the effect was to deter Lawrence from taking on anything as challenging as
Mille et Une Nuits.
He took instead a French novel about fishes (even stranger than a novel about a tree), a book which he thought (correctly) English readers might not take to. When he was not translating, he and his friends worked on his cottage, repairing and altering it to his taste. He carved in the lintel over the front door of Clouds Hill two words from Herodotus best translated as “I don’t care,” or perhaps more to the point, “I couldn’t care less.”
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When the Shaws were persuaded to visit Lawrence in his cottage, as the Hardys and E. M. Forster did, Bernard Shaw remarked, perceptively, that Lawrence’s pretense of living “humbly with his comrades” as “a tanker-ranker” was misleading, and that surrounded by his army friends at Clouds Hill “he looked very much like Colonel Lawrence with several aides-de-camp.”

Soon after meeting Lawrence, Shaw described him as “a grown-up boy,” and there is an element of truth to this: both as regards Lawrence, many of whose interests and tastes (motorcycles, for example, or the tiny, cozy cottage, with sleeping bags coyly marked
Meum
and
Tuam)
remained boyish, and who scrupulously avoided any of the adult entanglements of love, marriage, and domesticity; and as regards Shaw’s own relationship to him, which was that of an exasperated father. Lawrence had not only adopted Shaw’s name as his own, but found in the name of the village where the Shaws lived, Ayot Saint Lawrence, a kind of portent. Lawrence’s visits to the Shaws throughout 1922 and 1923 had made him, to all intents and purposes, almost a member of the family, and also gave him the unusual opportunity of sharing in the creation of one of Shaw’s best plays,
Saint Joan.
His visits were curtailed when one of his fellow privates borrowed his motorcycle and crashed it, but he soon managed to acquire another Brough, and in the meantime remained in constant correspondence with both Shaws.

Occasionally, Public Shaw launched a Jovian taunt at Private Shaw: “I have written another magnificent play. When I finish a play, I write another: I don’t sit down gloating in a spectacular manner over how the old one is to astonish the world. Yah!” Nevertheless, Charlotte sent Lawrence the draft acting script of
Saint Joan,
and Lawrence responded— boldly—with a long, detailed letter of suggestions to the great man. He answered via Charlotte, though he must have been aware that she would show the letter to her husband. He did not comment on the way Shaw had made use of his character and career in creating the part of Saint Joan herself. Like Lawrence, Joan had fought a powerful army to place a king “upon the throne of a nation-state"; like Joan, Lawrence had succeeded against the odds, and had then been dismissed (as she was martyred); like Joan, Lawrence combined unearthly courage with the ability to inspire men to follow him, and invented unorthodox military tactics that confounded the professionals; like Joan’s, Lawrence’s small size, humility, and modesty, whether real or feigned, did not prevent him from being the center of all attention wherever he went; and like Joan, he adopted a costume that separated him from his own countrymen—he went barefoot, in the robes of an Arab, and she wore the armor of a man. Even Joan’s way of expressing herself in the play resembles Lawrence’s—Shaw was nothing if not observant in pursuit of a character. In the words of Michael Holroyd, Shaw’s biographer, “With their missionary zeal to mould the world to their personal convictions, Joan and Lawrence were two small homeless figures elected by the Zeitgeist and picked out by the spotlight of history.” The comparison intrigued Shaw from his first meeting with Lawrence and gave him the key to creating a Shavian heroine who was at once saintly and proud, modern and medieval, as well as a deeply androgynous figure.