CHAPTER EIGHT

After Arabia

LAWRENCE ended his Arabian campaigns in Syria in early October 1918 with military victory, moral defeat, and a doubtful political situation. Public honour and fame, partly as a result of Lowell Thomas, the American journalist’s show, were freely accorded him but these, as well as any material benefit, he was convinced must be disowned and repudiated. Damascus had been taken from the Turks at the beginning of October 1918, he had marched into Jerusalem with Allenby, and his fame was established, and the myth about him began to grow; but he had known since at least 1916 about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This deal, which by secretly conceding to French claims in Syria, gave the lie to the Nationalist aspirations which Lawrence had so actively helped to foment and organise. The war in the Middle East had to be continued by other means – through politics and writing, especially of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which can be seen not only as an account of the Arabian Campaign and writerly ambition, but also as an attempt to recoup and redeem his moral position and influence upon the politics of the future: the continuation of war and politics by other means. Perhaps this may explain the ubiquity of the geopolitics of religion and ethical considerations in much of Lawrence’s public commentary after the war.

Having achieved military honour and prestige in the public realm, Lawrence felt morally horrified as a private individual; he felt deeply fraudulent. He had, by great efforts, become successful in the art of guerrilla warfare by his personal austerities and practices, which actually pre-dated the war, and by a close study of military thinkers and strategists dating back at least to Caesar’s Gallic War and Xenophon. However, as the First World War progressed he had found himself enmeshed in an essentially tragic situation in which he necessarily had to serve two masters whose interests increasingly diverged, similar to the dual allegiance described in Lancelot of the Lake and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Perhaps inevitably, this structure of developing conflicts of interest was initially addressed by Lawrence within a Christian moral universe, and with a Christian moral language, even though the experience of the war had shaken the form of Christianity in which he had been raised. Scattered throughout the Seven Pillars, his letters and The Mint, are many traces of this Christianity, as well as references to, and meditations upon, its deeper roots. These went beyond the Oxford Evangelism of his youth, back to the desert mystics of Nicea, and indeed the philosophical and spiritual influences of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin thinkers, which had formed the minds of the Church’s early intellectuals and mystics.

The inner necessity for these developments, of course, partly stemmed from the need to reach the gentiles if Christianity was to become more than a Jewish heresy.

To the extent that Lawrence’s early Christian formation, along with his personal integrity, were now in question, he was forced back on this tradition, or outside it, to further asceticism, or nihilism, or suicide. Even as his traditional faith was fading, one should bear in mind that Lawrence had also had his moment of profound temptation – the fundamental temptation of power itself, as if he had ‘been taken up into a high place’. He refers explicitly to his fear of the ‘liberty of power’, that his ‘empty soul would be ‘blown away’. Less spiritual, but equally revelatory of crisis and trauma, were the nightmares which were bad enough to disturb his fellow airmen to the extent that they instituted an unofficial court martial. The trajectory of Lawrence’s declared positions on Christianity can be followed through his writings: we can see how his thorough knowledge of the Bible gives depth to his explorations of Palestine, providing not only an introduction to the geography of the Middle East, but background to the mores of nomadic peoples. In his long letter to his mother from Beyrout dated 2 August 1909, amongst many other matters he describes Banias (Caesarea Philippi) as being:

‘… on a hill above the plain of Huleh, the swampy lake North of Galilee… Banias mother will remember from Matthew XVI or Mark VIII and other places. To read such extracts on the spot is certainly much the best way [we have seen this practice before with Le Petit Jehan]; it may be that the Transfiguration took place on one of the neighbouring spurs of Mt. Hermon: of course that is not known, but it would be a very pleasantly appropriate place.’1

The Christianity which Lawrence is discussing had, at least in its higher manifestations, both early and medieval, preached renunciations, and these renunciations were empowering in the sense that they withdraw energy from worldly concerns which can then be devoted to other purposes. Where this renunciation is genuine religious asceticism, it tirelessly preaches the abnegation of the self. Classic instances of this can be found in, for example, Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ:

‘My son, complete self-denial is the only road to perfect liberty. Those who are obsessed by self-interest and self-love are slaves of their own desires; they are greedy, inquisitive, and discontented.

‘Very many people have been harmed by publicity and by lightly bestowed praise for their virtues. But grace is most powerful when preserved in silence in this transitory life, which consists wholly of temptation and warfare.’²

Where this renunciation is in a military context, as in Chivalry, or with the Templars, and Hospitallers, for example, it is at least partly aimed at physical and practical excellence. These renunciations, whether for spiritual or military purposes, necessarily involve a redistribution of the perceptions and values which are usually found on the axes between pleasure and pain/guilt and innocence/honour and dishonour. Such redistributions do not accord with the conventional ‘worldly’ evaluations. Anyone subject to these disciplines, whether spiritual or military, must re-describe themselves according to the institution they inhabit. In either case there is a struggle involved to perfect the self in the light of new criteria. Latent in these struggles is the question which Chivalry formulates as its primordial question: ‘Who do you serve?’

Seen in these perspectives, Chivalry, especially in its highly Christianised form, can be read as an ethos of struggle (agon), both physical and spiritual and, like any ethos, it generates meanings, but uniquely entails discomfort, pain, and death because of its objectives – military victory and spiritual redemption. One should not forget that the Crusades, whatever other motives may be ascribed to them, were also penitential and redemptive (‘to pray in our Lord’s Sepulchre’). One could say that Chivalry, in both its Military and Spiritual aspects, is a ‘technology of the self’; a form of continuous training with its own style of self-realisation and self-judgement; a combination of path and ultimate goal, structured by a teleology of deeds.3

In passing, a late attempt to recoup asceticism outside of a religious context can be found in Nietzsche:

‘I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of denial, the aim of strengthening; a gymnastics of the will; abstinence and periods of fasting of all kinds, in the most spiritual realms too; a casuistry of deeds in regard to the opinions we have regarding our strengths; an experiment with adventures and arbitrary dangers… asceticism, one hardly has courage so far to display its natural utility, its indispensability in the service of the education of the Will.’⁴

There are here various other links to Lawrence, although there is no known evidence that he had read this particular Nietzsche text (see Appendix 2 for Nietzsche texts at Clouds Hill). Lawrence does, of course, speak of the Will, as do others when assessing and describing him, but the contexts in which he deployed his well-known willpower and his various capacities were problematic for him until he was finally settled into the RAF.

One result of Lawrence’s war experiences and the political struggles which followed them, was that he experienced Perspectivism – particularly in the sense that the contingency of the culture in which he had grown up became apparent to him. One of the formulations which he used to express this, and the attendant discomfort, was ‘the lack of an Absolute’. This tended to emerge when discussing literature and the possibility of criticism, but the issue also had larger metaphysical dimensions:

‘… there’s no absolute in the imaginative world, and so journeymen like myself are confused and miserable in it.⁵

‘In my case, the efforts for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.’⁶

The distanciation and loneliness described here seem to emerge after the war, and these experiences had to be understood with concepts which his original Christian and Classical education had provided. One of the main practical solutions was, of course, the RAF, which not only provided new, meaningful work, and the interest of machines, the early days of flight, and the development of fast motor boats; but also, more subtly, an arena for the secularisation and updating of Chivalry. The RAF also provided ‘the group of Aspiration’, replacing the monastery as the site of a shared faith in a future hope towards which work could be done in the present. It provided this work as a deed-to-be-accomplished, namely, ‘The Conquest of the Air’. One can add the companionship Lawrence also found in the RAF. This may account for his intense valorisation of the RAF and his denigration of the Army, and the Tank Corps in particular:

‘We do regard flying as a sort of ritual: more an art than science, it is. Unreasonable to expect other people to feel like that, of course; but it is not an unpresentable Crusade: compared with the Lord’s Sepulchre.’7

Returning to Chivalrous literature for a moment, in works by writers such as Malory, where the austere Cistercian influence is largely absent, there is nevertheless an aspiration to an ideal, expressed in a group – i.e. the band of knights around King Arthur – as having a kind of corporate spirituality, somewhere between the regiment or corps spirit, and the solidarity of the monastic community. Christian or military, it can be a transcendental orientation in that it refuses the present in the name of a possible future. From the point of view of worldly concerns, it is a counter-ethic; it chooses its duty within the world, without being of it. An early intimation of this sense of aspiration – not exactly duty– can be seen in a letter of Lawrence’s from Jerablus, on the west bank of the Euphrates, near Carchemish, where he had excavated a Hittite site before the war in 1911:

‘… still, the product of fairly healthy brains and tolerable bodies will not be all useless in this world. One of us must surely get something of the unattainable we are all feeling after.’⁸

Even at this early age, there is the suggestion of ‘service’ to the world, at the same time accompanied by the sense of unreachable aspiration. The distance Lawrence’s mind had travelled from orthodox Christianity, and some of the metaphysics associated with it, by the time he wrote The Mint in 1922, is evident in the following reflections, as is his affiliation to the group of other servicemen. The tone and vocabulary are almost Nietzschean, and the complex solidarity with his fellow servicemen is accompanied by an uncomfortable awareness of his own capacity for reflection:

‘Another monotonous failure of a church, in the grey cold rain which rusted our bayonets and made uncomfortable our clothes. This apparatus of a parade service prejudices into blasphemy what thin chance organized religion ever had over vigorous men. Our blood distrusts and despises that something emasculate on the Padre’s ascetic face. He aims so crooked too, when he tries to convict our party of sin. They are yet happy, being innocent of the reflection which creates a sense of sin.

‘Contact with natural man leads me to deplore the vanity in which we thinking people sub-infeudate ourselves. I watch, detachedly… judging myself now carried away by instinct, now ruling a course by reason, now deciding intuitively: always restlessly cataloguing each aspect of my unity. Like the foolish early Christians, with their Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three sides of God, in that Creed for whose performance we just now had to stand up.

‘Hungry time has taken from me year by year more of the Creed’s clauses till now only the first four words remain. Them I say defiantly, hoping that reason may be stung into new activity when it hears there’s yet a part of me which escapes its rule: though it’s as hard, by thinking, to take an inch off our complexity as to add an ell.

‘There it goes again: that conflict of mind and spirit. Whereas here are men so healthy that they don’t chop up their meat into mince for easy digestion by the mind: and who are therefore intact as we are thereby diseased. Man, who was born as one, breaks into little prisms when he thinks: but if he passes through thought into despair, or comprehension, he again achieves some momentary onenesses with himself. And not only that. He can achieve a oneness of himself with his fellows: and of them with the stocks and stones of his universe: and of all the universes with the illusory everything (if he be positive) or with the illusory nothing (if he be nihilist) according as the digestive complexion of his soul be dark or fair. Saint and sinner touch – as great saints and great sinners.’9

Elsewhere in The Mint Lawrence expresses this view even more trenchantly:

‘… the padre read a lesson from St. Paul, prating of the clash of flesh and spirit and of our duty to fight the body’s manifold sins… Our ranks were too healthy to catch this diseased Greek antithesis of flesh and spirit. Unquestioned life is a harmony, though then not in the least Christian.’¹⁰

It may be that these reflections not only register Lawrence’s growing distance from Christianity – at least in its creedal form – but also his personal struggle to become more like his fellows; to escape the ‘unicorn in a stable’ feeling, to become more ordinary and less lonely. Yet even at the philosophical level the ‘oneness’ he speaks of is simply the perceptual side of Monism, and there is a respectable antecedent for it in the Greek tradition he mentions – classical Stoicism. Perhaps the differences in tone and philosophy between the Seven Pillars and The Mint can also be ascribed to the profound differences in the books as Projects, as well as the mind states in which they were written. In his letter to Frederic Manning in 1930, Lawrence describes how he wrote as a novice with ‘hanging over me the political uncertainty of the future of the Arab Movement. We had promised them so much, and at the end wanted to give them so little… I wrote it in some stress and misery of mind… The Mint describes how the Air Force rounds off its pegs to fit into their holes.’¹¹

Of course, the fact is that the political motivation was only one of the many forces behind the Seven Pillars, and Lawrence himself endlessly pronounced on the subject, variously describing it as an ‘autobiography epic’, ‘a summary of what I had thought and done and made of myself in these first thirty years’, and ‘carrying a superstructure of ideas’, depending on who he was writing to, and when. What does seem to carry through both the Seven Pillars and The Mint is the inner self-reflexive voice with its restless clarity, certain attitudes to the body, a bedrock austerity of practice and evaluation, and a tireless ranging over Western thought from Homer onwards. All of these seem to colour and inform his judgements. It may be that there is a Cistercian influence, although this would be trickier to prove. Considering Lawrence’s deep study of the Crusades and Crusader Castles it is obviously highly plausible that he would have been aware of the influence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, not only as one of the major preachers of the First Crusade, and the author of De Laude Novae Militae, but also as the writer of The Rule which the Templars followed, and by which they achieved a workable synthesis of their military and spiritual duties. As might be expected, the deployment of the two codes of virtue – the military and the religious or spiritual – can be seen as Lawrence makes his assessments and judgements of the Bedouin in the Arab Bulletin of 18 November 1916:

‘As for their physical condition, I doubt whether men were ever harder. Feisal rode twelve days journey in six with 800 of them, along the Eastern road, and I have had them running and walking with me in the sun through sand and over rocks for hour after hour without turning a hair. Those I saw were in wild spirits, as quick as hawks, keen and intelligent, shouting that the war may last ten years.’12

Yet, in the Bulletin of 23 May 1917, Lawrence writes:

‘The Bedu are odd people. Travelling with them is unsatisfactory for an Englishman unless he has patience deep and wide as the sea. They are absolute slaves of their appetites, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars for tobacco… Had the circumstances of their life given them greater resources or opportunity, the Beduin would have been mere sensualists. It is poverty which makes them simple, continent and enduring.’¹³

The severity of these judgements is somewhat moderated by a notebook jotting, probably of the same month, complaining about the succession of feasts: ‘I had been twenty-eight years well fed and had no right to despise these fellows for loving their mutton… But I wish to God I was quit of it.’¹⁴ Even so, in August the same year, he wrote the famous Twenty-Seven Articles, of which number 16 includes, ‘Do not let them ask you for things, since their greed will then make them look upon you as a cow to milk.’¹⁵

The problem which emerges is the apparent contradiction between the foregoing and the evocation of the ‘gospel of bareness in materials’, and the ‘refounding clear of household gods’ which Lawrence describes in his letter of 1918 to Vyvyan Richards. In the Seven Pillars, a distinction is made between the pleasure-loving soft townsmen and the austere desert-dweller in the phrase ‘We abstinents of the desert’ – a phrase which summarises his own philosophy, and what he finds admirable and useful in the Bedouin. That is, the self-reliance, mobility, and lack of material dependence of the nomadic Arabs which Lawrence used to advantage in his guerrilla war against the orthodoxy and relative inertia, not to mention, predictability of the Turks.

However, there is a striking anticipation of the ‘bareness/simplicity gospel’ in an article published in the Jesus College Magazine in January 1913, three or four years before the above quotations, entitled The Kasr of Ibn Wardani. In it Lawrence describes a visit to the scented halls of Ibn Wardani, where each of the rooms had ‘… strange, indefinable scents, memories of myrtle and oleander, musk, cinnamon and ambergris.’

‘At last we came into a great hall, whose walls, pierced with many narrow windows, still stood to more than half their height. “This,” said he, “is the liwan of silence: it has no taste”, and by some crowning art it was as he had said. The mingled scents of all the palace here combined to slay each other, and all that one felt was the desert sharpness of the air as it swept off the huge uncontaminated plains. “Among us,” said Dahoum, “we call this the sweetest of them all”, therein half-consciously sounding the ideal of the Arab creed, for generations stripping itself of all furniture in the working out of a gospel of simplicity.

‘And the secret of the place? Old Khalil told us that night over his hearth-fire, that Ibn Wardani was as a king among the Arabs, and bricks of his palace were kneaded not with common water, but with those precious oils and essences of flowers which of old the Arab druggists could so well compound.’¹⁶

Firstly, this visit could not have been later than the Carchemish period of Lawrence’s life. Wilson remarks that the truth about the palace ‘… was probably more prosaic, for Lawrence told his parents that the palace of Ibn Wardani has many strange scents about it.’ Lawrence wrote, ‘as I wrote: it is famous all over north Syria, and my description is more like the rumour than the reality.’17 However, even if this deprecatory note is true, Lawrence’s promotion of a (supposed?) Arab asceticism which Wilson remarks ‘appealed to some fundamental element in his own nature’, gives us a marker for the substance of his own views. And, taken together with such examples as his letter to Vyvyan Richards of 1918, which praises Arab austerity and, for example, his lifestyle in the Forces and at Clouds Hill (where there were no cooking facilities, no toilet, sleeping bags, and the bread and cheese were under glass covers etc.) give us not only Lawrence’s views, but also his practice. If this celebration of Arab asceticism is considered along with Lawrence’s lifestyle, i.e., at Clouds Hill, we can see his philosophy and practice more clearly. It seems to be as the M.P., Ernest Thurtle, says that everywhere there was a reduction of material needs and, where comfort and freedom were in the balance, always was comfort sacrificed. In short, from Lawrence’s article in the Jesus College Magazine in 1913, to his letter to Vyvyan Richards in 1918, and subsequently while in the RAF and Tank Corps, and for the rest of his life, Lawrence chose austerity and simplicity.

Comparison between the Richards letter of July 1918 and the College Magazine article of January 1913 shows a consistency of view despite minor changes in formulation. Whereas in the 1913 article we have the transitions from ‘silence’ to ‘no taste’ to ‘ stripping… of all furniture in the working out of a gospel of simplicity’, five years later we have ‘refined itself clear of household gods, and half the trappings which ours [civilisation] hastens to assume. The gospel of bareness in materials is a good one…’ In both instances there is a series of negations, of ‘furniture’ or ‘household gods’ as the case may be; in any case, by implication, the trivial, the petty, material things – mere ‘stuff’. In both cases the positive is the announcement of a gospel, either of simplicity, or of bareness in materials. Both point away from the usual measures of worldly success, and the valuation of things. Nothing could be further from the culture of accumulation.

Corroboration of the simplicity/‘bareness in materials gospel’ can be found in a surprising source – from Lawrence’s dentist, W. Warwick James, who met him in 1922:

‘He was not understood by those who did not realize how little the ambitions of the majority of people appealed to him. He appeared to be an ascetic – perhaps hardly true, for his exclusion of things was effected by positive actions, rather than by mere self-denial. He had achieved an extreme simplicity, had an acute mind and an unusual capacity for assimilating any subject presented to him. These attributes and his great capacity to utilize time distinguish him from the ordinary individual.’¹⁸

Naturally enough it would be easy to point out where Lawrence does not live up to these austere views: simply, the accumulation of so many books – 2,000 in Clouds Hill according to a letter of 1932.¹⁹ The large, expensive motorcycles and the cult of speed. It would be tedious to attempt the ‘justification’ of these things, and I will not do so, being convinced that they do not vitiate Lawrence’s philosophy and basic comportment, nor that it was his duty to be a saint or follow a ‘foolish consistency’. The possible roots for these views about simplicity and material bareness may have lain in Lawrence himself, but I consider it more plausible that they can be found in Christianity and the Classics; and propose to return to them after considering in more depth the struggles depicted in the Seven Pillars.

Endnotes

¹ Selected Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 23-24.

² Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, p. 137. Biblical Ref. to 1. 2 Tim.iii,2.

³ See both Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vols 2 and 3, and Peter Brown, The Body and Society.

⁴ Italics added. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 483-484.

⁵ Selected Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 147.

⁶ Seven Pillars, Penguin Edn., p. 30. Oxford Edn., pp. 11-12.

⁷ Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 646. 1929.

⁸ Letters, Ed. Malcolm Brown, p. 34.

⁹ T.E. Lawrence, The Mint, Penguin Edn., pp. 171-172.

¹⁰ The Mint, p. 77.

¹¹ Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 691-692.

¹² Arab Bulletin 18/11/16. Published in Secret Despatches from Arabia, p. 53.

¹³ Arab Bulletin 23/5/17. Published in Secret Despatches, pp. 136-137.

¹⁴ See J.Wilson, Authorised Biography, pp. 409, 1069.

¹⁵ Secret Despatches, p. 157. Article 16.

¹⁶ From T.E. Lawrence, Seven Essays. Originally published in Jesus College Magazine, Vol I, No.2, January 1913. Republished in The Journal of the T.E. Lawrence Society, Vol III, No.1, Summer 1993.

¹⁷ See J. Wilson, pp. 112, 996 for reference to Home Letters, p. 239.

¹⁸ T.E. Lawrence By His Friends, p. 514.

¹⁹ Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 753.