CHAPTER NINE

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

LAWRENCE’S systematised views on military and psychological leadership and, by implication, his philosophical/ethical positions, are laid out with great clarity in the 27 Articles (see Appendix 1) published originally in the Arab Bulletin of 20 August 1917. The level and variety of skills discussed is extraordinary, as is the essential self-demand on which it is all predicated. This exacting self-demand is summed up in Seven Pillars as ‘… no man can lead Arabs unless he lives level with them, eats the same food, and yet appears a better man in himself.’ Seven Pillars, amongst other things, unpacks and describes the detailed experience of living up to such an agenda, where the background personal view is the ‘simplicity/bareness’ gospel discussed previously. Curiously, a hard-edged version of these high standards can be found ten years later in a letter to Lionel Curtis from Karachi:

‘I notice an incredible shabbiness and second-rating in all our effort here. We talk so much of climate. A gowk in a paper of this week said that the climate of Karachi was like a taste of Hell in summer… Well, this year it has not once been uncomfortably warm. It has never been hot, in the sense that Baghdad and Cairo are hot… Yet they burble of hardship, and sleep at midday, and wear sun-helmets, and cut the work hours to half the hours of England, and excuse themselves any laxity or indulgences of temper or disposition… It is laziness, pure or impure, and simple or complicated. We could work exactly as men do in England, and be all the better for it, for we would not then have the time to remember and cultivate all these fancies of fever and disease. Believe me, I am ashamed of my race, here. They deserve to lose ground in the world, for their frivolous ineptitude.’¹

If the foregoing can be taken as an example of the level of physical demand which Lawrence thought reasonable, and in peacetime, the following instance demonstrates his ethical stance during the war; particularly around the moral problem generated by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, which basically gave the lie to the promises which Lawrence was making to the Arabs on behalf of the British Government. The document was never actually sent from Lawrence to Captain Gilbert Clayton, principal intelligence officer in Cairo. It was in a notebook he was to leave behind, which was subsequently found among his wartime notes, heavily pencilled over, and finally read under special lighting and magnification. Lawrence was in Wadi Sirham at the time, a place he described as ‘hopeless and sad… putrid smelling… salt and snakes of evil doing.’ [cf. Wilson page 410.] Although unsent, it spells out Lawrence’s moral distress.

‘Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.’2

A similar line of thought is discernible in Seven Pillars:

‘A man might clearly destroy himself: but it was repugnant that the innocence and the ideals of the Arabs should enlist in my sordid service for me to destroy… but we the masters had promised them results in our false contract, and that was bargaining with life, a bluff in which we had nothing wherewith to meet our stake. Inevitably we would reap bitterness, a sorry fruit of heroic endeavour… Accordingly, on this march I took risks with the set hope of proving myself unworthy to be the Arab assurance of final victory. A bodily wound would have been a grateful vent for my internal perplexities, a mouth through which my troubles might have found relief.’³

[Author’s note: a reminiscence of Chretian de Troyes, the wound which becomes a mouth.]

Nowhere in his writings does Lawrence take refuge from these moral pressures in real politik or instrumentalism; the dilemmas remain personal, intense, and expressed in a language perfectly consistent with the braced conscience of his Christian youth, or indeed the honour so dear to Chivalry. At the same time the strategic and geopolitical considerations which were to serve his own country’s interests were studied and pursued with equal drive and honesty. Not for nothing did Lawrence want the portraits of both Allenby and Feisal on his walls in Clouds Hill.⁴

In Lawrence, the tension and conflict between mind and body, or soul and body, which he had inherited from his Christian background, was allied in him with an additional attitude of instrumentality towards the body, an attitude summed up in his remark, ‘If my body fails me now I will break it.’ Perfectly consistent with this was the cult of the Will: a combination (instrumentality and willpower) perfectly designed to serve an Ideal. The emerging problem, one which seeps through the pages of Seven Pillars and gives biting irony to its sub-title ‘A Triumph’, is what happens in the failure – absence or pollution of the Ideal? In a sense this is Lawrence’s defining problem, and the search for solutions to it, the drive which powers some of his post-war activities. Some French commentators have formulated this problem in terms of the search for the Absolute, and Lawrence does indeed use this term, but mostly in literary contexts, already noticed, for example, ‘there’s no absolute in the imaginative world, so journeymen like myself are confused and miserable in it.’⁵ Nevertheless, for one who lived by a militant asceticism, the dangers were real. In the light, not only of his experiences in the war, but also of his emerging judgement of his fame, coupled with the lost transcendence of his waning Christian faith, where does an ex-Crusader go, and what can replace the Ideal?

Lawrence’s solutions were various. Already mentioned is his joining of the RAF and high valorisation of ‘the conquest of the air’. As always, he had various writing projects, although always with a strong undertow of self-doubt. Especially in question was the production, value, and reception of Seven Pillars. It is unsurprising that the book is so variously filed in bookshops and libraries under ‘Military History’, ‘Biography’, ‘Literature’, ‘Gay Interest’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Middle Eastern Politics’ and elsewhere. The reason is its production served so many purposes. If ever the production and intent of a text was over-determined, this was. Lawrence, of course, provided dozens of explanations and remarks about his war and the writing of Seven Pillars, all more or less tailored to their recipients. Arranging some of these in an order beginning with the most external, yields the following:

‘After peace came I found myself the sole person who knew what had happened in Arabia during the war, and the only literate person in the Arab army. So it became a professional duty to record what happened.’6

In 1919, Lawrence responded by letter to a question about his motives during the war from G.J. Kidston, a Foreign Office official:

‘You asked me “why” today, and I’m going to tell you exactly what my motives in the Arab affair were, in order of strength:

(i) Personal. I liked a particular Arab very much, and thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present. [Author’s note: Probably a reference to Dahoum.]

(ii) Patriotic. I wanted to help win the war, and Arab help reduced Allenby’s losses by thousands.

(iii) Intellectual curiosity. I wanted to feel what it was like to be the mainspring of a national movement, and to have some millions of people expressing themselves through me: and being a half-poet, I don’t value material things much. Sensation and mind seem to me to be much greater, and the ideal, such a thing as the impulse that took us into Damascus, the only thing worth doing. [Italics added.]

(iv) Ambition. You know Lionel Curtis has made his conception of the Empire – a Commonwealth of free peoples – generally accepted. I wanted to widen that beyond the Anglo-Saxon shape, and form a new nation of thinking people, all acclaiming our freedom, and demanding admittance to our Empire. There is, to my eyes, no other road for Egypt and India in the end, and I would have made their path easier, by creating an Arab Dominion in the Empire.

I don’t think there are any other reasons. You are sufficiently Scotch to understand my analyzing my own mind so formally. The process intended was to take Damascus and run it (as anyone knowing the East and West could run it), as an independent ally of G[reat] B[ritain]. Then to turn on Hejaz and conquer it: then to project the semi-educated Syrians on Yemen, and build that up quickly (without Yemen there is no re-birth for the Arabs) and finally receive Mesopotamia into the block so made: all this could be done in thirty years of directed effort, and without impairing British holdings. It is only the substitution of a 999 years’ lease for a complete sale.

Now look what happened when we took Damascus:

Motive (i): I found had died some weeks before; so my gift was wasted, and my future doings indifferent on that count.

Motive (ii): This was achieved, for Turkey was broken, and the central powers were so united that to break one was to break all.

Motive (iii): This was romantic mainly, and one never repeats a sensation. When I rode into Damascus the whole country was on fire with enthusiasm, and in the town a hundred thousand people shouted my name. Success always kills by surfeit.

Motive (iv): This remained, but was not strong enough to make me stay. I asked Allenby for leave, and when he gave it me, came straight home. It’s the dying remains of this weakest of all my reasons, which made me put up a half-fight for Feisal in Paris and elsewhere, and occasionally drives me into your room to jest about what might be done.

If you want to make me work again you would have to recreate motives (ii) and (iii). As you are not God, Motive (i) is beyond your power.

I’m not conscious of having done a crooked thing to anyone since I began to push the Arab Movement, though I prostituted myself in Arab service. For an Englishman to put himself at the disposal of a red race is to sell himself to a brute, like Swift’s Houyhnhnms. However, my body and soul were my own, and no one can reproach me for what I do to them: and to all the rest of you I’m clean. When you have got as far as this, please burn it all. I’ve never told anyone before, and may not again, because it isn’t nice to open oneself out. I laugh at myself because giving up has made me look so futile.’7

A letter to Edward Garnett in 1922:

‘I can’t write poetry: so in prose I aimed at providing a meal for the fellow-seekers with myself. [Italics added.] For this the whole experience, and emanations and surroundings (background and foreground) of a man are necessary. Whence the many facets of the book, its wild mop of side-scenes and side-issues, the prodigality and profuseness: and the indigestibility of the dish. They were, when done, deliberate: and the book is a summary of what I have thought and done and made of myself in these first thirty years. Primarily it’s that, and not a work of art: and when the book was finished and I read it, the fact that it wasn’t a work of art rose up and hit me in the face, and I hated it, because artist is the proudest profession. I never hoped to be nearly one, and the chance allures me.’⁸

A letter to Edward Garnett in 1922:

‘The personal revelations should be the key to the thing: and the personal chapter actually is the key, I fancy, only it’s written in cipher.’⁹

A letter to E.M. Forster in 1928:

‘The Seven Pillars is a sort of introspection epic, you know: and it would have taken a big writer to bring it off.’¹⁰

A letter to E.M. Forster in 1928:

‘Of course The Seven Pillars is bigger than The Mint. I let myself go in the S.P. and gave away all the entrails I had in me. It was an orgy of exhibitionism. Never again… I’ve done my very best with every line of both books. Overdone it, rather than underdone it. Edgar Wallace does not take half my pains, I think.’¹¹

A letter to Robert Graves in 1935:

‘What I was trying to do, I suppose, was to carry a superstructure of ideas upon or above anything I made.’¹²

Endnotes

¹ Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 558-560.

² See Wilson, Introduction to Lawrence’s Minorities, pp. 32-33.

³ Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., pp. 295-296.

⁴ ‘In the flesh that double allegiance was difficult: but the two quiet heads on the wall will let me do what I please. I shall grow philosophical, at finding that problem solve itself.’ (1933). Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 774. Letter to Edward Garnett.

⁵ Letters. To E. Garnett, Ed. Garnett, p. 358.

⁶ Letter to Bernard Shaw in 1922. Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 356-357.

⁷ Letters, Ed. Malcolm Brown, pp. 168-170.

⁸ Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 371.

⁹ Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 366.

¹⁰ Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 621.

¹¹ Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 622, 624.

¹² Letters. Ibid., p. 853.