INTRODUCTION
Why Lawrence
Another book on Lawrence? Who was he anyway?
MOST people have either seen the film of his exploits in Arabia, or come across, if not read, one of the many books about him. Even so, there is something elusive about this small but charismatic fellow. In one sense he is an intellectual Victorian – born in 1888—who seems to mutate into many different figures as he enters the 20th Century – only to die suddenly in a motorcycle crash in 1935. His wandering parents finally settle in Oxford, where he and his four brothers – all illegitimate – proceed successfully through the classical and Christian education, which the city had offered for so long. He shows from the earliest days an unusual character, combining practical skills, a strong antiquarian bent and an interest in archaeology, with a cult of self-hardening; an urge to explore the limits of the physical and mental self beyond the complacencies of his class and time. His later fame, resting on his extraordinary achievements in helping to foment and lead the revolt of the nomadic and feuding Arabs in the First World War, is only one facet of his life. Equally, he could live on as a brilliant letter-writer, a diplomat, archaeologist, historian, or as a practitioner and theorist of guerrilla warfare, and developer of speedboats for the RAF. Critics still argue about the merits and demerits of his account of the Arab Revolt, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom and his book about the beginnings of the RAF, The Mint, written from the inside as a nobody with another name. Whatever may be the case, along with the letters, they will ensure his place in English writing.
The general account of his life has been rehearsed by many authors. In a broad sense the writing about him may be divided between two main types: the historical overviews (for or against), and the ‘anoraks’—the latter perhaps more interested in photographing the factory which made the spark plugs for his motorcycles. Although they are both useful, they are not what interest me. In my view, Lawrence is nothing if he is not a Mind. Accordingly, I go in search of this Mind, trying to understand and to begin to delineate it via his formation and experience. It is because he mixed with all classes, and certainly knew the powerful and influential people of his time, that I begin with his judgement of Ronald Storrs, who was military Governor of Jerusalem and Oriental Secretary in Cairo. Storrs was of a similar intellectual calibre and formation; therefore, I believe their mutual appraisal is instructive.
Finally, I do believe that there is something to be learnt from Lawrence’s life and writings, and that there is a message in them which our times need, even though we are very unlikely to hear it or believe it. By trying to delineate his mind and personality, my hope is that some, however few, will hear this message and even transmit it to the future.
‘His shadow would have covered our work and British policy in the East like a cloak, had he been able to deny himself the world, and to prepare his mind and body with the sternness of an athlete for a great fight.’
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, page 57, Penguin Edn. T.E.Lawrence’s judgement of Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary, and page 37, 1922 Oxford Text.
As a youth of 14, interested in Lawrence, I was given a Penguin book, edited by David Garnett, called The Essential T.E. Lawrence. One passage, in which Garnett quotes Eric Kennington, has stayed with me ever since:
‘I had long wished to get a statement from him, which would throw light on the spiritual difference I knew there was between us. What was his God? He answered without hesitation, and once more I missed his words, so beautiful was his face. He had a glory and a light shone in his eyes, but more of sunset, than sunrise or midday. What I think I heard in the flow of eloquence, was a record of process without aim or end, creation followed by dissolution, rebirth, and then decay to wonder at and to love. But not a hint of a god and certainly none of the Christian God.’ [page 22]
Garnett adds: ‘In other words T.E. Lawrence was a rationalist.’ I did not believe that he was a ‘rationalist’ then or now. What remained was the enigma of the missing words, and the question of how to understand what Kennington had recalled. In a sense the hunt was on, and only many years, and hundreds of books, later, did I understand what Lawrence was talking about.
In the following years, like many others, I read the various biographies, and the four main texts which Lawrence left us – Crusader Castles, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Mint, and the Collected Letters.
It is not necessary to go very far into these books, or the surrounding literature, before coming across the critics and detractors. Lawrence could be evasive, posey, annoying, and apparently inconsistent. Our times are deeply impatient with the heroic, and lost in an automatic ironical treatment of all serious values. Ready to hand lie psychology, politics, sociology, and theories of ideology. More recently, the diffusion of a glib deconstruction has given relativism new instruments, and armed a generation of New Sophists. The ‘Traison des Clerics’, at least of most public intellectuals, is evident in the strident confusion of the public culture, the loss of conviction in most judgements of evaluation, and a preoccupation with, what earlier times would have called, the trivial.
Easily, it seems, that Lawrence, and any ‘god’ he may have had, can be dismissed; masochist, homosexual, poseur, imperialist, militarist, elitist, liar. If I was convinced that any of these strictures were importantly true, I would not have begun this book, and gone in search of his philosophy of life. I shall return later to the arrangements Lawrence made to encounter more pain. So far as most psychology is concerned, like Sartre criticizing standard left views of Flaubert or Valery, I find little explained— certainly Flaubert was a petit bourgeois, but why was this particular petit bourgeois Flaubert?
If masochist and/or homosexual was the whole story, then Lawrence could have stayed in Oxford collegiate life, like Maurice Bowra and Dadie, or searched for rough trade in Soho. For those interested in the factual record, I refer them to Jeremy Wilson’s magisterial study, and John E. Mack’s compassionate Prince of our Disorder.
For myself, I am interested in something more complex and elusive, and I put aside as much as possible, any ready-to-hand explanatory devices and systems, and go in search of answers to the following questions which animate this book, as ways to discover the sources of his extraordinary energy and variety of achievement; his philosophy and practice during a life of such multiple activity.
1. Apart from ambition, what was it that got him to Damascus by the age of 30?
2. What motivated him, and gave him the strength to walk 1,100 miles through Syria, alone, at the age of 21, for his thesis about Crusader Castles?
3. To begin again, in 1922 in the RAF?
4. To turn away from food, sex, comfort, luxury, money, fame, much of the 20th century, and from most of the so-called necessities which sustain many other lives?
5. To change name, identity, career and milieux more than once?
Indeed, what was his god or his philosophy? Beginning the search for some answers, I did not, of course, expect a systematic belief system, or philosophy; perhaps a working ethic and practice, a particular comportment towards life, maybe something like the Regimen which Foucault begins to explore in his studies of the Stoics and early Christians.1Perhaps even a simpler version of the Regimen as it was formulated by Kant in The Conflict of Faculties (with a strikingly stoic flavour).2 Reflecting more, and reading more deeply, I came to the realization that if there was any sense in the very idea of ‘T.E. Lawrence’s Philosophy’, I was more likely to find it in the pre-Cartesian, pre-Modern, Ancient World sense: Philosophy as a way of life.3 In any case, I resolved to look for it in the following:
1. What he read and wrote. After all, a primary part of his self definition was as a writer. In his books and judgements I would look for the Perspective, the valuations.
2. What he did.
3. What those who knew him said, such as Colonel W.F. Stirling: ‘On one occasion he rode his camel 300 miles in three consecutive days (no one ever seems to comment on the camel’s endurance). I once rode with mine 50 miles at a stretch, and that was enough for me… his spiritual equipment overrode the ordinary needs of flesh and blood.’ (Quoted by J.E. Mack, page 201)4 Of course, my question is, what is this ‘spiritual equipment’?
4. Lawrence had an intense and enduring relationship to books, and those remaining at Clouds Hill at his death were the results of complex and revelatory choices. As Marguerite Yourcenar writes in the endnotes of Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘… one of the best ways to reconstruct a man’s thinking is to rebuild his library.’ [Memoirs of Hadrian, page 260, 1983]5 Accordingly, I examine this library, and read some of it with the foregoing questions in mind.
5. In the beliefs of his youth and his formation (what Hegel and Nietzsche call Bildung). I look for the connection between the extraordinary number of transitions he made in job, role, persona, status, and identity. A trajectory which passes from Classically-educated Christian archaeologist, via guerrilla warfare theorist and practioner, to marine racing engine specialist, voicing a near-Stoic version of materialism. Necessarily there will be quotation from what he sardonically dubbed his Collected Works; the things everybody knows. I will also dwell on aspects of his life and writings which have either been ignored or misread.
6. I examine the several matrices of influence: Biblical, archaeological, medieval, Crusader, military, and strategic; looking for the principles of action which pass through and beyond even his undoubted, and declared, ambition.
7. I happily admit my many debts, particularly to the books which led me into a better understanding of Chivalry, and the world of Classical Greek literature.6 Without them I would never have been able to work out the sources of Lawrence’s extraordinary power and mobility.
Endnotes
1 See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3 vols.
2 See Kant, The Conflict of Faculties: ‘A regimen for prolonging man’s life must not aim at a life of ease; for by such indulgence towards his powers and feelings he would spoil himself.’ [page 181].
3 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
4 Also in Stirling’s Safety Last, page 83, and in Friends, page 155.
5 See ‘Books at Clouds Hill’ in T.E. Lawrence by His Friends.
6 As M.D. Allen rightly remarks in The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia, there is a book to be written on The Classicism of Lawrence of Arabia (page 204). After dealing with the literature of Chivalry, I make a beginning of the larger issue of this Classicism.
