Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (88 page)

Lawrence was courageous enough to criticize one scene as “adequate” and another as “intolerable.” But on the whole he liked the play, and he praised the fifth act as “pure genius,” though several people have felt that
Saint
Joan
would have ended better without it (among these were Lawrence Langner and the Theater Guild, producers of the play in New York, who were afraid the audience members would miss their last train home). Lawrence pointed out that Shaw “doesn’t know how men who have fought together stand in relation to one another,” and gave him some sensible suggestions. Once the play had opened, Lawrence went to see it in London, and wrote to Charlotte of Sybil Thorndyke’s performance as Joan, “There isn’t as much strength in Joan … as I had gathered in reading her,” but added that since he had made the role and the text his, in his mind, “there was a little resentment at having others’ interpretations thrust on my established ones.”

Although Lawrence never enjoyed his years in the army as a private, one senses, in 1923 and 1924, not so much a softening of his attitude as an increasingly busy social and intellectual life that kept his mind off it. He was often in London, and was once even invited to a dinner to celebrate Armistice Day, given by Air Chief Marshal Trenchard. Lawrence accepted provisionally:

I’d like to very much: but there are two difficulties already in my view:
It is Armistice day, and I do not know if leave will be given.
I have a decent suit, but no dress clothes at all.

The leave I will ask for….The clothes are beyond my power to provide: and I fear that Lady Trenchard might not approve a lounge suit at dinner….Please ask her before you reply.

In the event, Lawrence attended the dinner at the Army and Navy Club in uniform, surely the only private soldier in the British army to be dining that evening with the equivalent of a four-star general. Again and again, there are instances of Trenchard’s breaking the rules for Lawrence. He called General Chetwode, the army adjutant-general, to arrange for special leave for Lawrence, and called again, in a rage, because Lawrence, who was on the defaulters’ list for having missed a parade in order to accept an invitation to tea from Thomas Hardy, was unable to meet him at the Air Ministry. Despite Lawrence’s complaints, there was no lack of powerful friends smoothing his path, and no hesitation on his part in asking them to do so.

Nor was there a lack of glamorous job offers. Sydney Cockerell tried to persuade Lawrence to accept the post of professor of English literature at Tokyo University, a position of some prestige; and Trenchard gave him a chance to complete the official history of the Royal Flying Corps in the 1914-1918 war, since the author of the first volume, Sir Walter Raleigh,had died leaving four or five volumes to go. Hogarth had given the job a try, but he was suffering from “all sorts of minor ailments,” as well as diabetes, and the air war was no great interest of his. Here, surely, was a job Lawrence could do superbly—and without having to leave England—but he turned it down, because he did not want the responsibility, and offered it instead to Robert Graves, who, with a wife, children, and a mistress, was in great need of money. But Graves also declined what Lawrence described as “a three-year job, worth £600-£800 a year,” an optimistic guess, since the completion of the official RFC history would, in fact, take another twelve years.

Although Lawrence still shrank from the prospect of letting people read
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
he had made the important step of putting its financing in the hands of Robin Buxton, a friendly banker, who as Major Buxton had led an Imperial Camel Corps unit of 300 men in support of Lawrence during the latter part of the war. Buxton was a rare type—an unflappable banker, endowed with energy, common sense, and a real affection for Lawrence; and Lawrence seems to have put together a “brain trust,” consisting of Alan Dawnay, Hogarth, and Lionel Curtis, to advise him on how many copies to print and what to charge. He was, as usual, an infuriatingly difficult author. He wrote to Buxton: “I’d rather the few copies: I had rather one copy at £3,000 than 10 at £300, or 30 at £100 or 300 at £10….1 hate the whole idea of spreading copies of the beastly book.” All this, of course, was still based on the notion that the whole job could be done for £3,000, which was hopelessly optimistic. At the same time, Lawrence decided that for moral reasons he should not make any money from the book, and gave up any claim to royalties. His choice of using the Oxford University Press to set the type was thwarted when it backed out, fearing the libel problems in the text. Lawrence eventually settled on hiring his own printer, an American named Manning Pike recommended by the artist Eric Kennington. Although this was his first attempt to design and set a book, Pike was a craftsman-artist after Lawrence’s heart. Still, Pike soon became a martyr to Lawrence’s cranky ideas about typography, a legacy of his passionate admiration for William Morris. Lawrence cut and changed the text to make paragraphs end on a page, to eliminate “rivers” of white space in the type, and to eliminate “orphans” (small pieces of text at the end of a paragraph). Lawrence’s interest in typographical design soon became obsessive, and without a publisher like Cape or an editor like Garnett to control expenses, he began altering his text merely for the sake of its appearance on the page—Pike was, after all, in no position to contradict him. “The business will be done as crazily as you feared,” Lawrence wrote to Shaw, and he was not exaggerating. Shaw’s own ideas about spelling, punctuation, and typesetting were at least as cranky as Lawrence’s, but his business sense was far sounder; he squeezed the maximum amount from his publishers, and was horrified that Lawrence proposed to forgo any profit from his book. Leaving his brain trust to find the necessary number of subscribers, Lawrence proceeded to have plates made of the illustrations and pay for the typesetting equipment Pike needed. He went through at least one more nerve-shredding round of revising the text, and then did so again as Pike began to produce proof sheets. This time he was aided, or perhaps hampered, by Shaw’s detailed suggestions and advice (followed shortly by Charlotte’s somewhat more timidly expressed ones), which finally arrived like a bombshell two years after Lawrence had first sent him the book:

Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo….

I invented my own system of punctuation, and then compared it with the punctuation of the Bible, and found that the authors of the revised version had been driven to the same usage, though their practice is not quite consistent all through. The Bible bars the dash, which is the great refuge of those who are too lazy to punctuate….1 never use it when I can possibly substitute a colon; and I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces. As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rough rules for you.

When a sentence contains more than one statement, with different nominatives, or even with the same nominative repeated for the sake of emphasizing some discontinuity between the statements, the statements should be separated by a semicolon when the relation between them is expressed by a conjunction. When there is no conjunction, or other modifying word, and the two statements
are
placed baldly in dramatic apposition, use a colon. Thus, Luruns said nothing; but he thought the more. Luruns could not speak: he was drunk. Luruns, like Napoleon, was out of place and a failure as a subaltern; yet when he could exasperate his officers by being a faultless private he could behave himself as such. Luruns, like Napoleon, could see a hostile city not only as a military objective but as a stage for a
coup de théâtre:
he was a born actor.

You will see that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

But by far the most urgent of my corrections—so important that you had better swallow them literally with what wry faces you cannot control—are those which concern your libels. I spent fifteen years of my life writing criticisms of sensitive living people, and thereby acquired a very cultivated sense of what I might say and what I might not say. All criticisms are technically libels; but there is the blow below the belt, the impertinence, the indulgence of dislike, the expression of personal contempt, and of course the imputation of dishonesty or unchastity which are not and should not be privileged; as well as the genuine criticism, the amusing good humored banter, and (curiously) the obvious “vulgar abuse” which are privileged. I have weeded out your reckless sallies as carefully as I can.

Then there is the more general criticism about that first chapter. That it should come out and leave the book to begin with chapter two, which is the real thing and very fine at that, I have no doubt whatever. You will see my note on the subject.

I must close up now, as Charlotte wants to make up her packet to you.

E. M. Forster too had written to Lawrence in detail, criticizing the elaborate style, which Lawrence toned down considerably now that publishing the book was a realistic prospect. It was a moment that was at once stimulating and deeply depressing for Lawrence, as if he were at once summoning up from the past and finally burying the experiences of two years of war, six years after it had ended. He had carried the burden of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
for so long that it must have seemed to him impossible to put it down.

It was soon apparent that there would be no shortage of subscribers—indeed, Lawrence would have trouble keeping the number down to the limit he wanted to set—and also that the entire project was going to prove far more costly than he had supposed. The extraordinary workload he had heaped upon himself, on top of a soldier’s normal day, would have broken the health of a far stronger man, and there is ample proof that he was sinking deeper into depression. It is no accident that he had written confidingly to Charlotte Shaw a kind of
de profundis,
explaining his experience at Deraa:

I’m always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender…. About that night I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things…. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from the pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter.

What he did
not
point out was that in the description of the incident in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
it is quite clear that the real horror was
not
the pain, but the fact that he experienced pleasure at the pain; that his sexual “surrender” was as “unforgivable” in his mind as it would be for a woman experiencing pleasure from a gang rape. He certainly never mentioned that he had gone to considerable trouble and some expense to reproduce the moment, whenever the need overcame him. Jock Bruce was still in his hut at Bovington, and among the soldiers he invited to his cottage.

Lawrence’s misery continued. He appealed once more to be allowed back into the RAF, but even a change in government did not help; the Conservative secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, was adamantly opposed to having Lawrence back in the RAF. Hoare, who had known Lawrence well in Palestine and Jordan, feared the inevitable publicity, and may also have resented the direct appeal that Shaw made to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin over Hoare’s head, which suggested that Lawrence might take his cause to the newspapers. John Buchan put in a good word for Lawrence with Baldwin as well, but to no avail. Baldwin, a man who combined extreme political shrewdness with genuine indolence, must have felt besieged by Lawrence’s friends, but true to form, he listened politely and did nothing.

To Buchan, Lawrence at least offered an explanation of a kind, writing to thank him for talking to Baldwin: “I don’t know by what right I made that appeal to you on Sunday…. They often ask ‘Why the R.A.F.?’ and I don’t know. Only I have tried it and liked it as much after trying it as I did before. The difference between Army & Air is that between earth & air: no less.” Even Lawrence’s pal at Bovington, Corporal Dixon, thought he was crazy on the subject of the air force, as did the sinister Bruce, but it made no difference; “I can’t get the longing for it out of my mind,” he wrote Buchan, and that was true. Lawrence’s yearning for the RAF was not a matter of reason.

Meanwhile, Manning Pike was slipping far behind with his typesetting—Lawrence had committed his book to a man who was not only inexperienced but subject to “fits of extreme depression,” and on top of that “had an unhappy marriage.” Lawrence, sunk in depression himself, was obliged to cheer Pike up. At the same time, Buxton, Lawrence’s banker, was reluctant to increase his overdraft. In the end, there seemed no other way out but for Lawrence to resign himself to staying in the Royal Tank Corps, and sell the rights to an abridged version of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
to finance the printing of the subscribers’ edition. Cape, despite Lawrence’s earlier decision to withdraw from his agreement to the abridged version, offered Lawrence a comparatively modest advance of £3,000; and with whatever misgivings, Lawrence accepted it, and agreed to publication in 1927, giving himself enough time (and money) to complete the limited edition. Most, if not all, of the abridgment had already been made by Garnett, but of course it would now have to be redone in view of the changes Lawrence had made in the text of the complete book.