II
A brief description of Lawrence:—He is short (five feet, five and a half inches), with his body long, I should judge, in proportion to his legs, for he is more impressive seated than standing. He has a big head of a Norse type, rising steeply at the back. His hair is fair (not blond) and rather fine: his complexion is fair and he could go unshaved longer than most men without showing it. The upper part of his face is kindly, almost maternal; the lower part is severe, almost cruel. His eyes are blue grey and constantly in motion. His hands and feet are small. He is, or was, of great physical strength: he has been seen to raise up a rifle at arm’s length, holding it by the barrel-end, until it was parallel with the ground—yet no one would suspect him of being more than tough. In Arabia he won the respect of the desert fighters by his feats of strength and agility as much as by his other qualities. The pass-test of the highest order of fighters was the feat of springing off a trotting camel and leaping on again with one hand on the saddle and a rifle in the other. It is said that Lawrence passed the test. Of his powers of physical endurance the story will tell.
Here are a few first impressions of Lawrence; difficult to reconcile:—‘That commonplace looking little man!’ (a poet). ‘Face and figure of a Circassian dancing-girl’ (an American journalist-lecturer). ‘A little man with a red face like a butcher’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘Face like a cheap writing-pad; a proper swede-looking (i.e. bumpkin) chap’ (Royal Air Force). ‘A comical little x—’ (Royal Tank Corps). ‘A young man of considerable physical beauty: it is the sober truth that I have not seen such burnished gold hair before or since, nor such intensely blue eyes’ (a visitor at Carchemish). ‘A very quiet, sedate manner, a fine head but insignificant body’ (a major of the Camel Corps).
He has a trick of holding his hands loosely folded below his breast, the elbows to his sides, and carries his head a little tilted, the eyes on the ground. He can sit or stand for hours at a stretch without moving a muscle. He talks in short sentences, deliberately and quietly without accenting his words strongly. He grins a lot and laughs seldom. He is a dead shot with a pistol and a good rifle-shot. His greatest natural gift is being able to switch off the current of his personality whenever he wishes to be unnoticed in company. He can look heavy and stupid, even vulgar; and uses this power constantly in self-protection. When he first joined the Royal Air Force he was sent one day to nail down carpets under the direction of an Air-Marshal’s wife. She had known him well, but Lawrence to avoid general embarrassment did not wish to be recognized, and so she did not know him. As a matter of fact he is hardly ever recognized in uniform by people who used to know him. The tight collar and peaked cap are a disguise and there is nothing immediately remarkable about his appearance, no irregularity of feature or gesture or carriage. When the current is not switched off there is a curious feeling of force whenever he is in the room, a steady force, not an aimless disturbing one, and the more powerful because it is so well controlled; so that those who do not accept him as a friendly being are apt to fear him. I have even heard it said ‘Lawrence must have direct dealings with the Supernatural.’ This is, however, nonsense. The power is from within and not from without. I have noticed that he dislikes being touched; a hand laid on his shoulder or knee is an offence; he can understand the Oriental notion that ‘virtue’ (he would, I think, call it ‘integrity’) goes out of a man when so touched. He will never shake hands if he can avoid doing so nor will he ever fight hand to hand. He does not drink or smoke. This is not due to deliberate teetotal conviction or because he regards these things as poison, but principally because he has no occasion to drink or smoke. Most people begin drinking and smoking out of mere sociability: Lawrence always avoids sociability of any sort. He is uncomfortable with strangers: this is what is called his shyness. He regards drinking, gluttony, gambling, sport and the passions of love—the whole universe for the average man—as unnecessary; as, at the best, stimulants for the years when life goes flat.
He avoids eating with other people. Regular mealtimes are not to his liking. He hates waiting more than two minutes for a meal or spending more than five minutes on a meal. That is why he lives mainly on bread and butter. And he likes water better than any other drink. It is his opinion that feeding is a very intimate performance and should be done in a small room behind locked doors. He eats, when he does eat, which is seldom, in a casual abstracted way. He came to visit me one breakfast-time on his racing motor-bicycle: he had come about two hundred miles in five hours. He would eat no breakfast. I asked him later what the food was like in the camp. ‘I seldom eat it: it’s good enough. I am now a storeman in the Quartermaster’s stores, so I don’t need much.’ ‘When did you last have a meal?’ I asked. ‘On Wednesday.’ Since when apparently he had some chocolate, an orange and a cup of tea. This was Saturday. Then I think I put some apples near him, and after a while he reached for one. Fruit is his only self-indulgence. (Shelley, by the way, had this casual habit of eating, though he did not thrive on it like Lawrence: and he had Lawrence’s gift of entering and leaving a room unnoticed if he wished.) It is his occasional habit to knock off proper feeding for three days—rarely five—just to make sure that he can do it without feeling worried or strained. One’s sense of things gets very keen by this fasting, he finds, and it is good practice for hard times. His life has been full of hard times.
Lawrence also, when his own master, avoids regular hours of sleep. He has found that his brain works better if he sleeps as irregularly as he eats. In the Royal Air Force he is always in bed at ‘Lights Out’ and sleeps until after midnight. Then he dozes, thinking more or less until reveille. At night, he finds, the minds of others are switched off and that gives his mind longer range, free of their vibrations. He avoids as far as possible all social relationships, all public events. He joins no clubs, societies, groups. He answers few letters but the immediately pressing ones and not always those. On visiting Oxford in 1922 after two months prolonged to six in the East, he found his table stacked with correspondence; perhaps two or three hundred letters. He had given orders to have nothing forwarded. He read them all carefully and sent off a single answer—a telegram: the rest went into the waste-paper basket. Usually he will answer a pre-paid telegram. Or, it would be more true to say, he will use the reply-form, though not necessarily to the sender. He never answers a letter addressed to him as ‘Lawrence’: this warning may save some of my readers money in stamps. When he does write a letter it is not of the sort that finds its way into the waste-paper basket. A Lawrence letter is always practical, considered, full, helpful, informative. This sort of thing ... ‘When you go to Rheims, go alone. Sit down at the base of the sixth pilaster from the west on the south side of the nave aisle and look up between the fourth and fifth pillars at the third window of the clerestory on the north side of the nave....’ (1910).
He is one of the rare people who have a sensible attitude towards money. He neither loves it nor fears it, for he has found it useless to help on the two or three occasions when he has greatly desired things worth while. He can be a financier if and when it pleases him: for the most part he is not bothered about his bank-balance. At the moment he has no bank-balance at all, and has taken great care not to make a penny out of any of his writings on the Arab Revolt. Apart from this he has done his best to earn money with his pen, and has made £35 in four years’ anonymous effort. He calls these earnings the jam on his Royal Air Force bread and butter. He writes with great difficulty and corrects much; and takes no pride or pleasure in anything that he has written. Most of these earnings are from translation-work and none of them from creative or original writing. He never intends to write another real book. He usually writes, by the way, in indian ink because it makes a good mark on the page. His handwriting is unpretentious and at first sight almost schoolboyish; but always legible. It varies very much with his mood, from large and square to small and narrow, from upright to a slight backward slant. I believe that the one thing that he likes is to find some one who knows more than himself or can do something better than himself. To such a person he will attach himself and learn all that is to be learned. And if he meets someone who can actually think faster or more accurately than himself and can even anticipate him in his apparently erratic but most carefully considered behaviour, so much the better. At the same time he has a savage conviction of his own general insufficiency which he will not allow to be contradicted by particular occasions on which he has been proved to excel others. It is not modesty but a sincere faith in his own unworthiness suggesting the cries in the Church Litany and will not stand contradiction.
Perhaps his most unexpected personal characteristic is that he never looks at a man’s face and never recognizes a face. This is inherited; his father one day stepped on his toe in the street and passed on with an apology, not knowing him. He would not recognize his mother or his brothers, even, if he met them without warning. Long practice has made Lawrence able to talk for twenty minutes at a time to whoever accosts him without betraying that he hasn’t a notion who the person is. Yet he can remember names and details of taste and character, and words and opinions and places vividly and at great length. He does his best to see people; but is constantly getting into trouble for not recognizing and saluting officers when they are out of uniform; for nobody is willing to believe his excuses.
He has never been dogmatic about any creed or political conviction: he has no belief in a philosophic Absolute. He has no use for crowds or any person whose only strength is that he is a member of some society or creed. He clearly also expects people to find themselves and be true to themselves, and to leave their neighbours to do the same: he would wish every man to be an everlasting question-mark. He can be relentless to the point of cruelty: the shock of his anger, which is a cold quiet laughing anger, is violent. To hear him, say, dismissing an impostor who claims to have served during the War in the East in such and such a unit, or reminding a bully of men deliberately sent to their death by him in such and such a province, is a terrifying experience. But when the offender is gone, the anger goes too and leaves no trace.
Lawrence does not like children (or dogs or camels) in mass, in the usual sentimental way. He likes a few children (as also a few dogs, a few camels). From the rest he shrinks. He is afraid of them, and he is sorry for them, as for creatures forced, without having their wishes consulted, into an existence in which, if they are good creatures, they will necessarily find disappointment. This will not prevent him at times from talking really to a child, treating it as an independent person and not merely as a clever echo of its parents.
He has, it seems, no use for the human race as such or interest in its continuance. He has no sentimentality about universal brotherhood, like Swift; he has no use for the works of men. And has come to this view, I think, by the same road as Swift, by an overwhelming sense of personal liberty, a largeness of heart, and an intense desire for perfection so obviously unattainable as hardly to be worth starting for.
We may conclude that when, in 1922, his dislike of the crowd became too strong and he saw that it was becoming a definite limitation for him, when he found in fact after the apparent triumph of the Arabian adventure that in avoiding the mask of a popular hero he was withdrawing more and more and becoming unwholesomely interested in just being himself, he took a violent course-he enlisted and bound himself to a life in which he was forced perpetually to be a member of the crowd. The Army and Air Force are the modern equivalent of the monastery, and after five years he does not regret his choice of a life as nearly physical as an animal’s, in which food is provided, and drink, and a round of work in harness and a stable afterwards until the new day brings a repetition of the work of yesterday.
‘AIRCRAFTMAN SHAW’ in ‘Scruff order’
Copyright
What is called Lawrence’s ‘love of publicity’ can best be explained as a burning desire to know himself, for no one can be himself except by first knowing himself. To publicity in the sense of what is published about him he is indifferent; he is never more than amused at what he has read about himself. But it ceases to be amusing to him when he meets people who believe all they read about him and act as if legend was truth. He denies the legend, and they say ‘how modest these heroes are’: and he is nearly sick. He does not believe that heroes exist or ever have existed; he suspects them all of being frauds. If he is interested at times in what people may think of him this is only because their opinion may show him what sort of a man he is more clearly than any amount of self-examination can. He has been often accused of vanity because he has sat for his portrait to so many artists and sculptors—he has only four times refused to sit—but it is the opposite of vanity. A vain man has a very clear view of himself which he tries to force on his neighbours. Lawrence sits for his portrait because he wants to discover what he is, by the effect which he produces on the artist: so far from being vain he clearly has no picture of himself at all except a contemptuous one. He accepts the view that he is a complete humbug and play actor; chiefly, perhaps, because people who are themselves humbugs and actors see him so in their own likeness.
He has another reason for ‘sitting’ and that is because artists (in the wider sense) are the only class of human beings to which he would like to belong. He can salve the regret that, rightly or wrongly, he feels at not being a true artist, by watching artists work and providing them with a model. He has done a good deal of experimental sculpture; he told me once that somewhere, I think in Syria, there are twelve life-size statues left by him on the roof of a house. Certainly some of the decorations outside a nonconformist chapel in the Iffley Road at Oxford are his work, but unsigned and indistinguishable from the rest. I have seen silversmith work by him. He has written poems, but they fall short of his intentions more seriously even than his handicrafts, because poetry has more freedom possible to it than these. Lawrence’s chief curse is that he cannot stop thinking, and by thinking I mean a working of the mind that is not mere calculation from any given set of facts, but a much more intense and difficult process which makes its own facts and tests them as it goes and destroys them when it is over. In all my acquaintance I know no more than three people who really think, and these three include Lawrence. He seems to be perpetually stretching his mind in every direction and finding little or nothing; ‘lunging about,’ as an Arab poet said, ‘like a blind camel in the dark.’ At least the effort seems to make the mind harder and fitter.
But this account is getting too philosophical, and the simplest conclusion about Lawrence is the best. It is not that ‘He is a great man.’ The greatness of his achievement is in any case historical. He, a foreigner and an unbeliever, inspired and led the broadest national movement of the Arabs that had taken place since the great times of Mohammed and his early successors, and brought it to a triumphant conclusion. It is not that he is a genius. This has come to be a vulgar almost meaningless word, attached to any competent scientist or fiddler or verse-maker or military leader. It is not even that he is an ‘erratic genius,’ unless ‘erratic’ means that Lawrence does not do the usual things that men of successful talents do; the ordinary vulgar things that are expected by the crowd. If Napoleon, for instance, who was a vulgar rather than an ‘erratic’ genius, had been in Lawrence’s position at the close of the 1918 campaign he would have proclaimed himself a Mohammedan and consolidated the new Arabian Empire. Lawrence did nothing of the sort, though he had popularity and power enough perhaps to make himself Emperor even without an official change of faith. But it would have been foolish to expect a man who has qualities that shine in difficult weather to subdue them in calm weather. He came away and left the Arabs to employ the freedom that he had given them, a freedom unencumbered by his rule which, however just and wise, would always have been an alien rule. He would have contradicted himself had he suffered all those pains to free the Arabs and then enslaved them under himself. The trouble with him often is that he is too sane. He is impish at times but never erratic; he does nothing without good reason, though his decisions may disappoint the crowd. There was nothing erratic about Lawrence when he enlisted as an airman in 1922. When I heard of it first it did not surprise me: one learns not to be surprised at anything Lawrence does. My only comment was ‘He knows his own needs,’ and now I can see clearly that it was the most honourable thing to himself that he could have done. It was, moreover, a course that he had decided on in 1919 and had suggested to Air-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond before the Armistice. But not till Mr. Winston Churchill had given the Arabs what Lawrence considered a fair deal was he free to please himself. Politics accounted for the three years’ delay.
The least and most that can be said about Lawrence is that he is a good man. This ‘good’ is something that can be understood by a child or a savage or any simple-minded person. It is just a feeling that you get from him, the feeling ‘here is a man with great powers, a man who could make most men do for him exactly whatever he desired, but yet one who would never use his powers, from respect for the other man’s personal freedom.’
Popular suggestions made lately for employing Lawrence’s talents or genius have been as numerous and varied as they have been ridiculous. The public has taken an interest in him that almost amounts to a claim for ownership: but nobody owns Lawrence or will ever own him. He is not a public Niagara that can be harnessed for any political or commercial purpose. A Colonial Governor-Generalship? What sort of appointment is that for a man who might have been an Emperor? And imagine Lawrence, who has long come to the point of disbelieving in his existence and every one else’s, laying foundation stones and attending ceremonial parades and banquets! Lawrence, shortly after the War ended, was invited to attend the reception after a society wedding. He went (a man he liked was being married) in company with a young diplomatic attaché who was much impressed by the occasion. ‘What name, gentlemen?’ asked the flunkey at the door. Lawrence saw his companion pulling himself-together for an impressive entrance and the spirit of mischief overcame him. ‘Messrs. Lenin and Trotsky,’ he said quickly. And ‘Mr. Lenin, Mr. Trotsky!’ the flunkey bawled out mechanically to the scandalized assembly: which, indeed, included Royalty.
Another suggestion has been that Lawrence should be entrusted with a mission to settle affairs in China. If Lawrence had any desire to settle affairs in China, even supposing that he felt himself capable of doing so, which is doubtful (it is quite possible that he is ignorant of Chinese), he would certainly demand an absolutely free hand. And it is then possible, indeed probable, that the solution he would provide would be one not at all favourable to European control of Chinese affairs. In any case, he had done this sort of thing once already: one does not repeat unpleasant experiences, for hire, without conviction, unless one has that sense of patriotic duty of which Lawrence is completely free. Other silly suggestions have been that he should edit a modern literary review, that he should be given an appointment in connexion with the Mesopotamian oil-fields, that he should be made director-general of British Army training or given a high post at the British Museum. All these suggestions remind one of the various methods detailed in mediæval books under the heading ‘how to catch and tame a Unicorn.’ People do not seem to realize that he knows himself pretty well and that he has chosen to serve in the Royal Air Force, which is not a life that comes easily or naturally to him, for a full engagement. He finds its difficulty worth coping with and is content. If he wants to do anything else he will do so without prompting.
It is remarkable that the most popular suggestion has been that Lawrence should head a great religious revival. In view of my conclusion about Lawrence that he can best be described simply as a ‘good man’ there may seem to be something in that suggestion. But it is as foolish as the rest. In the first place Lawrence has read too much theology to be a simple, successful revivalist and does not believe that religions can be ‘revived’, but only invented. In the second, he would not think of using his personality for any new popular campaign, military or religious, ever again. His nihilism is a chilly creed, the first article of which is ‘thou shalt not convert!’ In the third place....
But enough. Mr. George Bernard Shaw perhaps made the most practical suggestion, that Lawrence should be given a government pension and chambers in some public building (he mentioned Blenheim Palace) and be allowed to spend his time exactly as it suited him. But I think that Lawrence would be unwilling to accept even a gift like this; such an arrangement would put him under a shadowy obligation to the public and, anyhow, he does not believe that he is worth anyone’s paying. Also he might have æsthetic objections to Blenheim Palace. Also someone else already lives there. The only suggestion that I can make for the future treatment of Lawrence is simply this: that he should be left alone to maintain that rare personal liberty which so very few people are capable of maintaining.
Most of what I have written is more or less in Lawrence’s favour. What is the worst that can be said against him? A great many things, perhaps, but they have mostly been said by Lawrence himself at one time or another. In the first place, he is an incurable romantic and that means that he is on doubtful terms with all institutions which claim to preserve public stability. He has loved adventure for its own sake, and the weaker side because it is the weaker side, and the lost cause, and unhappiness. Now, the incurable romantic is approved by society only if he is incompetent and fails, gloriously perhaps, but conspicuously, and so proves that the stupid ordinary people who control public security are always right after all. Lawrence’s romanticism is not incompetent, it is not unsuccessful. When a European monarch one day in 1919 greeted him with the remark, ‘It is a bad time for us kings. Five new republics were proclaimed yesterday,’ Lawrence was able to answer, ‘Courage, sir! We have just made three kingdoms in the East.’
For the real success of his romanticism—a romanticism which, as in the ‘Winston’ settlement of the Middle East, the big achievement of his life for which the War was a mere preparation, comes uncomfortably near realism—he is naturally very much hated by most government officials, regular soldiers, old-fashioned political experts and such-like; he is a disturbing element in their ordered scheme of things, a mystery and a nuisance. Even now, as a mechanic in the Air Force, he is a worry. They suspect some diabolic trick for raising mutiny or revolt. They refuse to believe that he is simply there because he is there. That he wants to be quit of affairs and become politically and intellectually unemployable.
Again, he is not even a single-minded romantic: he clearly despises his romanticism and fights it in himself so sternly that he only makes it more incurable. People like Lawrence are in fact an obvious menace to civilization; they are too strong and important to be dismissed as nothing at all, too capricious to be burdened with a position of responsibility, too sure of themselves to be browbeaten, but then too doubtful of themselves to be made heroes of.
The only original thing—if it is original—that I can say against Lawrence—if it is against him—is this: he keeps his enormously wide circle of friends, who range from tramps to reigning sovereigns and Air-Marshals, as much as possible in watertight compartments, each away from the other. Towards each friend he turns a certain character which he keeps for that relationship and which is consistent with it. To each friend he reveals in fact some part of himself, but only a part: these characters he never confuses. So there are many thousands of Lawrences, each one a facet of the Lawrence crystal: and whether or not the crystal is colourless and the facets merely reflect the characters of the friends whom they face, Lawrence himself has no notion. He has no intimates to whom the whole might be shown. The result of this dispersion—his friends are not casually made but chosen out, representing various departments of art, life, science, study (and he has an especial tenderness for ruffians)—is that such of his friends as are of a possessive nature try to corner him, each believing that he alone knows the real Lawrence, so that there is a comical jealousy when they meet. This may be also partly due to Lawrence being a person about whom it is easier to feel than to speak. One cannot put him into words—I cheerfully own to failure—because he is so various, because he has no single characteristic or humour that one could swear to. So his friends resent every description of him that they hear and cannot give one of their own to justify their resentment. Hence, probably, their possessive secrecy.
In getting together material for this book I have had more than one rebuff from friends who have carefully treasured some personal relation with which they thought themselves uniquely favoured. In spite of rebuffs I have tried to get bearings on Lawrence from as many angles, friendly and hostile, as possible: and if the only Lawrence that I still can see is the facet that he has consistently presented to me in the seven years that I have known him—well, let it be so: if it is only a Lawrence and not the Lawrence, it is nevertheless more plausible than most supposedly complete individuals that I know.
I would not offer Lawrence, nor most certainly would he offer himself, or consider himself, as a model of conduct, or as a philosophic system. Circumstances and his own lifelong efforts have made him more free of human ties than other men. He can therefore dispose of himself in any market at any given time. Others cannot; they have careers, ambitions, families, wants, hopes, fears, traditions, duties—all binding them to that organized human society in which Lawrence seems to play only an accidental and perfunctory part. It is this extraordinary detachment, this final insulation of himself, which makes him the object of so much curiosity, suspicion, exasperation, admiration, love, hatred, jealousy, legends, lies. He has resolutely and painfully adopted the attitude towards organized society, ‘you go your way and I’ll go mine,’ ‘leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,’ but organized society cannot control itself in its hue-and-cry after a lost lamb that is perversely in need of no crook or fold. It is perhaps the triumph of his detachment that one can write of him in this way, as if he were a character in ancient history, confident that whatever one writes will not affect the man himself in the least, that his check will be only on infringements of copyrights that are no longer entirely his own.
For all that, he has not been able to keep himself to himself in one rather serious respect. Wherever he goes and makes his presence felt he seems to leave behind, probably unconsciously and certainly unwillingly, a number of fictitious Lawrences, people who seek to get something of the man’s power by a mere imitation of what happen to be at the time his outward peculiarities. An affected lack of ease in society, an affected self-withdrawal, an inclined carriage of the head, a deliberate economy of gesture and vocabulary, a peculiar dragging of the words yes and no, a lack of emphasis at the moments of arrival and departure—whenever I meet these, I know that the Lawrence legend is stalking about, a ghost as persuasive, as destructive, as false as the Byron legends of a hundred years ago. Lawrence has a right to be Lawrence; he is his own peculiar invention. But at second and third hand he is occasionally comic, as when some ambitious, conventional, sporting, self-indulgent lion tries on his unicorn skin. But more often it goes beyond the comic stage: strong silent little men are even more insufferable than strong silent big ones. And by a cosmic joke in the worst taste the legend of ‘The Uncrowned King of Arabia’ has become popularly entangled with a novelist’s myth of ‘The Sheik of Araby.’ Booksellers have wasted a good deal of time in explaining that ‘Revolt in the Desert’ is not a sequel to ‘The Son of the Sheik.’
Now, the difficulty of writing a definite summary of what Lawrence is or was at any given time is that he makes a point of keeping his opinions and desires as far as possible in a state of solution; he prevents them, that is, from crystallizing into a motive that will affect the opinions, desires and actions of other men. When, in spite of all precautions, a motive does appear, a force is generated that is nearly irresistible, and while this lasts he stands out with glaring distinctness as a figure in history. But his greatness or power or whatever one may call it, though popularly revealed on such occasions, results apparently from his negative policy of being sure of nothing, believing nothing, caring for nothing, all the rest of the time. And with this paradox my study must end.