Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

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.’