Lawrence was anxious to make the book as solid as possible, so he employed the best artists that he could find to do drawings for it under the art-editorship of Eric Kennington.
He published something more than a hundred copies for subscribers at thirty guineas apiece and gave away half as many more to friends. But he was so keen to do things well that he actually spent £13,000 on the edition—the reproduction of the pictures alone cost more than the subscrip-tions—leaving himself £10,000 out of pocket. It was to pay this debt to his backers (for he has no private means) that the abridgment Revolt in the Desert was undertaken for public sale. He made it in two nights, at Cranwell Camp, with the help of two other airmen, Miller and Knowles. The Seven Pillars was never intended for publication: it was to be a private record for Lawrence and a few friends. Revolt in the Desert was only published by the accident of the £10,000 debt. It is a series of incidents loosely strung together and purged of the more personal material. Single copies of the Seven Pillars now sell at extraordinary prices.
Lawrence has not made a penny himself from either of these books. He was scrupulous to arrange that when the debt of the Seven Pillars was paid off the extra money made by Revolt in the Desert should not go to him. It has been a set determination of his to make nothing out of the Arab war directly or indirectly. His army pay went towards the expenses of the campaign. His salary from Winston Churchill for the year at the Colonial Office he did not spend on himself either, but used it for official purposes. (On the other hand, Lawrence’s friends have much benefited by his generosity. The gift of a Seven Pillars with the note ‘please sell when read’ has been worth as much as £500.)
The success of Revolt in the Desert called for a French translation but when an application for the rights came from a Paris publisher Lawrence offered permission on one condition—that the book must bear on its jacket the inscription: ‘The profits of this book will be devoted to a fund for the victims of French cruelty in Syria.’ So there could be no French translation so long as he controlled the book rights.
I have never yet met with an explanation of the meaning Seven Pillars of Wisdom in all that has been written about the book. It is reminiscence from a chapter in the Book of Proverbs, part of which runs as follows:
‘Wisdom hath builded a house: she hath hewn out her seven pillars. She crieth upon the highest places of the city, “Whoso is simple let him turn in hither.... If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself.”’
The idea is, I believe, further elaborated in later Jewish theological writings. This title was all that Lawrence rescued from an earlier book of travel written in 1913 and destroyed in 1914; it compared the seven cities of Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus and Medina.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom will not be reprinted in Lawrence’s lifetime. It is not a book, people agree on Lawrence’s behalf, that should be published for a popular audience. (A simple member of the public, an electrician, was shown the most painful chapter while proofs were being passed. Then he could do no work for a week, but walked up and down the pavement outside his house, unable to rid his mind of the horror of it. The chapter about the Turkish hospital is almost as painful.) Also popular publication might, they say, involve Lawrence in a series of libel actions: he seems to spare nobody in his desire to tell the whole story faithfully (least of all himself). Again, the censor might, it is suggested, ban as obscene some of the more painfully accurate accounts of Turkish methods of warfare. But in any case Lawrence never intended publishing the book, except privately, so these remarks are really irrelevant. The book was first written as a full-length and unrestrained picture of himself, his tastes, ideas and actions. He could not have deliberately confessed to so much had there been any chance of the book coming out. Yet to tell the whole story was the only justification for writing anything at all. And once written a strictly limited publication of the book promised to remove the need of even thinking about that part of his life again.
The historical accuracy of Lawrence’s account has been jealously questioned by some overseas reviewers of Revolt in the Desert: he has been accused of self-interested exaggeration. However, as there were forty or fifty British officers, besides Arabs, as witnesses of his activities and as no one of them has challenged the accuracy of his statements, this criticism hardly calls for answer. Moreover, all the documents of the Arab Revolt are in the archives of the Foreign Office and will soon be available to students, who will be able to cross-check Lawrence’s account and are likely to find that his chief fault has been telling rather less than the truth.
It has been suggested that Lawrence’s part in the Eastern War was devoid of serious military significance. Part of a letter protesting against this point of view may be reprinted from a London weekly. I know the writer as an expert in these matters: