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.