Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (74 page)

The truth is quite simple: Lawrence had neglected to bring a briefcase with him to carry the manuscript, so Dawnay lent him an “official” one. Such a briefcase does not resemble a bank messenger’s bag, as has been suggested, but is made of black leather, with the royal coat of arms stamped on the front flap in gold—quite an impressive-looking object. Obliged to change trains at Reading, Lawrence waited in the station café, and when his train was called he boarded it without picking up the briefcase, which he had placed under the table. Despite great efforts, the case was never found or returned.

It may of course be true that Lawrence had a subconscious desire to lose it, though this seems rather far-fetched; and it certainly seems odd that a thief would pick up the briefcase, examine the contents, and not think in terms of returning it for a reward—but then, we have no way of knowing whether the manuscript had Lawrence’s name and address on it. In any event, it vanished. Lawrence’s initial reaction was hysterical laughter, perhaps to avoid tears. Of course it may seem odd today to give the only copy even to so trustworthy a friend as Alan Dawnay, but in those days the only way to copy a handwritten manuscript was by photographing every page. Hence most writers either typed a copy and a “carbon” or hired a typist to do it. Oxford must have been full of such typists, given the number of theses and manuscripts being written there, but Lawrence may not have wanted to be bothered hiring one, or may have felt it was too expensive.

There seems to have been no doubt in his mind that he would start from scratch and write it all over again, and Hogarth urged on him the importance of doing just that. By this time, Lawrence seems to have been fed up with All Souls, or more likely with his mother, since he spent more of his nights at Polstead Road than at All Souls, and he accepted the offer of Sir Herbert Baker, a distinguished architect he had met, to lend him the top floor of a building Baker rented in Westminster for an office. Sitting down to reconstruct a whole book would be a grueling and daunting task for anyone, but Lawrence made it an exhausting and physically punishing marathon, perhaps because only by turning it into a physical and mental challenge could he force himself to do it at all. He wrote at an incredible pace, producing “95% of the book in thirty days,” sometimes writing thousands of words at a sitting, and eventually completing more than 400,000 words. At one point he wrote 30,000 words nonstop in twenty-two hours, possibly a world’s record. It is almost impossible to keep straight the number of parts that Lawrence wrote—he called these parts “books,” and their number varies from seven to ten. Some of the books he would revise again and again over the next six years, particularly Book VI, which describes the incident at Deraa.

Probably no part of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
even the pages about Deraa, gave Lawrence more trouble than the dedication of the work, which he went to endless pains to get right. He not only wrote it over and over again, but—unsure whether it was prose or poetry—gave it to his young friend Robert Graves, already an admired war poet, to help him turn it into blank verse, and submitted it to at least one other poet for advice. Despite changes made by Graves, it is what it is, neither fish nor fowl, at once awkward and deeply moving:

To S.A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars

To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me

When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near

and saw you waiting:

When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me

and took you apart:

Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage

ours for the moment

Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind

worms grew fat upon Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a memory of you.

But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now

The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow Of your gift.

The identity of S.A. has stirred up controversy ever since the book first appeared in print, partly because Lawrence was deliberately mysterious. It has been suggested that the dedication is to Sarah Aaronsohn, a courageous Jewish spy who committed suicide after being captured and tortured by the Turks; or to Fareedeh el Akle, Lawrence’s teacher of Arabic. Since Lawrence never met Sarah Aaronsohn, and since Fareedeh el Akle lived on to great old age denying that Lawrence had dedicated the book to her, neither theory is plausible. Lawrence himself further confused the matter by saying that S.A. represented both a person and a place; but it seems self-evident from the context that the dedication is to

Dahoum, his friend in Carchemish before the war, and that it expresses not only Lawrence’s love for Dahoum but his bitter regret that Dahoum did not live to see the victory.

The first four lines also suggest a very unusual degree of grandiloquence for Lawrence: “I drew these tides of men into my hands” and “wrote my will across the sky in stars” are an usually direct claim to Lawrence’s authorship and leadership of the Arab Revolt, in contrast to his usual practice of giving full credit to other people. If they represent his real feelings—as they may, since the dedication is evidently to Dahoum—this is one of the few places where Lawrence lets his real self and his pride show through, an unexpected moment when the hero appears without apology or disguise.

Like many great works of literature
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
is a product of an intense obsession, driven first by Lawrence’s need to explore and explain his own role in the Arab Revolt, and second by his need to portray the revolt as an epic, heroic struggle, full of larger-than-life figures (Auda Abu Tayi, for instance) and noble motives (those of Feisal particularly). Also as with many of the world’s great books, the author was unwilling to give it up, or stop changing and revising it.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
remained a work in progress until 1927, and even today is still available in two different versions. Although Lawrence was scrupulously accurate about himself, in this book he approached the Arabs in much the same spirit as Shakespeare approached the English in
Henry V,
determined to make his readers see them as he did—as glorious figures, inspired by a great ideal. When parts of the story did not reflect this, he played them down as much as possible.

The top floor of Baker’s building was unheated, so Lawrence worked through the nights in a “flying suit,” believing that cold, hunger, and lack of sleep would concentrate his mind. The room had neither a kitchen nor running water, so he lived off sandwiches and mugs of tea bought at street stands, and he washed at public baths, a London institution that has pretty much vanished.

In his authorized biography, Jeremy Wilson points out, correctly, that Lawrence got a head start by incorporating into his manuscript all the reports of his actions he had written for the
Arab Bulletin,
and that he decided to alleviate the comparative dryness of these reports by inserting long and sometimes lyrical descriptions of the landscape. This explains the curious shifts of tone in the finished book, from reportorial to lyrical. Wilson suggests that the second version—the version Lawrence wrote under such intense, self-imposed pressure—was deliberately intended to underplay the British role in the Arab Revolt, so as to build up Feisal’s claim to Syria. When he wrote the lost first draft, in Paris and on the way to Egypt and back, Lawrence may still have had some hope that the French would relent, or that the British (and perhaps the Americans) would force them to, but by the winter of 1919-1920 he can have had no such illusion, so the second draft may have been written more as a propaganda document than the first. As Wilson puts it, “the book had now assumed a strongly political role"—though what use it would have been to the Arab cause if it was not going to be published remains unclear. In any case, from the beginning, Lawrence had tried carefully to put the spotlight on the Arabs, without in any way diminishing the enormous contribution made by British money, arms, specialists, officers, and men, and by the Royal Navy. We cannot examine the first draft of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
but in every subsequent version of the book Lawrence seems notably fair-minded toward the Indian machine gunners, the British armored car personnel and drivers, and above all Allenby and his staff, though they are overshadowed by the greater glamour of the Bedouin tribesmen. Still, the book was Lawrence’s story, and his story was among and about the Arabs.

Lawrence was awash with contradictory impulses. He wanted the book to be read by those whose judgment, experience, and suggestions for changes he respected, but not to be published and reviewed in the normal way. It was as if he hoped to protect himself against criticism, allegations that he was wrong, or arguments that he had changed the emphasis of events in the Middle East to put himself in the limelight and show the Arabs in a better light than they deserved. He toyed with the idea of publishing what he called a “boy-scout” version of the book in the United States, sharply condensed, and with all the controversial material left out. He even went so far as to start negotiations for it with F. N. Doubleday, the Anglophile American book publisher, whom he had met in London—indeed his correspondence with Frank Doubleday (whose nickname, coincidentally, was “Effendi”) should be sufficient to dispel any notions that Lawrence was indifferent to money, or had no head for business. Among the dozen or so alternative ideas he had for the book, once it was completed, he considered printing one copy only and placing it in the Library of Congress to ensure copyright, or offering one copy for a sale at a price nobody would pay, $200,000 or more. The idea of an abridged edition would eventually be realized with
Revolt in the Desert,
in 1927, but overall the curious history of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
is one of the more tangled and complicated episodes in book publishing.

The immediate reason for the negotiations with Frank Doubleday was that Lawrence needed the money to build a house on his land in Epping and to open the private press with Vyvyan Richards. The rest of Lawrence’s ideas represent imaginative ways to protect the copyright and prevent the text from being pirated without enabling people to actually buy and read the book. Throughout his life, Lawrence did his best to prevent people from reading the unexpurgated text, either because he shrewdly grasped that nothing creates more interest than a famous book readers can’t buy, or because he disliked the whole business of publication and the reviews that accompany it. Despite a reputation for innocence and eccentricity in business matters, which he was careful to maintain, the curious thing is that in the end Lawrence by and large managed to get his own way.

Had Lawrence been willing to allow
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
to be published in the normal way, perhaps accompanied by a numbered deluxe edition, there is no doubt that it would have been a huge best seller, and would have made him a fortune. But money was always secondary to Lawrence, whose attitude toward the whole subject was a curious blend of his father’s and his mother’s. His father, he knew, had “lived on a large scale,” on his estate in Ireland, and although Lawrence says that his father never so much as wrote out a check, Thomas Lawrence’s correspondence shows that he not only had a sound head for business but made sensible provision for his sons. Whatever mysteries may still have surrounded Thomas Lawrence, his death must have dispelled most of them. Indeed one subject over which Lawrence revealed a certain amount of bitterness was the fact that the Chapman family did not reach out to him once he became famous, and that his fame did not persuade them to accept him as one of their own.

Lawrence should have been comparatively well off. His “gratuity” on leaving the army was apparently difficult to calculate, given the many changes in his rank, and the fact that the paperwork followed far behind his travels even to EEF headquarters in Cairo, let alone back to the War Office in London. Thus, in 1919, a puzzled War Office official, wrestling with underpayments and overpayments, came to the tentative conclusion that if Lawrence had been a temporary major and “Class X staff officer,” he was owed £344, minus overpayments of £266, which would have given him a gratuity of £68 on relinquishing his commission. If he had been paid as a lieutenant-colonel, the gratuity should be £213; if he was being paid as a lieutenant-colonel
and
a Class X staff officer, his gratuity should be £464. A further calculation by a higher authority lowers this figure to £334. Some of this confusion is due to the exigencies of wartime service, some to the traditional inefficiency of the Paymaster Corps, and some no doubt to Lawrence’s own lack of interest in such details. A note in the file points out, for example, that there is no record that Lawrence was ever commissioned in the first place. Lawrence himself remembered receiving a gratuity of £110, which seems on the low side, but in any case he had accumulated almost £3,000 in back pay. His scholarship from All Souls was worth about £200 a year, and he had a set of rooms at the college, and meals, had he cared to make use of them.