Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (90 page)

Like so many of Lawrence’s friends, the Shaws learned to accept his appearance at their doorstep on his motorcycle, much as they disliked the machine. Lawrence had already survived two serious accidents while he was at Bovington, either one of which could easily have killed him. As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as a minor motorcycle accident.” It was not so much that Lawrence was a bad or dangerous rider—George Brough, the designer and manufacturer of his motorcycles, would argue that on the contrary, he was a skillful and careful one—but he used his motorcycle as everyday transportation, often over long distances and poor roads in bad weather. Fallen leaves, puddles, and patches of ice can all cause a skid even at less than daredevil speeds; and in the 1920s and 1930s a motorcycle headlight was, by modern standards, dim and unreliable. (It was not for nothing that Joseph Lucas, founder of the major British manufacturer of automotive electrical equipment, was known to owners of motorcycles as the “prince of darkness.”) Moreover, though Brough was something of a genius, his motorcycles were, for their day, large, heavy, and very powerful machines, a lot to handle for a slight man in his late thirties with a history of broken bones.

At an earlier stage of his life, Lawrence had traveled to far-off foreign places and had written to his family at home. Now, it was Lawrence who was in England while his mother and Bob were far away in China, which was impoverished, turbulent, dangerous, swept by competing warlords and by revolution, and at every level of society deeply hostile to European missionaries. It was now Lawrence who arranged for parcels to be sent abroad. He went to W. H. Smith’s, the British chain of newsagents, where his uniform was greeted with suspicion, to take out subscriptions to the
Times
and the
New Statesman
to be sent to his mother in China; he also mailed packages containing items she had requested: Scott’s journals, salts of lemon, and padlocks for her trunks. Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, and his wife were living temporarily at Clouds Hill—tight quarters for a married couple—while Lawrence spent Christmas Eve of 1925 alone in Hut 105 at Cranwell, correcting the proofs of his book and reading T. S. Eliot’s collected poems, apparently content. On Christmas Day, he wrote to his mother, who had asked if he needed money, summing up his plans and his financial state:

No thanks: no money. I am quite right that way just now. How I’ll stand a year or so hence, when all the bills of the reprint of my book come in, I don’t know. The subscribers (about 100) have paid £15 each, to date. That is £1,500 more due from them. The expenses to date are £4,500. The Bank has loaned me the rest, against security from me. To meet the deficit I have sold Cape (for £3,000 cash + a royalty) the right to publish 1/3 of the book after January 1, 1927. And there will be American serial & other receipts, too. Probably I’ll come out of it well enough off.

For his mother’s benefit, Lawrence oversimplified the immense task of printing the subscribers’ edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
He also significantly underplayed the many difficulties he had imposed on Cape and his American publisher Doran over
Revolt in the Desert,
particularly by setting a limit to the number of copies of the abridgment that could be printed during his lifetime and thus eliminating for all practical purposes the possibility of a runaway best seller. In any case, he was determined not to benefit personally from either version of his memoir. This was high-minded but shortsighted—the two books would have made him a rich man, had he been willing to become rich. In this, as in other matters, Lawrence clung to his policy of renunciation. He very much wished to be recognized as a great writer, but—perhaps unlike all other authors—he did not want to profit from writing, or to endure (or encourage) the publicity that would inevitably accompany success.

The excellence of Lawrence’s relationship with the airmen of his flight can be guessed by the fact that he hired a bus to take them all, including Pugh, to the annual air show at Hendon, just outside London. As the deadline—March 1926—approached, he also got two of his hut mates to help him in the laborious task of cutting the text of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
for the abridgment, “as with a brush and India ink, [he] boldly obliterated whole slabs of text,” at night in Hut 105, and cutting the first seven chapters entirely, thus deftly turning the account into a very superior adventure story. His cuts were not only bold but painstaking and supremely confident; he made almost no insertions, or “bridges,” to link the text together, yet it reads so smoothly and seamlessly that one would never imagine it had been cut out of a much larger whole. No doubt Lawrence was guided to some degree by Edward Garnett’s previous abridgment,but his own version differed in some crucial ways. In particular, he eliminated the death of Farraj (which Garnett was reluctant to give up), partly because it required too many pages to explain and partly, one guesses, because the tone of
Revolt in the Desert
was considerably more upbeat than that of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Lawrence’s shooting the wounded Farraj to keep him from falling into the hands of the Turks was exactly the kind of moral ambiguity that he wanted to keep out of the abridged book.

In truth,
Revolt in the Desert,
though it is dwarfed by
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
is a far more readable book. It opens with a bang at Lawrence’s arrival in Jidda—the first line is, “When at last we anchored in Jeddah’s outer harbour … then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless,” a very effective beginning—and it is by no means an insubstantial volume. The 1927 Doran edition is 335 pages long, or about 120,000 words. Interestingly, the author is identified on the jacket, binding, and title page as ‘T. E. Lawrence': the British-style single quotation marks are Lawrence’s way of suggesting that this person was mythical rather than real. Lawrence had many misgivings about putting his name on the subscribers’ edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and at one point decided to use the initials T.E.S.; but in the end, he opted to eliminate any mention that he was the author at all. Since all the copies are signed to the subscriber or to the person to whom he was giving the book, putting his name on the title page seemed to him unnecessary. This is perhaps the only case in literary history in which a major work has appeared with no indication of who the author was. Although he was still as opposed to bibliophiles as ever, Lawrence and his airmen aides went to considerable trouble to make every copy of the subscribers’ edition different, so that in some small way no two copies would be identical, thus keeping collectors busy for the next nine decades trying to spot and identify the differences. Some, of course, were easy—Lawrence had Trenchard’s “partial” copy (it was missing a few illustrations) bound in RAF blue leather, or as close as the bookbinder could get to that elusive color. He wrote to Trenchard: “It is not the right blue of course: but then what is the right blue? No two airmen are alike: indeed it is a miracle if the top and bottom halves of one airman are the same colour…. I told the binder (ex-R.A.F.) who it is for. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘it must be quite plain and very well done.’ ”

It was fortunate that Lawrence finished his labors when he did. In the spring of 1926, coming to the aid of a man whose car had been involved in an accident, he offered to start the engine and the man neglected to retard the ignition. The starting handle flew back sharply, breaking Lawrence’s right arm and dislocating his wrist. Showing no sign of pain or shock, he calmly asked the driver to adjust the ignition, cranked the engine again with his left hand, then drove his motorcycle back to Cranwell. In Flight Sergeant Pugh’s words, “with his right arm dangling and shifting gears with his foot, [he] got his bus
*
* home, and parked without a word to a soul of the pain he was suffering.” The medical officer was away, and it was the next day before he could see Lawrence, who still did not complain. “That is a man!” Pugh commented admiringly. Although Lawrence recovered from this injury, later photographs often show him clearly nursing his left arm and wrist, and it seems safe to say that it gave him pain for the rest of his life.

By 1926 it was clear that Lawrence’s posting to Cranwell would soon have to end. One reason for this was RAF policy, which required that an airman must eventually be posted overseas—to India or Egypt for a period of five years, or to Iraq for two years (because of its vile climate). It would be impossible to send Lawrence to Egypt, where his presence would surely have a political effect—after all, he had been offered the post of British high commissioner in Cairo to succeed Allenby, and he was known to be in favor of greater independence for Egypt. Posting him to Iraq would be even more difficult; his friend Feisal was its king, and Lawrence’s presence there would cause consternation, besides stimulating the Sunni tribesmen to who knew what dreams of war and plunder. Nobody had forgotten how the tribes had ridden in from the desert crying “Aurens, Aurens” and firing off their rifles to greet him in Amman in 1921. That left only India, which was not an attractive proposition for Lawrence: he had done the government of India out of its ambition to occupy and control Iraq, and for that and other reasons was disliked by Indian officials, some of whom still bitterly resented the opinions he had expressed about them during his visit to Baghdad in 1916.

Trenchard offered Lawrence a chance to stay in Britain, but Lawrence was more realistic; the publication of
Revolt in the Desert,
of which 40,000 words would first be serialized in the
Daily Telegraph
(which had paid £2,000, or about the equivalent of $160,000 in today’s money), and the release of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
to the subscribers would make him headline news again, all the more so because
Revolt in the Desert
would be published in America at the same time. “It is good of you to give me the option of going overseas or staying at home,” Lawrence wrote to Trenchard, “but I volunteered to go, deliberately, for the reason that I am publishing a book (about myself in Arabia) on March 3, 1927: and experience taught me in Farnborough in 1922 that neither good-will on the part of those above me, nor correct behaviour on my part can prevent my being a nuisance in any camp where the daily press can get at me…. Overseas they will be harmless, and therefore I must go overseas for a while and dodge them.”

It was already clear that
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
would be oversubscribed: the list of subscribers included, among writers alone, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Hugh Walpole; and among other notable figures it included King George V (Lawrence contrived to return the check for the king’s copy and make him a present of the book).
*
* Lawrence declined to give the usual two copies to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Museum Library, as was required for copyright purposes, having already donated the original manuscript to the Bodleian. This was an infringement of the U.K. Copyright Act, but being Lawrence he got away with it.

His last weeks in England were spoiled by another serious motorcycle accident, in which his latest Brough was badly damaged, but Lawrence sustained only a cut on his knee. He had to rent out his cottage, collect the books he wanted to take with him, and make his good-byes to the Shaws and the Hardys. The farewell to Hardy was a sad moment for them both. Hardy was eighty-six, and neither of them expected he would live to see Lawrence’s return. They stood on the porch at Max Gate in the cold weather, talking, and Lawrence finally sent Hardy into the house to get a shawl to wrap around his neck and chest. While Hardy was inside, Lawrence pushed his motorcycle quietly down to the road, started it up, and drove away, to spare Hardy the pain of saying farewell, and to spare his own feelings too, for he loved Hardy deeply. He sent his mother’s copy of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
to his brother Arnold, to look after it until she returned to England; and he wrote to her in China, chiding her gently for staying there despite the danger, and warning her and Bob of the futility of “endeavours to influence the national life of another people by one’s own,” a reflection not only of his dislike of Christian missionaries, but of his own experience with the Bedouin.

He sailed for India on December 7, 1926, on board the
Derbyshire,
an antiquated, squalid troopship, packed with 1,200 officers and men, as well as a number of their wives and children, in conditions that shocked him. “I have been surprised at the badness of our accommodation,” he wrote to Charlotte, “and the clotted misery … on board.” Conditions were so bad that Lawrence wrote a letter of complaint about them to his friend Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, knowing that Marsh would pass it on. This became something of a habit with Lawrence—throughout his life in the RAF he made behind-the-scenes efforts to improve the lives of servicemen by bringing problems to the attention of those with the power to change things for the better. He persuaded Trenchard to drop many of the small regulations that plagued airmen’s lives unnecessarily—reducing the number of kit inspections to one a month, for example, as well as allowing airmen to unbutton the top two buttons of their greatcoat (unlike soldiers), removing the silly “swagger sticks” they were supposed to carry when in walking-out uniform, and abolishing the requirement to wear a polished bayonet for church parades. Lawrence wrote detailed letters about anything that seemed to him unfair, antiquated, or just plain silly, and in a surprising number of cases won his point, substantially improving the life of “other ranks.” Churchill was serving at the time as chancellor of the exchequer, and had already made the disastrous decision to return the pound to the gold standard, which many economists would later decide was the starting point of the great worldwide Depression; but at Lawrence’s behest he paused long enough to inquire into the conditions of shipping British service personnel and their families. Lawrence had an uncanny knack for bringing to the attention of those in high office conditions about which they would not normally have been informed, and getting them to do something. This was perhaps the only aspect of his fame that he found useful. His correspondence is full of injustices he wants corrected, or idiotic regulations he wants abolished. He served as a discreet and entirely unofficial equivalent of what is now called an ombudsman, and was responsible for a surprising number of commonsense reforms, including the abolition of puttees for airmen and their replacement with trousers, and the replacement of the tunic with a high collar clasped tightly around the neck by a more comfortable tunic with lapels, worn over a shirt and tie. These interventions were seldom, if ever, for his own benefit; nor did he mention them to his fellow airmen. He was always a master of the skillfully handled suggestion that allowed other people to take the credit, just as Bernard Shaw re-created him in the role of the omniscient, omnipotent Private Meek in
Too True to Be Good.