T. E. Lawrence and S. A. – The Puzzle Solved Betty McKenzie 2002

The Effort

"The Effort," embodies not just the Arabian campaign, but even more significantly his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom -- A Triumph and above all, a self-purification of T.E. Lawrence "myself" -- the achievement of the "ideal standard."

The French word for effort is essai -- pronounced almost exactly the same as S.A -- a word Lawrence was fond of using. So his campaign was an essai. His book was an essai. Cementing all this together is the very last word in the book: "Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort." In the context of the final paragraph of the Seven Pillars, it seems clearly to refer to the campaign, the book, and his long postwar essai -- falling so far short of his hopes -- to bring about for the Arabs the things they had thought they were fighting for, bringing to this component of S.A. indeed a tragedy that fits the love symbol of the dedication.

Lawrence the Medievalist, as a young man, spent much time cycling around France, visiting medieval cathedrals and castles. Especially, just as he loved the book The Life and Death of Richard Yea and Nay, so he also loved King Richard I (Richard the Lion Heart -- Richard, Coeur de Lion), and the Chateau Gaillard. TE knew French very well. He would have especially latched onto the meaning of the French word essai in the sense of a trial by combat, in connection with his Arabian campaign, relating this to the medieval knights trial by combat in the battles they fought for their ladies -- he fought his for his lady, "Mrs. Fontana." (I.e., to free the site and Aleppo where they had been together.)

Other specific meanings of the French word essai include an attempt, generally; an assessment of metallic content, translating it into English as assay, one of its meanings --e.g., the purity of silver or gold, or combo in alloy. His later book, The Mint, of course clearly relates to the refinement of himself in "the ranks" of the RAF -- refining "love carnal" into "love rarified" which two forms of love he mentions in one of his last letters. And of course this relates back to his chapter on Myself, his talk of love driving the world’s progress. Even at the time he wrote the first draft of the Seven Pillars -- in fact to some extent in vision even back on his 30th birthday -- he was already contemplating the purification process toward love rarified that the time in the RAF accomplished.

He finished SPW and got it ready for publication before being sent to Karachi (in fact, as I recall, asked for that faraway assignment in order not to be around when it actually came out). So he "assayed" his own content before and after the experience of the mint -- essai. The dedication to S.A. symbolizes his sense of disillusion about both the effort (essai) of the campaign and that of the book, hence "for fit monument" to both of them, "I shattered it unfinished. . . . ." Nevertheless, while falling short of his hopes for them, he came to believe in the end that he had acquitted himself as best he could in both (see some of his letters on this, plus the intro to one of the sections of the book of his letters), hence he was able to title his book, relating to both efforts, the campaign and most of all the book itself, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph. And again, the final lines in the Epilogue refer to those "who are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort." (It was not an ordinary essai.) In addition, the book was also of course, an essay -- a very long one! -- another meaning of essai.

The following is copied from my French-English dictionary published around the period Seven Pillars was written: ESSAI: (1) trial, experiment (the campaign was clearly that -- probably the first really modern war experiment with guerrilla warfare {see Lawrence's chapter XXXIII on his strategy for the Arabian campaign, and the book was clearly that -- i.e., a trial and an experiment -- as well -- a great and essentially anti-war philosophic treatise couched in the guise of the recounting of a military campaign); (2) dissertation, essay; (3), assay, essaying, test (again, valid in SPW); (4) sample (a sample of the extraordinary tasks that can be accomplished by what he hoped himself to be, an ordinary man -- of course he wasn't!); Faire l'essai de ses forces, to try his strength. Then under ESSAYER: (1) faire l'essai de, to try, to prove; des habits, etc., to try on (a coat, etc.) -- cf. regarding the British uniform versus the Arabian robes "wedding dress" -- he "tried on" the dress of the Arabs, with specific reference to fighting for his lady; to assay; (2) fig. to try; (3) to try, to attempt. Then under S'ESSAYER: (1) faire l'epreuve de son talent, to try one's hand (at) -- yes, he sought proof of his talents; (2) essayer d'apprendre, to try, to learn (to) -- yes, it was a great learning process for him.

Lawrence writes of the progressive self-analysis that builds in the last hundred pages of SPW as having taken place during the final stages of the Arabian campaign -- and no doubt the beginnings of the process did occur at that time. It seems reasonable to think, however, that these early assessments were expanded and strengthened, and the life-decisions based upon them finally sealed, in the reliving of the campaign as he transcribed it into his book. Thus the introspections that went into it bore with them much of the further knowledge he had gained during the years between completion of the campaign and completion of the Seven Pillars. In truth, this complex document can be seen as both a cause and an effect of Lawrence's chart for his future life.

For this reason, in order best to evaluate his analyses and decisions, it is necessary to understand his motivation for writing the book. The most direct means to this understanding, or so it now seems to me, lies in a somewhat "backwards" approach, that is, by looking at the last few chapters of the book -- always in the context of Lawrence's other writings as well -- before going back to take up the complexities of the entire final hundred pages.

There is a tone of ineffable sadness in these closing chapters -- devastating to the reader who has come to love Lawrence, as it must have been to Lawrence himself. The account of the final days of the campaign begins, however, on a rather optimistic note. They took Damascus:

When dawn came we drove to the head of the ridge, which stood over

the oasis of the city, afraid to look north for the ruins we expected:

but, instead of ruins, the silent gardens stood blurred green with river

mist, in whose setting shimmered the city, beautiful as ever, like a

pearl in the morning sun. SP p.644

The use of the word pearl is significant. In medieval allegory the pearl was the symbol of purity -- in the tropologic sense, of the soul purifying itself. In the context of certain conclusions I reached, it becomes clear that Lawrence regarded the ordeal of writing the Seven Pillars very much in this sort of light, that is, as the beginning of a years-long process of self-purification. Hence the meaning of the "pearl" phrase in this paragraph goes beyond the simple allegoy of Damascus, soon now to be freed from the Turks, as the jewel of Lawrence's beloved Syria whose capital it was. Its full significance emerges in the recounting in the book of the liberation of Damascus, heralding as it did the end of his years of writing, and thereby bringing to a close this first lap of Lawrence's journey toward purification of his own soul. Thus, as he approached the writing of the final chapters of the story, ". . . . .instead of ruins" in personal tragedy as a result of the Arabian campaign, he had reached a level where he could look ahead with hope to the vision of "a pearl in the morning sun."

But at the time the actual events took place, despite a certain sense of accomplishment that he must have had in the knowledge of the war's campaigns completed, the victory over the Turks and the triumphal entry into Damascus were for Lawrence a hollow, lonely time. Of his first evening in the city he wrote, toward the end of the Seven Pillars, of the Muedhdhin in a nearby mosque sending his call of last prayer through the night to his people:

"'. . . . . there are no gods, but God: and Mohammed is his prophet

. . . . . Come to prayer: come to security . . . . . God alone is great . . . . .'"

Then: "At the close," (Lawrence writes) ". . . . . he softly added: 'And He is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus.'"

Finally, in his sense of personal emptiness, Lawrence ends the episode:

. . . . .everyone seemed to obey the call to prayer on this their first

night of perfect freedom. While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause,

showed me my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since

only for me, of all the hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase

meaningless.

His sorrow at this moment has generally been attributed to the British government's betrayal of the promise of freedom to the Arabs. And it is certainly true that it took only a few days of the occupation of Damascus by "the Allies" to establish beyond doubt, first, the intent of Britain and France that in no way would the Arabs' role in the liberation earn them clear title to their lands, and second, a "case-is-closed" assumption by his superiors that Lawrence would remain in Damascus as a dedicated servant not of any Arab cause, but only of His Majesty, King George V of England.

(Although his total self could never have seriously considered it, a part of Lawrence for brief moments probably contemplated such a contingency, in the context of feeling himself "the node of a national movement" i.e., of the Arab cause. But in the "Epilogue" he also wrote: “We took Damascus and I feared. More than three arbitrary days would have quickened in me a root of authority."

Always wary of his sense of a lust for power within himself -- and with the growing certainty regarding the British-French intentions for Syria-Arabia, and the futility of any attempt on the part of the Arabs to combat them -- Lawrence's fear of such power in the role potentially to be assigned him in Damascus must have broadened into proportions requiring unequivocal rejection.)

In my own view, those who attribute his sorrow in his last days in Damascus only to the two-faced British position vis-a-vis the Arabs seemingly ignore the fact that Lawrence knew from the beginning that Britain's promise was at best ambiguous. Lawrence himself states in the Seven Pillars, he early advised Feisal that the extent of fulfillment of the British promise would hinge greatly upon what military strength the Arabs could muster at the time of conclusion of the campaign.

True, throughout the war and for a long time thereafter Lawrence persistently refused to accept the fact of betrayal of the Arabs as final; but of the intent on the part of His Majesty's Government he was always aware.

The very opening paragraph of the Seven Pillars -- although I did not grasp this until long after, in retrospect -- tells us all we need to know of the strange blindness and what appears to be a dual treachery (both to the Arabs and to his own people) of Lawrence himself.

The paragraph is shattering in its force. Even without the insights I later gained, I was gripped and drawn into the book by the power of those nine brief lines, already unable to retreat or set the book down.

Some of the evil of my tale" (Lawrence writes) "may have been

inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one

another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the

hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At

night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the

innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without

parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a

purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so

transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

Many have interpreted this paragraph primarily in the light of the remainder of the opening chapter, characterizing "the evil" as the bloodshed, the savage conditions of life in the searing furnace heat of the desert, and especially, the homosexual aspects of the relationships among some of his men. Of course these are part of it. But as I later came to see it (although I do not find this interpretation of mine in any other source except Lawrence's own paragraph), there is a greater overriding "evil" he is dealing with here. Lawrence does not say, "some of the evil of our tale" (although he speaks of our circumstances); rather:

"Some of the evil of my tale . . . . ."

and it is with his own internal nature -- as always with Lawrence -- with the evil within himself that he is above all concerned. So -- look again: ". . . . . devoted to freedom . . . . . a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare."

In the transcendent goal of freedom for Carchemish and Aleppo, there was no room in the inner landscape of his mind for that of which his logical functioning intellect had full cognizance; and it had to come to be that ". . . . . our (British) earlier ambitions faded in its glare."

Hence it is my belief that writing of Damascus that night, it was not so much for his country's deceptions that his heart wept in the words ". . . . . only for me . . . . . was the event sorrowful and the phrase meaningless." His tears were rather for the final symbolic acknowledgement, in this travesty of "liberation" for Syria, of the end of the dream of his love, and Carchemish and Aleppo -- the end of "the strongest motive throughout . . . . . a personal one" -- the "persisting element of life . . . . . dead before we reached Damascus."

In the last paragraph of the last chapter of the Seven Pillars Lawrence writes of the termination of his own role in Damascus, culminating the wracking first days of the occupation, with their near-anarchy, their political juggling, their meetings upon meetings, their secrecy-cloaked maneuverings and intrigue:

When Feisal had gone, I made to Allenby the last (and also I think

the first) request I ever made him for myself -- leave to go away.

For a while he would not have it; but I reasoned, reminding him of his

year-old promise, and pointing out how much easier the New Law

would be if my spur were absent from the people. In the end he

agreed; and then at once I knew how much I was sorry. SP p.660

Sorry that he was not staying on in Damascus to help structure the time of peace as he had the time of war? (So some would have us believe, indicating, even, that it was not of Lawrence's own volition that he went away.) On the contrary, it is my guess that it must have been clear by now to Lawrence that if anything more was to be accomplished by him for the cause of Arab freedom, he needed to tackle much bigger game than the representatives of His Majesty's Government in Damascus. He needed to get back to London as fast as possible, where the major action in preparation for Britain's role in final settlements among the war's combatants would be taking place.

Why then, "how much I was sorry"? Sorry, I am certain, because this farewell symbolized his wanting to have what had happened to him not be -- and because, knowing that he could never have back his love pure and innocent again, this was goodbye forever to Syria in all it had meant to him.

Would he see S.A. again, in England? I believe the dedication to the Seven Pillars tells us that he did, but that he could not now face her again in the old closeness, nor even tell her why -- not yet, surely -- or of the secret knowledge he carried in his thoughts. Because he couldn't, in his dedication he wrote:

"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."

. . . . . the "shape" not her physical shape, but the dead shape of his love, as he gave himself to morbid self-punishing visualization of the decay of its one-time beauty.

And the last lines of the dedication? It is my interpretation that in his tortured state of mind, he was now viewing his dream as a contributing factor to "the end of my tale" -- the whole complex of broken faith (broken love); of freedom's goals betrayed as his own goals for Carchemish and Aleppo had been betrayed. Hence, denying those who "prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a memory of you" (perhaps a reflection of a half-felt longing to stay in Syria and lead the Arabs in a futile fight to the death for their freedom?) he cries out to S.A. in these last lines:

". . . . . 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."

His gift to her, of freedom for their land, shattered, unfinished -- a fit monument, "marred" as he believed he had marred their love. " . . . . . and now the little things creep out . . . . ." -- the politicians, the old men who moved in on youth's victory, to build again their old, stranglehold domain.

Lawrence had, nevertheless, something left of S.A.: the spiritual love he had held for her, though no longer to be fulfilled in reality, would be his to keep in memory. It is my own assessment that to this love he dedicated, in two great undertakings, all that he could at that moment foresee of his future life.

The one task: to master the offending desire within him, the "love carnal," as he had already mastered others of what he termed his "appetites." For this effort, plans had already begun to form in his mind. More of my own viewpoints on how he arrived at the formulation of these plans are detailed in later chapters. In brief, it is my view that his determination to achieve mastery over the physical-sexual within himself was a major force in his decision to do what he described in a letter to Robert Graves as "the nearest modern equivalent of going into a monastery in the Middle Ages": enlistment in the ranks of the R.A.F. Letters p. 853 Here, in the conditioning to his own twentieth century asceticism, he would achieve the "ideal standard" -- by which (in my interpretation) he meant the attainment in actuality of the quality of love he had blinded himself to think he had attained in the past, this attainment to be reached in an ultimate asexual, spiritual level of life, where he could believe in himself as worthy again, and could offer to S.A. a kind of love he had the right to give.

But before he could devote full-time commitment to the R.A.F. life, there was something else he had to do -- this, a burning conviction that increasingly obsessed him and devoured his energies and strength until its basic structure was complete, and its writing had accomplished its purposes, both evident and disguised. To the memory of the past beauty of his love for S.A. he would build now a new monument; and as that love had been of the mind and soul, so should his monument be. He fashioned it -- something for her that should be immortal -- nearly at the cost of his sight, his mind, his life. He said: "I nearly went blind and mad in the writing." Letters p. 456. It was the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, "a triumph."

How often one reads in a commentary: "How could he put those words, 'a triumph,' on the title page? Why did he call the Arab war a triumph, when he himself considered it a hollow victory?"

But the triumph was not the campaign. It was the book. His masterpiece that would live on, long after the war had become only one more battle in British military history. This book "To S.A." -- to carry into immortality his love for her -- would stand forever, the "fit monument" -- in the words he had used earlier of books that meant much to him: " . . . . . the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you." Letters p. 85

It is my suggestion, and my conviction, that this (together with the attendant required introspective study of himself) was his all-consuming reason for writing the Seven Pillars. The record of the period of his life spent in the writing of the book is well known: months in semi-isolation, near starvation; long periods without sleep, writing l5,000, 20,000, or more words without rest; the manuscript almost completed, lost, begun all over again. (Did he only say it was lost? Had he perhaps, in that first draft, given himself "quite away"? Did he therefore possibly simply burn it?) He called his book "shamelessly emotional," and "red-hot with passion" Letters p. 542 -- wrote of being "afraid of saying something (in the book) even to myself." Letters p. 463 The ordeal he must have endured, to write the kind of book he had to write, is seen in the light of his own early creed concerning the revelation of one's feelings, as set forth in a letter he wrote to his mother after the death of his brother Frank in the l9l4-l9l8 first "World War":

"Poor dear Mother --

I got your letter this morning, and it has grieved me very much. You

will never never understand any of us after we have grown up a

little, Don't you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so?

-- I feel such a contemptible worm for having to write this way about

things. If you only knew that if one thinks deeply about anything one

would rather die than say anything about it? Home Letters p. 304

The young man who had so written of his own reticence now forced himself to pour into his book all the strength of his being. As his campaign had been an epic of guerrilla warfare, his story of it would be an epic in English literature -- in his own words, he hoped a "titanic book." With the power that he had to experience life so intensely, he drove himself to tear out of the war experience in Arabia every valuable thought, inspiration, emotion; every beauty of nature and spirit; every torment and tragedy; every insight into humanity; every historical, military, philosophical concept; miracles of courage and devotion; abysses of fear; new-learned relationships of man to God and universe; finally, every relentless, damning condemnation of himself born of his two years of desert war. His book had to be as complete and perfect as he could bear to make it, in order that this, his spiritual gift to S.A., might redeem even while it condemned "the marred shadow of your gift" that he saw in his dead crusade.

In the writing, the scope of his book's purpose grew with the immensity of the task, as through its pages he searched for and began to find himself, until at last it became in his own words an "introspection epic" -- and to the reader who could feel life on the same plane, an unforgettable experience.

He termed it, once completed: " . . . . . a summary of what I have thought and done and made of myself in these first thirty years." Letters p. 37l Later he added that "By putting all the troubles and dilemmas on paper, I hoped to work out my path again, and satisfy myself how wrong, or how right, I had been."

Then there is the title -- Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence tended to brush the title off as relatively meaningless:

. . . . . it is used as title out of sentiment: for I wrote a youthful

indiscretion-book, so called, in l9l3 and burned it (as immature) in

'14 when I enlisted. It recounted adventures in seven type-cities in

the East . . . . . Letters p. 43l

Again:

. . . . . I put (the title) on to my war diary because I couldn't think of

anything short and fit. Letters p. 5l4

But Lawrence was not a person who couldn't think of words he wanted to use. Moreover, this providing of two different reasons on two different occasions is typical of his procedure when covering up something he did not choose to reveal. Still further, it would seem, in the light of his own definitions of the book, that the title had more significance than he ordinarily cared to discuss, for he identified the original source as the book of Proverbs:

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” -- meaning a complete

edifice of knowledge." Letters p. 5l4

And it was that -- his complete edifice of knowledge of himself.

In yet another way the book had meaning for him -- a sad and wistful meaning in all the sometimes frightening proportions of the strength of this man -- a meaning caught in a phrase that creeps in again and again in his letters over the first hard years. He called the Seven Pillars his "child." Letters p. 495. He was a man of far too much insight into the workings of his own mind for the nature of such an allusion to be unconscious. Rather, surely, it symbolized the fulfillment he could not have in life -- nor even permit himself to dream -- woven into their book:

"To S.A.

I loved you. . . . ."

this spiritual "child" that he, and she no less surely, though only in fantasy through his love for her, had made.

The obsessive nature of his drive to complete the manuscript of his fit monument explains such remarks as that made to B. H. Liddell-Hart, that the strain of writing the Seven Pillars had "excited" him too much, and that he was "nearly dotty" when he enlisted in the R.A.F. L.H. p. 73

In a man with Lawrence's self-command to perfection, the extent of the book's importance to him made it almost foregone that he would feel an initial disillusion over the finished draft.

However, many months spent in literary revision, and the assurances of the worth of his book by writers whose judgment he valued, brought him in the end to view it in a more kindly light. Although he recurrently deprecated his achievement, there were times, too, when he acknowledged its strengths, and it seems certain that by the time of his death, the continuing praise by those writers he most admired satisfied him that his monument would become, as he had wanted it to be, one of the living greats of English literature.

In any event, by the date when printing of the subscribers' edition began, he could look at his work with enough regard to set in type, for the title page, the achievement of his fit monument to S.A.:

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

a triumph

In a letter Lawrence wrote much later to his old friend Robert Graves, describing the "changes" I have made in myself" since the period when they were at Oxford together, he explains the creation of the Seven Pillars as related to his life in general at the time of its writing:

I was then trying to write; to be perhaps an artist (for the Seven

Pillars had pretentions towards design, and was written with great

pains as prose) or to be at least cerebral. My head was aiming to

create intangible things. That's not well put: all creation is tangible.

What I was trying to do, I suppose, was to carry a superstructure of

ideas upon or above anything I made. R.G. p. l83

The "superstructure of ideas upon or above anything I made," as stated in the letter, relates of course to things "made" in connection with the book -- primarily to the writing, but probably also to its design in cover, typeface (including the ornate initial capitals for each chapter), illustrations, layout. Of special significance certainly would be the text on the front cover, accompanying the crossed Arabian swords: "the sword also means cleanness and death. But beyond that, the letter may say much more, for it seems to me that this creator carried the same superstructure upon or above the other central things he made in his life: the campaign he made, and even the very "changes" in the perfecting of personality he made for himself through his years in the R.A.F. All were reflections of a complex of major motivations -- monuments to a superstructure of ideas that resolved out into a single overriding purpose: the search for the "ideal standard" in life and love.

With respect to my concept of the four levels of meaning underlying and explaining key passages of the Seven Pillars, although I have not seen such an interpretation anywhere in the writings of others who have studied Lawrence's life and works, a most revealing passage occurs in one of Lawrence's own letters written after completion of the manuscript. The publication of his Letters did not take place until several years after his death, hence I had no knowledge of them when I made my own assessments concerning the four levels of meaning. However, this particular letter, which came to my attention only a long time later, startlingly corroborates the conclusions I had reached.

As part of the background for the discovery of this corroboration, I should first explain that on the sheet of random-tinted drawing paper that formed the front cover of my Richard's typed copy of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Richard had traced in black ink two curved swords, their tips crossed at the bottom -- their hilts reaching upward and outward -- the whole forming a kind of parabola suggesting motion into the infinite. In the intervening space there was written, in handwriting not identifiable as Richard's own, the words:

the

sword

also means

clean-ness

&

death

To my question, Richard had answered: "I can't say with any certainty what it means. I've drawn it here because it is impressed into the leather of the actual book. The handwriting appears to be Lawrence's. Not sure. I endeavored to copy it exactly. The swords are of course Arabian -- of the sort used in the campaign. I've tried to puzzle out the full intent of the words. That is to say, 'the sword also means clean-ness and death . . . . .' Because of also, I conclude that in addition to its clean-ness and death reference, the sword has some other reference as well -- a symbolic reference. These two concepts could relate either to the campaign or to the book -- or to both."

Later, when I proposed my four-levels-of-meaning hypothesis, Richard and I together searched for some way to relate the sword to my theories. The "death" of course clearly related to the "death" at Deraa. And between us, we had come up with a variety of other ideas -- adopting some of them, rejecting others, not reaching as yet a definitive four-level image -- when in l938 the 800-odd page Letters of T. E. Lawrence came into print. I had long since, by that date, returned to America. Richard sent me the book from England -- and a short time later our letters crossed, containing almost identical paragraphs:

"About our four-level meaning for the sword: see TEL's letter to

Kennington of 27 November, l922."

Lawrence's November 27, l922 letter concerning "the sword" was addressed to Eric Kennington, the English artist who did most of the color portraits of the giants of the Arabian campaign for the Subscribers Edition of the Seven Pillars. In addition to the portraits, Kennington had executed a number of drawings proposed for use in the book. This specific letter of Lawrence's was written as response to his first review of these drawings, which he referred to respectively as "the dysentery," "the nightmare," "the snow-storm," "the dead-village-at-night," and "the last dream." Of "the last dream," which he characterized as an image of "the Arab East," Lawrence wrote to Kennington:

There's a hypnotic suggestiveness about your work, which makes me

give in to it, when I stare at it. So I like the dream very much in

retrospect . . . . . There was a little bit of land behind the palm tree,

leading to the sword, which felt peaceful.

(On reading this part of the letter, Richard and I had both immediately seen this "little bit of land leading to the sword" as Lawrence's beloved "site" at Carchemish that had led him to "the sword" of the Arabian campaign.)

Lawrence's letter to Kennington continues:

The sword was odd. The Arab Movement was one: Feisal another

(his name means a flashing sword): then there is the excluded notion,

Garden of Eden touch: and the division meaning, like the sword in the

bed of mixed sleeping, from the Morte d'Arthur. I don't know which

was in your mind, but they all came to me -- and the sword also

means clean-ness, and death.

There it was -- all there:

-- the literal sense in "the Arab Movement."

-- the religious sense in Feisal, as Lawrence's counterpart "flashing

sword," in the dual-deliverance holy crusade.

-- the tropologic, or personal moral-ethical sense, underlying both

"the excluded notion, Garden of Eden touch" (for the Garden of Eden

was the land of the Tigris-Euphrates -- of Carchemish -- this "little

bit of land leading to the sword" -- and Lawrence's revelations of

insight into himself regarding the nature of his love for S.A. had

now forever excluded him from what had once been in that Garden

of Eden idyllic land); and underlying too "the division meaning, like

the sword in the bed of mixed sleeping" (dividing him forevermore

from S.A.)

-- and the last meaning, culminating in the parabola-image on the

cover of the Seven Pillars -- the meaning in the sense of the

anagogic -- the final meaning that transforms the symbolic object

into a spiritual truth in the striving of inner psychic forces toward

the highest ideals:

"the sword also means clean-ness, and death"

. . . . . the death, all the deaths of Lawrence after Deraa; the clean-ness, the purification of his own soul, toward which the writing of his fit monument, the Seven Pillars, was the first step in the journey.

Anyone who has read the Seven Pillars with any degree of involvement cannot fail to be haunted by the hatred of sex and the sex act -- of this "lust" that produces children -- of the whole realm of the animal-physical world, which Lawrence suffered at the time of the writing of the book, and which permeates its pages. These hatreds pervade, too, his personal letters written to friends during the first years immediately following the war. That the sex-physical hatreds infuse even those portions of the Seven Pillars preceding Deraa is not surprising, since all the actual writing was done afterward. However, careful study indicates that this state of mind (though there were perhaps earlier latent contributing causes) grew specifically out of the deeper knowledge of himself and the sexual aspects of his love for S.A. that struck like a sword into his consciousness on the heels of the sudden fear of threatening impotence during the Deraa beating. It is my conviction that no other assessment is reasonable, because:

-- there is no evidence whatever of this hatred in his personal letters

written prior to the Deraa incident;

-- nor is there any evidence of it in the letters he wrote in the later

years of his life, after he got well.

Going back again to the opening words of the book, the foreshadowing darkness of "Some of the evil of my tale . . . . ." moves forward in the ensuing pages -- wound in among the passionate devotion to the cause and the creed of freedom, the gothic language, the sense of a purpose allied to the life-force of the universe -- moves forward with an undercurrent of man's rage at his own frailties, as Lawrence speaks of his men who subjected themselves to pain and filth in the life of their desert war, "thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent." He spoke of the others -- but was it not he himself who thirsted most of all? And wasn't his book itself also part of his own thirsting punishment of himself, as the mirror-spectre of his father's love rose as a barrier to his own?

Running throughout are outcries against man as the perpetuator of the human race, such as that quoted earlier, to Sherif Abd el Main at Shobek. And others -- among them the much-cited passage:

I began to jeer at (the great fighter Auda) for being so old and yet so

foolish like the rest of his race, who regarded our comic reproductive

processes not as an unhygienic pleasure, but as a main business of life.

Auda retorted with his desire for heirs. I asked if he had found life

good enough to thank his haphazard parents for bringing him into it?

or selfishly to confer the doubtful gift upon an unborn spirit?.

Again, the recorded words carry a strong element of contempt. But again, it seems reasonable to think -- particularly since Lawrence states that Auda accepted the taunts with "benign humor" -- that the actual conversation (long before Deraa) was in the nature of a friendly tease about Auda'a new young wife, and took on its deeper barbs only later, in the writing, because of the self-threatening "lusts" Lawrence's mind saw within himself after Deraa, and his probably equating of these lusts to his own "haphazard" parents' "selfishly" conferring the "doubtful gift" of life on him.

The point in the book where the hatreds, fears, and self-derogation culminate -- are pulled together, dissected, studied, understood, reassembled, and set forth -- is reached in "the personal chapter," Chapter CIII. "The personal revelations should be the key of the thing:" Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett, "and the personal chapter actually is the key, I fancy: only it's written in cypher." Letters p. 366 And to Garnett again:

The personal chapter clearly bothers you. A man (a metaphysician

by nature, who was at Oxford with me and knows me very well) read

it, and told me that it stood out as the finest chapter in the book. I

tend more to your opinion: it's not meant for the ordinary

intelligences, and must mislead them but to set it out in plain English

would be very painful. Letters p. 369

Appropriately, this chapter carries -- and is the only chapter that does so -- the same page-head throughout. The page-head is Myself.

Here, in ruthless yet at last nascently tolerant self-analysis, Lawrence reaches a rational viewpoint on the irrationalities and contradictions within him. Here also he sets down -- climaxed in one crucial paragraph; in one beginning, hypothetical, "perhaps" clause -- the direction he senses, not yet fully seen, reached only gropingly but reached, that he will have to take to attain the rock of self-value again, perhaps at last to regain the "citadel of my integrity" that he had thought to have "irrevocably lost."

Undoubtedly, the beginning efforts at self-assessment and direction took place when the chapter says they did, during a period of relaxed lazy days with Buxton's Camel Corps at Bair. But equally undoubtedly, the full analysis and sense of decision that characterize this chapter must have been attained only toward the end of the tormented days of completing the main draft of the book. Further, the attainment of this sense of direction was an essential prelude to the manuscript's completion. Finally, the decisions reached and the attendant ability to complete the book were major determining factors in his moving ahead to effect his long-considered enlistment in the R.A.F.: the decisions providing assurance that enlistment was his clearcut course; the completion of the book granting his release to embark on it.

Further in this context, the final page of the text of the Seven Pillars carries the page-head:

SET FREE

The apparent reference is, of course, to Allenby's granting of Lawrence's appeal for "leave to go away." Much deeper however lies the caption's fullest significance, taking form only as Lawrence wrote the last page:

Set free by completion of his book -- the compulsion to build his fit

monument now fulfilled;

Set free to enlist in the R.A.F. -- to burn out in his 20th century

"monastery" the animal lusts he damned within himself --

free to punish, to drive out, to scourge -- free to mint . . . . .

and in this process to earn his way toward a level of life of

which he had, in these first groping stages, only begun to dream

. . . . .

Confirming these views of his actions and the reasons behind them, there stands a paragraph in Lawrence's letter of l9 March, l923, to Lionel Curtis, stating that his reason for enlistment is to be found in "my complete works." He writes:

". . . . .on my last night in Barton Street, I read chapters 113 to 118,

and saw implicit in them my late course." Letters p. 4ll

Now, these chapter references are to an early draft. Adding together all I have learned of Lawrence and of the Seven Pillars I am convinced that the reference is to chapters XCIX-CIII of the publicly printed edition, Chapter CIII with its page-head Myself being "the personal chapter." Letters p.366

In setting forth my own particular decipherment of the "cypher" related to Lawrence's "late course" (his enlistment in the R.A.F. as his future course in life) I shall deal in detail with the last of the five chapters to which he refers, that is, Chapter CIII, both because it seems to me to synthesize the thinking of all five, and because -- most important -- Lawrence himself called it "the key." Letters p. 366

(L is here trying to persuade Serahin to join them in the effort.) He writes:

To be of the desert was, as they knew, a doom to wage unending battle with an enemy who was not of the world, nor life, nor anything, but hope itself; and failure seemed God's freedom to mankind. We might only exercise this our freedom by not doing what it lay within our power to do, for then life would belong to us, and we should have mastered it by holding it cheap. Death would seem best of all our works, the last free loyalty within our grasp, our final leisure: and of these two poles, death and life, or, less finally, leisure and subsistence, we should shun subsistence (which was the stuff of life) in all save its faintest degree, and cling close to leisure. Thereby we would serve to promote the not-doing rather than the doing. . . To bring forth immaterial things, things creative, partaking of spirit, not of flesh, we must be jealous of spending time or trouble upon physical demands, since in most men the soul grew aged long before the body. Mankind had been no gainer by its drudges.

There could be no honour in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat. Omnipotence and the Infinite were our two worthiest foemen, indeed the only ones for a full man to meet, they being monsters of his own spirit's making; and the stoutest enemies were always of the household. In fighting Omnipotence, honour was proudly to throw away the poor resources that we had, and dare Him empty-handed; to be beaten, not merely by more mind, but by its advantage of better tools. To the clear-sighted, failure was the only goal. We must believe, through and through, that there was no victory except to go down into death fighting and crying for failure itself, calling in excess of despair to Omnipotence to strike harder, that by His very striking He might temper our tortured selves into the weapon of His own ruin.

This was a halting, half-coherent speech, struck out desperately, moment by moment, in our extreme need, upon the anvil of those white minds round the dying fire; and hardly its sense remained with me afterwards; for once my picture-making memory forgot its trade and only felt the slow humbling of the Serahin, the night-quiet in which their worldliness faded, and at last their flashing eagerness to ride with us whatever the bourne.

My conviction is that all of the above refers also, very importantly, to a much larger concept of his own failure -- in the peace settlements, against "God" the British Empire, and "beyond our control" -- the French. He dared and tried and failed the total, though did "the best we could." Thus the "effort" -- both the campaign/peace-settlements and SPW are "the triumph," in the sense of failure being God's freedom to mankind. Thus he is "free" now to join the R.A.F.

Note at end of this chapter, the failure on the effort to achieve the ideal standard -- "somewhere there is an ideal standard and I cannot find it" (approximate wording, quote from first Letters book) -- beginning with Deraa, he had of course felt that he had fallen far backward from any such achievement, and even at the time of completion of SPW he felt himself far below that goal. Hence the failure in this "essai" (so far in his life) also fits the "marred shadow" lament of the S.A. dedication, in the sense of his "gift" to himself, as well as to his lady.

Note that "essay" is defined as the most personal form of literature. S.P.W. is by that definition a very long essay -- intensely personal, that is.

The following is re: TEL’s letter to Dr. Cowley, presenting SPW (Subscriber’s Edition) to the Bodleian .

Written from Dreigh Rd., Karachi, May l927 (l0/5/27?) from 338l7l A.C.Shaw, black pen.

This copy -- subscribers edition -- is blue leather -- The Seven Pillars in gold on back -- sides, edges tooled in gold -- arabic-looking figures. Signed inside as a "complete copy" by "TES". Title inside: Seven Pillars of Wisdom -- a Triumph - T.E.Shaw.

It was addressed to Dear Dr. Cowley, and presented S.P. to the Bodleian with certain restrictions, including the following one on its use: ". . . . . available only to readers moved by some other motive than personal curiosity: and that this restriction remain in force till the book is republished after my death.

"There -- do you think I make an absurd fuss over a trifle? Perhaps: but a fellow doesn't feel his own private feelings to be a trifle: and mine, I fancy, is a book which would never have been written by anyone properly imbued with the public school spirit.

"Also I justify myself in making conditions on the grounds that the book is rare and valuable.

"You'll have to index it under Shaw, that being my initials in it. God help the catalogue with me, someday, for not even Lawrence is the correct and authentic name which I will eventually have to resume. I've published as Lawrence, as Shaw, as Ross: and will, probably, eventually publish as C. What a life!"

(He then talks of his requirement to stay in Karachi -- till l930 I think he wrote -- "worse luck") (says, as I recall, then, that his address is given above, but)

" . . . . .Hogarth keeps in touch with me and will forward anything you want to send him."

(Then something about Cowley's and Bodleian's success. Closes:

"Increase isn't a thing to wish, blindly.

T.E.Shaw"

The "C." of course refers to Chapman, his father's real name. Its use here seems to me to indicate TE's growing comfortableness about his whole background, family, hence resolution of the "lust" stuff feelings along with so many others, during his l2 years of "mint"-ing.