Books: More Light on Lawrence

ORIENTAL ASSEMBLY—T. E. Lawrence—Duff on ($3).

As Britain’s ace intelligence officer in World War I, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence raised the desert Arabs in revolt against the Turkish caliphate, did more than any one Englishman to safeguard Britain’s Moslem empire. Later, with a vigor and spontaneity of language matched in his generation only by D. H. Lawrence (no kin), T. E. Lawrence described his exploits in his prose masterpiece, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

His decision to retire into a quasi-monastic life in the Royal Air Force (as Aircraftman Shaw) heightened a certain mystery which readers sensed uneasily in Colonel Lawrence’s character. Many of his admirers were perplexed by the transformation of England’s brilliant intelligence officer, strategist, writer, archeologist into a grease-monkey. Unkind critics attributed his act to some deep-seated malaise in Lawrence’s character at which Lawrence himself sometimes hinted darkly. Even before his death (in 1935 in a motorcycle crash in England), observers scrutinized the smallest scraps of Lawrence’s writings for some fresh clue to one of the century’s most tantalizing personalities.

This week the work of collecting Lawrence’s literary odds & ends was continued in Oriental Assembly. Editor was Colonel Lawrence’s brother, A. W. Lawrence. Among other things the book contains the synoptic diary Lawrence kept in 1911 when he was unconsciously preparing himself for the capture of modern Damascus by archeologizing among the ruins of Hittite Carchemish; an article (from The Army Quarterly, October 1920)on the evolution of the Arab revolt and its hit-&-run strategy, which occurred to Lawrence while he lay ill of fever near Medina; 111 photographs taken by Lawrence of Arab troops, Arab leaders, Arab buildings and arid Arab landscapes. Due to the difficulty of developing the negatives, most of the photographs lack sharpness, some of them lack clarity.

The book also contains the introductory chapter to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which Bernard Shaw got the author to omit from the lay version, and which for political reasons has never been published before. In this suppressed introduction T. E. Lawrence admits that as a British intelligence officer he always knew he was hoodwinking the Arabs, as a friend of the Arabs he somehow hoped he wasn’t.