Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (83 page)

I am afraid you are rather making a labour of it, or you don’t want to tell me that it’s rubbish. I don’t want to bore you (nice of me!), and if you say it’s rot I’ll agree with you & cackle with pleasure at finding my judgment doubled.

Please laugh & chuck it.

Yours sincerely,

T. E. Lawrence

Unlike most such letters, this one very soon produced a lengthy reply, urging Lawrence to be patient and revealing that Charlotte Shaw had read the book with great admiration and had urged her husband to read it—more than urged, in fact. In his absence—he was “road tubthumping round England” for the forthcoming general election—she read every word of the awkward six-pound book, and on Shaw’s return “she began ecstatically reading passages of it aloud to him.” Shaw’s letter to Lawrence, if allowance is made for the somewhat hectoring style he used to everyone, was thoughtful, encouraging, and full of advice, much of which Lawrence was to ignore, and it clearly opened up to Lawrence the possibility of friendship with the Shaws.

Of course forming a friendship with “G.B.S.” was like letting the proverbial camel stick its nose inside the tent. Shaw was bossy, fussy, opinionated, indefatigable, irascible, determined not only to offer his friends advice but to ensure that it was followed in every detail. He was overwhelmingly generous with his time, despite his widespread commitments—a workload that would kill a horse; a firm determination to introduce to Britain not only socialism but a total reform of everything from English grammar, punctuation, and spelling to the way the British dressed, ate, and educated their children; and campaigning vigorously for such principles as wearing woolen garments next to the skin instead of cotton, total vegetarianism, and a radically different relationship between the sexes. On many of these subjects, Shaw sounded like a crank; on others, he wrote some of his greatest plays. But in any case his genius; the unstoppable flow of his eloquence; his sheer output of books, plays, letters, and pamphlets; and above all his willingness to argue with anyone about anything until whoever it was gave in out of exhaustion—all this made him seem to many like the Nietzschean superman improbably manifesting himself in England, as a fiercely bearded Anglo-Irishman.

The fact that Charlotte Shaw had read the book and liked it mattered very much indeed. The Shaws had what might best be described as an odd marriage: as noted earlier, from the very beginning they had agreed not to have sex. Charlotte had a deep-seated fear of sex and was determined never to have a child. Though it pained her often and deeply, it was part of the understanding between them that Shaw could have affairs, mostly with actresses, provided he did so with a certain amount of discretion. They got along very well together—Charlotte was wealthy and cultivated; they enjoyed each other’s company; and they respected each other’s opinions. Her enthusiasm for Lawrence’s enormous book meant something to Shaw, and her determination that he must read it himself was not something he would ignore. Like Lawrence she was afflicted by “a fearful streak of conscience and sense of duty, complicated by a sensitiveness that is nothing less than a disease.” In this Charlotte also resembled Lawrence’s mother, who certainly had a “streak of conscience” and a fierce “sense of duty,” though without Charlotte’s “sensitiveness” or Charlotte’s essential shyness, which was in such sharp contrast to Shaw’s extrovert nature and his phenomenal capacity for rudeness when he chose to inflict it on people.

By mid-November, Lawrence had told enough people about his enlistment in the RAF to make further secrecy unlikely. Garnett knew, and this was probably safe enough, since he was that rarest of book editors, one who didn’t gossip about his authors. But Lawrence would very shortly let Shaw know, and this was riskier.Also, for reasons best known to himself, Lawrence also informed his friend and admirer R.D.Blumenfeld, the editor of the
Daily Express.
Although Blumenfeld seems to have been uncommonly discreet for a newspaper editor, the
Daily Express
—Lord Beaverbrook’s sensationalist daily—was not a place where any secret was likely to be kept for long. Lawrence had written for this newspaper when he was campaigning to make the British government live up to its promises to Feisal, and had developed a certain respect for Blumenfeld in the process.He may too, like many celebrities, have believed that if you fed the beast the occasional tidbit, it wouldn’t bite you, but if so, he misunderstood the ethics of Fleet Street. Writing to Blumenfeld with the news that he was joining the RAF and adding, “This letter has got to be indiscreet…. Do keep this news to yourself,” was either naive or self-destructive, or possibly both. Blumenfeld responded, from a nursing home where he was recovering from surgery, by offering Lawrence a job, possibly writing about British policy in the Middle East. Lawrence perhaps unwisely declined, in a breezy, personal letter that could only lead to trouble if it got into the wrong hands: “Your offer is a generous and kind one: and you will think me quixotic to refuse it: but I ran away here partly to escape the responsibility of head-work…. No, please don’t publish my eclipse. It will be common news one day, but the later the better for my peace in the ranks.” Some of Lawrence’s biographers, including his authorized biographer, Jeremy Wilson, suggest that he consciously or subconsciously was seeking to bring to an end his service in the RAF, and of course this is possible; but one must bear in mind that he had only to go to a public telephone and call Air Vice-Marshal Swann, or send a postcard to Trenchard, to be released from the service.

Perhaps he wanted to achieve that end without having to bring it about himself, by forcing Trenchard and Swann to make the decision for him; on the other hand, one must set against this the fact that Lawrence, once he was discharged from the RAF, almost immediately enlisted in the army, then transferred back to the RAF as soon as he could—so clearly the military life, with its built-in foundation of discipline, order, and austerity, appealed to him. It seems more likely that Lawrence was suffering from what we would now call mood swings, perhaps as a result of his wartime stress, and that he rebounded from a deep depression and a sense of helplessness, which had engulfed him after he left the Colonial Office, to a dizzy height of overconfidence in his ability to eat his cake and have it too. After all, he had persuaded Swann to intervene on his behalf twice, he was on the brink of combining a military and a writing career, and he seemed to have everything he wanted—always a dangerous moment.

At the beginning of December Lawrence apparently made up his mind to publish the abridgment of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
informing Garnett that he in turn could inform Jonathan Cape of this decision, and selecting the literary agency Curtis Brown to represent him. Their task was obviously complicated by the fact that the idea of abridging the book had first been suggested to him by Frank Doubleday, the American publisher. By the first week in December Lawrence was already deep in negotiation with Cape—like so many authors, not letting the right hand know what the left one was doing, since he should have allowed Curtis Brown to do all this for him.

At this point Shaw’s immense enthusiasm for the book, which he was still reading, was clear enough, to Lawrence’s relief: “I know enough about it now to feel puzzled as to what is to be done with it,” Shaw wrote to him. “One step is clear enough. The Trustees of the British Museum have lots of sealed writings to be opened in a hundred years…. You say you have four or five copies of your magnissimum opus, At least a couple should be sealed and deposited in Bloomsbury and New York.”
*
* Shaw was concerned about several problems of libel (given his own writing, this was a subject he was familiar with), and suggested that an abridgment, leaving out the potentially libelous passages, would be a good idea. Lawrence must have glowed at Shaw’s description of his book as a “magnissimum opus.” And he was pleased that the great man not only took the book seriously, but favored an abridgment, which, between Lawrence and Garnett, was already moving forward quickly.

Between this whirl of correspondence, his motorcycle, his photography course, and the success of his campaign to get Doughty a pension, Lawrence may not have taken notice of the fact that reporters were appearing at RAF Farnborough asking questions about him. Not surprisingly, some were from the
Daily Express,
but there were also some from the biggest rival of the
Express,
Lord Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail
—all the big Fleet Street dailies had spies in each other’s editorial offices. On December 16, Wing Commander Guilfoyle, for whom Lawrence had already developed a strong but possibly undeserved dislike, was already writing to Air Vice-Marshal Swann that reporters had interviewed two of his junior officers, and on learning that “Colonel Lawrence” was unknown in the officers’ mess, had started to wait outside the camp gate to waylay airmen as they came and went. “Do you think,” Guilfoyle wrote stiffly, but not unreasonably, “that all this conjecture and talk is in the best interest of discipline?” Clearly, it was not, and there was worse to come.

Lawrence, in the meantime, found himself in another dilemma, this one at least not of his own making. Filled with enthusiasm for
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and acting with his usual conviction that he knew what was best for everybody, Shaw had brought the subject of the book up with his own publisher, Constable, urging the two senior partners to go after it boldly. Never one for understatement, Shaw, as he wrote to Lawrence, told them, “Why in thunder didn’t you secure it? It’s the greatest book in the world.” Shaw urged Lawrence to open negotiations directly with Constable as soon as possible, with a view to publishing an edited version of the full text first, and an abridged version later (exactly the reverse of what Lawrence wanted to do), and he bullied the two senior partners of Constable into having a talk with Edward Garnett.

This put the fat in the fire, since Garnett had already discussed the book with Cape, whose reader he was, and discussions were already taking place between Cape and Raymond Savage, Lawrence’s literary agent at Curtis Brown. Lawrence, whose intention was to bring out the abridged text first, and who had already authorized Garnett to bring the project to Cape, had to inform Shaw that all this was going on, and Shaw was, predictably, very put out. One reason for Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the firm of Jonathan Cape was that both Cape and his partner G. Wren Howard were intensely interested in producing handsome books. Their ideas about book design, layout, and typography were less extreme than Lawrence’s, but they were more likely than Constable to produce something close to what would please him. Since Cape is now a distinguished institution in British book publishing, not unlike Knopf in New York, it will surprise those who know anything about the publishing business that Shaw thundered back with a warning that Cape and Howard were “a brace of thoroughgoing modern ruffians,” and that they probably lacked the capital to produce the book. He added, for good measure, on the subject of Lawrence’s enlistment in the RAF, that “Nelson, slightly cracked after his whack on the head in the battle of the Nile, coming home and insisting on being placed at the tiller of a canal barge, and on being treated as nobody in particular, would have embarrassed the Navy far less,” a comment that was undoubtedly correct. “You are evidently a very dangerous man,” he wrote to Lawrence, with undisguised approval; “most men who are any good are….1 wonder what I will decide to do with you.”

The truth was that Lawrence felt himself already committed to Cape, and his agent was already in discussion with Cape and Howard about the contract, so Shaw’s unexpected charge into the middle of these negotiations put Lawrence in an embarrassing position with Cape, while Shaw, of course, felt foolish at having urged his own publishers to go after a book that was already as good as sold to somebody else. Over the years, this would become a pattern in the relationship between Lawrence and Shaw, yet Shaw, after an initial outburst, always forgave the younger man. From the outset, Shaw adopted the attitude of an exasperated and indulgent parent toward a wayward, difficult child. As if to demonstrate this, Shaw not only read all 300,000-plus words of the manuscript (Shaw estimated its length at 460,000 words, but this seems excessive); he also made copious, detailed notes, suggestions, and corrections, including a “virtuoso” essay on the use of the colon, semicolon, and dash, and the proposal that Lawrence drop the first chapter of the book and start with the second, which Lawrence eventually accepted, though he sensibly ignored most of the rest.

By the time Lawrence received this letter, however, his presence at RAF Farnborough had made the front page of the
Daily Express
in big headlines:

“UNCROWNED KING” AS PRIVATE SOLDIER

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Famous War Hero Becomes a Private

SEEKING PEACE OPPORTUNITY TO WRITE A BOOK

The article inside was fairly innocuous by the standards of the
Express,
though written in its inimitable hyperbolic style—"Colonel Lawrence, archaeologist, Fellow of All Souls, and king-maker, has lived a more romantic existence than any man of the time. Now he is a private soldier.” The next day a long and more detailed follow-up piece named him as AC2 Ross, placed him at RAF Farnborough, and gave details of his daily schedule, a sure sign that somebody had been talking to the
Express’s
reporter. Lawrence would afterward put the blame on the junior officers, rather than his fellow airmen, and say that one of them sold the story to the
Express
for £30 (more than $2,000 in contemporary terms), but this number sounds suspiciously like Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and in any case Blumenfeld was already onto the story. To put this in perspective: by 1923 Lawrence was Britain’s most famous war hero, and a media celebrity on a scale that until then had been unimagined. It was as if Princess Diana had vanished from her home and had been discovered by the press enlisted in the ranks of the RAF as Aircraftwoman Spencer, doing drill, washing her own undies, and living in a hut with a dozen or more other airwomen. Every newspaper now, from the most serious to the most sensational, rushed to catch up with the
Express,
briefly turning the area outside the camp gates into a mob scene of reporters and photographers.