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Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. V, No. 2, Spring 1996 Edited by Philip Kerrigan Living with Lawrence
Malcolm Brown
Reflections on editing
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence Prefatory note: Following your Editor's enquiry as to whether I had anything to contribute to this edition of the Society's journal, the article has been brought out from obscurity, dusted off, and given a somewhat belated publication. Please accept it as a product of its occasion. The research it describes was undertaken between the summer of 1986, when A. W. Lawrence asked me to edit a new selection of his brother's letters, and the book's first publication - as required by my contract with the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust - in Lawrence's centenary year, 1988 (intended for August, it was finally got out, after various hazards and delays, in November.) Its subsequent appearance in paperback seemed to offer a suitable opportunity to reflect on the experience of compiling it. In brief, I wanted to say: 'This is what I learned about this curious man when I worked on this book; and, ladies and gentlemen, I was fascinated by what I found.' Members should understand that these reflections were intended for largely 'alien' ears and therefore a certain amount of basic biographical information about Lawrence (and, indeed, about myself) had to be included in the mix. They might also recognise some material re-cycled from my Introduction to the Letters volume. They will not be surprised to hear that the knight in Bodleian armour who provided the evidence for the important footnote referred to (see Letters page 267) was - who else? - Jack Flavell. __________ Editing the letters of a historical character for publication is a curious experience. He ceases to be a project and becomes a person in your life. His letters stop being documents to be assessed for their biographical or literary value and become a voice in your ear. You attune to his varying moods. You become involved - excited, nervous even, as to what you might find, or won't find. As you open another packet of photocopies or sift through another collection of originals, it's as though you had hurried to the door as they dropped through the letter-box of the people they were written to and had become their instant second reader. You get a distinct sense of looking over the shoulder, of 'my turn next'. This 'personalisation' might not take place in the case of a dull or mediocre letter writer, but T. E. Lawrence was never that. He wrote fluently, often outspokenly, and always with style. I found him a good companion. Letters-editing is no easy ride, however. While there can be huge satisfactions, there will also be anxieties, and not a little sweat. Deadlines loom ahead like icebergs bearing down on the Titanic and there are so many more letters to assess. Partly you're delighted at finding a new letter offering an unexpected aspect or a lively piece of writing; partly you're afraid that it might disturb the pattern of a section you had thought rounded and complete. In that case it's like the arrival of an unexpected guest in the middle of a dinner party - you find yourself shuffling the chairs and the table mats just when you thought you could put on the coffee. And there's that other constant snare threatening you - the reference you failed to identify, or identified wrongly, on which, infallibly, some reviewer or other will delightedly pounce. Pounce - and, all too often, denounce. 'Mr So-and-so's unawareness of such-and-such leaves one in the gravest doubts as to the quality of his editorship overall.' 'Connoisseurs of the writings of X still await an interpreter with the necessary scholarship.' You almost feel you're reading one of your old school reports. 'Requires more application.' 'Must do better next term.' The trouble is you resent being found wanting but know your critic is probably right. Yet what you can't say in reply is, 'Look at the footnote on such-and-such a page. That reference took weeks to trace and needed the wit of Hercule Poirot - plus the help of half the brains in the Bodleian Library - to find the answer. That note has added to the sum of human knowledge.' There was such a footnote in my book, though I didn't need all the Bodleian staff, just one, to whom I shall be ever grateful for finding the vital clue in an extremely obscure magazine of the early 1920s. The problem is that the reader can't see the work behind those lines in minuscule print at the bottom of the page - he simply glances at them (or not as the case might be) and moves on. He expects the explanation to be there, and would be offended if it wasn't. Of course, there's the Christopher Isherwood trick, which I hadn't the courage to play. In introducing an edition of Baudelaire's Intimate Journals, Isherwood wrote: 'After some thought, I have decided not to attempt annotation. . .[W]hat does it matter to the average reader who Moun was, or Castagnary, or Rabbe? Read this book as you might read an old diary found in the drawer of a desk in a deserted house.' I call that masterful. It might also be called a cop-out. Anyway, while envying Isherwood's boldness, I took a different, more dangerous road. When the book was finally committed to the printers, I felt like the man in Bunyan when the burden fell from his back. There'd been quite a bit of Hill Difficulty, and, as happens to walkers when they take off a heavy pack, there was a feeling almost of dizzy levitation. For a number of reasons publication followed almost at once - far too soon to get any sense of perspective on the two years' effort which the book had entailed. My principal pleasure was in simply having got the thing done.
I can now recognise how rewarding the work was for so much of the time. I'd made television documentaries about Lawrence and co-written a brief biography, but the letters opened all sorts of new doors, I hadn't quite expected, for example, to find Lawrence fun. In many ways his story is tragic: the genuine wartime performer turned into the Beau Geste matinee idol from which half real, half unreal persona he retreated into aliases, an obscure life in the ranks of the Army and the R.A.F. and an early, wasteful death. Shakespeare might have made something of it - or at least put the story in his pending file. But though Lawrence can sometimes sound like Lear on the heath, or, as he put it himself, 'Lucifer after his forced landing', much of his correspondence is up-beat, buoyant. Take his letters to former wartime colleagues or servicemen who were his comrades in the R.A.F. and Tank Corps - letters quite as well written in their brisk and often bantering way as those to
literati like Robert Graves or Bernard Shaw. 'Is Cranwell still decent ? ' he writes from India in 1927 to Sergeant Pugh, whom he had met at the R.A.F. Cadet College at Cranwell, Lincolnshire: 'No trumpeters? no guards? no roll calls? no general nonsense? Has the band stopped playing the Lincolnshire poacher? Does the hot water still work? Particularly I want to know if it's decently warm at reveille. Dusty will know. I used to bribe the stoker to do our fire first, in the mornings.' To an ex-Royal Flying Corps friend B. E. Leeson, married, in business in Manchester, but away from home when he chanced to call, he writes in 1929: 'Commend me to your maid. You are a plutocrat. I have no maid: nor even a wife: whereas you have two women to look after you. Mohammedan!' One other thing that struck me again and again was his sheer genius for friendship, not a public-relations skill cultivated like that of a general determined to show he knows his men, but a talent as natural as spring water. And his service friends received at least as much genuine concern as his friends among the gliterati and the nobs. Almost his last letter - written only three days before his fatal motor-cycle accident - was to his former Tank Corps comrade, 'Posh' Palmer, whose life was in disarray and who had hinted at suicide. 'Many people oh excellent P. would like to make a complete break with the past - but pasts are unavoidable facts. You can (by the aid of a gas oven) make a complete break with your future . . . but that's all. And at Clouds Hill there are no gas ovens, so I shall look forward to seeing you this summer as soon as the plants have been watered. . .You will be a marvelously welcome person as and when you please to come.' Lawrence was much given to analysing his own personality and problems as well as those of others. In this area his principal confidante and confessor was someone many years older than he - Bernard Shaw's wife, Charlotte. Like Lawrence she was Anglo-Irish, had suffered under a formidable and domineering mother and had no intention of ever adding to the world's population. He wrote over three hundred letters to her between 1923 and 1935 (enough to fill a volume almost the size of War and Peace), of which I found space in my book for about sixty. Here are the most moving references to his beating and rape by the Turks at Dera'a in 1917, or to the conflict of identity between himself as ordinary serviceman Ross or Shaw and the high-flying Colonel Lawrence he had once been. Emotionally he was content with his decision to lose himself in the ranks, but constantly undermining his contentment was his reason, which, he wrote to her in September 1925, 'tells me all the while, dins into me day and night, a sense of how I've crashed my life and self and gone hopelessly wrong: and hopelessly it is, for I'm never coming back, and I want to. O dear O dear, what a coil.' But as well as the De Profundis note, he can strike happier ones. His letters teem with much lively discussion of plays and books, and deft descriptions of people whom he had met. This of Noel Coward in 1930 in a letter to Mrs Shaw: 'He is not deep but remarkable. A hasty kind of genius. I wonder what his origin is? His prose is quick, balanced, alive: like Congreve probably, in its day. He dignifies slang when he admits it. I liked him: and suspected that you probably do not. Both of us are right.' He took to Coward and even went once to one of his rehearsals. But his admiration for Coward's verbal dexterity brought out another self-undermining trait - that sense of inadequacy about his own writing which never left him. He wrote to him: 'Your work is like sword-play; as quick as light. Mine a slow painful mosaic of hard words stiffly cemented together.' If he is ever boring it is perhaps in this persistent denigration of his efforts as a writer. He will not accept anybody else's good opinion of his books Seven Pillars of Wisdom or The Mint. His rebuttals are excessive; by no standards are these works 'putrid rubbish'. Bernard Shaw, Mrs Shaw, E. M. Forster, F. L. Lucas, all beat against his self depreciation in vain. But his letters convince that this was not a pose to win greater praise. He wrote to Forster: 'You can rule a line, as hard as this pen-stroke, between the people who are artists and the rest of the world.' He knew on which side of the divide he saw himself. In the light of the denigration to which he was later subjected, this genuine wariness at over-praise by his friends is worth stressing. He was also not happy with any of the books written about him. Of Liddell Hart's biography published in 1934 he wrote to an American admirer: 'I'm rather regretting L-H's surrender to my "charm". Had he maintained his critical distance and examined my war-time strategy and tactics with a cool head, the results would have been interesting - to me, at any rate! He is a good military thinker. But instead there comes only Panegyric III' - Panegyrics I and II being the earlier efforts by Lowell Thomas and Robert Graves. I don't think he deplored panegyrics because they might lead to subsequent critical onslaughts; he simply wanted his part in events put into a reasonable and fair perspective. One reason why it has been difficult to achieve such a perspective on Lawrence is that when in the 1950s the battle was joined over his reputation by Richard Aldington and others the papers relating to his wartime role were still embargoed under the then fifty year rule. The jury was out with much of the real evidence unavailable. Perhaps the greatest excitement of my research was to go through the relevant files now available to any visitor to the Public Record Office at Kew and find not only a mass of documents relating to Lawrence and his activities but also many letters by him, some copy-typed at headquarters but not a few written in his own hand. These 'new' letters show an officer playing an important, indeed a key role in a complex and difficult war situation - the vital nature of his work as adviser to the principal Arab field commander Prince Feisal being well understood among his colleagues and superiors. From these letters I pick out one dated 12 February 1918, written after his ordeal at Dera 'a, a brutally cold winter, much achievement but also many setbacks. 'I'm in an extraordinary position just now,' he informs Brigadier-General Clayton at G.H.Q., 'vis-à-vis the Sherifs and the tribes, and sooner or later must go bust. I do my best to keep in the background, but cannot, and some day everybody will combine and down me. It is impossible for a foreigner to run another people of their own free will, indefinitely, and my innings has been a fairly long one.' In the same letter he agreed that he will see to it - a pretty high-grade mission to be given to a mere 'hostilities only' major not yet thirty - that the Arabs will not be deterred in their war effort by the recently released news of the Balfour Declaration: 'For the Jews, when I see Feisul [sic] next, I'll talk to him, and the Arab attitude shall be sympathetic, for the duration of the war at least.' (Look at the Middle East today and we realise these were deep waters indeed which he was obliged to stir.) He achieved this and much else, and, as everybody knows, his 'innings' continued until the Turkish collapse in October 1918: his war ends with a flurry of signals informing Allenby's G.H. Q. about the last stages of the Arab campaign and the seizure of Damascus. Lawrence once wrote: 'I don't think much of letters as an art form. Not even Fitzgerald, or Keats, or D. H. Lawrence or Gertrude Bell's. They always have something ragged, domestic, undressed about them.' Others, such as Liddell Hart, have claimed that he is assured of a place in literature just through his letters, but he made no such claim himself. It is perhaps precisely because he was not attempting to make literature that his letters, written uninhibitedly, with scarcely any corrections, often at length and to a remarkably wide range of people, shed so much light on so many aspects of his life. I have found it good to get to know him. Back to the contents page for this issue You can buy issues of the Journal
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