Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM” by T.E. (Thomas Edward) Lawrence. (Completed 1922; first published in a very limited edition in 1926; first pubic edition 1935)

 

 

 

            Read carefully this paragraph  which opens Chapter 56 of Book Five of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

            “ Now I had been four months in Arabia continually on the move. In the last four weeks I had ridden fourteen hundred miles by camel, not sparing myself anything to advance the war; but I refused to spend a single superfluous night with my familiar vermin. I wanted a bath, and something with ice in it to drink: to change these clothes, all sticking to my saddle sores in filthiness: to eat something more tractable than green date and camel sinew. I got through again to the Inland Water Transport and talked like Chrysostom. It had no effect so I became vivid. Then, once more, they cut me off. I was growing very vivid, when friendly northern accents from the military exchange floated down the line: ‘It’s no bluidy good, sir, talking to them fookin water boogers.’ ”

I take this paragraph to be typical of T.E. Lawrence’s prose style. There is some hard, sordid reality in the mention of hunger, the saddle sores, the filthy clothes and the vermin. This is credible and probably truthful. But there is also the self-praise and false modesty. He tells us he has ridden fourteen hundred miles “not sparing myself anything to advance the war”, and apparently he is capable of speaking like Chrysostom, although this reference could, like so many of Lawrence’s historical or pseudo-Classical references, be a “camp” joke to please fellow Oxonian readers. But it will serve to impress, as erudition, any of the hoi-polloi who might be reading. As for the hoi-polloi, well, they’re there to be caricatured, aren’t they? I understand that “bloody”, “fucking” and “buggers” were words that would have been difficult to publish in 1926. But Lawrence is signalling the inferior status of the “friendly northern accents” when he purports to report the words as “ ‘It’s no bluidy good, sir, talking to them fookin water boogers.’ ” Our social inferiors are good for comic effect, right? And we can always impress them by using recherche words. Why “vivid” instead of “livid”, by the way?

 

 

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) is a very contested book now. Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence apparently took copious notes during his Arabian service in 1917-18 and claimed he had worked them up into a full book by 1920. But, so the story goes, he lost most of this manuscript on a train so he had to begin again. (There is no real evidence that this “lost” manuscript ever existed.) He completed this overlong book in 1922, and allowed a very limited edition to be printed in 1926; but it was not released to the general public. Instead, by 1928, he produced a very much abridged version called Revolt in the Desert, which was published for the general public. The full text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published publicly only in 1935, a few months after the 46-year-old Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident. Its title is essentially meaningless, but is the type of title that appealed to Lawrence because it produced a spurious sense of gravitas. It is a quotation from the Biblical Book of Wisdom wherein “Wisdom has built her house on seven pillars”. Lawrence was going to use the title for a planned earlier book, when he was a rookie archaeologist and before he was involved in the war. It was going to be about seven great ancient Middle Eastern cities. That book was never written, so he carried this irrelevant title over to his war book. He tries a little feebly to justify it, as when the last Book of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is called “The House is Perfected”, concerning the capture of Damascus and the defeat of Turkish forces. It baffles me how on Earth anyone, even then, could have considered anything to have been “perfected”, what with the chaos and the endless disputes that followed the taking of Damascus. But, given that Seven Pillars of Wisdom is subtitled  “A Triumph”, Lawrence wanted to give his book a triumphant ending.

With an introductory chapter and then 10 “Books”, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an unnecessarily long work – running to over 700 pages in the fat de luxe editions, but running to only 560 pages in the 1976 edition I bought years ago: an unabridged edition with smaller print and more lines per page. In his ten “Books”, Lawrence gives a narrative that runs from the first suggestion that an “Arab revolt” could help the British army in fighting the Turks, to the taking of Damascus when the whole war was nearly over. In between there are Books on blowing up railway lines (especially Books 3 and 8); the taking of Aqaba in Book 4; a campaign using Arabs around the Dead Sea, which was ordered by the British General Edmund Allenby, in Book 7; and the way Lawrence’s Arabs were largely used as a diversion when Allenby’s regular forces advanced in Books 8 and 9. One gets used to Lawrence’s sometimes eccentric – or archaic – spelling. Aqaba is “Akaba”, Bedouins are “Beduins” and Beirut is “Beyrout”. But these might have been standard spellings at the time.

Now why am I examining this particular book?

Because, as so often with these “Something Old” sections of my blog, it has sat unread on my shelves for years and I decided finally that I should either crack it or throw it out.

In Lawrence’s lifetime, Seven Pillars of Wisdom was praised by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves and Winston Churchill as a true epic bound to become a classic. But it is very hard to see it in those terms now, not only because of Lawrence’s strained and pompous language, often indulging in unnecessary archaisms, but because of the way history has shown us that we now have to interpret very differently the political, social and nationalist topics that Lawrence touches upon. And we are more aware of Lawrence’s curious temperament and often his economy with the truth.

One major problem is Lawrence’s deeply-embedded racism. We are aware that many of his characterisations of other ethnicities were simply the standard attitudes of Europeans at the time he was writing. Even so, Lawrence’s racial prejudices are so strong that they distort his whole attitude towards the events he claims to be reporting. One lesser prejudice – but still notable – is his typically English dismissive attitude towards the French, as drawn in his dealings with the French Colonel Bremond, where he says that “the two races worked ill together on a great undertaking” (Book 2, Chapter 21); or where he blames the French and their military supremo Foch for the static trench warfare and its meat-grinder in Europe’s Western Front, claiming this “would not represent the British attitude” (Book 3, Chapter 33) – a rather clumsy way of extricating England from its own complicity in the nature of the war.

More pervasive, however, are his frequent slurs on non-Europeans. Syrians are “an ape-like people having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow” (Introductory Book, Chapter 4). He claims that half of Turkish prisoners taken by British forces had “unnaturally acquired venereal disease” and were habitual buggers (Introductory Book, Chapter 6). He tells us gleefully that many solitary Arab shepherds “turned dangerously savage, more animal than man, haunting the flocks, and finding the satisfaction of their adult appetites in them, to the exclusion of more licit affections.” (Book 3, Chapter 34). His general characterisation of the Bedouins [the very people he is supposedly helping to liberate from Turkish rule] is very dismissive: “They are absolute slaves to their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars of tobacco…. Their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation…If forced into civilised life they would have succumbed like any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation.” (Book 3, Chapter 37). He encounters a Syrian and characterises him as being “of the queasy Syrian race; jealous; hostile to merit, or to its acknowledgement”. (Book 4, Chapter 40). In Book Five, Chapter 58, Lawrence classifies all the tribes and ethnicities of the Middle East, speaking contemptuously of some of them.

Most notorious, however, is his rant about black Africans in Book 3, Chapter 29, where he writes “Something hurtful to my pride, disagreeable, rose at the sight of these lower forms of life. Their existence struck a servile reflection upon our human kind: the style in which a God would look on us; and to make use of them, to lie under an avoidable obligation to them, seemed to me shameful. It was as with the negroes, tom-tom playing themselves to red madness each night under the ridge. Their faces, being clearly different from our own, were tolerable; but it hurt that they should possess exact counterparts of all our bodies.” This is effectively a refusal to accept Africans as fellow human beings; and Lawrence’s statement that it “hurt” him to know Africans shared the same biological reality with Europeans shows us the depth of his neuroses. [For the record, the African-American novelist James Baldwin quoted these phrases – with justifiable disgust - in his long essay about American movies The Devil Finds Work]. In spite of his pretensions to be liberating Arabs, Lawrence still speaks in the voice of an imperialist, basically seeing all non-European tribes and peoples as his inferiors. Perhaps one could read the same dismissiveness into a sequence (Book 5, Chapter 63) where Lawrence claims to have had an epiphany as he listens to an old Arab man praise the love of God, and Lawrence reacts with surprise that an Arab can relate God with love. The narrowness of his vision has deprived him of the awareness that other peoples have systems of thought and belief as complex as his own.

If chronic racism turns this book into a museum piece rather than a living text, we are also aware of a strong strain of bad faith in Lawrence’s writing. In May 1916, before Lawrence was involved in his Arabian campaign, English and French diplomats has signed a secret agreement commonly known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. The agreement was ratified by cabinet ministers of the English and French governments. It set out the two countries’ real war aims in the Middle East. France would control Lebanon and Syria while England would control Palestine and all of Arabia, allowing Britain to take all the oil which it sought. (Tsarist) Russia was also promised some spoils by the agreement. The idea of Arab independence was not on the cards. This secret agreement was first made public at the end of 1917 by Russia’s new Soviet government, who hoped to embarrass the Western allies. Although he repeatedly denies it, Lawrence was fully aware of the Sykes-Picot agreement before he even began on his enterprise of stirring the Arabs into revolt. In other words, he was aware, even as he was inciting his Arab forces to fight for their liberation, that England and France already had in place their scheme to carve up the Middle East between them.

At various points in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence rather unconvincingly pleads his innocence. His Introductory Chapter claims “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make the likeness of the former world they knew.” But remember, this is an ex post facto claim, written after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. Lawrence claims to have believed that “the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation – by us or others – in Western Asia of unduly ‘colonial’ schemes of exploitation.” (Book 2, Chapter 21). In Book 4, Chapter 48 he shows that he was fully aware of “a treaty… by which France, England and Russia agreed to annex…. promised areas [i.e. areas promised to the Arabs] and to establish their respective spheres of influence over the rest…. I could see that if we won the war the promises to the Arabs were dead paper. Had I been an honourable adviser I would have sent my men home, and not let them risk their lives.” But he then claims “In revenge I vowed to make the Arab Revolt the engine of its own success… and vowed to lead it so madly in the final victory that expediency should counsel to the Powers a fair settlement of the Arabs’ moral claims.” So, he ingeniously claims “the issue of the fraud was beside the point.” In Book 6, Chapter 81 he manages to block out the reality of what he is doing so that he can pretend he is not working in the interests of British (and French) colonialism:  “When necessary, I had done my share of proselytizing fatigues, converting as best I could; conscious all the time of my strangeness, and of the incongruity of an alien’s advocating national liberty. The war for me was a struggle to side-track thought, to get into the people’s attitude of accepting the revolt naturally and trustingly.  I had to persuade myself that the British Government could really keep the spirit of its promises.” He admits his military failures at the end of Book 7, Chapter 90, adding how fatigued he was by “the rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind’s habit: that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress: with behind it a sense that the ‘promises’ on which the Arabs worked were worth what their armed strength would be when the moment of fulfilment came. We had deluded  ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply.” One discovers that much of Book 9 is taken up with his misgivings and disillusion, frequently seeing himself as a fraud… and by this stage in his stretched narrative admitting that the war against the Turks was overwhelmingly won by the regular British and Commonwealth armies, and not by his small and relatively peripheral Arab force. “Among the Arabs I was the disillusioned, the sceptic, who envied their cheap belief,” he says in Book 9, Chapter 99. “Yet I cannot put down my acquiescence in the Arab fraud to weakness of character or native hypocrisy: though of course I must have had some tendency, some aptitude for deceit, or I would not have deceived men so well, and persisted two years in bringing to success a deceit which others had framed and set afoot,” he says in Book 9, Chapter 100.

Much of this reads as public breast-beating, to absolve himself from the fact of having knowingly misled his Arab followers with an idea of Arab independence which he knew would not be fulfilled. 

 

If his deep racism and his bad faith are what most alienate the modern reader from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, there are other major problems. Lawrence has a tendency to praise himself while pretending to be modest – “backing into the limelight” in effect. A typical example is at the end of Book 7, Chapter 86, where he is talking about a skirmish which he and his forces had won: “Headquarters loved it, and innocently, to crown the jest, offered me a decoration on the strength of it. We should have more bright breasts in the army if each man was able without witnesses, to write out his own despatch.” Note how he brushes off as a “jest” having been given a medal, the better to show how little he cared for decorations… but [his real aim] he has still told us that he won a medal.

With one exception, there is little real humour in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, apart from accounts of crude horseplay and Lawrence’s joshing with Arab troops. The exception is in Book 6, Chapter 78 where Lawrence tells us that he failed to blow up a train and then had to stay in place, pretending to be an Arab peasant and in full sight, as the train rolled past him with Turks waving in a friendly way as they passed, rather than shooting him. Yes, it is funny although of course it is also self-praising – here is Lawrence the Englishman with his sang froid, stoically riding out the moment when he should have been a sitting duck.

Or did he so behave? For there are many stories he tells that sound very like fiction. Take the very implausible tale he spins in Book 4, Chapter 53 of somersaulting over his camel in the midst of a skirmish and lying calmly where he fell, reciting a poem. Sometimes, too, he appears to tell a detailed story to disguise a failure. In Book 2 Chapter 26, he tells us of the impressive column of various tribes he had assembled, all swearing fealty to Feisal, the man whom he had picked out as the most capable leader of a potential Arab revolt; but he uses this event – the gathering of the tribes -  to make excuses for arriving late to what was supposed to be a combined operation with the navy against the Turks. Because Lawrence’s contingent was late and did not turn up to the confrontation, the whole enterprise was carried out by the navy on its own. The reader is also often aware of how “performative” [to use a modern term] is so much that Lawrence narrates. He tells the story of how, in order to prevent a blood feud,  he had to kill an Arab who had killed somebody from another tribe [this episode was played up in David Lean’s often purely fictitious film Lawrence of Arabia]. But read Lawrence’s account of this execution (last paragraph of Book 3, Chapter 21) and you see he concentrates on himself and his feelings – a piece of sheer theatricality.

Warfare is always a bloody affair and always involves violence and murder. It is certainly true that, in the Middle East in the First World War, Turkish forces committed atrocities. Lawrence records one in Book 4 Chapter 52, where Turks cut the throats of old men, women and children whom they found in an otherwise deserted village. The problem is, though, that there is a distinct element of sadism in some of Lawrence’s own actions, involving what amount to atrocities in two cases. In Book 4, Chapter 51 he writes in a flippant tone about allowing the mutilation of a herding boy, who might have given the alarm to the Turks, when his men crossed the boy’s fields. He does nothing to restrain the Arabs, who are presumably under his leadership, when they massacre men and women after a train has been derailed. (Book 5, Chapter 66) Most egregiously in one case he personally permitted the killing of prisoners. Taking a Turkish position “by my order, we took no prisoners, for the only time in our war.” (Book 10, Chapter 117). Early in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence remarks “I hated responsibility… in all my life objects had been gladder to me than persons, and ideas than objects”. (Book 2, Chapter 17). Doesn’t this at once suggest somebody indifferent to other people?

And now we come to the element in this narrative which makes elderly colonels harrumph and get angry at the thought that such matters should be mentioned in relation to that great icon Lawrence of Arabia. It is quite clear that Lawrence’s sexual tendencies were homosexual – a matter in itself which should no longer be seen as a moral fault. I do not write this as a matter of idle speculation. I am here considering what Lawrence’s own text either says or implies. And in considering his sexual orientation, I can only conclude that in Lawrence’s particular case his homosexuality also involved a degree of paedophilia and certainly some sadomasochism. Readers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom will know that it is prefaced by a poem (actually a prose statement by Lawrence teased into a “poem” by Robert Graves). The “poem” is addressed to “S.A.” who has almost certainly been identified as the adolescent Arab boy Selim Ahmed who was part of Lawrence’s Arab entourage. Consider if you will the lines “Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, / Our brief wage / Ours for the moment.” I won’t insult you by spelling out what this means.

Lawrence has a predilection for telling us about the homosexual habits of young Arab men. In Book 1, Chapter 1 Lawrence refers to Arabs who refuse to use “public women” to slake their lust “our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies… Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort.” Note their male bodies are “clean” as opposed to the bodies of women. And again, do I really have to spell out the meaning of “supreme embrace”?

In Book 4, Chapter 40, Lawrence speaks of two young Arabs in his entourage thus: “They were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent, they were hot and unashamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation, like marriage.” So obviously, selon Lawrence,  marriage (between men and women) is less spiritual than – and therefore inferior to – relationships between men.

As for sadomasochism, consider Book 6, Chapter 80. It gives a detailed account of Lawrence, caught out in a spying mission, being tortured and nearly raped by a Turkish Bey and his men. Lawrence does not say that he was anally raped. That was something he claimed privately in a letter to George Bernard Shaw’s wife, but obviously he decided to keep this detail from readers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Even so, there is an odd sadomasochist twist to this chapter. He says he was kicked, beaten and otherwise tortured. But when a corporal had him down and kicked him “I remembered smiling at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me; and then he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin.” Getting an erection while being beaten up - isn’t this almost a textbook example of sadomasochism?

It would take a psychiatrist to unpick all the curious kinks there were in Lawrence’s psyche. There is a curious dichotomy in him of “purity” and willed degradation, and despite his masochistic tendencies he had a curious horror of being touched. As he says in Book 8 Chapter 97: “When combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand, I was finished. The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat: perhaps because one such terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact: or because I so reverenced my wits and despised my body that I would not be beholden to the second for the life of the first.”

By now, if you are not yet asleep, you will note that I have marked T.E.Lawrence as a racist, a man working in bad faith, a boaster pretending to modesty, a potential sadist and a man with a deeply-troubling sexual identity. But before you cry “foul”, please note that I am drawing all these conclusions from Lawrence’s own words. If you wish to dispute what I’ve said, then I invite you to read all of Seven Pillars of Wisdom yourself and check the evidence, tedious though reading the book is.

Yet after the aforementioned things I have said, I still acknowledge that, for all his flaws and probable untruths, Lawrence did achieve something and did help create a force that had a small but interesting part in the defeat of what remained of the Turkish Empire. Bear in mind too that in 1917-18, when all his interactions with Arabs took place, he was only in his late twenties. It is extraordinary that such a young man and a foreigner was able to gather together the Arab force he did.

It is fair to notice, too, that he does not praise only himself. He acknowledges other people involved in the war in the Middle East. In early sections of the book, he thanks many British officials and soldiers who formulated the idea of an Arab revolt before he was involved in it, and he does note that the strategy of blowing up Turkish railway lines was already in place before he himself adopted that strategy. In Book 5 he gives credit to two sergeants, an Australian called Lewis and an Englishman called Stokes, for their major role in an attack on a Turkish train. And especially in Book 5, Chapters 60 and 61 he gives accounts of other explosives experts who contributed to disrupting Turkish lines of supply. He also shows awareness that the war in the Middle East was won by British and Commonwealth troops, especially in the last book, Book 10. Lawrence’s Arab followers did sabotage work in the later stages of the war (cutting telegraph wires; blowing up bridges) but they were merely auxiliaries to Allenby’s forces, and RFC aircraft carried out the most important bombing raids. Nearly always, he speaks in admiring terms of General Allenby, although this may have been in the interests of getting approval for his work. (Allenby was still very much alive when Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published. He died in 1936, one year after Lawrence died.) In Book 6, Chapter 81, Lawrence says that for him, Allenby’s entering the Jaffa Gate (in Jerusalem) “for me was the supreme moment of the war.” In Book 5, Chapter 56, Lawrence writes a positive assessment of Allenby when he met first him, though he does interestingly admit that in assessing Lawrence “Allenby could not make out how much [I was ] was genuine performer and how much charlatan.” Many others have had the same uncertainty about Lawrence ever since.

Also, despite all his evasions and literary dandyism, he does produce some convincing reportage of travel, as in the account of a hard desert journey (Book 4, Chapter 42); or the sequence, on the road to Aqaba, of eating greasy rice, freshly-killed onyx and antelope flesh (Book 4, Chapter 46). Likewise, he does note some of his military failures, especially in Book 6 (“The Raid Upon the Bridges”) where he focuses on a failed attempt to blow up bridges that would have prevented any tactical Turkish retreat and that would have allowed Allenby’s forces to trap the Turks earlier. And, perhaps most refreshing of all, in Book 4 he does admit that the taking of Aqaba was essentially a walk-in upon a small Turkish garrison - quite unlike the heroic image of an Arab horde galloping from the desert to the sea, as seen in David Lean’s spectacular movie.

How does history now judge Lawrence’s actions? Ambiguously, I would say. In some ways he was courageous, in others devious and disingenuous. With regard to the historical results of his actions, it is hard to see that he improved the Middle East in any way. As for Seven Pillars of Wisdom itself, it is no classic but a document of its time whose historical truths have to be picked out from a mess of pretentious prose, much obfuscation, a muddled and overlong narrative, and the author’s sense of self-importance.

I wish you luck if you try to read it.