Demi-Coriolanus
T. E. Lawrence to his Biographers. By Robert Graves and Liddell Hart. (Cassell, 42s.) AT last these extraordinary letters, hitherto only available in the signed, liniited edition, in two volumes, published in 1939, come before the wider public. Had it been more widely known at the time Aldington's debunking biography came out, then the latter might have been dealt with far more effectively than it was. Robert Graves was the only authorised biographer of T. E. Lawrence during his lifetime (Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927). Liddell Hart was authorised to write a military history of the Arab Revolt in which Lawrence was at first sup- posed to appear only incidentally; but he found that Lawrence was the Arab Revolt; and so the book evolved into a biography after all (T. E. Lawrence : in Arabia and After, 1934).
This book gives both biographers' selections from Lawrence's comments on their accounts; both received frequent letters from him while writing their biographies, and both sent him type- scripts for elucidation and correction. The result is the most revealing and authoritative of all books about Lawrence—with David Garnett's edition of the letters and Professor Arnold Lawrence's important selection of letters to his brother, which was published last year.
Lawrence's friendship towards Graves--which was, for him, an unusually deep one—was largely founded on his admiration both for Graves's own work and his obvious, although as. yet un- realised, dedication to poetry as a way of life. He felt,' explains Graves, that. poets 'had some kind of secret which he might be able to learn for his own spiritual profit.' Lawrence felt him- self responsible for his younger friend's financial Welfare, and helped him often: he decided to authorise Lawrence and the Arabs because Graves was in difficulties, and the book was, as Graves tells us, purely a hack job—though done as decently as he could do it. Lawrence never mentioned the name of Lid- dell Hart to Graves until the end of his life; he also concealed from Liddell Hart the fact that he had given his blessing to Lawrence and the Arabs. He liked to keep his friendships sealed off from one another—deep down in his nature lay a paranoid horror of his friends getting to- gether and rumbling him : his secret was that he could believe in nothing.
There are remarkably few discrepancies be- -
tween the two biographies, although they were written seven years apart and from very different points of view. Aldington's attempted exposure of Lawrence as a military charlatan, which has gained wide currency among the ignorant, is as effectively shattered here as it ever will be. Graves is a conscientious and intuitive historian with a good nose for fraud and much more mili- tary knowledge and know-how than Aldington; had he found what Aldington claimed to find he would certainly have shelved the project. Nor- is it likely that Liddell Hart, whose ideas only subsequent military events have ever really en- thusiastically supported, would have been taken in. He did not hero-worship Lawrence; he wrote on him because he saw what his contribution to the science of modern warfare had been.
But the most affecting as well as the most re- vealing aspect of T. E. Lawrence to his Biographers is Graves's stand against his former friend and benefactor's almost deliberate de- generation into a tasteless crypto-Fascist: the fellow of All Souls, who had changed his accent to what Graves aptly calls 'garage English,' and whose grin flashed gold fillings.
There is little doubt that Lawrence would have developed into a sinister political figure, re- nouncing the quietness of his retirement in his cottage on Cloud's Hill (he chose, msthetically, the nastiest possible building in a beautiful county) for the excitement of helping or even leading Fascists or people like them. Law- rence, with his enormous powers and what Graves calls his 'serpent cunning,' would have shown up Mosley even more than history has already so cruelly done.
In a conversation in 1934 he told Liddell Hart that he would not help the Fascists to power, but that if they gained it he would become `dictator of the press' for a fortnight. When Liddell Hart questioned the wisdom of suppress- ing even the yellow press, he answered that it would do no harm. He went on to say that there was undoubtedly a call for, a new kind of leadership, and that this would stop being Fascist as soon as it came to power.. This remark is, of course, as revealing of what Lawrence had become as anything he ever said—it will not bear comment. Liddell Hart finally asked him if he would consider accepting the leadership of any such movement, and while he recorded that Lawrence said he would not, he also noted his own conviction that Lawrence was changing— `more than he is conscious of.'
This aspect of Lawrence's final years may have been minimised in most of the official literature about him. For example, the nature of his asso- ciation with Henry Williamson, an enthusiastic authoritarian from the early Thirties, has been somewhat played down.
Yet I have heard it said, on excellent evidence, that at the time of his death Lawrence was actively considering accepting an invitation to displace Mosley in his position as Fascist leader. There was really no other direction in which he could go.
Lawrence's letters of the early Twenties show him to have been a literary critic of understand- ing, subtlety and penetration—there is in a letter to Graves, for example, as perceptive a para- graph on E. E. Cummings as I have ever read. But by 1932, when sent some critical work that Graves had been doing with Laura Riding, his reaction was as aggressively and deliberately low- brow as his accent was deliberately plebeian: . . . I'm a fitter, very keen . . on engines, but in no way abstract.'
Lawrence could never give 'much of himself away to other people, although he was free with money (as, for example, to Graves), and in this way he was ungenerous and, in an important sense, anti-creative. He lacked the capacity to love other people; and yet he was never stupid enough for long enough to love himself with the wholehearted pleasure of an egoist. Retreat into the heartless vacuum of power-pofitics would have been a classical escape—even if it had brought him disgrace.
His paranoid secrecy probably prevented him from having any kind of realised sexual life, and produced the slyness and deviousness that were his most unattractive—and frightening—features: Graves speaks of 'a sort of street-urchin fur- tiveness.'
This book vindicates Lawrence as the leader of the Arab Revolt, and shows him to have had many remarkable qualities: sensitivity, kindness, courage and the capacity to inspire great devo- tion. It also traces with depressing clarity— perhaps for the first time—the moral disintegra- tion of the only genuine hero-figure of this cen- tury. It tells us, really, all that we need to know —and, in one way, more than we wanted to know: that behind this inspiring and bewitching mask there was, after all, nothing.
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
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