Winston Churchill wrote that Seven Pillarsranked with the greatest books ever written in the English language and called it ‘an epic, a prodigy, a tale of torment’. 9The book also received high praise from distinguished figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and many others. Lawrence wrote Vyvyan Richards in 1923 that he was aware that it was ‘a good book’ but added that it ‘was not as good as it should have been’ 10– that is, it was not as good, he felt, as Moby Dickor War and Peace.It was an aspect of Lawrence’s competitive nature that he should aspire to equal the works of Tolstoy, Melville and others, and it was also typical that he should feel that he had fallen short. Indeed, he seemed to grow less and less satisfied with Seven Pillarsover the years, frequently referring to it as ‘my shit’. He was convinced that it was a failure, and would accept no praise for it, dismissing any approving comments as flattery, and considering them a tribute to the legend he had become. He was partly, but not entirely correct in this. Seven Pillarsis a masterpiece of technical ability: it displays a wit and a mastery of language which is far out of the ordinary. Yet it has its faults. Lawrence himself commented that it had no unity, was too discursive, dispersed, heterogeneous: ‘I’ve shot into it,’ he wrote, ‘as a builder into his yard, all the odds and ends of ideas which came to me during those years.’ 11Lawrence was a superb descriptive writer, but the narrative of Seven Pillarsis occasionally so oppressively overwhelmed with detail that the story itself is obscured: ‘the paint,’ as St John Philby observed, ‘is too thick on the canvas.’ 12Lawrence’s passion for concealment and whimsicality is counter-productive, because writing is about the clear communication of ideas, whereas some of his passages are opaque. The book’s greatest fault, however, is its lack of spontaneity: Lawrence’s emotions seem artificial – there is no ecstasy, little real passion: there are likes and dislikes, but little genuine love or hate. Lawrence has often been called ‘a poet’, yet he wrote almost no poems. He became a ‘man of letters’ after the war, but he was never a ‘writer’ in the sense that his friends Forster, Hardy, Sassoon, Graves, Shaw and others were writers. If he had not been ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Seven Pillarswould have remained a remarkable book, but it certainly would not have had the same impact on the world: The Mint,his second book, might not have been published at all. He himself suspected this: when he tried to submit articles to various newspapers and magazines later under an assumed name, they were rejected. Lawrence was a famous man who had one magnificent story to tell, who told it magnificently. He found himself a niche among the great artists and writers of the age, but was never quite certain that he belonged there.
Indeed, Lawrence’s post-war career is in many senses an essay in the exigencies of fame – a phenomenon which was perhaps less well known or understood in his era than it is today, in the age of television. At the end of the millennium we are familiar with personalities who are ‘famous for being famous’, as the saying goes, and we are aware that fame obscures all truth and rides in an ethereal dimension of self-perpetuating fantasy. We know now that fame need have little connection with talent or accomplishment, and can often be entirely the result of presentation. Other than stars of the screen, Lawrence was perhaps the first international megastar of the century, and ‘Law-rence of Arabia’ was created by its first major publicity campaign. Lawrence’s fame began almost as soon as he arrived back in Britain after the war, when he was interviewed by newspaper correspondents who found him surprisingly ‘unassuming’ for a hero. They did not know, of course, that this apparently guileless exterior had been carefully cultivated by Lawrence from childhood and, coupled with a sense that there was more concealed which he was too modest to reveal, was guaranteed to pique their interest – as, by Lawrence’s own admission, it was fully intended to do. Even at school this quality had been noticed by his teachers: time and time again it had worked to Lawrence’s advantage: with Hogarth, with Feisal, with Allenby, and now with the press. Predictably, they became avid for more and more about the strange ‘Colonel Lawrence’. It was in 1919, though, when the American journalist Lowell Thomas opened at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with an illustrated lecture, eventually entitled ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’, that the myth of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was firmly established.
In 1918, Thomas had been commissioned by the American government to produce material which would generate enthusiasm for the war among the American people. Finding that the Western Front, with its dirt, disease and monotonous stalemate, presented no image worth carrying home, Thomas had been steered by John Buchan, Britain’s propaganda chief, to the more photogenic Eastern front. In March 1918 Thomas had met Lawrence in Jerusalem, and the arch-propagandist in Lawrence had immediately recognized the efficacy of publicity. He had arranged for Thomas to visit him in Aqaba, where he had not only posed for him happily in Arab costume, but had succeeded in getting him permission to film the Bedu. Thomas wrote later that it was not Lawrence himself, but his fellow British officers who tended to be camera-shy. Although Thomas returned to the United States too late for his material to perform its original function, his post-war presentation in London was a phenomenal success. It quickly boosted Lawrence to superstar status: in Britain alone it was watched by more than a million people, including the King – who asked for a private showing. It succeeded by harnessing a series of heroic archetypes which appealed deeply to the subliminal consciousness of a people whose nation had just survived a devastating war. In a very real sense, ‘Colonel Lawrence’ redeemed the souls and the seemingly pointless deaths of thousands of Britain’s young men. Thomas claimed that Lawrence had been regarded by the Arabs as ‘a sort of supernatural being’ who had been sent from heaven to deliver them from their oppressors; he declared that Lawrence had done more to unify the Arabs than anyone since the age of the ‘Great Caliphs’. Lawrence had achieved this, he said, by ‘transforming himself into an Arab’ and wandering around the Arabian deserts with only two companions, persuading individual tribesmen to join the revolt by pure rhetoric. This ‘youth’ had, he said, become virtually the ruler of the Holy Land of the Arabs and the commander-in-chief of thousands of Bedu. It was a compelling picture: the messianic nature of the story was just what the audience wanted to hear. It also expressed precisely the kind of mythological, archetypal images in which Lawrence himself had always liked to deal. In early 1920 he wrote to Sir Archibald Murray, his former Chief in Cairo, who objected to certain comments Thomas had made about him in the lecture, noting that he himself had to ‘sit still’ while Thomas called him ‘Prince of Mecca’ and ‘other beastly things’, 13yet a year earlier Lawrence had announced to the King of England that he was ‘a prince among the Arabs’ and even used the title ‘Prince of Mecca’ deliberately in the 1922 edition of Who’s Who. The truth was that Lawrence loved Thomas’s lecture, was fascinated by it, went to see it several times, and hated himself for loving it. Lawrence called the publicity ‘rank’, yet when Thomas asked him what his attitude to mis-statements would be, he answered that he would neither confirm nor deny them. Thomas, who, unlike Lawrence’s later biographers, had actually met Lawrence during the campaign, wrote that he revelled in being the leader of an army, a strategist, and a maker of history: ‘he got a real thrill,’ he wrote, ‘out of the kudos that accrued from his success.’ 14