April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 43

By Paul Alkon

Churchill predicted that “Lawrence’s name will live in English letters…in the traditions of the Royal Air Force…in the annals of war and in the legends of Arabia.” Churchill’s Few have outshone Lawrence, but he retains an honorable place in RAF history for helping to develop fast boats for rescuing downed aircrew at sea.

In the annals of war Lawrence remains noteworthy as a warrior-diplomat. While fighting with the Arabs against the Turkish army, he became a theoretician of what we now call asymmetric warfare: using a small force to tie down, demoralize, and perhaps ultimately defeat a larger force. Lawrence did not invent guerrilla warfare, but his success against the Turks earned a wide audience for his articulation in Seven Pillars of Wisdom of principles governing such campaigns—principles studied by the likes of Mao Tse-Tung and still included in the curricula of war colleges and military academies in the United States and elsewhere. Though Lawrence never targeted civilians, his theories of asymmetric warfare remain relevant as we now learn how to cope with horribly expanded versions of that way of war.

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Also of enduring relevance is Lawrence’s diplomatic role trying—often vainly—to harmonize the aspirations and outlooks of societies with apparently irreconcilable differences. Lawrence dismissed his campaign as a side show of a side show. Whatever its actual importance, there are few better ways to start getting historical perspective on Middle Eastern problems—perhaps for us no longer a side show—than by study of Lawrence’s involvement in a coalition war with Arabs, his thwarted advocacy of Arab nationalism at the Versailles Peace Conference, and his work as an adviser to Churchill preparing for the 1921 Cairo Conference that shaped the Middle Eastern politics with which we are now so deeply engaged.

In English letters, Seven Pillars has an enduring but uncomfortable place. In civilian schools it fits neither the old nor the new curricula. It is too much a work of military history and theory to fit into literature courses. It is too much a work of introspective autobiography, too much an artful effort to shape events into a tale with an epic structure redolent of Homer, and too much a travel narrative to fit into history courses. It does not match current pieties of cultural studies courses because of its oblique and often ambiguous treatment of sexual issues, empire, nationalism, and European perceptions of “oriental” cultures. Neither its beautifully lucid though intricate prose nor its imposing length suit students who live in a world of sound-bites and DVDs. But Lawrence is lucky. He has never been reduced to one more tame item on reading lists. Seven Pillars is mostly read by people who want the challenge of a difficult, disturbing, unconventional text. For those who tackle it the rewards are high. The tale is exciting. Lawrence’s strange but compelling personality as depicted in its pages is fascinating. The borderline between fact and fiction sometimes blurs in ways that foreshadow our postmodern mentalities. Above all, Seven Pillars is among the handful of masterpieces that best reflect the shattering impact of world war that became a tragic paradigm of life in the twentieth century.

In the legends of Arabia Lawrence endures, but not as an Arabian legend. He created a European legend about Arabia, about how we view our relationship to all the cultures we lump under the term “Arabia.” He lives among our legends of Arabia which, like other legends, do not always provide the most accurate view of reality. But that is not the purpose of legends. As with all the best legends, Lawrence’s varies with the telling and means different things to different audiences. He ensured that it emerged in myriad shapes that could never be altogether reconciled. Artful ambiguities, contradictions, and reticence inform the style of Seven Pillars. Lawrence fed different versions of key episodes of his life to his early biographers who, like their successors, added information, inferences, and theories. Around the known facts of Lawrence’s life, as around a kind of human Rorshach ink blot, readers and writers have constructed various figures endowed with a mythic force no less useful for our time than the legends of King Arthur’s failed Camelot once were. And this is exactly what Lawrence—the student of Crusader castles and medieval literature who carried with him on campaign a copy of Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur—would have wanted.

After World War Is slaughter, people hungered for a romantic, individual hero. From this partly self-created image, Lawrence fled into the ranks of the Royal Air Force, thus enhancing the legend and making it more complex by combining in one figure the fearless, triumphant (British) leader of exotic tribes in desert warfare with the shattered man no less traumatized and mentally crippled than so many other ruined survivors of the Great War, albeit a tormented intellectual who could give voice to his and their agony by writing a great work of literature.

By fostering this appealing legend, Lawrence became a symbol of much that is best as well as much that is least understood, most confused, and most broken in ourselves and our era. Both the legendary Lawrence of Arabia and the real Thomas Edward Lawrence will always warrant attention from those who turn for understanding of their own and the human condition to history, to biography, and to brilliant writing. Among those most willing to do so, surely, are readers of this journal devoted to a kindred but far greater soldier, diplomat, and author who mastered politics, earned a Nobel Prize in literature, and created the reality that has now become an enduring and inspiring legend of his and Britain’s finest hour.