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Lawrence of Arabia and the Shaws (T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw , Volume 4, 1929–35, edited by Jeremy and Nicole Wilson)

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 32; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.32.1.0182

1529-1480

Stephen E. Tabachnick,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Owing to the efforts of scholars in many fields, including military history, political science, and English literature, T. E. Lawrence—or Lawrence of Arabia, as he is more widely known—has become justifiably celebrated in academe for many achievements, including and ranging beyond his successful leadership of the Bedouin tribes against the Turks during World War I. For those interested in literature, those achievements include Seven Pillars of Wisdom, detailing his Arabian adventures and his thoughts about them; The Mint, his record of his subsequent service in the RAF as an airman, or private; and his prose translation of Homer's Odyssey. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in particular, was highly praised by the significant writers of his own period, including Thomas Hardy, Robert Graves, E. M. Forster, and Bernard Shaw, and it continues to be studied, as a steady stream of Ph.D. dissertations emanating from universities around the world demonstrates.The ongoing publishing and editing project of authorized Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson and his wife Nicole, whose purpose is to publish all of Lawrence's writings in authoritative editions, will help keep Lawrence in the academic spotlight for some time to come. In their four volumes of correspondence between Lawrence, G.B.S. and Charlotte Shaw, the Wilsons have gathered much unpublished as well as previously published correspondence, some of which is available only in British and American rare-books libraries, and for that alone we must be very grateful. Even material available in other previously published but not always easy to access venues is handily brought together in this final volume, as in the earlier volumes in the set. The Wilsons' previous volumes of Lawrence/Shaw correspondence are divided into the years 1922–26, 1927, and 1928. As in all of their published volumes of correspondence between Lawrence and his literary friends—including, for instance, Henry Williamson, E. M. Forster, and F. L. Lucas—the Wilsons have kept their editorial apparatus to a tasteful minimum. At the same time, Jeremy Wilson's introduction to the volume and the commentaries, as well as the footnotes on individual letters and other items interspersed in this as in all the correspondence volumes, are very informative and valuable. (One small mistake in this volume, however, occurs on page 22, where Robert Graves's birth and death dates of 1895 and 1985 are wrongly stated.)Shaw's friendship with Lawrence had the complexity characteristic of many relationships between writers with strong personalities, in this case, an eccentric amateur writer of genius lacking confidence and a famous, experienced professional. Perhaps most important, Shaw found Lawrence unusual enough as a personality to provide him with the basis for the affectionate caricature that appears as the character Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek in Shaw's Too True to Be Good; and Lawrence's personality certainly influenced Shaw's Saint Joan as well. Shaw apparently accepted Lawrence's suggestions for the improvement of Too True to Be Good, which were included in Lawrence's letter to Charlotte of 9 January 1932; and that is certainly one of the most informative letters in this volume.But while Lawrence and Shaw maintained a respectful, if somewhat distant, writerly relationship with one another, Lawrence's connection with Shaw's wife, Charlotte, to whom the vast majority of the letters in this and the other volumes are addressed, is most notable for its spiritual intimacy. Lawrence seems to have regarded Charlotte as almost a second mother, confessing to her alone traumatic personal secrets, most prominently his statement in a letter of 1924 that, to escape further torture, he allowed himself to be raped by the Turks when he was captured at Deraa, Syria, a statement that does not appear in the ambiguous account of this incident in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But as Jeremy Wilson comments in his introduction to this final volume, when after his wife's death Shaw read these letters, he must have been surprised by the intimacy of the intellectual relationship between Lawrence and Charlotte, who also confessed to Lawrence things she had not told to GBS himself; and, as a possible consequence, Shaw's “comments about Lawrence in later years seem coloured by antipathy” (xix), possibly caused by envy of this spiritual closeness. But, on the positive side, as seems apparent from these letters and other sources, both Shaws understood that Lawrence was a unique and remarkable personality, Lawrence greatly valued his acquaintance with them, and the relationship produced worthwhile literary results on both sides.Shaw hovered between genuine literary admiration of Lawrence's writing ability as manifested in Seven Pillars, which he and Charlotte helped edit, as Lawrence's thanks to them in his acknowledgments in the final edition of that work indicate, and a more ambiguous view of his personality. We see that especially in two documents by Shaw that the Wilsons have included here, the first being Shaw's very positive essay on Lawrence from Lawrence's brother A. W.'s 1937 collection T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. In that essay, Shaw states unequivocally that Lawrence's “genius included literary genius” (249), and he goes on to praise Seven Pillars as a masterpiece of descriptive writing. As a professional author who was very conscious of his earnings from his own writing, Shaw mildly pokes fun at Lawrence's willingness to lose rather than to gain money from his literary work. Shaw also mocks Lawrence good-naturedly for having an inordinately high view of writers and for not including himself among them. And Shaw presents Lawrence as an immature, if highly gifted, boy who never grew up. But that is the extent of his criticism of Lawrence in this essay, in which Shaw's admiration clearly predominates.However, the second extended Shaw document that the Wilsons publish in this volume is somewhat less friendly to Lawrence, if not terribly so. In this lengthy inscription written in 1949 on the flyleaf of his rare 1926 subscriber's edition of Seven Pillars when he was ninety-three years old and, according to Wilson, in need of money, Shaw is more critical of Lawrence as a man and as a writer than in his previous essay. For instance, Shaw quotes Charlotte as calling Lawrence an “infernal liar” on one occasion, but then Shaw denies that Lawrence was a liar, preferring instead to call him an “actor,” which is only slightly less uncomplimentary. And then Shaw immediately adds that “neither was he a monster of veracity” because of the admittedly ambiguous account of Lawrence's ordeal with the Turks at Deraa in Seven Pillars. Taken together, Shaw's comments seem to indicate his own unresolved ambiguity about the question of whether or not Lawrence was indeed a liar. Also, Shaw claims that Lawrence made every reader of the 1922 text of Seven Pillars think that he alone was being allowed to read it, when according to the Wilsons' footnote, Lawrence never concealed the fact that he was allowing several people simultaneously to read this text, which was printed on the press of the Oxford Times in several copies precisely for that purpose; and Lawrence only very reasonably asked of the readers that they not reveal details from the still-unpublished text. And in an uncharacteristically priggish vein, Shaw says that The Mint, Lawrence's autobiographical sequel to Seven Pillars, was unfit for publication because of its obscenities and truth to the vulgarity of life in the barracks, and even appears scandalized that Lawrence presented the manuscript of this work to Charlotte. Shaw goes on to write, again priggishly, about that manuscript that “It is now in the British Museum, priceless as a document, but not for the entertainment of the common reader. I suppress its title accordingly” (259). Shaw also writes here—going back to his comments about Lawrence's immature personality in his essay in T. E. Lawrence by His Friends—that Lawrence “died, not as a great thinker but as a boy tearing along on a motor bicycle at 80 miles an hour” (258). But as the Wilsons' footnote makes clear, in fact Lawrence was going a much more reasonable 40 mph—his bike was in second gear—when he crashed; and he crashed because he swerved in order to avoid hitting two delivery boys on bicycles, which is not a cause for criticism. In these somewhat complicated comments on Lawrence and his work, we see Shaw's own final ambiguity about Lawrence's personality.Outside of the inclusion of these documents, Shaw plays a largely indirect role in this volume, partly because Lawrence preferred to pass his opinions concerning Shaw and his work through Charlotte, and as far as we can tell she seems to have acted as a filter, sometimes stating Lawrence's comments to her husband and sometimes not. The vast majority of these letters are from Lawrence to Charlotte, and they are pleasantly full of literary and other gossip, although as Wilson comments in his introduction, after about 1931 they get shorter and less personal, probably because Lawrence was consumed by boats and his mechanic's role, and Charlotte by illness. In addition to comments about Forster, Lucas, Graves, and Laura Riding, among others, Lawrence frequently opines about the books that he has been reading, including some work by Shaw. He also shows concern for Charlotte's health, and reports that he has lost his copy of Saint Joan with Shaw's inscription, “from Public Shaw to Private Shaw” (Lawrence had changed his name to Ross and then to Shaw), praises Edward Elgar, discusses his translation of the Odyssey, and talks about his Brough motorcycle.There are not many letters from Charlotte to Lawrence included here, and certainly the most touching letters are those that Charlotte wrote not to Lawrence but to her friend Dorothy Walker after Lawrence's death, which are the last two letters (as opposed to other documents) in this volume. She feels that he cannot really be gone, and that he remains with her in Ayot St. Lawrence, where he was so often a guest (24 June 1935). She also tells Dorothy that Lawrence was “an inexpressibly complicated person,” that at the end he was “very dreadfully lonely,” and finally that he was “The strangest contact of my life” (6 March 1939).In short, these letters tell us things about Lawrence's work and character—and about the Shaws, too—not likely to be gleaned elsewhere, and they supplement Stanley Weintraub's substantial discussion of the relationship between the Shaws and Lawrence in his Private Shaw and Public Shaw (1963), for which—as Weintraub himself tells us in his SHAW 29 review of volumes 2 and 3 of this correspondence—he was not allowed to draw upon many letters, which were embargoed at the time by A. W. Lawrence. Ending as it does with Shaw's unusually critical Seven Pillars flyleaf “inscription” of 1926, this final correspondence volume gives a bittersweet touch to the relationship between the Shaws and Lawrence, one that, as all four volumes show, was never quite free of complexity. Nor could it be, given the forceful characters of both men, and Charlotte's sometimes-baffled attempt to understand Lawrence's many complications and ambiguities.In this concluding volume of Lawrence's correspondence with the Shaws, the Wilsons have also usefully included a list of meetings between the Shaws and Lawrence during the 1929–35 period, as well as a striking October 1929 photograph of the Shaws at RAF Cattewater, where Lawrence was stationed; another, dating from the spring of 1930, of Lawrence and his Biscayne Baby speedboat, also at Cattewater; and a 1934 photo of Charlotte Shaw. Whatever the precise nature of the relationship that emerges from these letters, the Wilson-edited Lawrence/Shaw volumes themselves would undoubtedly have pleased both GBS and Lawrence, one feels, because they are, while pricey (the set of four goes for £575), all beautifully bound, printed, and illustrated—“books beautiful” in the William Morris tradition, which Shaw no less than Lawrence greatly valued.