The Intellectual as Hero: Lawrence of Arabia

Abstract

Lawrence once told Wyndham Lewis that ‘Rudyard Kipling did not like what he had written, because he considered “he had let the man of action down”’;¹ and whatever the truth of the story, it shows Lawrence’s awareness that he was himself a man of action of a very different kind from Kipling’s heroes. There are some unexpected similarities, however. Lawrence was patriotic, with ‘a pugnacious wish to win the war’ and to establish most of the Middle East as an Arab dominion within the Empire. (‘It will be a sorry day,’ he subsequently wrote to Robert Graves, ‘when our estate stops growing.’²) He gave innumerable proofs of his courage in action, his stoical endurance of hardships, and his charismatic leadership. He had a gift amounting to genius for irregular warfare; and fighting in what E. M. Forster called ‘the last of the picturesque wars’³—a war, moreover, in which individuals could still have a decisive influence—he seems at times like a glorified Stalky let loose in Arabia. Yet the comparison has only to be made to be at once repudiated, for Lawrence was both a brilliantly successful man of action and an intellectual—sensitive, scholarly, self-analytical and self-tormenting; and it is his combination of these two roles that gives the Seven Pillars of Wisdom its unique distinction.

‘Now [having read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom] … I am able to view your vast war-work near at hand, with its almost daily multifarious terrible & difficult haps, experiences, physical and mental strains, & sufferings & dark chances that must needs be taken, in meeting & circumventing enemies, in the anxious Leadership of an Armada of discordant elements, as often naturally hostile among themselves of Arab Tribes; until, after two years, you won through to the triumph of Damascus, after enduring all that human life can endure to the end.’ C. M. Doughty, in Letters to T. E. Lawrence, ed. A. W. Lawrence (London, 1962), p. 54.

‘As autobiography The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is veiled, ambiguous, misleading: less a direct revelation than a performance from which the truth can be wrenched. Nor can it be taken as formal history, since it focusses too subjectively, too obsessively, perhaps too passionately on its theme…. Primarily the book is a work of art, the model for a genre that would become all too characteristic of the age: a personal narrative through which a terrible experience is relived, burned out, perhaps transcended.’ Irving Howe, ‘T. E. Lawrence: The Problem of Heroism’, The Hudson Review, vol. 15 (1962–3), p. 356.

‘The Seven Pillars is a sort of introspection epic….’ The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London, 1938), p. 621.