Almost from the start of his interjection into the catastrophic dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, T.E. Lawrence most probably harbored a desire to write a book that could hold its own alongside other enduring memoirs of warfare. It’s doubtful that he anticipated how much the personal consequences. of being one of the originators of “special forces” would end up impinging on his imagined epic. His memoir tried to do too many things as a summation of his “ordinary effort” and the book holds its spot on one’s shelf largely as something to be read intermittently.
Lawrence was also a prolific letter-writer, and many readers enjoy the letters for more than just a glimpse into the daily life of an enigmatic hero; his correspondence prances through many moods with a puckish style worth savoring late at night, when one needs a literary aperitif. His single best increment of writing, however, is not to be found in his letters, but in a posthumous book, “The Mint,” which was a diary he kept of his service as an enlisted man after the Great War. The writing throughout is solid English prose, with just the right proportion of droll humor. In the chapter in which Lawrence records his response to an officer’s inquiry about why he joined te Air Force (“I think I must have had a mental breakdown, sir.”), Lawrence appears to have set himself up for a charge of “insolence,” but the incident resolves itself wit Lawrence not only getting off scot-free of any punishment, but being complimented by the officer who was performing the original barracks inspection.
Subservience was Lawrence’s method of dealing with PTSD, and by all accounts the men with whom he served benefitted from his presence in the ranks. Submission, however, cannot completely escape the recoil built into its suppressed cantilevering; the desire to hold oneself apart from others cannot help but rear up even as one immures oneself in a larger mass of obedience. What Lawrence called his “surplus emotion” found an outlet in riding his motorcycle. “The Road,” which comes very near te end of “The Mint” (it is chapter 16 of the book’s third and final part) is a five page description of one of Lawrence’s typical expeditions on his motorcycle after the day’s work was done. It is one of the ten most perfect pieces of short writing on any subject I have ever read. Lawrence’s sentences flow with a dexterity that is free of any aspect of rhetorical inefficiency. Each word thrums in an attuned demarcation.
“A miracle that all this speed waits behind one lever for the pleasure of my hand.”
The other day, I was walking near Los Angeles Harbor Arts in San Pedro and saw this motorcycle parked on the sidewalk and thought yet once again of the sentence I just quoted. Indeed, any sentence a writer has devoted full attention to seems in and of itself to be an equal miracle.
The best book about Lawrence’s involvement in the Arab Rebellion during the Great War remains Scott Anderson’s “LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” The current expansionist retaliation of Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah was predicted by Lawrence, who foresaw that the only way a Zionist nation could be maintained on the Mediterranean coast was by force of arms. A two-state solution, I would add, would still be possible, but only at the cost of a transparently coordinated policy of “mutual assured destruction.”
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