T. E. Lawrence's Criticism

ELT 39 :1 1996 teach courses on Woolf and Lessing or who include their writings in other courses. Mary Lou Emery ______________ University of Iowa T. E. Lawrence's Criticism Harold Orlans, ed. Lawrence of Arabia, Strange Man of Letters: The Literary Criticism and Correspondence of T. E. Lawrence. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 331 pp. $47.50 HAROLD ORLANS'S Lawrence of Arabia, Strange Man of Letters is a useful and meticulously edited compendium with an odd title. T. E. Lawrence may appear "strange" when set beside the soldiers, diplomats and mechanics with whom he sometimes worked, but he seems much less so in the routinely quirky company of writers. Lawrence himself, for instance, found his namesake D. H. Lawrence "a very great but very strange man" (131). Shakespeare's sexuality, like T. E. Lawrence's, has been questioned, Swinburne was as obsessed with flagellation as Lawrence was, and Lawrence was probably less self-deprecating than the Kafka who saw himself as an insect. Might Lawrence's works, then, if not his life, appear particularly "strange" when viewed against the background of modern British Uterature ? The majority of the journalistic biographers to whom Lawrence's legacy was unfortunately so long abandoned were uninterested in any sophisticated analysis of his literary work, and usually saw it as completely anomalous. Orlans, an anthropology Ph.D. and former thinktank policy planner, seems to share their spirit of wüful ignorance when he derides literary, psychological and textual exegesis" of Lawrence as "the occupational disease of English departments" (12). But it is largely owing to precisely that exegesis (which began to appear only around 1970, long after Lawrence's death in 1935), that we have gained understanding of Lawrence in the context of his period. He has gradually come to take his place, for instance, in the traditions of Anglo-Arabian travel literature, late-Victorian art prose, and World War I autobiography. Thanks to serious academic efforts, T. E. Lawrence, whüe always unique and individual, today appears less strange and more approachable as a writer than at any time in the past. Orlans's own collection demonstrates Lawrence's basic literary normality and traditionalism rather than his strangeness. Born in 1888, Lawrence unsurprisingly received a solid grounding in the Greek and 128 BOOK REVIEWS Latin classics. He was a neo-medievalist in the late-Victorian vein, idolizing the Pre-Raphaelites, Wüliam Morris and (at least early on) Doughtys Arabia Deserta. Lawrence felt that the relatively understandable E. M. Forster (the completion of whose A Passage to India Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom had influenced), was "a very great writer." He attempted to come to grips with the complex modernism of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, feeling that the late-Romantic prose of his own Seven Pillars was "an insult to modern letters" after the advent of Ulysses. But as an engaged participant in his period, he successfully tried his own hand at literary Futurism in The Mint. As late as 1934, the year before his death, he was appreciative enough of new literary currents to promote the career of C. Day-Lewis, but perceptive enough to reject Day-Lewis's Marxist polemics. It is Orlans's judgments and emphases, rather than Lawrence's, that often seem strange. Lawrence's intense respect for creativity is one of his most admirable qualities, but Orlans thinks that Lawrence "certainly overvalued art and artists" (33). Orlans criticizes the 1926 text of Seven Pillars as "flawed by excessive detail" (26) but then states without much explanation that he prefers the 1922 text, which is far longer and more detailed. Although he makes a good point about Lawrence's interest in literary craftsmanship, Orlans scrupulously avoids engagement with the important aesthetic issues, especially those relating to school and genre, raised by Lawrence's own work and comments. Despite these eccentricities, Orlans deserves our thanks for having brought together conveniently in one place Lawrence's scattered and therefore difficult-to-access critical works. He presents Lawrence's introductions to Arabia Deserta, Richard Garnett's Twilight of the Gods, and Bertram Thomas's Arabia Felix; reviews of D. H. Lawrence, H. M. Tomlinson, W. H...