Three Shaws

From T. E. Lawrence's secular monastery of an R.A.F. station in what is now Pakistan, he retained contacts in his former world of the famous and the familiar by what he would call "a flock of letters." They began, on 11 January 1927, from the air force depot on Drigh Road, above Karachi, only six miles from the city, but inaccessible to T.E., who would not venture from the perimeter of the base on the edge of the desert of Sind. His life outside would be lived entirely through his correspondence. He was in a five-year enlistment as a lowly aircraftman. At thirty-eight, T.E. was a self-described "waif" earning three shillings thruppence a day. Although the eldest in the camp ranks, enlisted as T. E. Shaw, he was unlikely to lose himself, as he claimed to want, in "ordinary" service anonymity.

In the first batch of "home papers" that troops received, T.E. wrote to Charlotte Shaw, upon whom he would dump his emotional baggage, they "blushingly lay before me snippets of The People and Tit-Bits, which represent me as … marvellous." Bernard Shaw's promotional efforts, of course, had helped. In one of Charlotte's first letters from England, she enclosed G.B.S.'s prefatory encomium to a catalogue of a Leicester Galleries show of paintings, pastels, drawings, and woodcuts illustrating T.E.'s prose epic Seven Pillars of Wisdom, released in a luxurious limited edition about which people pleaded in classified columns to pay dozens of pounds only to borrow it for a few days to read. Closing, Shaw wrote blandly that the wartime colonel was now "out of reach of this exhibition and preface."

Lawrence would serve two years—he hoped for more—in dusty stations as remotely north as bleak, restless Miranshah in Waziristan, his life and routine chronicled in the second and third of what may be four volumes of letters to and from the Shaws, edited and annotated by Jeremy Wilson, author of a major Lawrence biography (1989), and his wife, Nicole. The first volume appeared in 2000. A final volume will collect the surviving correspondence from 1929 through 1935, when Lawrence, in closer proximity to the Shaws and again a frequent visitor, wrote far fewer letters. Wilson's ill health has delayed completion of the series.

Once more only a motorcycle dash away from London and Ayot St. Lawrence (where a bedroom was reserved for him), he had little need on his abrupt return to resort to the post other than to announce his intentions by telegram.

By deed poll in 1927, through a solicitor in London, T.E., who had become effectively a surrogate son to the childless couple, took his acquired surname of Shaw legally. One of five illegitimate sons of expatriate Irishman Sir Thomas Chapman, who had abandoned his wife and daughters and restyled himself and his companion (their former governess) as Lawrence, T.E. had put further distance between himself and his family by informally adopting the Shaws. His father had died in 1919; his mother, Sarah, steeped in acknowledged sin and on what was certainly a guilt trip, had suffused herself in religion and become a missionary in China, preceded there by her son Bob. Two other sons had died in the Great War; the youngest of the five, Arnold, was a classics scholar. Sarah, T.E. confided to Charlotte (14 April 1927), "has given me a terror of families and inquisitions…. Knowledge of her will prevent my ever making any woman a mother, and the cause of children." In his letters to Charlotte, T.E. referred mockingly to the "incomplete manhood" (18 August 1928) of several literati he knew in England, and he remained asexual at best, having a secret taste for masochism, as even his open bearing—even savoring—of pain and his severe lifestyle evidence. After he...