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BOOK REVIEWS "Hodge," originally an abbreviation from "Roger," was the familiar, half-contemptuous, term for a farm labourer and would no more connote "farmer" than 'Tommy Atkins" would connote "colonel." Wessex Poems is said to close with "a poem upon the proper valuation of architecture"— later reformulated as the proper "use" of architecture, which is hardly the same thing. Regardless of the adequacy of either as a description of the thematic burden of "Heiress and Architect," and regardless of whether a "conclusion" can reasonably be called a "center," "heuristic" or otherwise, there can surely be little argument that a poem placed forty-eighth in a fifty-one-poem volume can scarcely be said to be a conclusion, particularly when the fifty-first spot belongs to a poem of such accomplishment, fame and terminatory emphasis as "Ί Look Into My Glass.'" And so approximation follows approximation, factual error, stylistic infelicity, expressive ponderousness, and argumentative strain destroying the will to believe in those conveniently pairable volumes, or in The Famous Tragedy's satirical "de-scription" of Cornwall as demonstration of the pretentiously cryptic truth that "For silence to be assured, the source must be empty even beyond silence." By book's end, all that survives is resigned acknowledgment of the apparent authorial conviction with which the chaotic argumentative agenda has been advanced, and a rather less resigned sense that the instability of the whole shaky structure seems to be depressingly paradigmatic of a contemporary disciplinary malaise. Keith Wilson ___________________ University of Ottawa T. E. Lawrence M. D. Allen. The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 220 pp. $28.50 READERS have long noted T. E. Lawrence's medievalism and have readily linked it to the Arab Revolt and Seven Pillars. H. D. Allen usefully delineates these interests and fills in the details, sometimes rewarding readers richly, but a narrow focus finally limits his book's usefulness. The valuable fifth chapter casts new light on Lawrence's obsessions, arguing that W. S. and Lady Anne Blunt's translation of the Moallakat, a pre-Islamic cycle of Arabic poems, was a main source of Lawrence's chivalric ideas. This intriguing possibility surpasses the usual idea that 345 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 Lawrence's Arabs were merely examples of chivalric values; rather, for him they were "the original wellspring of pure chivalry, lived as well as written," a far more powerful idea. The Moallakat influenced Lawrence's life and Seven Pillars notably, and his motivation in Arabia was possibly even more complex than we realize. Allen also puts Lawrence's Odyssey translation into valuable new perspective as "another version of Seven Pillars." Sensibly ignoring the memoir's epic qualities, he compares the Odyssey as a translation whose "word-choice and . . . syntax" indicate "disillusion and defeat." Those indicators are often medieval expressions that, for all their "richly emotional and intellectual vocabulary," remain, as in Seven Pillars, "once evocative words and scraps of knowledge" that sadly contrast medieval ideals with modern experience. Unfortunately, Allen devotes few pages to the Odyssey, merely indicating the fruitfulness of studying Lawrence's translation as translation. At times Allen goes astray. Chapter Ten describes Lawrence's reservations about chivalry, lengthily examining James Branch Cabell's Jürgen to conclude that it represents Lawrence's "downward fall" as the Moallakat represents his "upward and aspiring" path. The two arguments lack balance. The Moallakat chapter is economical and persuasive ; the Jürgen parallel remains only a parallel, illuminating little. Similarly, the conclusion scrutinizes David Jones's little-known In Parenthesis as another medieval-and-modern war memoir only to show that Lawrence is "more convincing." Also, we learn, not for the first time, that Lawrence had an eye for medieval architecture, but Allen consistently portrays Lawrence as a prig, strutting technical details that Allen mistakes for imagination—an "outpost of engrailed sangars" hardly resonates as Lawrence or Allen thinks, especially when we learn what such silliness means. Here is Lawrence at his worst, and Allen's scholarly explication only condemns his pedantry. Furthermore, the Lawrence who displays no imaginative grasp of medieval spirituality or courtly love, who investigates Crusader castles already convinced of what he will find and...

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