T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Doubleday, [1926] 1938. 672 pg. 

"Some Englishmen... believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin..." And so also begins T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a memoir of the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt that took place during the First World War. He opens his tale with a clear understanding of context, and a sly smile as to the uncanny nature of the story about to unfold. Lawrence, a young archaeologist familiar with Arab-Islamic culture, quietly enters the British army at the outbreak of the First World War. He then rides into the desert, ostensibly under British direction, to encourage the Arabs to aggressively fight the Turks, and create a diversion from the main efforts of the British regular army. To rally the disparate Arab tribes, he preaches a message of absolute liberation and glory, wherein the Arabs might reestablish their dominance in the Middle East, and expunge the light of foreign influence. Lawrence helps the Arab chiefs create and channel a painful, violent, and masochistic campaign of guerrilla warfare. He assassinates wayward followers, glories in combat, and waxes philosophic as to the futility of mercy. Lawrence lives in the world with an exciting, irreligious energy. He couples that energy with a British school boy's sense of decency and a mastery of Arab mores, particularly those pertaining to power politics. He struggles with incompatible allegiances to both the British Army and the Arab nationalism. In a few short years, the British and their Arab allies annihilate the Turks and seize the great city of Damascus. Lawrence finds that the city's abrupt capture "disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action." He resigns his post. "And at once, I knew how much I was sorry."

Lawrence's penchant for introspection and abstract formulation move the book beyond a mere catalog of facts. His writing demands that one ask whether literature or history or sociology might best value the blood-soaked fruits of his battles in the desert. He comes across as a man of virtue and spirit, uniquely suited to understanding and appreciating the beauty and complexity of the Arab guerrilla campaign. In the least, Seven Pillars accomplishes Lawrence's goal of creating a monument to the men he fought with. Yet it also stands for something more: a testament to human will, and the ready potential for unleashing our imaginative, violent impulses not for cause or country, but for the sheer glory of the action. 

T. E. Lawrence never authorised the mass publication of a definitive version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Various versions of the book appeared very different guises over the years, and this variety presents readers with something of a puzzle when deciding which version of the book to read.

If you wish to purchase a used copy, I strongly recommend looking for the 1938 "De Luxe" edition from Double Day. The editors cut the book marvelously well, and include may helpful drawings, cartoons, maps, and abstracts. I cannot say much about the other editions except the 2011 Wilder edition with a grey cover: Avoid this version at all costs. Filled with errors, the Wilder edition treats its readers like a dog treats a fire hydrant--yes, the book is glad you're there, but it has a terrible way of showing it. If you're looking for an audio version, James Wilby ably read an abridged version of the book for CSA Word Classic.


UPDATE:   5 November 2014


Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center I have had the opportunity to look at several versions of Seven Pillars. My favorite version was the 1926 volume that he printed in full color; he only printed 200 copies for his subscribers, so this version is not easy to get a hold of. But it is well worth the trip to the HRC to see it. The scores of graphic images and portraits not only magnify Lawrence's themes, but also place the book firmly in the twentieth century. The 1938 copy reads like a Medieval epic with updated pictures. But the 1926 version feels like a cross between a graphic novel and an illuminated manuscript. It is wholly original and never boring.  It represents the only way to understand what Lawrence was laboring towards for close to eight difficult years. It is cliche to say the story 'leaps off the page,' but it just this, and then fills the room, burns down the roof, and lets in the rain.

Many publishers have attempted to abridge Seven Pillars, and to strip out its portraits and drawings for the sake of decreasing the cost of publication. The only abridgment worth touching is Revolt in the Desert: the Authorised Abridged Edition of 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom.' This is the abridgment that Lawrence himself created. As Jeremy Wilson (Lawrence's authorised biographer) states in his 2011 introduction to the book, Lawrence relented to public pressure to create a popular narrative of the capture of Damascus. For the task, Lawrence trimmed the book's political, social, and psychological dimensions, and even cut out his capture at Der'ra and his abandonment of the mission. The book nevertheless tells a coherent story and communicates the nature of Lawrence's campaign in a meaningful way. It is much shorter than Seven Pillars. If teachers are looking for a reasonably priced version of Seven Pillars to assign to their undergraduate students, this is probably the one to choose. 

Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians, 1918. First Harvest Edition, 1969.                                          

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians offers a superlative example of comparative biography. First published in 1918, Strachey's account of four Victorian lives anticipates the First World War, and thereby constitutes a look back in anger at an idealistic and superstitious period in British history; Strachey, however, never states an official theme beyond form: he aims to revitalize biography, and paints his subjects in hues of faith-fueled vanity. The author also demonstrates that the Victorian moral ethos failed to free his four subjects from the peculiar eccentricities that often accompany powerful men and women. The book begins with Cardinal Manning--an Anglican convert to the Roman Church, and a man who abandons his Anglican patriotism out of fear of modernity. Florence Nightingale and Doctor Arnold receive kinder treatments, though Strachey's pen retains a distrustful style, even for these two populist saints. Strachey ends his book with the violent life and death of General Gordon, a British officer and Christian mystic whose force of personality draws him towards a violent and foolish death in the deserts of Sudan. In a rare moment of analytic weakness, Strachey understates the brutality of Gordon's involvement in the Taiping Rebellion; in human terms, the war cost more lives than any civil war in history. Twenty to thirty million individuals perished either from plague, famine, or violence, and yet Strachey's account sounds a little too tidy--Gordon escapes the conflict with little more than a nickname: "Chinese Gordon." Surely the scale of the violence Gordon witnessed as a young man influenced his later actions elsewhere in the British Empire.

Strachey's book remains an entertaining read. His use of biography--cradle to grave for each of the four--naturally attracts the human mind and modern attention. He portrays ambition, violence, and political intrigue not as a game of chess, but as a great wave that crashes over all of England, and leaves but a few human beings standing, and all of humanity soaked. Eminent Victorians remains a necessary book in the 21st century due to the usefulness of its comparative structure, as well as its probative psychological insights into the Victorian mind. 


I hope that an enterprising editor might attempt to add footnotes and historical references to the book--Strachey assumes a familiarity that modern readers cannot possibly posses. Such difficulty should not dissuade readers from attempting to read the 'classic' editions of the book. But it probably will. Publishers: hire an editor and give the book another run. 

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage Books First Edition, 1999. 893 pp.                J. M. Meyer

Virginia Woolf marks one of the many returns of literary scholar and historian Hermione Lee to perhaps her favorite subject: the letters, memory, and ghost of Virginia Stephen Woolf. The biographer charts her subject's life according to distinct themes, and at each point shows how Virginia's memories of her childhood, siblings, parents, and husband (and nearly everything else) inform her subsequent literary work and shaped her psychological traumas. Lee argues that Virginia's genius lay not only in her artistic talents, but in her psychological and physical fortitude. Virginia did not cave to her "madness;" she fought with severe depression, courageously, for nearly her entire life, and perhaps only allowed her despair to overcome her out of love for her husband and respect for his work, a notion noble, strange, and sad. Virginia's suicide in 1941, Lee argues, represents the conclusion of a fifty-nine year battle, but does not represent defeat: "She endured... great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkable little self-pity." As a cutting-edge modernist writer, Virginia "would have been horrified by interpretations of her work which reduced it to a coded expression of neurotic symptoms."

 Lee writes a thorough, spirited, and complete biography of Virginia; further works on the great modernist author can only seek to add additional historical context to Virginia's time and place, or perhaps bring to bear new snippets of fact regarding her life. Lee's accomplishment stands as the pinnacle of historical work on Virginia Woolf. Lee relies on many primary and secondary sources, and the work of other historians, but her biography presents a uniquely compassionate portrait of Virginia as a writer and a human being. Attempts to sum Virginia's character (or even the character of her biography) threaten to undermine the power of Lee's accomplishment. Virginia Woolf seems so familiar in the popular consciousness, that the mere mention of her name evokes envy, annoyance, and admiration in every writer. Her death seems, all at once, tragic, wonderful, and pathetic. Lee's Virginia would understand such mixed reactions. At one point, Virginia reflects on her own memory of herself, and plaintively asks a friend, "Do you like that girl?" She tentatively replies to her own question: "I'm not sure I do, though I think she had some spirit in her..."

David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, 2004. 645 pp. 

David Reynolds seeks to shed a "revealing light on Winston Churchill's three most important personae--historian, politician, and soldier;" in the process, Reynolds finds himself creating an image of Churchill far more complex than a mere portrait, for he sketches the bureaucratic, emotional and political landscape in which Churchill created his memoirs of the Second World War. In the summer of 1945, Churchill's party lost its majority to Labour. Surprised at his sudden loss of political power, he cobbled together a band of military officials and academics and wrote one of the defining accounts of the Second World War. Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic paid him a fortune for the rights to serialize and publish the words produced through his "Syndicate" of writers. Critical reaction labeled him a hero, not just for his wartime efforts, but for his ability to write his will on the pages of history. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. In the growing shadows the of Soviet expansion, he cast the Second World War as an unnecessary conflict, "a tragedy in which the misjudgments and kindly dreams of men of good will in our country encouraged wickedness elsewhere to seize its opportunities." Churchill, throughout the war years, used glittering oratory to collapse dissenting opinion and mitigate wartime fears; the powers of oratory stayed with him, and showed themselves at full force his books of history. Churchill, more than any other British statesman of the time, offered hope for victory--he sold hope better than anyone else. Yet after the war, his memoirs and Post-war speeches exacerbated Cold War tensions, and his historical imagination left a lasting (and somewhat incorrect) impression on the minds of many admirers. Churchill intentionally distorted history, sometimes to suit his ego, but just as often to preserve state secrets or to shape the Cold War. For example, to mask British use of technology, Churchill pretends that foreign spies, rather than code-breaking machines, provided most of the actionable intelligence he used in the Mediterranean campaigns.

Despite Reynolds simultaneous interest in wartime history, literary analysis, and biography, his story navigates the rough waters of Churchill's life with remarkable calm. Reynolds offers smooth transitions through seemingly disparate subjects. Even as he admires Churchill, Reynolds shows that Churchill used his memoirs to disparage political opponents, and to craft history to fit his own particular vision. Reynolds' lengthy quotations and historical framing preclude his readers from absolutely needing ready access to Churchill's books; ready access, nevertheless, certainly helps, because the original books grant a sense of pacing, storytelling, and emphasis that Reynolds' descriptions cannot match. Yet In Command of History represents a magnificent and exhaustive introduction to Churchill's magnum opus. Reflecting on his own writing, Churchill coined a phrase that surely Reynold's can empathize with in a unique way after completing 645 pages of fine print: 'To begin with it is a toy, then an amusement, then it becomes a mistress and then it becomes a masters and then it becomes a tyrant and, in the last stage, just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.'

Reynold's comparison of Churchill's memoirs to accurate historical ledger and various drafts of the memoirs does not debunk Churchill. The original documents paint a more interesting picture, with a man shaping the story of the Second World War in a nuanced and complicated way. Churchill sold a more virtuous and less objective vision to the masses; the proper way to read such a work requires either dogmatic nestling of the text, or else a painful exploration of alternative outcomes at nearly every juncture. In the past half century, many intelligent 'Churchaholics' took the easy way out and gulped the nectar, the way children take to sugar. These Churchaholics manage to find their own views in perfect accord with Churchill's, largely because they never bother to learn or understand the complexity of the underlying story--it would be terribly inconvenient for them to discover that history can pose irresolvable riddles and moral dilemmas. Reynold's book cannot protect Churchaholics from their own narcissism, but it does help rescue a thinking-persons Churchill. The seas of history require an able navigator with plenty of talent, a lot of luck, and a sense of purpose, and that is the Churchill that Reynold's preserves. 

Gavin Mortimer, Stirling's Men: The Inside History of the SAS in World War II. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.                                                                      

            In the summer of 1941, with the British army still reeling from German victories in France, Belgium, and Greece, enlisted men and officers began experimenting with new tactics and survival techniques in the deserts of northern Africa. Colonel David Stirling's Special Air Service (SAS)--a combat arms detachment still in use today--represents one of the most durable contributions to that legacy of experimentation. In Stirling's Men, Gavin Mortimer uses interviews with SAS veterans to depict the lives of the soldiers that joined Stirling's unit in the summer of 1941, and stayed together for the remainder of the Second World War. The SAS got off to a rough start. In one of their first parachute training exercises, a sergeant accidentally throws two of his men out the aircraft door without proper rigging; their death on impact leads to the first casualties in SAS history. Shortly thereafter, the first SAS combat mission ends with only a handful of men making it back to British lines. The unit eventually manages to string together a number of successful raids, ultimately destroying over a hundred German aircraft with homemade "Lewes bombs" and the liberal use of machine guns. The destruction of German aircraft, however, came at a heavy cost. Out of the seven officers Stirling initially recruited to the ranks of the SAS only two survived the campaign in North Africa. Most died from either extreme exposure to the elements, or shot to pieces when caught in the open beneath the vengeful cannons of a German fighter aircraft. The North Africa campaign ends shortly after the German soldiers capture David Stirling at gun point, and the remainder of the book covers the campaigns his men undertook in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. The SAS continued to play a supporting role as the British and their allies fought their way through Italy, across France, and into Germany.

            Mortimer never breaks the book into patterns of behavior, and the book sometimes reads as a quote-filled chronology of SAS actions during the war. The author never formulates an explicit argument, except perhaps a bland tip-of-the-hat to military heroes. Nevertheless, distinct patterns emerge from the book. The men who joined the SAS did so voluntarily, often with the stated motivation of escaping from the line infantry. Many volunteers cited the dangerous, behind-the-lines actions of the SAS as the lesser of two evils compared with soldiering with the British infantry. In an age of concentrated heavy artillery, aerial bombardment, and motorized tanks, it seems that some British officers and soldiers preferred taking their chances behind enemy lines, even though this preference frequently led to death. Mortimer never explicitly draws out the these patterns, but they seem crucial to understanding the psychological motivations of soldiers who volunteered for the SAS. Mortimer personally interviewed many SAS veterans at the end of their lives, and for that reason alone his book makes a welcome contribution to the literature on special operations.

Bayly, Christopher and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945.  Allen Lane, 2004.       

In Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper embark on a five year odyssey of British Asia during the hell-fires of the Second World War. The authors encounter nearly the full spectrum of humanity: fools, cowards, leaders, and luminaries, but very few heroes; the tensions of British Asia and the Japanese conquest sharpen even the most virtuous of spirits into blades too quick to cut. Racism and class distinctions, prior to the war, make for sordid lives bent towards economic necessity. With the Japanese invasion of 1941, the economic basis for social order disintegrates, yet the terrible distinctions remain. The British imperial power fails to protect its subjects, especially the socially and economically disadvantaged minorities. British Asia collapses in a rush of blood and disillusionment. The fall of Singapore, in particular, stands as a historic embarrassment. In a failed defensive effort with little effort and less planning, a garrison of 85,000 men surrenders to a Japanese assault force of 30,000. Many thousands die in the aftermath. The Japanese conquest feeds off of anti-British sentiment throughout the region, and turns 40,000 captured Indian troops into a detachment of the Japanese army. The Japanese shock troops, rather than liberating British colonies, induce wave after wave of ethnic violence, and glory in the rape of women and the humiliation of men. The British never manage to call the bluff of the overstretched Japanese forces, but eastern monsoons accidentally collude with the Battle of Midway to halt the Japanese expansion. The British Empire crawls back, but never returns to its pre-war position of dominance.

            The book earns its title. One can read a history of the Second World War (as I did just last week) and not hear more than a paragraph about anything that Bayly and Harper uncover. The authors render the political context of the fighting with authority and candor. They maintain a neutral stance towards most agendas and parties, though they exhibit sympathy for nationalist feelings, if not nationalist leaders. The authors write beautifully, and their sense of humanity urges them to include details that others might miss, such as 1942's surreal conjunction of mass starvation in Burma, the kerosene burning of the corpses, and the unusual beauty and quantity of Assam butterflies before the monsoon rains.                           

Christopher Sykes, Orde Wingate: A Biography. The World Publishing Company, 1959.    
         
  In his biography of Orde Wingate (1903-1944), Christopher Sykes recounts the life of one of the great practical and theoretical progenitors of unconventional warfare within the British military. Wingate’s tactical innovations still proliferate military training manuals around the world, but the innovations came at a great cost in men and material—and possibly Wingate’s sanity. His eccentricities bloomed from a feverish compost of aristocratic upbringing and dogmatic Evangelical religiosity. With a brand of pride and whip of faith, he learned "to assert the right of the exceptional man over the beliefs, conventions, hopes, and even the morality of 'the herd.'" Despite his enduring dislike for conventional behavior, Wingate joined the British officer corps, and then spent the rest of his short life fighting against its every tradition. He quickly demonstrated an eccentric degree of originality, including a moment in which he sat naked in the desert sun for hours to conduct "an experiment in endurance, ascertaining the point at which sunstroke might be expected to intervene." His subsequent actions equally astonish. Despite Wingate's taste for the irregular, the chaos of the Second World War allowed Wingate to use his keen intelligence, quick anger, and fierce determination to successfully implement new methods of operating behind enemy lines. Sykes’ biography relates the beginnings of a Zionist army, the restoration of the Ethiopian empire, a knife-point suicide attempt, dinners with Churchill, exhaustive training, and decimating campaigns into the jungles of Burma. His life ended with a mysterious plane crash during the second Chindit expedition, his demise just as inexplicable as his life.

It is one hell of a story. As a veteran of the British special operations, Christopher Sykes’ 1959 biography ably navigates Wingate's boyhood and military life. Yet a few problems arise as well. First, Sykes' Wingate makes an effort to disparage the character and methods of T.E. Lawrence, an unconventional warrior of the previous generation. Given the similarities in the work of Lawrence and Wingate, a close examination of the actual differences in their theories and methods would help delineate each soldier's unique brand of combat operations. Lawrence, for all his troubles, led a virtuous life—one cannot necessarily say the same for Wingate, an impossibly difficult man with few sustained friendships. Wingate stands accused of war-crimes in some circles, as well as ruthlessly spending the lives of his men for minor victories of questionable merit. Furthermore, Sykes' incessant use of weak verbs and the passive voice slow the writing to an awkward trot. And yet, while the amendment of the just mentioned shortcomings would make for a better book, Skyes' work nevertheless compels due to its riveting subject matter and the author's instinct for placing anecdotes within a wider moral and philosophical perspective. The author successfully proves Wingate's ambition, and his unique brand of eccentricity that Churchill called "genius." "This is a moment to live in history," Wingate tells us. "It is an enterprise in which every man who takes part may feel proud one day to say I WAS THERE."

***

PUZZLES

I originally wrote this review a few months ago, and I want to flesh out a few of my concerns regarding Orde Wingate and T.E. Lawrence. Have you ever looked in the mirror, and wished that you were a little leaner, stronger, or tougher? Perhaps a touch more beautiful, or more distinct looking? Or maybe less dependent on others, or more friendly to other people. We all search for a better version of ourselves. We can also project a part of ourselves onto other figures, and so when we critique the other we really critique ourselves. Did Wingate do this Lawrence? Did he see someone like himself, and so reject the 'other' even as he attempted to sculpt his own persona? Perhaps, but such "construct building" obscures the underlying mechanisms that operate on more familiar ground. 

Why did Orde Wingate denigrate the work of T. E. Lawrence, rather than argue Lawrence as a successful model for conducting insurgency operations? In the latter approach, Wingate could go to his superiors, point to the success of Lawrence, and then draw resources towards a successful approach. When reading Sykes' account, the opposite occurred. Wingate denigrated the methods of Lawrence as wasteful and ineffective. Denigration occurs in every day life on a regular basis. In front of spouses, friends, and partners, human beings denigrate potential rivals to sculpt their own status position relative to that of the rival. "He's not that good of a writer." "If only her talent could keep pace with his ambition." "She's pretty, but she doesn't have taste." Denigration occurs for other reasons, however, besides status. Other possibilities include 1) Strategy. 2) Jealousy over Rex Wingate’s knowledge and/or affinity of/for Lawrence. 3) Status. 4) Everyone always talking about that damned Lawrence. Or some combination thereof.  I wonder if Cousin Rex, Orde’s relation and supporter, actually disliked (or was jealous of) both Allenby and Lawrence, and if his opinions influenced Orde. I travel to London in a couple of weeks, and hope to sort some of this out. 

I've received a lot of wonderful support from Ami Pedahzur, TIGER Lab, and the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas. Thanks to this support, I have decided to keep a public record of the notes I collect from my research-related reading. More to follow. 

"The drum major lost his baton. The marchers, in chaos, follow the piccolo."