Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2009.

Hermione Lee approaches the study of biography as a practitioner as well as a critic. Her 2009 book, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, reflects a thorough and personal knowledge of the craft of life-writing. She especially empathizes with writers facing the impossible task of constructing “the complete, true story of a human being” using the tools of a “mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone.” Her hesitant embrace of the genre playfully manifests itself throughout the book, as well as in her own works, especially her wonderful 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf.

Lee digs into the actual words of biographers and brings to surface the pivotal moments and techniques that allow the transcendence of books such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. In a chapter called “National Biography,” she traces the struggles of Thomas Carlyle and other writers to determine what (and who) they should include in biographical studies. Changing habits, tastes, and trends shaped the biographical works produced throughout the years, or at least helped determine which works received a wide readership. Lee’s winds her way through the practice of biography by means of questions that strike the conscience of many life-writers: what is the purpose of biography? What tone should biography take? What elements of a life should one include, and what should one discard? What is the proper relationship between a biographer and her subject? Which metaphor best describes biography—the gruesome scientific cuts of autopsy or the feelingly sketched drama of portraiture?

Throughout, Lee stands at a remove from much of biography. She disapproves of biographical accounts constructed with a sensationalist tone. She argues against life-writing that produces smear campaigns rather than an empathetic investigation. She rightly censures authors that crudely denigrate the lives and choices of their subjects. And she often sympathizes with individuals who grow queasy at the idea of another human being investigating and summarizing their life for profit.

She addresses a particularly pertinent problem for the modern world of biography—to what degree should a writer embrace the use of modern psychological theory to understand a person’s life and interpret their behavior? The greatest biographies seek to understand the very minds of their subjects, so that the individual under review seems to breathe life into every page; the muscular theories of psychology (ancient or modern) seem like useful tools for digging into the earth and excavating the mind of an individual. But Lee seems to side with Richard Ellmann on the use of psychological theory—it too often manipulates the biographer, rather than the biographer manipulating a generalized psychological theory. She argues that “some of the most masterful literary lives of the mid-20th century—Leon Edel’s Life of Henry James (1953-77), or George Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959)—now seem skewed by their psychoanalytical bias… however rich and deep Edel’s account of James’s social, personal, and literary context, such moments in his biography seem over-schematic and infantilizing.” In Lee’s reading, psychoanalytic biographies fail to endure except as “historical moments in the interpretations of those great writers’ lives,” a fate she ascribes to all biographical approaches. To give a work greater longevity and spirit, she seems to suggest building a new theory of psychology, one custom built for that particular individual human being. Yet it seems impossible to believe that one can approach the life of another without assumptions regarding human nature, and that these assumptions direct one where to look when describing the life of the individual. At the same time, one can readily appreciate her point that biographers use psychology or psycho-analytics too readily, and without enough questions (one might say the same of religious or Platonic or philosophic interpretations of individual life).

Her selection of quotations enliven the book and often present an ironic edge to the proceedings—she begins with a ‘theme’ for each chapter, and then uses pertinent quotes and examples to steadily undermine the theme’s power to convey the attributes of a successful life-study.

A particularly fun thought comes from a Robert Graves poem, “To Bring the Dead to Life.”

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.

Limp as he limped,
Swear by the oaths he swore;
If he wore black, affect the same;
If he had gouty fingers,
Be yours gouty too.

Assemble tokens intimate of him --
A ring, a hood, a desk:
Around these elements then build
A home familiar to
The greedy revenant.

So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.

Today we remember Graves more for his memoirs, poetry, and historical fiction rather than his early biographies of T.E. Lawrence, but all of those genres can burn close to biography, and may require similar skills. He and Lee both see the odd spiritual pairing found between the biographical writer and his or her subject matter. Biography lacks the medical precision and efficiency of the autopsy, or the immediacy and efficiency of portraiture. But it requires a unique art, a dance with the dead, wherein the dead gain strength from the writer and begin to move again; the writer, however, comes closer to joining the dead with each line.

Refreshingly, Lee provides neither a ‘how to’ list for life-writers, nor a ‘definitive’ guide to recommended biographies. She instead introduces the key ethical and academic questions pertaining to biography. The answers to those questions arise as suggestions rather than prescriptions, and come from not only her own viewpoint but from the many sources she uses to guide the book’s conversation. 

David Rooney, Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance. Arms and Armour Press, 1994.

Orde Wingate served in the British military as a determined battlefield commander, but he found himself drawn to the uneven virtues of his Old Testament heroes: David and Saul, Job and Moses. He lived a life close to the earth. He chose tactics and strategies that ensured his own body would drip sweat and blood—along with those of his men. Despite the unequivocal support of Winston Churchill, Wingate remains one of the most controversial generals of the Second World War, and David Rooney directs his squarely at the center of Wingate’s historical reputation.

Rooney argues that Wingate’s memory suffered a posthumous attack from jealous officers in the Indian Army. The chief offender, Major-General Stanley Woodburn Kirby, wrote the Official History of the war against Japan, shaped Field Marshal Slim’s autobiography, and marked and altered Christopher Sykes’ biography of Wingate; in brief, he held exceptional influence and dramatically effected the memory of Wingate’s strategic and tactical prowess, as well as his psychological fitness. Rooney aims to correct the record, and show that a smear campaign did in fact take place.

Rooney’s book begins with a conventional biography of Wingate. The story opens with the trauma of Wingate's birth in India, which very nearly killed his mother when she suffered a dangerous hemorrhage. She recovered, and they moved to England. Wingate’s family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, where he and his brothers and sisters received love and encouragement from their parents even as the Bible threatened them with eternal damnation. 

Wingate attended Charterhouse as a young man, and later the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Rooney then passes through the many distinct phases of Wingate’s life, and usually agrees with Christopher Sykes and other Wingate biographers in his interpretations. As a young officer, Wingate's first loves were hunting, horses, and brashness. He loaned money freely, especially to his own soldiers. He developed his best male friendship to David Tulloch, who later served under him in the Chindits in Burma. Wingate dragged one young woman, Peggy Jolly, through a multi-year engagement, before bashfully abandoning her to marry a much younger woman. With the help of family connections, he escaped the doldrums of artillery camp life through a course in Arabic and a trip to Sudan. There he gained valuable leadership experience directing patrols against poachers.

Wingate eventually posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer, and this is where his life accelerated into violence at a drastic pace. Upon reaching Palestine in 1936, he found the country in the midst of an Arab revolt against British governance and Jewish settlements. Unlike the British establishment, his sympathies stood with the Jews, rather than the Arabs. He began actively campaigning for the Zionist cause. With the support of General Archibald Wavell he formed tactical units known as Special Night Squads to protect Jewish settlements. The Special Night Squads consisted of British officers, British non-commissioned officers, and Jewish soldiers. They met with some success, at least tactically, and represented one of the first serious uses of force on the part of Jewish settlers. He proved an outstanding battlefield leader.

“You have a lot to learn,” Wingate told his soldiers, “and a lot to forget, but I shall give you a basis for your study of the art of war. Do not take notes—just listen and digest. Great soldiers are serious, diligent and of outstanding moral character. In war personal qualities are the most important—a coarse and savage man makes a bad soldier.”

Wingate stressed surprise, economy of force, and security as the principles of SNS warfare—in fact, he would insist on these three elements throughout his remaining campaigns. Of course, nearly all battlefield commanders say something to similar effect. But Wingate met his principles with a disciplined set of operating procedures that personally showed his men how to conduct such warfare with modern weapons. He loved the details of map-reading and the employment of machine guns, but he could also step back and offer an appreciation of the wider strategic picture.

From there on out, a short-lived pattern emerged: Wavell posted to a new assignment, and tasked Wingate with finding a way to take the fight to the enemy. Shortly after deploying Wingate, Wavell would find himself reassigned, and Wingate’s support from GHQ would slowly evaporate.

As the Second World War began to grip the world, Wingate aggressively took the fight to the enemy during a time when the much of the world found itself back on its heels. He possessed uncanny powers of imagination that allowed him to see the enemy’s blind spots, as well as Britain’s own untested strengths. He did so with the SNS in Palestine, and then Gideon Force in Ethiopia.

His most famous battles came with the units he formed in India and took into the jungles of Burma—the “Chindits.” After his first Chindit campaign, his fame exploded and Churchill took Wingate to Quebec to meet the American military leaders as an example of a British officer eager to fight the Japanese. The Americans (at least in Quebec) loved Wingate, and offered him tremendous support via aircraft; the Americans also formed a unit later known as ‘Merrill’s Marauders’ as their own version of Wingate’s “long range penetration” columns.

Wingate returned to Burma and led an expanded Chindit force back into the jungles. The forces at his disposal reached their height—he began executing the largest Allied airborne operation prior to D-Day, and disrupted Japanese operations throughout the area.

His battlefield opportunities as a commander, however, met with a sudden end. Travelling back and forth over the jungles of Burma, his transport aircraft crashed into a mountainside. The impact killed all aboard. Command of Wingate's Chindit forces fell into the hands of detractors and ineffective military leaders; many died in the subsequent battles. Time and again, outsiders such as General Joseph Stillwell ordered the Chindits into battlefield actions that defied Wingate’s strict procedures of engagement, which he designed to minimize exposure and maximize concentration of firepower. Curiously, Wingate’s best friend, Brigadier Tulloch, foolishly recommended one General Lentaigne as Wingate’s successor. Lentaigne despised Chindit tactics. Morale plummeted as Lentaigne repeatedly denigrated the Chindit approach and grew ‘windy’ to the tempestuous orders that inevitably fall from above during any battle.

While the bulk of Rooney’s book simply recounts the story of Wingate’s biography, his critical contribution manifests itself at the end of the book, as he shows the influence Kirby had on British history. For Rooney, Kirby stands as the most obvious example of jealousy within British forces for the fame and success of Orde Wingate, a man who rose in ranks from captain to major general in less than eight years. Kirby and the Indian army military establishment accused Wingate of forming a ‘private army.’ Kirby also discounted Wingate’s strategic and tactical innovations, and undermined his reputation through a series of sleight-of-hand psychological portrayals of Wingate as a madman and loose cannon, a man with poor grip on strategic possibility. Rooney shows that Kirby’s version of Wingate appears not only in the official history, but also in General Slim’s autobiography, and—most importantly—in the Christopher Sykes biography of Orde Wingate, perhaps the most thorough and detailed record of Wingate’s life. If Rooney is right, then Sykes’ biography—which appears objective at first glance—actually misleads. Rooney found, among other items of evidence, record of Sykes thanking Kirby for his careful reading of a draft of the Wingate biography, and his numerous corrections.

Rooney won the match with Kirby. Wingate was not a loose cannon. He worked hard to work with others, though not to get along well or be liked. It remains a little less clear if Wingate had quite the positive impact on modern strategy that his supporters insist upon. Rooney notes that Wingate’s strategies served as forerunners to the strategies used extensively in Vietnam. Vietnam, of course, was no more successful than the Chindit campaigns. Wingate's strategies also make an appearance in the modern firebases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet again, one cannot call these operations victories without outrageous equivocation. Such operations work best when used in conjunction with standard, sweeping campaigns of organized political violence designed to uproot and annihilate opposing political positions by any means necessary, but that’s not what happened in Burma (not while Wingate lived), and did not happen in Vietnam nor Iraq nor Afghanistan. In each case, scattered patrols supported with air power and good logistics failed to destroy the political opposition. I am not arguing that Wingate anticipated any of these campaigns—he kept his eyes on the battle in front of him, so much so that he did not have a plan ready in case of his own death, much less any serious shift in the strategic outlook in Burma (or world politics). I argue that Wingate introduced tactics that seem effective only within a hopeless strategic environment. His methods buy time, and bring out courage and willfulness in the troops involved. But clear political victory must remain elusive without stronger methods involving greater material resources. Wingate’s tactics tempt political leaders into initiating conflicts they lack the strategic vision to win.

Hence it is possible that Wingate was a good commander, and yet that his military innovations did not actually contribute to winning any war. Wingate’s battlefield maneuvers, however, represent an instance of aggressive action at the height of British difficulties in the Middle East and Far East. Churchill was not mistaken about that, and that is why Churchill found Wingate such an attractive figure, one worth taking to Quebec and granting personal support. If an interesting brand of madness effected Wingate’s mind, it did not lessen the psychological usefulness of Wingate’s actions. Men and material (and mostly material) win wars, but human beings need leaders with confidence and verve who possess the guts to say that victory remains possible. Courage invents confidence, and confidence begets courage; the two characteristics loop together among the minds of the many.

Rooney’s book provides a welcome correction to the history of Orde Wingate. Rooney’s most important contribution probably rests in showing the extent of the smear campaign that discredits Wingate as a human being and effective leader. It represents a tragedy of written record that such distortions influenced the Sykes’ biography of Orde Wingate. (Even with the distortions, Sykes' biography probably remains the best available). Wingate stands as one of the most interesting soldiers of the Second World War, one who died in action for his country and earned the respect of both his commanders and his men. He deserved better than he got.

Archibald Wavell, The Viceroy's Journal, ed. by Penderel Moon. 1973, OUP. 528 pp    

The Viceroy's Journal records the first-person impressions, calculations, and musings of Archibald Wavell, a great man given the shoddy task of serving as the second-to-last viceroy of India, 1943-1947. Just prior to the book's opening moments, Wavell led the defense of British Middle East and British Asia, always with limited resources and virtually no proper support from Churchill's cabinet. Churchill thrusts Wavell, a one-eyed soldier with no active political experience, into the civilian appointment of Viceroy of India to avoid giving the popular general further military commands. Instead of riding out the war in comparative luxury (as Churchill expected), Wavell immediately sets to work with intelligence and enthusiasm, helping to end the famine in Bengal, release Gandhi from prison, and lobby His Majesty's Government (H.M.G.) to transfer Indian political power before the end of the war. Wavell records the government’s callow responses with frank and adroit perception. In the viceroy's account, Indian politicians do not fare any better. Gandhi and Jinnah appear as political demagogues, each clumsily manipulating the respective Hindu and Muslim masses. They seem more devoted to party approval than to the competent dissolution of the Raj. "They do not understand how the machinery of Government works in practice," Wavell avers, "and think entirely on the lines of all questions being decided by party votes."

Wavell addresses his readers with roughly three types of journal entries: amusing anecdotes of political machinations, annoyed dismissals of pomp and ceremonial lunches, and engaged analysis of India's economic and political problems. He writes with a calm voice and courageous enthusiasm, even when the task assumes a difficulty of quixotic proportions. Editor Penderel Moon, a former colonial administrator, provides footnotes and appendices that offer an approving assessment of Wavell's influence and understanding of Indian politics. Wavell, a career soldier, also demonstrates an apt mind for interpreting the dialectical highs and lows of British parliamentary politics. Inexpert readers might find Wavell's frequent use of acronyms and titles a little difficult to follow, and updated footnotes would help preserve the book's usefulness for future generations. That said, Wavell evinces a remarkably calm sense of duty and self-understanding, which allows the book to serve as a profound guide to the closing days of the British Raj.

Robert Graves. Good-Bye to All That. Anchor Book Editions, 1998 [1957].                       

Robert Graves, upon reading a 1929 edition of his own memoir of the Great War, remarked "I wonder how my publishers escaped a libel action." Good-Bye to All That perhaps escaped libel action through its outrageous candor: Graves tells a soldier's story so brutally, comically honest and accidentally heroic that any attempt to legally discredit the author could only appear as aggrandizement of a war that left a bad taste in the mouth of survivors. Other literary accounts of the First World War, such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms or Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, strive for tragedy. Notably, both books are novels, not memoirs. Graves' account embraces dark and irreverent comedy. He spins ghost stories he does not believe, and as gladly relates gossip from the trenches as he does any factual account of the fighting. He strikes a dismissive tone of courage, tactics and strategy, and yet takes pride in his own stoicism and poetic observations. Friends and fellow soldiers enter the scene, deliver a line to Graves, and then walk into machine gun fire and die, or catch a mortar shell and die, or go mad (or catch venereal disease) and live.

The author assumes a knowing audience. He never bothers to explain technical military terms, or particular references to celebrated friends and acquaintances; as such, the book would make a difficult introduction to the subject and time period. Yet Graves' absolute, unfiltered humanity creates a startling and vital account of the First World War and the years immediately before and after. He never blushes to describe the erotic, Platonic boy-love of the English school system, nor his own struggle to walk the line between bodily courage and moral cowardice. Remarkably, he never highlights any one aspect of his early life as more important than another: his upbringing receives as equal treatment as his  exploits as a soldier. I should not use the word "exploits," because Graves never uses it. The author typically refers to battles as "shows," and seems to smile when people he dislikes die in combat. He shrugs when good soldiers fall in pain and agony, and sighs (and gurgles) with relief when he receives a lung-wound dangerous enough to send him back to England for a few months of convalescence. He leaves England at the end of the book, just as his marriage falls apart and his friends seem to run out of patience with his heavy-hearted laughter. The reader should be glad to have read his book, and thankful not to be in it.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1952.                                                         

George Orwell speaks of his catalytic impulse for violence in plain terms: he wants to kill Fascists. He travels to Spain during the opening movement of its Civil War (1936-1939), and joins a social-anarchist militia. In doing so, Orwell sets himself against not only the fascists, but also the powerful Stalinist strains of Spanish communism. He moves to the frontlines with little equipment, and significant uncertainty. Along the front, the militiamen sleep little and fight less, and Orwell portrays the war with candor and humor. In the process of killing fascists, he sleeps with lice, eats ice-crusted beans, side-steps death, and bombs parapets. Ironically, the book's great climax of Barcelona street fighting occurs hundreds of miles from the frontline action. The communist police agents eventually hound Orwell out of Spain, and back to England at the dawn of the Second World War. Orwell tried his best, and it did not do any good: "If this was history," he complains, "it did not feel like it." Orwell admittedly failed to achieve military or political victory, but he succeeds with words, and therein gives voice to the violent heartache of twentieth century soldiering and revolutionary ideals.

Orwell's account remains the best English-language book on the Spanish Civil War because he combines a soldier's romanticism with an intellectual's idealism, and then skillfully cuts the two perspectives to ribbons. Like the smooth and colorless puzzles of an M.C. Escher drawing, Orwell's unaffected grace paradoxically simplifies Spanish political tensions while showing their intractable nature. Orwell holds a clear perspective, and it leads nowhere: Fascism approaches, jingoes lie, and politics smells worse than war. Orwell's book, ultimately, feels like the work of a cartographer. He marks the intellectual ground in a tremendous rush, as though he knows the churning tide of Fascist conflict must come further up the shore, and he wants to preserve a moment in time in which he chose to act. Yet he saw that action amount to no more than wet sand. The British public largely ignored Homage to Catalonia at its initial release, but Orwell's book speaks with a strong and nuanced voice, and continues to attract a steady stream of readers who prefer their disillusionment to come from the pages of Orwell's book rather than from battlefields.

Norman Davies, The Isles: A History, Oxford University Press, 1999.                             J. M. Meyer

Norman Davies’ The Isles offers a gripping historical narrative of the cultural, economic, and political history of what most members of the twenty-first century refer to as Ireland and the United Kingdom. The author constructs a narrative that emphasizes chance and change over institutional design, thereby creating a living history, rather than a stale memorial to the rise of a monolithic (and mythic) civilization. Davies despises teleological accounts of history that suggest "smooth, seamless, linear progress." Instead, he argues, the history of the isles demonstrates "kaleidoscopic change and of repeated, turbulent transformations." Simplified economic models of state development and teleological historical accounts distort history, and leave unsuspecting readers with similarly distorted minds; Davies aims to counter such histories with a well-spun tale of how a national consciousness takes shape, forms, and disintegrates, time after time.

The chaos of history might make for a chaotic-mess of a book, but Davies carefully spaces the history of the isles into ten simple eras. He examines each era with three reoccurring (and very effective) methodological tools: a 'snapshot' of a particular person or action from the period at hand, a wide-angle account of the same era, and finally an examination of how subsequent generations portray the time period. Davies' use of a three-pronged attack on each historical era represents one of the great strengths of the book. Each section allows him to use a different level of magnification. When an historical cause seems of critical import, or illuminates a particular aspect of a people's culture, Davies gladly hesitates over its significance and meaning, breathing fresh life into a familiar story. (If the book receives a second edition, the author (and publisher) might wish to reorganize portions of the last few eras, which seem thrown together compared with the artfully constructed early chapters.)

At times, however, Davies' forceful strokes bleed beauty out of the accomplishments that occurred within the confines of the isles. His emphasis on historical chance and idiosyncratic outcomes tends to spoil some of the interest of humanity's frail accomplishments, such as the inexplicable genius of Shakespeare, or the psychological fortitude and madness of William Wallace. 

Despite Davies’ hum-bug approach to genius, the book offers fascinating historical accounts on every page. Ten-thousand years ago, Davies argues, the isles lived nameless. His book, in its dying fall, offers no suggestion as to what humanity should call them next.

A. J. P. Taylor, The Second World War: An Illustrated History. Penguin Books, 1976.       J. M. Meyer

In The Second World War: An Illustrated History, A. J. P. Taylor provides a controversial account of the world-wide conflict that destroyed the lives of more than seventeen million combatants, and an even greater number of civilians. The war lasted six years, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, and concluding with the Japanese capitulation to American forces. Throughout the book, Taylor argues that ignorance and luck prevailed over tactics and strategy; he curiously suggests that rationality and reason played no useful role in determining troop movements, though they did seem to help leaders such as Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, and Stalin maintain control over the masses. Taylor paints such famous actions as the Battle of Britain, Operation Market Garden, and the battles of North Africa as episodes in which one fool strikes another, and wherein neither side possessed any real understanding of its opponent. He derides the contributions of popular generals, including Rommel, Patton, MacArthur, and Montgomery. He praises, however, the Soviet General Zhukov as "perhaps the greatest general of the war," and the officer most usefully responsible for winning the largest land battles in history. In the closing pages, Taylor defends Soviet action at the close of war, especially in light of Europe's traditional hostility to Russian power. He attempts to dispel the illusion that the conclusion of the war might have led to universal peace; the victors purposed to destroy the regimes of Germany, Japan, and Italy, and in this task the Allies succeeded. "Despite all the killing and destruction that accompanied it, the Second World War was a good war," and left people everywhere "happier, freer and more prosperous than they would have been if Nazi Germany and Japan had won."

The book reads quickly, with many photographs and paintings punctuating a scant 234 pages. Taylor's prose touches on nearly every famous and momentous action of the war, and many besides. The book wants, however, for a detailed bibliography, as well as a list of recommended reading. Despite these shortcomings, Taylor's slim volume craftily builds a case for the wild, uncontrollable character of the Second World War, and the idiosyncratic nature of its unfolding. 

John E. Mack. A Prince of our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence. Harvard UP. 1976.

John E. Mack’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography, A Prince of our Disorder, gently uses the tools of psychology and psychoanalysis to understand T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), an Irish-English, second-child of an illegitimate marriage whose self-confidence, personal charisma, and feverish imagination propelled him to the forefront of some of the most pivotal events of the early 20th century.

Lawrence became famous while serving as tactical adviser to the leaders of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Combat destroys illusions, but it also creates myths, and Lawrence (to this day) serves as one of the Great War’s greatest heroes, as well as its most disappointed solider. After an early childhood spent fighting off his domineering mother, he studied medieval archeology and poetry at Oxford, and began touring the Middle East as an archeologist. Like many of his peers, his war-like medieval fantasies collided with reality at the outbreak of war with the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and (most importantly to Lawrence) the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps too short for immediate acceptance as a British officer for the war in Europe, Lawrence leveraged his Middle Eastern expertise into service as an intelligence officer in Cairo. He grew restless, however, after two of his brothers died on the Western front, and thereafter Lawrence accelerated his ambition to participate in a conflict in the Arab world. Lawrence always measured the present against an impossible and imaginary medieval ideal, “and his most important actions may be seen as efforts to impose upon grimmer circumstance, to which had also to adapt, his utopian imaginings.” He welded a rich fantasy life to absolute action—a combination with which he won victory after victory in simultaneous support of the British Army and Arab nationalism.

Lawrence remained painfully aware of his own dual identity: “The two selves [the Bedouin and the overcivilized European],” Lawrence wrote, “are mutually destructive… so I fall between them into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false God in which to believe.” The timeline of Mack's book goes far beyond the reach of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and places a much greater emphasis on Lawrence's life before and after the war. Mack, for example, reports the Arab revolt and capture of Damascus over a course of fifty pages, whereas Seven Pillars of Wisdom uses some seven hundred pages for the same task.

 Mack’s use of psychoanalysis and social psychology do not impede the flow and structure of the book. He wisely avoids pedantic diatribes on psychological theory. He keeps the focus on Lawrence, except where he anticipates a necessary corrective to the ‘popular’ psychology of TIME, television, and the like. Mack’s expertise works quietly throughout the text, and pays steep dividends when he examines contradictions and tensions within Lawrence’s self-representations. 

For example, Mack astutely reports two accounts of an Arab ambush of Turkish forces, one written for a fellow soldier, and another for a civilian audience. To the fellow soldier, Lawrence viewed combat as a “stunt” with such “beautiful shots” that the violence only took “about ten minutes… I hope,” Lawrence wrote, “that it sounds as fun as it is.” Yet in a separate record of the exact same ambush, Lawrence wrote a civilian friend that “This killing of the Turks is horrible… I hope when the nightmare ends I will wake up and become alive again.” 

Mack’s remarkable biography shows that Lawrence’s fun ended with the writing of his famous memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Yet the nightmare of relishing in war relentlessly pursued Lawrence until his death in a motorcycle accident in 1935. In the interim period, even as the press lionized the ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ the real Lawrence abandoned all political hopes for Arab nationalism, and sought personal purification through sexual abstinence and menial servitude in the British ranks. Throughout the journey, Mack provides a bright light with which to see even the darkest corners of Lawrence’s tremendously beautiful psyche. 

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.