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.

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. 

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.