The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Humphrey McQueen once claimed to have been the only person to have read Xavier Herbert’s massive novel Poor Fellow My Country (1975) from start to finish and I’ve never heard him contradicted. Some books are like that. In Woody Allen’s brilliant comedy Zelig (1983), the only regret psychotic chameleon Leonard Zelig has at the end of his life is that ‘I never finished Moby Dick’. Same with me. I suspect that for many people TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) falls into the same category.
I bought the handsome, map-festooned Penguin Classic version about 40 years ago, read several chapters but was turned back twice, perhaps three times. Jean reports a similar experience or thinks she may have skipped through, rather than read it. Recently I decided to try again with the talking book version (this runs for something over 25 hours, about two and a half times the length of the average novel), hoping that an expert reading would hold me. It has.
It is an extraordinary book, unlike any other I know of in English. Lawrence, an expert in Middle Eastern history and an Arabic speaker, was assigned, in the early stages of World War I, the task of encouraging the Arab tribes to revolt against the Ottoman Turks who controlled most of the Arabian peninsula. The idea was to eliminate Germany’s major ally and cause her to divert men and materials from the Western Front. Lawrence’s big book is an account of his attempts to persuade the Arabs to this cause. There were many problems; the Arabs were beset by tribal feuds and by a propensity to raid, loot and break off to enjoy the spoils. The distances Lawrence had to cover by camel were immense and the conditions – scorching sun and freezing cold – were horrendous. Added to this was Lawrence’s knowledge that he was deceiving the Arabs, that the European powers were already planning to carve out their ‘spheres of influence’ and deny independence to the Arabs. Which they did.
Against this background of guilt Lawrence charts his failures and successes in minute detail. The book is a war diary, a travelogue, an ethnography and a history. There are dramatic accounts of attacks on trains, bombings, and of the writer’s gunshot wounds and debilitating illnesses.
At one point Lawrence has to execute a thief within the Arab ranks to prevent a feud breaking out. He does so with a trembling hand that almost botches it. Later he is forced to shoot a wounded comrade to save him the torture that would certainly be his lot if captured by the Turks. This is underplayed and all the more dramatic for it.
A passage in which Lawrence is apprehended by Turks, beaten and raped has been contested by historians and biographers but there is certainly a homo-erotic thread running through descriptions of men, their faces, bodies and movements.
All this is exciting and graphic on a grand scale, but it must be admitted that there are pages of over-wrought philosophising about Man, Nature and Lawrence himself which are torturous to the point of incomprehensibility.
But I stayed with it and am glad I did. The question now is whether to attempt Moby Dick again.
And what about ‘Ulysses’? That’s the book I’ve started a few times and never managed to finish. My last attempt was while I was Dublin – it was a treat, a delight to walk in the footsteps of Joyce’s mind.
PS You’ve really turned me on to the idea of audio books.