A prince of our disorder by John E. Mack

Author:John E. Mack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lawrence, T. E. 1888-1935, Great Britain. Army -- Biography, British -- Middle East -- History -- 20th century, Orientalists -- Great Britain -- Biography, Archaeologists -- Middle East -- Biography, Soldiers -- Great Britain -- Biography, World War, 1914-1918 -- Middle East
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1998-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Return to England: London and All Souls

287

hugely and said, ‘I’m afraid I know him much too well.’ He enjoyed my discomfiture. I said, ‘Well, anyway, you dont look like him. He replied,

‘I know I don’t and I don’t feel like him.’ And we both laughed.”®^

Lawrence tended at All Souls to engage in undergraduate pranks (he was thirty-two at the time). Most of the tales of these escapades — flying the Hijaz flag from the pinnacle of All Souls, ringing the station bell captured at Tell Shahm out his window into the quadrangle, or stealing the Magdalen College deer — have been told by Robert Graves, a well-known fiction-maker himself, but some of them have been confirmed. Arnold Lawrence feels that these pranks were clear indications of his brother’s troubled state.®^

It did look for a time in 1920 as if Lawrence might become the Oxford scholar he had always seemed almost to be. He visited his many friends in Oxford, talked and wrote about books and printing, and called himself a bookworm. He indicated in a letter that he thought of settling down some day to do his history of the Crusades.®® But his restlessness and discontent proved eventually too profound for such a quiet life. When I got back I tried Oxford for a bit but gave it up,” he wrote at the end of February.®^

When asked to be the godfather (how often he was a godfather!) to his friend Newcombe’s boy he answered: “In the history of the world (cheap edition) I’m a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second Knight, a Strand-Magazine strummer. In the eyes of ‘those who know I failed badly in attempting a piece of work which a little more resolution would have pushed through, or left untouched. So either case it is bad for the sprig. ®®

Despite this demurring, he took a godfatherly interest in the sprig, who was named Stewart Lawrence Newcombe. Wouldn t the child be handicapped by that name? Lawrence asked the father. He soon asked to visit his godson, and was enchanted with him. “Ned loved Jimmy from the time he was bom,” the mother confided to me, “and bounced him on his knee. He felt Jimmy was something that was his, a familial link.’®®

In March Lawrence wrote to a wartime friend, “I’m out of affairs by request of the Foreign Office which paid me the compliment of calling me the main obstacle to an Arab surrender.”®^ On May 14 he wrote to Frederick Stern: “Paris gave me a bad taste in my mouth, and so last May I dropped politics, and have had no touch with British or Arabs or Zionists since. I’m out of them for good, and so my views on Palestine are merely ancient history.”®® But British mismanagement of its Middle Eastern responsibilities hadvalready been drawing Lawrences attention, and a few days after writing Stern he was once more in the thick of Middle Eastern politics.

While Lawrence was struggling with his memoirs in London and enjoying his friends in Oxford, the situation in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East was deteriorating.

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