Читать книгу Lawrence of Arabia: Zionism and Palestine - Sir Ronald Storrs - Страница 6
II
Оглавление“A pardlike spirit beautiful and swift.”
SHELLEY
My Baghdad journal of 15 July 1917 unsupplemented alas, by memory, tells me: “Lawrence and Feilding to lunch. L.’s performance in Syria little short of miraculous and I hope he will get his V.C. Mentioned to me vague Damascus possibilities.”[7]
During my leave in London I heard nothing of him: on my return to Cairo at the end of 1917 he was—elsewhere.
Rūhi[8], whom I had instructed to watch over him in the beginning, told me that Lawrence came to him in Jeddah for further information about the customs and habits of the Hejaz Arabs. Rūhi compiled for him a vocabulary of vernacular Arabic expressions, accompanied him round the coast to Yanbo, Qaddīma, Umlej and Wajh, and there suggested to him that he should leave his uniform for Arab garments. At that time (according to Rūhi), Lawrence “spoke Arabic with horrible mispronunciation”; and though he greatly improved his accent, he never could have passed as an Arab with an Arab—a defect which renders his achievement the more remarkable.[9] He learnt the prostrations of the Moslem prayer, and for a time called himself the Sharīf Hassan, “born of a Turkish mother in Constantinople.”
There are other accounts, besides those in Seven Pillars, of the dynamiting of Turkish bridges[10] and culverts: none so far as I know giving the impressions of a dynamitee. This was the unsolicited introduction to Lawrence of Carl Raswan,[11] travelling on a Turkish train to Damascus:
“Somewhere near Deraa in Transjordan, as we approached a dry river bed, we were stopped, and as we looked out of the windows of our carriage, I suddenly saw and heard a terrible explosion, followed by several smaller ones. A bridge, several yards ahead of us, had been blown up with a train on it. It was ahead of our Military Convoy; our cars were shattered by falling debris, but I remember hardly anything, as we were taken away from the place of disaster and had to stay several days near Amman, until the bridge had been repaired.”
Early in January 1918 I was sitting in a snowbound Jerusalem, when an orderly announced a Beduin, and Lawrence walked in and sat beside me.[12] He remained for the rest of the day, and left me temporarily the poorer by a Virgil and a Catullus. Later on, when in Jerusalem, he always stayed in my house, an amusing as well as an absorbing if sometimes disconcerting guest. He had Shelley’s trick of noiselessly vanishing and reappearing. We would be sitting reading on my only sofa: I would look up, and Lawrence was not only not in the room, he was not in the house, he was not in Jerusalem. He was in the train on his way to Egypt.[13]
In those days and (owing to the withering hand of Monsieur Mavromatis’ Ottoman concession) for years after, there was no electric light in Jerusalem, and in my bachelor household the hands of the Arab servants fell heavy upon the incandescent mantles of our paraffin lamps, from which a generous volcano of filthy smuts would nightly stream over the books, the carpets and everything in the room. Lawrence took the lamp situation daily in hand, and so long as he was there all was bright on the Aladdin front. He said he liked the house because it contained the necessities and not the tiresomenesses of life; that is to say there were a few Greek marbles, a good piano and a great many books though (I fear) not enough towel-horses, no huckabacks, and a very irregular supply of cruets and dinner-napkins. Not all my guests agreed with Lawrence’s theory; but the Egyptian cook did, for my servant Said once observed: “When your Excellency has none other than Urenz in the house, Abd al-Wahhāb prepares ala kaifu—without bothering himself.”
He was not (any more than Kitchener) a misogynist, though he would have retained his composure if he had been suddenly informed that he would never see a woman again. He could be charming to people like my wife and sister, whom he considered to be “doing” something, but he regarded (and sometimes treated) with embarrassing horror those who “dressed, and knew people”. When at a dinner party a lady illustrated her anecdotes with the Christian names, nick-names and pet-names of famous (and always titled) personages, Lawrence’s dejection became so obvious that the lady, leaning incredulously forward, asked: “I fear my conversation does not interest Colonel Lawrence very much?” Lawrence bowed from the hips—and those were the only muscles that moved: “It does not interest me at all,” he answered.
I was standing with him one morning in the Continental Hotel, Cairo, waiting for Rūhi, when an elderly Englishwoman, quite incapable of understanding his talk, but anxious to be seen conversing with the Uncrowned King of Arabia, moved towards him. It was hot, and she was fanning herself with a newspaper as she introduced herself: “Just think, Colonel Lawrence, Ninety-two! Ninety-two.” With a tortured smile he replied: “Many happy returns of the day.”
In those days he spoke much of the press he would found in Epping Forest for the printing of the classics, where, he said: “I’ll pull you the Theocritus[14] of your dreams. I’m longing to get back to my printing-press, but I have two kings to make first.” He made the Kings if not the press: Faisal in Iraq, Abdallah in Transjordan stand indeed as in part his creations. But with his (and my) old friend Husain Ibn Ali of Mecca his relations were fated to fall tragically from bad to worse. That monarch was alas becoming less and less a practicable member of the Comity of Kings. Fully supported but wholly uncontrolled in his absolutism by the might of the British Empire, he dropped into the unfortunate habit of regarding the mere suggestion of anything he did not wish to do as an attack on his honour and his sovereign rights. An historian with the knowledge and the patience to go through the complete file of al-Qibla, for eight years the official organ of the Hāshimi Government in Mecca, could present to the world a state of mind—and of affairs—closer to the Middle Ages than to the twentieth century. In Jeddah money for the building of a mosque was collected by the simple process of the Qaimaqam sending for persons whom the King wished to subscribe, and presenting each with a receipt prepared in Mecca for the amount to be cashed in. As late as 1923 hands were being chopped off for theft in Mecca, as prescribed by the original Shari Law. When the telegraph cable between Jeddah and Suakin broke, His Majesty hoped that the Sudan Government would withdraw their request for the customary cash deposit for its repair. Finding them obdurate, he ordered that no ship in Jeddah harbour should use her wireless under penalty of being cut off from all communication with the shore, making no exception for owners engaged on the most important business, or for time-signals. The Jeddah wireless station was kept on the watch all night in order to jam even the receipt of messages by ships, and by sending out meaningless (and sometimes obscene) signals interfered with the daily time-indication from Massawa and the correction of ships’ chronometers up and down the Red Sea.
Such being the royal attitude abroad as well as at home, there was matter less for surprise than for sorrow that Lawrence’s last negotiations with the man he had helped to raise so high should have been broken off in anger. Time after time the King would go back on agreements made after hours of discussion the day before. More than once he threatened to abdicate.[15] (Lawrence “wished he would”.) I myself incline to doubt whether King Husain ever loved Lawrence. There were moments when he and his sons suspected him of working against them, and more than once let fall hints to confidants that he should not be allowed to mingle too much with the Arab tribesmen. Faisal spoke of him to me with a good-humoured tolerance which I should have resented more if I had ever imagined that kings could like kingmakers.
Towards the end of my time in Jerusalem I received the notice inviting subscriptions (“by approved persons”) for the original limited edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I dispatched my cheque at once, to receive it again in a month neatly torn into four fragments, accompanied by the sharpest words I had ever known from Lawrence, to the effect that “in the circumstances” my letter was an insult, and that he was “naturally” giving me a copy, “your least share of the swag”. Later he professed a cynical indifference to his magnificent gift, and, when it became known as the Twenty Thousand Dollar Book, recommended me twice to sell quickly, while the going was good. When, with his (and some joint) notes, it was burnt, he immediately collected and sent me a complete set of the original illustrations.
AUTHOR WITH KING HUSAIN AT JEDDAH
December 12th, 1916
In the interval between Jerusalem and Cyprus I wrote to learn his plans and to suggest a meeting. He replied:
338171 A C Shaw,
Hut 105
R.A.F. Cadet College,
Cranwell, Lincs.
1. vi. 26
Dear R. S.,
Yes: I’m too far from London and from affairs to see many people now-a-days. Yet I hear of you and them, sometimes. If you want to see me you had better stay a week-end at Belton. We are about ten miles from it.
In August I’ll be away somewhere (no notion where). Sept.-October in Cranwell, November on leave, December on a troopship for I’m on overseas draft, probably to India for a five-year spell. One of the attractions of the R.A.F. is that you see the world for nothing.
Tonsils: yes, rotten things. I haven’t any. Lost them, like you.
The Sargent is reproduced and finished. The Kennington is still on the stones. The complexity and extravagance of my colour reproductions have put the Chiswick Press out of gear. They have been two years over them and are still hard at work. August, they hope to finish them. Till they do my book is held up. Yet it must come out, complete or incomplete, before I go abroad. So live in hope. Though what you will think of my personalities (yours and everybody’s!) God only knows.
Au revoir,
T. E. L.
In the autumn he resumed:
2. ix. 26.
Dear Ronald,
I’ll come over on Saturday the eleventh, to Belton. When? I can’t yet tell you. Just carry on with what programme the overlord of Belton has: and I’ll fit myself in. If Saturday is unfit for any reason (service life is highly irregular) I’ll come on Sunday, and will hang about till I see you. It might be tea-time on Saturday or late, after dinner, on Sunday: but God knows. Just carry on, and I’ll loom up sooner or later. I have a motor-bike, and so am mobile.
Book? November probably. Your copy will probably be posted to Colonial Office, and sent on thence by bag to the Governor and C.-in-C. of Cyprus (His Excellency; hum ha). I was exceedingly glad when I saw that news. The Sargent is at Kennington’s house (Morton House, Chiswick Mall), finished with. The Kennington has been the most difficult of all the pastels, and is not yet passed in proof. It keeps on falling to bits: looking butcherly-like, in raw-beef blocks of red. Very difficult. Kennington struggles hard with the colour-printers: and I hope not vainly. All over by 15 September, for that is “binding” day, when sheets are to be issued.
More when we meet,
Yours,
T. E. S.
My uncle forgot to warn the butler, who therefore announced that “an airman” was at the door. Strapped under the seat of his motor-cycle was the bound manuscript of Seven Pillars, one or two passages in which he wanted me to check. When, after tea, we were pacing up and down, round and about the lawns and gardens, I asked him point blank why he was doing what he was doing—and not more. He answered that there was only one thing in the world worth being, and that was a creative artist. He had tried to be this, and had failed. He said: “I know I can write a good sentence, a good paragraph, even a good chapter, but I have proved I cannot write a good book.” Not having yet seen Seven Pillars I could only quote the praise of Hogarth (which meant much to Lawrence) and agree that, compared with the glory of Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, career was nothing. Still, admitting these to be unattainable, there were Prime Ministers, Archbishops, Admirals of the Fleet, Press Barons and philanthropic millionaires, some of whom sometimes rendered service surely preferable to this utter renunciation? He allowed the principle, but refused the application. Since he could not be what he would, he would be nothing: the minimum existence, work without thought; and when he left the Royal Air Force it would be as night-watchman in a City warehouse.[16]
For all his puckishness, his love of disconcerting paradox, I believed then and am certain now that Lawrence meant what he said; though I thought there was also the element of dismay at the standard expected of him by the public; and I doubted how far even his nerves could ever be the same after his hideous manhandling in Deraa.[17]
I further believe that, though not given to self-depreciation, he did underrate the superlative excellence of Seven Pillars, and, as a most conscious[18] artist in words, ached to go further still.
13. ix. 34.
Dear R. S.,
I have been away for a while, during which your P.C. sat on the edge of Southampton Water, peacefully, in blazing sunshine. If all of the years were like this, no man would need to go abroad....
Here are your K. articles,[19] which I return because I know how rare fugitive writings become in time. Once I did three or four columns in the same paper, but I have never seen them since; they gave me the idea that newsprint is a bad medium for writing. The same stuff that would pass muster between covers looks bloodless between ruled lines on a huge page. Journalistic writing is all blood and bones, not for cheapness’ sake, but because unnatural emphasis is called for. It’s like architectural sculpture which has to be louder than indoor works of art.
So I’d say that these articles of yours read too “chosen” for press-work; but that in a book they would be charming. You write with an air ... and airs need the confinement of walls or end papers or whatnots to flourish. But do airs flourish? I think they intensify, suffuse, intoxicate. Anyhow they are one of the best modes of writing, and I hope you will try to write, not fugitive pieces, but something sustained or connected by the thread of your life.
.....
I’ve often said to you that the best bit of your writing I ever read was your dictated account of the report of an agent’s interview, pre-revolt, with the Sharif of Mecca on his palace roof at night. If you could catch atmosphere and personality, bluntly, like that, it would be a very good book. These K. articles might be blunted. You’ll have to use the word “I” instead of the bland “Secretary” ...[20] Forget the despatch and the F.O. and try for the indiscreet Pro-consul!
Yours,
T. E. S.
He loved discussing his own prose and, if convinced, was humble under criticism, whether of style or of fact. When I told him that he had been too generous to me in the beginning of his book but not quite just in the middle,[21] where, if I was “parading”, it was in order to teach him a business at which he was new and I was old, he exclaimed that he would have altered the passage had he known in time.
My wife and I came upon him early in 1929 returning from India by the Rajputana, where he spent his time, flat in his berth, translating Homer. He did not dissent when I thought that his Odyssey sacrificed overmuch to the desire of differing from predecessors: for instance in rendering ῤοδοδάκτυλος ἤως—rosy fingered dawn—in nineteen different ways. It is therefore an arresting rather than a satisfying version. Lawrence, though respectful almost to deference of expert living authority, lacked the surrender of soul to submit himself lowly and reverently, even to the first poet. Of Matthew Arnold’s three requisites for translating Homer—simplicity, speed and nobility, all dominating qualities of Lawrence’s being—he failed somehow in presenting the third, substituting as often as not some defiant and most un-Homeric puckishness of his own, so that Dr. Johnson’s criticism of Pope’s Iliad would be no less applicable to Lawrence’s Revised Version. The classical Arab could become in a trice a street Arab. Nevertheless, Lawrence’s Odyssey possesses two outstanding merits. It represents Lawrence as well as Homer, and it has by hero-worship or the silken thread of snobbishness led to Homer thousands that could never have faced the original, or even the renderings of Pope, Chapman, or Butcher and Lang; just as for countless Londoners the “approach” to the Portland Vase, visible but neglected for a century in the British Museum, was induced through its auctioning at Christie’s in the presence of the Prince of Wales.
Lawrence sent me in Cyprus, inviting comment, the typescript of The Mint, a remarkable and sometimes brutal picture of his early days in the Air Force. The narration was no less fine than the description, but the contrast between the lives and the language of all ranks was startling indeed. It seemed that they could only find relief from the cloistered rigour of their existence by expressing their emotions with an almost epileptic obscenity.[22] I offered, by a necessary minimum of blue pencil over a total of some thirty pages, to enable the book to emerge from the steel safe in which I had to guard it when not in use, into general reading: but Lawrence said the language was the life, sooner than falsify which he would rather not publish at all. (Part having appeared during his lifetime in an English newspaper, under a misapprehension that he had approved thereof, a copyrighting publication of 10 copies prohibitively priced was arranged in America; none other to appear until his earliest authorized date of 1950.)
He hated public attention save when impersonal enough for him to appear not to notice it, but was not disappointed when, as nearly always, his incognito broke down. One day he offered to take my wife and me to the Imperial War Museum “to see the Orpens”. When we came to his portrait by James McBey, I asked him to stand in front so that we might for a minute see him against McBey’s vision. In a flash the word went round the Staff that Lawrence was here, and for the rest of our visit we were accompanied by the rhythmic beat of a dozen martial heels. Lawrence was clearly not displeased, yet when on our departure I remarked upon the number of our escort, “Really?” he said “I didn’t notice any one.” He was indeed a mass of contradictions: shy and retiring, yet he positively enjoyed sitting for, and criticizing, his portrait. No one could have been more remote from the standard of the public school, and I can as easily picture him in a frock-coat or in hunting pink as in an old school tie. In action likewise he was an individual force of driving intelligence, but with nothing of the administrator; having about as much of the team spirit as Alexander the Great or Mr. Lloyd George.
In England we met (as might have been expected) more often unexpectedly than by appointment—in the street, on a bus, or at a railway station. Once, when I was choosing gramophone records, a hand from behind descended firmly upon my shoulder. I had only just arrived in England, and supposed for a moment that this must be an attempt on the part of an assistant at Brighter British Salesmanship. It was Lawrence, replenishing the immense collection of records arranged in volumes round a square of deep shelves in the upper room of his cottage. On another occasion he led me to his publishers where, walking round the room, he picked out half a dozen expensive books, and, as though he were the head of the firm, made me a present of them.[23] He was a loyal, unchanging and affectionate friend, and would charge down from London on the iron steed from which he met his death to visit me in a nursing home, or run up 200 miles from the West of England to say good-bye before I returned to Cyprus. After a convalescence voyage he wrote
338171 A/c Shaw,
R.A.F. Cattewater,
Plymouth.
5. v. 29.
Dear R. S.,
Maurice Baring told me you were back. Did it do good? Are you fit, or fitter even?
I’m down here, too far off to reach London even for a week-end: but the place is good, and the company. So all’s well with me.
Please give my regards to Lady Storrs. I hope she is contented with your improvement.
M. B. has given me a huge Gepäck[24] five times as fat as yours, and stuffed full of glory. I did not know there were so many good poems, in it, and outside it. Half of it is strange to me.
Yours,
T. E. S.
Leaving Southampton for Canada in 1934 we were “greeted[25] by C.P.R. officials and by T. E. Shaw. Him I found, healthier in appearance than ever before, capless in brown overalls and blue jersey. He came aboard and talked awhile of his retirement next March to a small cottage on a maximum of £100 per annum. He would provide bread, honey, and cheese for visitors, but could not put them up otherwise than in a sleepingbag (marked Tuum—his own Meum) on the floor. In order to side-slip the photographers he took me in his Power-boat Joker (£180, 25 knots, unupsetable) and allowed me to zigzag it about for 15 minutes. A permanent friend I shall always rejoice to see, with generosities of feeling for persons as well as for books.” I never saw him again alive.
Nine-tenths of his letters to me have perished, and only a half-dozen, which never left England, remain. Even these few reveal his power and variety in that rarely mastered art. I had in a moment of weakness consented to ask him to write an introduction to a book on Beduin Life by an artist whose exhibition I had opened. I knew the request was hopeless, and had only written par acquit de conscience begging him at least to let me have an answer I could pass on. His reply, though admirable and richly deserved, hardly fell within this category.
Bridlington,
25. ii. 35.
No: I won’t; Forewords are septic things, and I hope never to do another. Bertram Thomas was like the importunate woman; but to strangers it is easy to say “No”: he must understand that he has no claim on me: nor do I even know what he has written, or why, or who he is. No, most certainly No.
Yours,
T. E. S.
I leave here to-morrow a.m.... and the R.A.F. that same moment εἰθε δὲ μήδ᾿ ...[26]
LETTER FROM T. E. LAWRENCE
[Transcribed]
Bridlington
25.2.35
No: I won’t; Forewords are septic things, and I hope never to do another. Bertram Thomas was like the unfortunate woman; but to strangers it is easy to say “No”: he must understand that he has no claim on me: nor do I even know what he has written, or why, or who he is. No, most certainly No.
Yours
TES
I leave here tomorrow a.m.... and the R.A.F. that same moment εἰθε᾿ δὲ μήδ
