Lost History – Lawrence of Arabia’s unlikely love of E.E. Cummings
T.E. Lawrence inspired the imagination of his tragic generation. “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time,” wrote Winston Churchill. Daring acts of un-commissioned bravery cemented his reputation for quixotic valour and inspiring gallantry, rendering that obscure Oxford academic one of the most revered figures in recent military history. His abilities, of course, encompassed many more vocations than the waging of guerrilla campaigns.
His autobiographical work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, retains a peculiar status in the annals of literature. Some critics have depicted it as a poetic echo of Herodotus’s anthropological histories. To others, what Lawrence owes to Doughty’s Arabia Deserta is obvious. In any case, it is seen as a masterpiece of modern letters, difficult to pigeonhole, painful to read, yet unmistakably made of profound and distinct prose. Its long and sinuous sentences evince the intellectual civil war between Lawrence’s divergent tendencies of soldier-poet and scholar-spy. Their struggle for dominance in his mind stretches the expressions of his observations in opposite directions.
Having produced an extraordinary work of literary Modernism, it is perhaps not surprising that Lawrence would be attracted to the prose of a pioneering poet. The invocation of E.E. Cummings alongside T.E. Lawrence does, however, feel incongruous. One belonged to the entirely American convention of compulsively renewing the methodology of art; the other has become a byword for British adventure abroad. Cummings was a stylistically strange, though thematically familiar, modern poet. His lowercased verses exhibit traditional sentiments like love, loss and lassitude, but their freedom of form and coarseness of vocabulary enable their music to reach a rare tone of intimacy and tenderness. His work evokes a mellifluence of feeling that many of the most fabled Romantic poems fail to match. With his keen emotional intelligence, he exhaled his enticing tautologies through a uniquely laconic lyricism. Like Lawrence, his best prose was autobiographical.
An association between these two giants may seem ostensibly astounding, but Cummings’s first novel, The Enormous Room, written about his experiences as a prisoner in France after the First World War, found an unlikely champion in England’s great desert warrior. Jailed for the supreme sin of driving an ambulance with a close friend who happened to pen anti-war missives to his family in America, Cummings had to endure a three-month stint in sunless La Ferté-Macé. The title is a reference to the room in which he slept accompanied by thirty other prisoners. “I call it one of the very best of the war books,” wrote Lawrence in a letter to Robert Graves.
Indeed, it was Lawrence who turned Graves’s attention to Cumming’s “surprising sense of character” and “terrifying actuality of imagination”. These qualities impressed Graves enough to compel him to provide an erudite introduction for the English edition. Prior to its publication in the United Kingdom, Lawrence sent Cummings’s manuscript to a literary agent in London who “touted it round with a cautious little note” from its famous patron. The note praises Cummings’s capacity to capture the atmosphere of incarceration and commends his ability to convey “the tang of herded men” more keenly than a desultory discernment of actual senses. That is quite an achievement. For a man as cognitive as Lawrence to say that a semi-fictional account of events reveals more veracity than an experience of those events, is a compliment that would make the most self-assured novelist blush.
Admitting that he preferred Cummings’s prose to his poetry, Lawrence conceded that Cumming’s experimentation with poetry lent “balance” to his prosaic exertions. Its failure to find an immediate publishing home in England did not prevent Lawrence from “pushing it vigorously” and even after his efforts ended, he “remembered the book for years”. A world-weary Lawrence labouring away in India must have been gladdened when he received a message from Graves informing him that Cummings’s book had finally been published.