Meanwhile, he applied for a scholarship at St John’s College – here his elder brother Bob was already studying medicine – but was unsuccessful. The following January, though, he succeeded in obtaining a Meyricke Exhibition at Jesus College – available to him because of the accident of his Welsh birth – which provided Ј50 for the study of Modern History. Jesus was very much a Welsh college, and during Easter 1907 he felt compelled to make a cycling tour of Wales – which he had never seen – to acquaint himself with his country of birth. His letters home from this tour show a new fluency, a factor Lawrence may have owed to John Ruskin, whose book The Stones of Venice he had read the previous year. Ruskin, a poet, was one of the founders of the Victorian Gothic Revival, and was concerned with the way in which architecture mirrored the human spirit. He believed that the fineness of true medieval Gothic stonework was a consequence of the fact that the workmen of the age had been allowed more freedom of expression than the modern artisan, condemned as he was to be a cypher on the production line. Ruskin’s writing, considered a beau ideal of Victorian mannered prose, stimulated Lawrence into imitation: ‘I now have some conception of the right way to study architecture,’ he wrote on first reading Ruskin, ‘and how to draw the truest lessons from it.’¹⁶ One of the most frustrating moments on the trip, though, was when he overheard the young landlady of the Pelican Hotel at Kidwelly discussing him with her family. Few of us would have been able to refrain from listening, perhaps, but Lawrence, whose inner lack of self-image gave him a lifelong craving to know how he appeared to others, strained desperately for every word: ‘It really was awfully funny,’ he reported, ‘… he family council ended by deciding I would probably “be” something – rather a pointless conclusion I think.’¹⁷

Lawrence went up Jesus College on 12 October 1907, but he continued to live at Polstead Road for most of his time as an undergraduate, taking rooms for only one term – Trinity 1908 – to comply with college rules. Theo Chaundy, who entered Christ Church in the same year, admitted that he and his peers had been surprised to see Lawrence up for a scholarship – not because of any lack of intellect, but because they doubted that he had the commitment required for an academic life. Lawrence later claimed to have attended no lectures while at Jesus, and to have spent all his time in private reading – often reading which had little connection with his subject. In history, anything after 1500 bored him anyway, and his concept of the Middle Ages was much more the chivalrous world of Morte d’Arthur than the down-to-earth one of serfdom and the Plague. L. C. Jane, a rather neurotic but brilliant tutor who coached Lawrence for his Repositions, felt that he was not a scholar by temperament, and observed that the only books he would read were those which were out of the ordinary: books, in other words, which appealed to his sense of self-mystification. Jane noticed Lawrence’s aloofness, and his habit of making provocative statements in order to test his personality. Ernest Barker, a history don, believed that Lawrence had chosen to study history simply because it was a hurdle to be jumped, and saw him as a knight girding himself for action. The more observant Midge Hall, who was at Jesus with Lawrence, though, realized that he was, in fact, ‘a wanderer for wandering’s sake’ with no settled purpose other than to escape. Reginald Lane Poole, Lawrence’s tutor in medieval history, thought him a romantic, though noted, obversely, that he would begin his essays with some challenging statement – a technique he had acquired from the advice of Sir Charles Oman, whose theories on medieval castles he would one day set out to refute. Once, when Lawrence wrote Poole a note apologizing for missing a tutorial, his tutor riposted with rapier-like wit that it was unimportant since it ‘had given him time for an hour’s useful work’.

Lawrence played little part in the life of the college, and drew attention to himself by his very solitariness. His refusal to join in sport raised some eyebrows, but he was too subtle to argue the toss with college hearties, preferring to lampoon them by following them through the streets on their way to the sports field or rowing club, making fun of their physical characteristics. There were other abstentions too. He did not smoke, he did not drink, he rarely attended official meals in hall. He explained to one fellow undergraduate, A. G. Prys-Jones, that he did not sit on chairs if he could avoid it and took no breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, no tobacco or strong drink: ‘… fact,’ said Prys-Jones, ‘he did nothing which qualified him to be an ordinary member of society.’¹⁸ Once, he burst into Midge Hall’s room with a grotesquely distorted face and began firing a revolver through a window into the Turl below. Hall realized that the shots were blanks, and concluded, probably correctly, that Lawrence was play-acting, though Lawrence claimed to be letting off steam after a marathon forty-five-hour work-session without food or sleep. In Trinity Term 1908 he took rooms in the inner quadrangle of Jesus, overlooking the covered market, and above the college kitchen whose stale cooking smells drifted miasmically through them. Late at night, when everyone else was retiring, Lawrence would come alive, ‘like a cat’, prowling the dark streets on his bicycle or merely tramping the quadrangles alone. A. T. P. Williams, an undergraduate who would later become Bishop of Winchester, recalled meeting him there often: ‘I do not know when he went to bed,’ he wrote, ‘some nights, I’m pretty sure, not at all, certainly seldom till well on in the small hours.’¹⁹ His sleepless tramping eventually piqued the curiosity of a third-year undergraduate named Vyvyan Richards, who went to investigate the solitary freshman and immediately fell in love with him. Richards, a sharp, angular, sensitive man, was the son of a Welsh inventor and his American wife, who had spent his life gaining distinctions, and sneering at art, history and literature. His fascination with Lawrence took him abruptly into a very different dimension, a world of old things: ‘castles, churches, memorial brasses, pottery and books-books-books’.²⁰ The two young men could not have been more different: Richards, sporty, snobbish, unintellectual, critical, orthodox: Lawrence, mercurial, whimsical, unconventional, super-cerebral, wrapped up in antiquity and romance – and yet, on their first meeting, Richards would write, ‘some deep and quick affection took hold upon us whose vividness stirs me still after thirty years have passed away’.²¹ Richards became obsessed with his love for Lawrence, offering him boundless affection, subservience and sacrifice, but his passion went unrequited. Lawrence was not attracted to him, and though he enjoyed his company and was flattered by his attentions, never gave the slightest hint that he understood the nature of his friend’s interest. He recognized that Richards was a difficult and complex personality, inclined to be dismissive of what he understood poorly, and with a horror of vulgarity, which he euphemistically referred to as ‘professionalism’. He liked Richards’s latent artistic talent and enjoyed helping to nurture it, and he could not ignore the tremendous energy Richards sent his way, which he turned to their mutual advantage. He loved Richards’s directness and experienced with him an intimacy which he had never known before. Much to Richards’s disappointment, though, that intimacy remained chaste. Years later, he claimed that Lawrence was ‘sexless’, and his conviction that he had ‘neither flesh or carnality of any kind’ echoes Clare Sydney Smith’s view that ‘Lawrence’s presence was hardly a physical one’. Neither understood that Lawrence was a masochist whose sexual feelings were closely tied up with his fear of pain. Though he preferred men to women and his later writings show a fascination with the idea of homoerotic sex, he had a horror of the reality of physical intimacy, which was directly connected to his early relationship with his mother: ‘The disgust of being touched revolted me,’ he would write, ‘…perhaps because one … terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact.’²² He would tell E. M. Forster that he was ‘funnily made up sexually’, and as regards the homosexual act, would write: ‘I couldn’t ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me.’²³