In the meantime, Lawrence had set out in pursuit of bigger fish than Garnett. Taking advantage of his one brief meeting with Bernard Shaw, Lawrence had written to ask Shaw to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom.His letter was a perfect mix of flattery and modesty: “I’d like you to read it … partly because you are you: partly because I may profit by your reading it,if I have a chance to talk to you soon after, before you have got over it.” Nothing could have been more tactfully phrased, or more carefully baited, to lure Shaw into reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom;nor did it hurt that Lawrence, despite his modesty, was himself a celebrity. Shaw’s ego and vanity were world-class—indeed by wittily mocking his own weaknesses, he had made himself ever more famous, and by 1922 he was at the height of his formidable powers, both intellectual and theatrical. Perhaps more important, he had succeeded—as two previous Anglo-Irish playwrights, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde, had done—in turning himself into a “character,” whose doings and sayings were constantly publicized, and who was given wide license to say outrageous things because he was Irish and a self-proclaimed genius. As a theatrical reviewer he had been the talk of London for his wit and intelligence, and as a playwright he was, like Sheridan and Wilde, a huge success from the beginning, often confronting on the stage serious social problems that approached the limit of the lord chamberlain’s tolerance (the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was, until 1968, the official censor of the British stage). Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting is supposed to have said, as she emerged from the theater after a performance of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra,shaking her head in disapproval, “How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.” Fiercely argumentative and intolerant of any opinion but his own, Shaw was the best known of the Fabian Socialists—he outshone Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with their compulsive gathering of statistics, and H. G. Wells, despite Wells’s enormously popular novels, as the most articulate spokesman for socialism and social reform in Britain.

Shaw signified his willingness to read the book, so one copy was sent to him, and Lawrence, like any other author, chafed while waiting for his reaction. In the meantime, Lawrence had sent another copy to his friend Vyvyan Richards, who read it more promptly, and wrote a most confusing letter back about it: “It seems to me that an attempted work of art may be so much more splendid for its very broken imperfection revealing the man so intimately.” This was probably meant as praise—at least Lawrence took it that way—though on its face it seems to mean that the book’s faults revealed Lawrence’s strengths. Lawrence replied at length, to say that he knew it was a good book, but felt that “it was too big for me: too big for most writers, I think. It’s rather in the titan class: books written at tiptoe, with a strain that dislocates the writer, and exhausts the reader out of sympathy.” This is a more perceptive judgment than Vyvyan Richards’s, but luckily for Lawrence, he was a first-class writer about battle, and very good with the small, human dramas of war. When he stops trying to achieve the effect of a masterpiece, and lets his gift for description show through, his work rises to a level of its own, matched by no other nonfiction book on war in the twentieth century. In any case, Rich-ards’s praise, however qualified, was not what Lawrence was waiting for—he was awaiting Shaw’s, which was distressingly slow in coming.

Doughty’s Arabia Desertawas also on Lawrence’s mind. He felt a great debt and affection toward Charles Doughty, and had been instrumental in getting the Medici Society and Jonathan Cape to bring that difficult and sometimes impenetrable classic, more often admired than read, back into print by agreeing to write an introduction for it—one of his best short pieces, and well worth reading for its own sake. Now, though he was a mere airman in training, Lawrence continued the campaign he had begun to obtain for Doughty a Civil List pension, reaching out to the prime minister, David Lloyd George. He wrote to Doughty, “Of the present Ministry three or four are Fellows of All Souls, and most of the others are friends of mine. The Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Salisbury, and Amery, and Wood and three or four others would be glad to serve you in any way you wished.” In this generous service, he was successful. Doughty, who was old—and mostly forgotten and impoverished until Lawrence took up his cause—was overwhelmed by Lawrence’s hard work on his behalf; and it says much for Lawrence’s courage and determination that he used none of these friendships on his own behalf, but simply went on, not so much “solitary in the ranks” as, for the moment, invisiblein the ranks.

But not for much longer.

Edward Garnett, despite Lawrence’s reluctance to allow Seven Pillars of Wisdomto be published, was working painstakingly on the abridgment. This idea tempted Lawrence, both because it would remove from the book the more controversial passages he did not want the general public to read, and because it would almost certainly produce enough money to enable him to print a deluxe and very limited edition of the full text for his friends—something that Gertrude Bell had begged him to do while they were together in Paris during the Peace Conference.

In the meantime, Lawrence had been posted to RAF Farnborough, thanks to Air Vice-Marshal Swann’s intervention, and arrived there on November 7, after a brief leave, which he cut short by two days, so anxious was he to get into the “real” air force. Farnborough was indeed the real air force—it was, among other things, home to several squadrons, and it contained research and experimental facilities and the RAF school of photography.

If there was one specialty in the RAF for which Lawrence was perfectly suited, it was photography. His father had not only taught him everything there was to know about photography, but made sure that he had the best and latest equipment; and with his natural interest in technology and crafts of any kind, Lawrence quickly became an expert. Some of the photographs Lawrence took in the Hejaz, during the war, are amazing—they belong among the classic images of warfare by photographers such as Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan, and are all the more remarkable because Lawrence was a combatant, not a photojournalist, and because his equipment was by modern standards bulky and slow. His photographs of Feisal’s encampment at dawn and of the Bedouin advancing toward Aqaba are still the two most emblematic and famous pictures of the Arab Revolt. In addition, Lawrence was one of the pioneers in the use of aerial photography in mapmaking and military intelligence. He devised his own system of laying out aerial photographs in a grid pattern to use them as the basis for a map, and taught pilots how to take the pictures he needed. Lawrence could have taught the class in photography at RAF Farnborough—it is unlikely that any of the instructors there knew as much as he did, or had even a small fraction of his practical experience. Trenchard was not wrong—Lawrence’s refusal to accept a commission in the RAF deprived the air force of the opportunity of learning something from a master of irregular warfare, and from one of the few commanders who understood how to use aircraft to support ground troops or how to make practical use in the field of aerial photography.

Still, the move to Farnborough was a happy one—so happy that it may have increased Lawrence’s confidence in the RAF to the point where he became incautious. Here there was no square bashing; the NCOs were mostly instructors; the airmen were either learning or carrying out their “trades,” as the RAF calls its different specialties. The predominant noise on the station was that of aircraft engines warming up, not the yells of drill corporals, the crash of boots on the parade ground, or the sharp, metallic clatter of hundreds of men performing rifle drill. During his leave Lawrence had purchased a motorcycle, a secondhand Triumph with a sidecar—a new stage in the lifelong love affair with motorcycles that would end only with his death. For the moment his duties at Farnborough were anything but onerous, a fact which very shortly got him into serious trouble.