It is revealing that Holroyd refers to Arabia as “an ideal theatre of action” for Lawrence, because Shaw himself, the supreme man of the theater of the twentieth century, seemed to believe that Lawrence’s wartime self was a role that he could drop as quickly as he had picked it up, not recognizing that with Lawrence, as with himself, the role had taken over the man. “Bernard Shaw” (he disliked the name George, which reminded him of his drunken father) was an equally brilliant role, but it was not one Shaw could take off when he went home and resume the next day for the entertainment of his admirers. Neither he nor Lawrence was an actor who could change roles every night and twice on matinee days; like it or not, Shaw had over time becomethe role he had created for himself: the unorthodox, testy, argumentative agent provocateur and gadfly of British life and conventions, an amazing presence who combined some of the attributes of Shakespeare with those of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.Only his death—in 1950 at the age of ninety-four—would release him from this role.

So it was with Lawrence. He could struggle against the role he had invented; hide in the ranks of the RAF or the army to escape from it; and attempt to sublimate it into meekness, modesty, and silence—but the powerful chin, the “glittering” bright blue eyes, and the hands, at once beautiful and very strong (as Findlay shrewdly noticed), gave him away even in the drabbest of uniforms. He was nota different man after the war, “a personality less intense,” to quote Findlay. His personality, on the contrary, was remarkably consistent. His whole life had been, in a sense, a training program for heroism on the grand scale; the war had merely provided an opportunity for Lawrence to fulfill his destiny. His intense will and his determination to have things his own way were always remarkable. He had methodically pushed himself beyond his physical limits, as a child and as a youth long before the war. He had carefully honed his strength and his courage, forced himself to a lifelong repression of his own sexuality, punished himself for every temptation toward what other men would have regarded as normal impulses. Since boyhood his life had been a triumph of repression, a deliberate, calculated assault on his own senses. He would always remain, however reluctantly, a combination of hero and genius: “a dangerous man,” indeed.

Only a day after the follow-up story in the Express,the rival Daily Mailpublished a story about Cape’s negotiations to buy the rights to Seven Pillars of Wisdom,hardly a surprising leak, given the porous nature of book publishing. This news further alarmed the Air Ministry and the secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, who had not been enthusiastic about having Lawrence join the RAF under an assumed name in the first place, and whose reservations now were vindicated, putting Trenchard in an awkward position. As for the commanding officer and the junior officers at RAF Farnborough, they now faced the difficulties of giving orders to a celebrity who was also the author of what would surely be a best-selling and widely debated book, a literary event of the first order.

Until this point, Lawrence’s writing had not been a concern. The existence of Seven Pillars of Wisdomwas known only within the limited circle of his friends. The public knew nothing about it, or about his intention to write a book describing the RAF “from the inside.” Now both books were news, and big news at that. The heart of the problem Sir Samuel Hoare and Air Chief Marshal Trenchard faced was not just that Lawrence had made news but that he now wasnews. He no longer had to doanything to produce headlines.

Unfortunately, Hoare and Trenchard were not the only people this news story took by surprise. Lawrence’s letter to Bernard Shaw explaining that he had decided to take his book to Jonathan Cape had not arrived by the time Shaw read the story in the Mail,and he was predictably outraged and baffled. Despite this initial reaction, however, he had calmed down by the time he responded to Lawrence (enclosing the clipping from the Mail):“The cat being now let out of the bag, presumably by Jonathan Cape with your approval, I cannot wait to finish the book before giving you my opinion and giving it strong. IT MUST BE PUBLISHED IN ITS ENTIRETY UNABRIDGED ….I REPEAT THE WHOLE WORK MUST BE PUBLISHED. If Cape is not prepared to undertake that, he is not your man, whatever your engagements to him may be. If he has advanced you any money give it back to him (borrowing it from me if necessary), unless he has undertaken to proceed in the grand manner.”

Shaw had completely reversed himself on the subject of the abridgment, and now thought Seven Pillars of Wisdomshould be published complete, perhaps in several volumes. He renewed his criticism of Cape in vehement terms, and had Lawrence cared to parse his letter carefully, revealed that he still had not finished reading the book, and was relying at least in good part on Charlotte’s enthusiasm. Referring to the ten years he had spent on “the managing committee of the Society of Authors,” Shaw pointed out that “there is no bottom to the folly and business incompetence of authors or to the unscrupulousness of publishers.” As if all this were not alarming, Charlotte wrote an impassioned letter, the first of many: “How is it conceivable, imaginablethat a man who could write the Seven Pillarscan have any doubts about it? If you don’t know it is ‘a great book’ what is the use of anyone telling you so ….1 devoured the book from cover to cover….1 could not stop. I drove G.B.S. almost mad by insisting on reading him special bits when he was deep in something else. I am an old woman, old enough at any rate to be your mother…. But I have never read anything like this: I don’t believe anything really like it has been written before…. Your book must be published as a whole. Don’t you see that?”

Shaw himself wrote again a few days later, blending, as was his way, advice with abuse: “Like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions…. It is useless to protest that Lawrence is not your real name. That will not save you…. You masqueraded as Lawrence and didn’t keep quiet: and now Lawrence you will be to the end of your days…. Lawrence may be as great a nuisance to you sometimes as G.B.S. is to me, or as Frankenstein found the man he manufactured; but you created him, and must now put up with him as best you can.” He urged Lawrence to “get used to the limelight,” and, so far as the book was concerned, reminded him that Constable was not only “keen” on it, but had “perhaps more capital than Cape,” adding forcefully that it was a duty to publish the book unabridged.

Even before this barrage of correspondence reached Lawrence he had decided to give up on the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and to renege on his understanding with Cape—a decision reinforced when the chief of the air staff himself made an unprecedented visit to the camp, to warn Lawrence “that his position in the RAF was becoming untenable.” Trenchard tried to soften the blow, telling Lawrence that he was “an unusual sort of person, inevitably embarrassing to a CO,” but Lawrence disagreed, and felt that if Guilfoyle were a bigger man, he could ignore Lawrence’s “lurid past,” and treat him as an average airman. One result of all the publicity was that Lawrence tended to be treated in camp as if he were an exotic exhibit in a zoo, rather than an ordinary airman learning a trade, or so he felt.

Lawrence took Trenchard’s visit to mean that he could not publish anything so long as he remained in the RAF, and he wrote to inform Cape of this. By now he had too much at stake to risk being discharged from the RAF: friendships; work that interested him; his powerful, glittering Brough “Superior” motorcycle, the Rolls-Royce or Bentley of motorcycles, with which he had replaced the more modest Triumph, handmade, idiosyncratic, powerful, precision-engineered, and very fast; even his blue uniform, sharply altered by the camp tailor to fit tightly like that of an “old sweat” or an NCO. Lawrence, it must be remembered, at the age of thirty-four had no home of his own, no family of his own, no lover, and almost no possessions; his only abode was a borrowed attic room in London, so to an extraordinary degree the RAF had become his life. The barracks, the parade ground, and the mess were all the home he had, or expected to have. The relationship between Lawrence and the RAF was neither reasonable nor explicable to civilians like Shaw—it was a love affair, albeit one-sided. He was desperate not to give all that up, and therefore decided to forgo publishing the book in any form for the time being.