Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo….I invented my own system of punctuation, and then compared it with the punctuation of the Bible, and found that the authors of the revised version had been driven to the same usage, though their practice is not quite consistent all through. The Bible bars the dash, which is the great refuge of those who are too lazy to punctuate….1 never use it when I can possibly substitute a colon; and I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces. As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rough rules for you.When a sentence contains more than one statement, with different nominatives, or even with the same nominative repeated for the sake of emphasizing some discontinuity between the statements, the statements should be separated by a semicolon when the relation between them is expressed by a conjunction. When there is no conjunction, or other modifying word, and the two statements areplaced baldly in dramatic apposition, use a colon. Thus, Luruns said nothing; but he thought the more. Luruns could not speak: he was drunk. Luruns, like Napoleon, was out of place and a failure as a subaltern; yet when he could exasperate his officers by being a faultless private he could behave himself as such. Luruns, like Napoleon, could see a hostile city not only as a military objective but as a stage for a coup de thйвtre: he was a born actor.You will see that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.But by far the most urgent of my corrections—so important that you had better swallow them literally with what wry faces you cannot control—are those which concern your libels. I spent fifteen years of my life writing criticisms of sensitive living people, and thereby acquired a very cultivated sense of what I might say and what I might not say. All criticisms are technically libels; but there is the blow below the belt, the impertinence, the indulgence of dislike, the expression of personal contempt, and of course the imputation of dishonesty or unchastity which are not and should not be privileged; as well as the genuine criticism, the amusing good humored banter, and (curiously) the obvious “vulgar abuse” which are privileged. I have weeded out your reckless sallies as carefully as I can.Then there is the more general criticism about that first chapter. That it should come out and leave the book to begin with chapter two, which is the real thing and very fine at that, I have no doubt whatever. You will see my note on the subject.I must close up now, as Charlotte wants to make up her packet to you. E. M. Forster too had written to Lawrence in detail, criticizing the elaborate style, which Lawrence toned down considerably now that publishing the book was a realistic prospect. It was a moment that was at once stimulating and deeply depressing for Lawrence, as if he were at once summoning up from the past and finally burying the experiences of two years of war, six years after it had ended. He had carried the burden of Seven Pillars of Wisdomfor so long that it must have seemed to him impossible to put it down.

It was soon apparent that there would be no shortage of subscribers—indeed, Lawrence would have trouble keeping the number down to the limit he wanted to set—and also that the entire project was going to prove far more costly than he had supposed. The extraordinary workload he had heaped upon himself, on top of a soldier’s normal day, would have broken the health of a far stronger man, and there is ample proof that he was sinking deeper into depression. It is no accident that he had written confidingly to Charlotte Shaw a kind of de profundis,explaining his experience at Deraa:

I’m always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender…. About that night I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things…. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from the pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity. It’s an unforgiveable matter. What he did notpoint out was that in the description of the incident in Seven Pillars of Wisdomit is quite clear that the real horror was notthe pain, but the fact that he experienced pleasure at the pain; that his sexual “surrender” was as “unforgivable” in his mind as it would be for a woman experiencing pleasure from a gang rape. He certainly never mentioned that he had gone to considerable trouble and some expense to reproduce the moment, whenever the need overcame him. Jock Bruce was still in his hut at Bovington, and among the soldiers he invited to his cottage.

Lawrence’s misery continued. He appealed once more to be allowed back into the RAF, but even a change in government did not help; the Conservative secretary of state for air, Sir Samuel Hoare, was adamantly opposed to having Lawrence back in the RAF. Hoare, who had known Lawrence well in Palestine and Jordan, feared the inevitable publicity, and may also have resented the direct appeal that Shaw made to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin over Hoare’s head, which suggested that Lawrence might take his cause to the newspapers. John Buchan put in a good word for Lawrence with Baldwin as well, but to no avail. Baldwin, a man who combined extreme political shrewdness with genuine indolence, must have felt besieged by Lawrence’s friends, but true to form, he listened politely and did nothing.

To Buchan, Lawrence at least offered an explanation of a kind, writing to thank him for talking to Baldwin: “I don’t know by what right I made that appeal to you on Sunday…. They often ask ‘Why the R.A.F.?’ and I don’t know. Only I have tried it and liked it as much after trying it as I did before. The difference between Army & Air is that between earth & air: no less.” Even Lawrence’s pal at Bovington, Corporal Dixon, thought he was crazy on the subject of the air force, as did the sinister Bruce, but it made no difference; “I can’t get the longing for it out of my mind,” he wrote Buchan, and that was true. Lawrence’s yearning for the RAF was not a matter of reason.

Meanwhile, Manning Pike was slipping far behind with his typesetting—Lawrence had committed his book to a man who was not only inexperienced but subject to “fits of extreme depression,” and on top of that “had an unhappy marriage.” Lawrence, sunk in depression himself, was obliged to cheer Pike up. At the same time, Buxton, Lawrence’s banker, was reluctant to increase his overdraft. In the end, there seemed no other way out but for Lawrence to resign himself to staying in the Royal Tank Corps, and sell the rights to an abridged version of Seven Pillars of Wisdomto finance the printing of the subscribers’ edition. Cape, despite Lawrence’s earlier decision to withdraw from his agreement to the abridged version, offered Lawrence a comparatively modest advance of Ј3,000; and with whatever misgivings, Lawrence accepted it, and agreed to publication in 1927, giving himself enough time (and money) to complete the limited edition. Most, if not all, of the abridgment had already been made by Garnett, but of course it would now have to be redone in view of the changes Lawrence had made in the text of the complete book.

Lawrence might have continued to serve in the RTC and work on the two different versions of his book, however unhappily, but in May 1925 Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabiawas at last published in Britain. It had been a huge success in the United States, and became one again in Britain, reviving curiosity about Lawrence at just the moment when he felt most defeated. The same old exaggerations, told in the jocular voice of an American pitchman, were made more unbearable for Lawrence because he had given Thomas so many of his stories and anecdotes in the first place. Overwhelmed, Lawrence wrote a plaintive letter to Edward Garnett, describing his book as “muck,” and adding that this “gloomy view of it deepens each time I have to wade through it…. I’m no bloody good on earth. So I’m going to quit … [and] bequeath you my notes on recruit life in the recruits’ camp of the R.A.F.”