From time to time he was tempted by further literary projects, among them a life of Sir Roger Casement, the Anglo-Irish British consular official who had been among the first to expose and document the atrocities that were committed in King Leopold of Belgium’s Congo Free State—the background and subject of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—where it was routine to chop off the right hand of any native who was slow to collect or carry ivory and rubber. Casement was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George for his revelations about the Congo, and was later awarded a knighthood for his extraordinary journey through the Amazon and his courageous attempts to protect the indigenous native population from slavery and mass murder at the hands of rubber planters. Casement was an adventurer very much like Lawrence, and something of a British hero for his humanitarian work, but in time he became one of the leading Irish nationalists and eventually resigned from the British Consular Service. Just before World War I he went to Germany, where, once the war had begun, he tried to recruit prisoners of war from Ireland for an “Irish Brigade” to fight the British. Early in April 1916 he was landed in Ireland, just three days before the Easter Rising, by a German submarine; he was captured by the British and tried for treason. The defense at his trial was hampered by references to Casement’s “black diaries,” which contained explicit descriptions of homosexual acts; these diaries almost certainly played a part in turning the jurors against him. He was found guilty and hanged in August 1916, despite pleas for clemency from W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the archbishop of Canterbury, and G. Bernard Shaw. Shaw had offered to write Casement’s speech in his own defense at the trial, an offer that Casement turned down but should probably have accepted. (Casement became an Irish hero and martyr after his death, and in 1965 his body was exhumed from its lime-pit grave at Pentonville Prison, and repatriated to Ireland, where he was given a state funeral attended by more than 30,000 people.)

For many reasons, Casement would have been an excellent subject for Lawrence, and both Charlotte and Bernard Shaw pressed him to write this biography. But in the end Lawrence decided that unless the British government allowed him to read and quote from the “black diaries,” it would not be an honest book; and no British government, Labour or Conservative, was likely to let Lawrence, of all people, see Casement’s diaries, which many of his supporters believed had been forged by the intelligence services in order to ensure his execution. “As I see it,” Lawrence wrote to Charlotte Shaw, “he was a heroic nature. I should like to write upon him subtly, so that his enemies would think I was with them till I finished my book and rose from reading it to call him a hero. He has the appeal of a broken archangel. But unless the P.M. will release the ‘diary’ material nobody can write of him.” This was not likely to happen only fifteen years after an event about which emotions ran high on both sides, so Lawrence never began the book. He gave some thought to a kind of spiritual autobiography, and Charlotte Shaw was enthusiastic about the idea, but he never did more than talk about it. His translation of the Odysseywas the last work he wrote, and it seems fitting that when he went into a bookshop looking for something to read, the salesclerk tried to sell him The Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrenceat a reduced price, since he was in RAF uniform. He told her that he knew the fellow, “and he was a wash-out.”

Lawrence always managed to have the last word about himself.

By 1932, if he had been anyone else, Lawrence would have been wearing three stripes and a brass crown on his sleeves. Indeed, had he been willing to accept a promotion, he would have been yet another of those hugely competent middle-aged men on whom the RAF (like the Royal Navy) depends: the grizzled flight sergeant or chief petty officer who knows more about his area of expertise than any officer does, whether it is guns,marine engines, or anything else; who can repair anything; and whose word is law when it comes to his specialty. It had startled Lord Thomson to hear the NCOs at Calshot referring to AC1 Shaw as “Mr. Shaw,” but they were merely recognizing that Shaw had the quiet authority of a man who knew how to get things done, and was reaching an age when he no longer looked like the glamorous young adventurer. He was still muscular and wiry, but photographs show that his hair was graying, cut now very short at the sides, though still long and unruly on top; his face had acquired a certain weather-beaten maturity; his body had filled in. He was not by any stretch of the imagination fat, but he was solid. With his strong jaw, powerful nose, and piercing eyes, he would have looked right at home in the sergeants’ mess.

The sea made much the same appeal to Lawrence’s imagination as the desert, with its emptiness and its sudden dangers. All things considered, he was where he wanted to be, and doing what he wanted to do. Much of his work around the boatyard he could do in civilian clothes, a sports jacket, baggy gray flannels, a sweater, and a scarf (Lawrence was never a natural collar-and-tie man). When Lawrence’s new commanding officer showed up at Hythe, Lawrence sent himself home on leave, having already typed up the leave ticket for his signature.

With Lord Thomson’s death, Lawrence’s busy social life resumed much as before—he often visited Cliveden, the Astors’ big country house, arriving for dinner on his motorcycle; and he kept up his correspondence with the great and famous. Harold Nicolson describes his arrival at a tea party in RAF uniform, looking “stockier and squarer … a bull terrier in place of a saluki.” The notion of Lawrence as a lonely man is belied by his letters—he wrote to Edward Marsh, to Lord Trenchard, to Sir Edward Elgar, to C. Day Lewis, to Siegfried Sassoon, to John Buchan, to Lionel Curtis, and to Robert Graves. He met and liked Noлl Coward (after being taken to a rehearsal of Private Lives),and sent Coward the manuscript of The Mintto read, a gesture of great intimacy and trust. Coward replied with a letter that begins memorably: “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?).” Lawrence also began the lengthy correspondence with B. H. Liddell Hart that would eventually produce the best book about Lawrence as a military leader and innovator, Colonel Lawrence: The Man behind the Legend.He even corresponded with W. B. Yeats, one of the poets he most admired.

Jock Bruce had not altogether vanished from Lawrence’s life, though he appeared less frequently, as if the intensity of Lawrence’s demons was declining. According to Bruce, he was called down to whip Lawrence in 1929, when Lawrence returned from India, and again in 1930—he continued to receive his Ј3 a week, whether he was called on to apply the birch or not. Bruce claimed that the worst beating of all, a kind of marathon of torture, took place in the autumn of 1930, when Lawrence traveled all the way from Cattewater to Aberdeen with a new set of demands from the unappeasable old Man. These included swimming in the North Sea (“The water was freezing cold and very rough,” Bruce wrote, certainly a torture to somebody who hated the cold and disliked swimming as much as Lawrence did), and riding lessons, some of them bareback, which Lawrence hated, to be followed by a severe whipping. oddly enough, Lawrence managed to write a long letter to Frank Doubleday, the American publisher, from the cottage Bruce had rented for all this punishment, making it sound like a jolly weeklong seaside holiday, and describing Jock Bruce, not inaccurately, as “the roughest diamond of our Tank Corps hut in 1923.” Judging by the date, it is possible that this particularly sophisticated and elaborate series of punishments was intended to atone for the success of Revolt in the Desert.Nothing quite like it was repeated, although Bruce claims to have whipped Lawrence again in 1931, in 1935, and “six or seven times” after that. Charlotte Shaw was certainly aware of much of this—Lawrence was more frank about himself with her than with anyone else—though it seems doubtful that she passed any of it on to her husband, who was busy writing a play about Lawrence, Too True to Be Good.But then there was much about herself that Charlotte hid from her husband, including the sheer volume and intimacy of her correspondence with Lawrence, which, for once, deeply shocked the normally imperturbable Shaw when he discovered it after her death.