One has the impression that in some ways Lawrence’s glamour as a hero was fading slightly. The public had come to accept him as “Aircraftman Shaw,” and however odd his decision to serve in the ranks still seemed to many people, it was no longer news, even after Shaw’s play opened. Lawrence paid a visit to Janet Laurie Hall-Smith, to whom he had once proposed marriage, and who was now a married woman and the mother of four children. It may be that Janet had asked for his help—her husband was a difficult man, whose ambition to be a great artist had failed, and who, in order to support his rapidly growing family, was stuck in a bank teller’s job in the small seaside town of Newquay, in Cornwall, then a rather stuffy summer resort. Hall-Smith had won the DSO in the war, and he may have resented Lawrence’s cavalier disregard for his own honors, as well as his fame and the fact that he had given Janet money early in her marriage, when the couple were virtually penniless. Janet herself had changed, not surprisingly, from the slim, tomboyish girl Ned had loved to a plump, matronly woman with more than her share of troubles; this may have dismayed Lawrence. In any event, as seen through the eyes of Janet’s daughter Emma, Lawrence fades into insignificance. He had agreed to join the Hall-Smiths for “a beach picnic,” but turned up very late, a “small man, made smaller, dwarfed, by the size of [his] motorbike,” as Emma remembers him. Whereas the children are wearing bathing suits, Lawrence “is wearing a uniform of thick, scratchy material, heavy, clumpy boots, and knee-breeches. Our legs are bare, but his are bandaged from the ankles up, by what are called, we know, puttees. How horribly hot and uncomfortable he’s bound to be, poor man, inside his layers of stuffy clothing.” When her sister Pam says that she is Lawrence’s godchild, he replies, with undisguised annoyance, that he has too many godchildren to count, mortifying the two little girls. “I didn’t think he’d be so little,” Pam says sadly, and the girls are doubly disappointed when their father and Lawrence appear to quarrel—Mr. Hall-Smith had hoped to achieve fame at last by painting his portrait, but Lawrence refuses and roars away on his motorcycle without saying good-bye to the girls.

Although Lawrence appears to have been quite good with the children of his friends, he was not always at ease with children he didn’t know. For example, Anthony West, the illegitimate son of H.G.Wells and Rebecca West, describes meeting Lawrence, and being more impressed by his Brough motorcycle, “the best motorcycle out,” than by Lawrence himself. He remembered Lawrence as a name-dropper who blushed easily. When his aunt—who,like his governess, falls almost instantly under Lawrence’s spell—tells him that he should make allowances because Lawrence is an extraordinary person, the young West says uncompromisingly: “I didn’t want to have to make allowances for him….1 wanted him to be a hero.”

“ ‘Ah, yes—that—’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘One does. And that’s his great problem. It’s the problem all heroes have to cope with—when you’ve made your gesture you’ve got the rest of your life to live.’

“ ‘Do you think it’s very difficult for him—being a hero?’

“ ‘Oh, yes, it’s very hard work wearing a halo—or any other mark of distinction for that matter.’ ”

Aunt Gwen had a point— thepoint, in fact—whether she really said it, or Anthony West is speaking through her words: it isvery hard work being a hero, much harder than becoming one; and although Lawrence spent the better part of his adult life, from 1918 to 1935, trying to escape from his own reputation, he never succeeded. Perhaps nobody with so enormous a reputation as his could have. Children, for whom he was a kind of mythic hero, sensed, perhaps more quickly than adults, the curious contrast between the heroic legend and the small airman with the diffident and curiously remote manner. Adults knew what Lawrence had been or done, and understood how hard he had tried to put all that behind him; children merely saw that he did not resemble what they thought of as a legendary hero like King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and were correspondingly disappointed.

Lawrence returned to RAF Mount Batten in 1931, but found it had lost its appeal now that the Smiths were no longer there. In addition, the Air Ministry decided to end “boat testing and experimenting” at Mount Batten, so Lawrence was left with nothing of any personal interest to do.

He did not find his commanding officer inspiring, either; and in March 1933 he “applied to be released from further service” as of April 6. Rather unimaginatively, his new commanding officer forwarded the application to the Air Ministry, with the note, “The discharge of this airman will cause no manning difficulty.” The story leaked to the newspapers, which gave it full play, alarming the air member for personnel, Air Marshal Sir Edward Ellington, GCB, CGM, CBE, since everybody from Lord Trenchard on down assumed that Lawrence was being thrown out of the RAF. Until now, Lawrence had asked his many friends in high places to use their influence to get him intothe RAF or to keep him there. Now the position was reversed: the Air Ministry, deeply concerned about bad publicity, was determined to keep him inthe air force at any price. The secretary of state for air, the marquess of Londonderry, demanded to know why AC1 Shaw wanted to leave the RAF. Sharply prodded by Sir Philip Sassoon—member of Parliament, undersecretary of state for air, and a friend of Lawrence’s—Air Marshal Ellington ordered Wing Commander Andrews, Lawrence’s unfortunate new commanding officer at Mount Batten, to find out whether Lawrence had any grievances, and if so to remedy them at once.

However, Lawrence had no grievances, as such. He merely wanted a responsible job that interested him, rather than routine station duties; and he told his commanding officer that if there was any special job in which the chief of the Air Staff “could [find him] particularly useful” he would stay on—a modest enough request from an aircraftman to the chief of the Air Staff! Since Trenchard’s successor was Lawrence’s old friend Air Chief Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, a solution was quickly found. Lawrence was posted to RAF Felixstowe, site of the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment, where he would wear civilian clothes in order to avoid publicity and travel around the various boatyards producing launches for the RAF, looking after the interests of the Air Ministry. “Lawrence of Arabia has decided to stay on in the Air Force,” the secretary of the Air Ministry wrote to Trenchard, to reassure him, with a combination of relief and mild amusement. “As he knows a good deal about motor boats he has been given a fairly free hand to go round various motor boat firms in the country.” Lawrence eventually found it more convenient to take a room in Southampton, rather than live at RAF Felixstowe, and was therefore relieved of any of the normal duties of an airman. As usual, Lawrence had gotten exactly what he wanted: a job in which he could help in the design, building, and testing of high-speed motor launches, but without the supervision of an NCO or an officer, or even the need to wear uniform. It was a position unique in the RAF, tailor-made for Lawrence. At the boatyards, where everybody knew who he was, he was referred to with respect as “Mr. Shaw.”

The long-delayed publication in the United States of Lawrence’s translation of the Odysseybrought him a good deal of publicity, since his name was on it. The book was praised by the distinguished classical scholar C. M. Bowra, who “agreed with Lawrence’s view of the Odysseyas a story.” In general Lawrence received praise for his rendering of “scenes of action” and fighting, which, as in Seven Pillars of Wisdom,were his strong points as a writer. He had completed the translation on an elegiac note, writing at the end of the manuscript: “This last page of my version of the Odyssey upon which I have spent almost as long as odysseus and travelled further, which has furnished me with luxuries for five years and so wholly occupied my hours off duty that I had no leisure to enjoy them …” Indeed, Lawrence’s Odysseyis exactly that— hisversion, not a conventional translation, or a “crib” of the original, but rather a far more ambitious attempt to make the story accessible for a modern reader without trying to convey the poetic form of the original, and without the tiresome repetition of metaphors that had a specific emotional meaning for Homer’s audience. In Lawrence’s version, the Odysseycan be read like a novel, which of course it is, and the fact that his version of it is still in print today is proof he succeeded. Nobody, after all, understood better than Lawrence the difficulties facing a warrior and hero on returning home, or could write more feelingly about it: “surely I am not in clear-shining Ithaca? I think I have lighted on some foreign land, and you are telling me it is my Ithaca only in mockery, to cheat my soul.”