Djelloul Marbrook

The other day my wife and I wandered into a magical antiquarian book shop in Hudson, New York, and found a 1935 copy of the first trade edition of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I bought it for twenty-five dollars and a few days later told the owner of the shop, Neil Montone, how once in Providence, Rhode Island, I’d stumbled on a signed copy of the work. Oh yes, Mr. Montone said, such a copy is probably worth a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars now. I paid two dollars and fifty cents back in 1959.

So much happened—and didn’t happen—since then, and somehow over the years I was separated from my precious find. And yet my reunion with Seven Pillars is sweet and at the same time bittersweet. The sweet part first: the book is a monument to the state of English rhetoric at the time. Lawrence’s use of language is at once elegant and bold. To boot, Lawrence (inset), an archaeologist by trade, was a considerable grammarian. These matters alone are enough to warrant revisiting the book and savoring its place in the canon.

Here is an example of Lawrence’s prose:

“The Arabs, who usually lived in heaps, suspected some ulterior reason for any too careful privacy. To remember this, and to foreswear all selfish peace and quiet while wandering with them, was one of the least pleasant lessons of the desert war: and humiliating, too, for it was part of pride with Englishmen to hug solitude; ourselves finding ourselves to be remarkable, when there was no competition present.”

No writer today, except a pedant, would consider using a colon and a semicolon in the same extended sentence, and very few could carry it off, if they did. But Lawrence carries it off with grace and wit, the complex grammar suiting his equally complex observations of people and events.

What is bittersweet about Seven Pillars also justifies its being in the canon. No one reading Lawrence’s description of the Arabs’ tribal culture would have barged into Iraq the way we have. The British, with Lawrence as a tool of their policy, used their knowledge of Arab tribalism for their own ends. We simply ignored it, choosing to see the Arabs as ripe for Western democracy when in fact they’re hardly committed to nationhood.

Seven Pillars never speaks of democracy. It does speak of self-determination. We seem to think that inevitably means choosing democracy. What if it means choosing a caliphate? Would we still be so hot for democratizing the Arabs?

When Lawrence stirred them into revolt against the Turks he genuinely, if naively, hoped the best for them, but in the end , being duped by the Allies, they traded one kind of imperialism for another. The victorious British and French did not allow them to determine their own destiny. Instead, they carved up the former Ottoman provinces between themselves, creating phony nations, like Iraq. And now we have bungled matters even more.

We would do well to read the instant pundits and hired ideologues of the think tanks less and read such classics as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom more. We’ve had far too much fast-food expertise and it has gotten us into a mess we don’t even begin to understand. But worse than that, our ignorance has given a free pass to war profiteers. The profits they make will not, as the politicians of the right would have you believe, trickle down to the rest of us. They will trickle down to accounts in the Caymans and Zurich, and they will facilitate the exportation of our jobs and our dreams.

—DM