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Why ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ is worth reading today - The Washington Post

Michael Dirda on T.E. Lawrence’s memoir of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire -- the basis for “Lawrence of Arabia”

Last month, when Vladimir Putin was still massing troops on the Ukrainian border, I decided to read “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00E2RZIC2&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_Q9TWW64C5D0QN9VSS4DV&tag=thewaspos09-20" target=_blank>Seven Pillars of Wisdom</a>,” T.E. Lawrence’s memoir of the 1916-1918 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The “private” edition first appeared 100 years ago in 1922, by which time its author had already tired of being called “Lawrence of Arabia.” Still, this account of how a young Englishman helped lead a Bedouin guerrilla force tasked with blowing up trains and rail lines is subtitled “A Triumph.” I wanted the same outcome for Ukraine, birthplace of one of my wife’s grandfathers, in its struggle with Russia, birthplace of one of mine.

If you’ve seen David Lean’s breathtaking film “<a href="https://amzn.to/35Aq6Wl" target=_blank>Lawrence of Arabia</a>,” you already know the overall arc of the narrative. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany, which led Great Britain to send troops to the Middle East. At roughly the same time, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali inaugurated an independence movement — largely spearheaded by two of his sons, Ali and Feisal — to break free of Turkish domination. Because Lawrence had spent time on archaeological digs and could speak Arabic, he was commissioned as a liaison between the British army and the ragtag rebel forces. Surprisingly, the young Oxford graduate, not yet 30, first earned the trust of Feisal, then persuaded the Bedouins to adopt hit-and-run battle tactics. Highly mobile fighters on camelback, he argued, could strike the enemy unexpectedly, then quickly disappear into the desert they knew so well. Soon nicknamed “Prince Dynamite,” Lawrence showed himself to be — in the words of military historian B.H. Liddell Hart — “a supreme artist of war.”

Five feet five inches tall, he was also an excellent gymnast, a crack shot and a skilled mechanic. During the revolt, Lawrence carried Malory’s “<a href="https://amzn.to/3tJ7yLk" target=_blank>Le Morte d’Arthur</a>” in his saddlebag and in later life translated Homer’s “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B096G1M843&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_SZDHBKJ54YD6ZZ8TV216&tag=thewaspos09-20" target=_blank>Odyssey</a>.” This self-described “pocket Hercules” may also have been homosexual but probably nonpracticing: He couldn’t bear to be touched and claimed never to have had consensual physical intimacy with anyone. Abstemious about food and drink, Lawrence was utterly uninterested in acquiring possessions or wealth, while many have testified to his spiritual charisma and intensity. He repudiated the least suggestion that one race was better than another.

As a writer, Lawrence excels at portraiture, topographical description, confession (usually laced with self-doubt) and the depiction of combat. Auda, the fiercest of all Bedouin warriors, “had married twenty-eight times” and “been wounded thirteen times; whilst the battles he provoked had seen all his tribesmen hurt and most of his relations killed. He himself had slain seventy-five men, Arabs, with his own hand in battle: and never a man except in battle. Of the number of dead Turks he could give no account: they did not enter the register.”

Lawrence’s evocations of landscape range from the sharp and swift — “The heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless” — to the intensely tactile, as when the rebel forces trek through the Wadi Hamdh river, “a trough 15 miles across.” The sand was “rotten with salty mud and flaking away, so that our camels sank in, fetlock deep, with a crunching noise like breaking pastry. The dust rose up in thick clouds, thickened yet more by the sunlight held in them; for the dead air of the hollow was a-dazzle.”

Above all, Lawrence visualizes battles almost cinematically, as in this tour-de-force sentence about a surprise attack on a train:

“As I watched, our machine-guns chattered out over my head, and the long rows of Turks on the carriage roofs rolled over, and were swept off the top like bales of cotton before the furious shower of bullets which stormed along the roofs and splashed clouds of yellow chips from the planking.”

Book Review: ‘The Young T.E. Lawrence,’ by Anthony Sattin

For many readers, the most horrific episode in a work replete with shocks occurs not when a captured Lawrence is raped by a Turkish officer at Deraa, but when his forces enter the massacred village of Tafas. After coming upon sickening atrocity after atrocity, the Arabs discover “a three or four year old child, with a huge wound where neck and body joined. She tottered forward and cried ‘Don’t hit me, Baba.’ Abd el Aziz, whose village this was, stumbled toward her, she screamed, then died.”

Overcome with anguish, one of Lawrence’s best fighters madly gallops into the midst of the fleeing enemy soldiers and is immediately cut down. At that point, Lawrence finally gives his command: “I said, ‘The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.’ ” For the only time, he adds, “by my order we took no prisoners.”

At first, the long-sought capture of Damascus might seem to be the climax of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Yet the book’s actual conclusion occurs afterward, when the weary-hearted Lawrence, urged to visit that city’s hospital, surveys the hundreds of wounded and dying laid out on pallets. Here is the true face of battle.

Today’s readers, used to the twittering demotic of our age, may need to adjust to this titanic prose-poem’s leisurely, mandarin style. It’s worth the effort. To H.G. Wells, the book was nothing less than “the finest piece of prose that has been written in the English language for 150 years” — in other words, since Edward Gibbon’s “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B09HHB9H5M&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_383HRBACVMMAFX7G7906&tag=thewaspos09-20" target=_blank>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</a>.” Other equally ardent admirers of the work or its author include Winston Churchill, British Field Marshal A.P. Wavell, playwright George Bernard Shaw, poet Robert Graves and Israeli statesman Chaim Weizmann.

Like Gibbon’s masterpiece, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” can be criticized as slanted, partial and even unreliable. But as epic and psychological document, it remains a stunning achievement. It’s also something of an encyclopedia, providing reflections on Middle Eastern history, the nature and appeal of fanatical piety, the sociology of Bedouin life and, sadly, the Western Allies’s political duplicity. While this great book’s monumentality can certainly be daunting, reading it is an experience you will never forget.

<i>Michael Dirda reviews books for Style every Thursday.</i>

Michael Dirda

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Why ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ is worth reading today

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Critic Michael Dirda explores book compilations and how they can steer readers to great books. - The Washington Post

Critic Michael Dirda explores book compilations and how they can steer readers to great books.

When I was growing up, Mortimer J. Adler championed “The Great Books of the Western World,” Clifton Fadiman promoted “The Lifetime Reading Plan” and every thrift store worth its salt carried a broken set of the Harvard Classics. All these enterprises were energized by one basic assumption: Civilization was on the ropes because fewer and fewer people engaged with the literature and intellectual achievements of the past. Instead, Americans — especially young Americans — were wallowing in ephemeral, popular amusements, which in the mid-20th century largely meant movies and television. Wouldn’t we all be better off devoting our evenings to Aristotle and Emily Dickinson?

Probably. Yet these well-intentioned literacy campaigns usually made reading sound like schoolwork. Far better, I now think, to emphasize that acquiring familiarity with humankind’s greatest cultural achievements, besides increasing one’s store of knowledge, lends an additional pleasure to life. After all, we read because it’s exciting. Metaphorically speaking, books are always taking us to the big city, opening our eyes to the world’s plenitude and diversity. By contrast, those who ban or censor them want to keep us down on the farm, restricting our experience to some safe or approved orthodoxy.

You’re done with it all. You head for the hills. What books do you bring?

Here, in fact, is where reading lists — of Great Books, Neglected Books or Favorite Books — prove their worth. Like the Michelin travel guide endorsement “Vaut le Voyage,” they implicitly guarantee that the selected titles will be “worth the trip.” You’ll laugh over Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat,” your heart will break during Madame de Lafayette’s “The Princess of Cleves,” you’ll thrill to “Njal’s Saga,” you’ll feel smarter for having spent time with James Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.” You really will be, too.

As it happens, I was recently sifting yet again through the detritus I grandiosely call my files and papers when I turned up a half-forgotten storage box. Inside was a bulging wad of photocopies and pages torn from magazines and newspapers — book lists of every kind. They are now piled, higgledy-piggledy, by my side as I type.

At the top is a clipping from a 1976 issue of the New York Times Book Review in which a dozen authors choose the books they most enjoyed that year. For example, Joan Didion talks about Joseph Conrad: “I … reread ‘Victory,’ principally because I had been working with a first-person narrator”— she’d just finished “A Book of Common Prayer” — "and I wanted to see how Conrad had handled some of the problems an uninvolved narrator presents. This turned out to be an exercise in humility.”

Next in the stack are several stapled pages from the London Times Literary Supplement’s 1993 feature, “International Books of the Year.” There, Joyce Carol Oates writes “Of contemporary books, none has struck me as more ambitious, instructive, and rewarding than the massive anthology, ‘Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Contents from Polemics to Pulpit,’ edited by Gerald Early.” She concludes her enthusiastic endorsement for this two-volume work by presciently declaring, “A revolution has been underway for some time in American culture, stimulated by black consciousness, and ‘Speech and Power’ names the players.”

12 books I should have reviewed last year: A critic’s lament

Following this, I come upon “Big Brother’s Reading List” excised from a 1976 issue of National Review. The unnamed compilers offer a corrective to what they perceive as the over-liberal bias and self-lacerations of the titles selected for the Bicentennial by the American Library Association. The magazine’s alternative list includes Jacques Barzun’s “God’s Country and Mine,” described as “the definitive rejoinder to fashionable anti-Americanism,” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” summed up as a “prophetically satiric novel about wars of liberation.”

After unearthing John Pelan’s essay “Collecting Modern Horror,” clipped from a 2002 issue of Cemetery Dance magazine, I learn that this genial authority recommends 91 titles, running from Robert Aickman’s “Night Voices” to John Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids”— both favorites of mine. From a now unidentifiable source — I’m miserably inept at record-keeping — the travel writer Colin Thubron praises Freya Stark’s “Ionia: A Quest,” her study of the classical Greek cities of Turkey, and fantasy’s grandmaster Michael Moorcock urges the rediscovery of George Meredith’s “The Amazing Marriage” and “Diana of the Crossways,” both highlighting Victorian heroines exhibiting a modern feminist spirit.

As I skim through these clippings and photocopies, surprises abound. Did you know that Norman Mailer, Northrop Frye and Guy Davenport ardently admired Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”? A book list from Trinity College in Connecticut, annotated by Professor Harry Todd Costello, is winningly pungent: Benjamin Jowett’s 19th-century translation of Plato’s “Dialogues” shows a “smooth evasion of the subtler points” and Ivan Turgenev’s beautifully composed novels share “a humorless sadness.”

From another dive into the pile, I discover that Edith Pargeter — a.k.a. Ellis Peters, creator of the Brother Cadfael mysteries — regards Clemence Housman’s “The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis” as “the finest work on an Arthurian theme since Malory … I know of nothing in literature more intense nor of an intensity so held in control.” In a 2002 issue of The Week magazine the critic James Atlas calls Frank Conroy’s “Stop-Time” the “best book ever written on what it’s like to be a boy growing up in postwar America.” For a regular feature in Antaeus Quarterly dubbed “Neglected Books of the 20th Century,” Laurie Colwin — author of the wonderful “Happy All the Time” — selects “The Liar,” by Thomas Savage, a writer currently being rediscovered because of one of his other novels, “The Power of the Dog.”

And next I find … that I’ve run out of space here, having scarcely begun to work my way through these yellowing pages of bookish enthusiasm. Let me end, though, with a 1997 Spectator magazine survey in which English biographer Sheridan Morley names “Personal History,” by The Post’s longtime publisher Katharine Graham, as “the memoir of the year.” It “tells us who really … runs Washington, which is in fact the author.” Would that this were still so!

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How do you choose a book? Book lists by other writers are a great place to start 

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Sherlock Holmes gets the gala treatment in New York - The Washington Post

Michael Dirda reporting from this year's Baker Street Irregulars celebration in NYC. Please edit for publication at 8 am on Wednesday, 1/26. Thank you.

Should I go? Last summer I’d agreed to deliver the toast to Sherlock Holmes at the annual banquet of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York. But as Friday, Jan. 14, approached, the omicron variant was, as they say, raging. Still, I’d been boosted and everyone attending was required to present proof of vaccination. How, then, could I let the team down?

Happily, I didn’t get sick and tested negative after returning home. Perhaps it wasn’t happenstance that the Westin Hotel on East 42nd Street, where most Irregulars were staying, is directly across from the Pfizer World Headquarters. Signs on its building proclaimed, “Science Will Win.”

This year, socializing got underway on Thursday afternoon at the Grolier Club, the country’s leading society for bibliophiles. Opening that week, and running till April 16, was “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects,” an exhibition drawn from the fabled collection of Glen S. Miranker. Fabled? As I once wrote, “If the Great Agra Treasure — from ‘The Sign of Four’ — contained rare Sherlockian books and manuscripts instead of priceless gems, it would resemble Glen Miranker’s library.”

In display cases below a huge banner depicting Holmes in his signature dressing gown, one could see the only known copy in its dust jacket of the first edition of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” with original artwork by Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele, handwritten drafts of four major stories, and even Conan Doyle’s work ledger containing the December 1893 memorandum, “Killed Holmes.” This refers to “The Final Problem,” which ends with the great detective and his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, both falling to their deaths, or so it seemed, at the Reichenbach Falls.

As Miranker notes in the show’s sumptuous and witty catalogue (co-authored with his wife, Cathy), his manuscript for “The Dancing Men” aptly combines his own “two consuming interests, cryptography and Sherlock Holmes.” A <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2013/11/26/a-former-apple-executives-obsessive-search-for-sherlock-holmes/?sh=4644a8f31c65" target=_blank>former chief technology officer of Apple, Miranker </a>also collects World War II “Enigma” coding machines.

A little after 6 on Friday evening, decked out in my thrift-store tuxedo, I hurried to the Yale Club for the weekend’s main event — the cocktail party and banquet. Hollywood’s go-to ornament and jewelry designer Maggie Schpak, whose pieces can be seen in “Star Trek,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” pinned on my badge and then showed me the tiara she had created for the next day’s raffle. Near the bar I chatted briefly with Otto Penzler, the dapper owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, and award-winning Washington playwright Ken Ludwig (“Lend Me a Tenor,” “The Game’s Afoot”). In the swirl, I noticed several other friends: actor Curtis Armstrong, who first gained fame as Tom Cruise’s worldly-wise buddy in “Risky Business,” mystery novelist (and my Oberlin College classmate) SJ Rozan, and the effervescent Nancy Holder, best-selling horror writer and author of numerous Buffy the Vampire Slayer tie-ins.

The enduring fascination with Sherlock Holmes: It’s elementary.

Despite my initial worries, the evening went exceptionally well. All the talks were splendid, notably Andy Solberg’s clever roast of Mycroft Holmes, Ray Betzner’s appreciation of Sherlockian bookman Vincent Starrett, and Ira Matetsky’s account of the aftershocks from Rex Stout’s notorious 1941 presentation, “Watson Was a Woman.” In my own toast, I first mourned the loss in 2021 of Michael Whelan, the BSI’s longtime head (always referred to as “Wiggins”), then pointed to Sherlock Holmes as “an emblematic avatar of reason in this, our age of unreason.” Among those memorialized in Marsha Pollak’s “Stand With Me Here Upon the Terrace” — honoring Irregulars who died in 2021 — were two longtime Washingtonians: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/09/08/collector-tracks-down-fictions-black-sleuths/9c46f29d-d9b2-420e-8717-d2ce99b2c74c/" target=_blank>Philip Brogdon</a>, the BSI’s first Black member, and Jon Lellenberg, the society’s disputatious historian and a mentor to me and many others. To close the evening, Michael Kean, our new “Wiggins,” invested 14 new Irregulars, seven men and seven women, the latter including Laurence Deloison from the Cercle Holmesien de Paris.

Sherlockians are collectors. Each banquet attendee receives a packet of souvenir items — postcards, pamphlets, pins, pens and the Sherlock Holmes issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine — as well as a handsome program illustrated by Frank Cho, the celebrated comic-book artist. On Saturday morning in the “Merchants’s Room,” Cho was signing copies of this and his other work, while numerous dealers purveyed their wares. I bought “A Masterpiece of Villainy,” which reproduces, with scholarly commentary, Conan Doyle’s holograph of “The Norwood Builder.” This latest installment of the BSI’s “Manuscript Series” is edited by Ross E. Davies, yet another Washingtonian, as well as a driving force in the new Arthur Conan Doyle Society.

Michael Dirda

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