LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

HIS PLACE AS A WRITER. Til the popular estimation Colonel Lawrence's achievements in active life far outshone his merits as a writer, but his writings have not escaped notice in the memorial tributes (writes the literary correspondent in London of the "New York Times"). According to the "Manchester Guardian" he has left > one book which shows that he could write our language with a precision and a subtlety not unworthy to be mentioned in the same breath with Swift. 11. A. L. Fisher does not hesitate to call him "a great man of letters." Colonel W. F. Stirling, Lawrence's chief stuff officer in Arabia, describes him in the "Daily Telegraph" as "the writer of, perhaps, the greatest book of the century."

If we should doubt the qualifications of this friend as a literary critic, he is able to support his own judgment by that of an acknowledged authority. He tells us that, when lie asked H. G. Wells what he thought of "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," Mr. Wells replied that, in his opinion, it was the finest piece of prose that had been written in the English language for 130 years. Lawrence himself seems to have taken a modest view of it. Sir Ronald Storrs reports him as saying: "I know I can write a good sentence; I think I can write a good paragraph; 1 believe I can write a good chapter, but I have tried my best and failed to write what I consider a great book." One of the claims put forward for Lawrence would require us to recognise ill him not only a great writer but the greatest reader of books that ever lived. An obituary notice in one of the London dailies asserts that, while he vis an undergraduate, he read all' the nooks in the Oxford Union library, about 50,000 in number. Evidently tha mythmaking tendency is not content to conline itself to Lawrence's exploits among the Arabs. A simple sum in arithmetic will show the utter absurdity of this statement. In the four years of the undergraduate period there are 14<i] days. This works out at an average of over 34 bopks a day, with 110 time off for Sundays or vacations. It means, that is to say, considerably more than a book an hour, day and night, year, in, year out. But while Lawrence was not such an impossible literary glutton as this, he was undoubtedly fend of books, and on most of his visits to London lie used to call for a talk with J. G. Wilson, the eminent bookseller, whom he often surprised by his knowledge of the new work that was appearing.