“You will see that your colons before buts and the
like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in
reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use
semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced
in camp life.”—George Bernard Shaw, October 7, 1924 letter to T.E. Lawrence,
quoted in Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003)
George Bernard Shaw could insult with such geniality and creativity that,
I suspect, most of the recipients of his letters regarded it as a kind of badge
of honor. That appears to be the case here in this letter to T.E. Lawrence,
better known as Lawrence of Arabia (pictured here).
What accounts for the Anglo-Irish playwright’s
asperity, at least in this instance, is that, after two years of trying to
arrange publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by the
leader of the Arab Revolt in the First World War, he had only now gotten his
hands on the manuscript. Of course he knew that the former British Army
intelligence officer was a brilliant linguist, but—knowing Shaw—I wouldn't have put it past him to be cheeky enough to urge the younger man to master English first before
going on to anything else.
Lawrence had been dead seven years before Robert
Graves and Alan Hodges took Shaw to task for his own affronts to the English
language in The Reader Over Your Shoulder
(1942). Still, it’s doubtful that this most enigmatic of men would have felt
unfairly abused by Shaw. The playwright had, in the end, provided one of the
most glowing tributes to Seven Pillars of
Wisdom (“The work is a masterpiece, one of the few very best of its kind in
the world”).
(Shaw and his contemporaries might have concerned
themselves less with Lawrence’s knotted prose and more with his knotted
memories of events. In an article in the Autumn 2014 issue of MHQ Magazine
on how Lawrence and a co-founder of modern irregular warfare, Orde Wingate,
contributed doctrines that proved fatal to the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam,
Douglas Porch called Seven Pillars of
Wisdom “an exaggerated, semiautobiographical account of the desert war that
appealed to interwar tastes for desert escapism.")
When Lawrence cast about for a (relative) cloak of
anonymity to hide his participation in the Royal Air Force, he took the name
T.E. Shaw, in tribute to his growing friendship with the playwright and his
wife Charlotte. The playwright acknowledged the compliment and repaid it with
Too True To Be Good, his 1932 satire in which “Private Meek”—who
drives the top brass up the wall with his unconventional dress, before it is
revealed that he is actually a colonel (and military genius) who prefers the
rank-and-file where he will have a “freer hand”—is, unmistakably, Lawrence.
(See my prior post on how the
real-life Lawrence compares to the character depicted in David Lean’s classic
film, Lawrence of Arabia.)
1 comment:
I'm unfamiliar with this blog (or with blogs in general). I found this piece on Lawrence very good. I'm doing a book on WWI and would like to credit the author of this article with a quote I intend to "lift" with attribution.
Thanks, James Charles Roy
Post a Comment