Reviewer's Scoop

Strangest aspect of the career of the late Colonel T. E. Lawrence was the astonishing lack of success that attended his efforts to keep out of the public eye.

Few secrets in recent history have been so badly kept as Lawrence's many secret missions and changes of identity, his periodic and highly publicized droppings-out-of-sight. Few carefully-guarded, privately-printed volumes have become so well-known as his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Last month the curtain was drawn from another characteristic Lawrence concealment when Critic Henry Seidel Canby, beating the release date on a book by 14 years, received Lawrence's $500,000 posthumous volume, The Mint, for The Saturday Review of Literature.

By the terms of Lawrence's will, The Mint cannot be published until 1950. To comply with U. S. copyright laws and prevent printing, Publishers Doubleday, Doran & Co. printed twelve copies of the book, deposited two with the Library of Congress, as the law requires, offered the remainder for sale at $500,000 each. The ten books, kept in the vault of the Nassau County Trust Co. in Mineola. L. I., are not displayed by the publisher in accordance with Lawrence's will, although anyone with $500,000 to spend can buy a copy. Consequently Critic Canby, reading one of the two copies in the Library of Congress was one of the most fortunate of book reviewers, since few readers are in a position to disagree with his judgments on the literary merit and historical value of The Mint.

Although he uses characteristically generous language, the main impression conveyed by Dr. Canby is that The Mint is not worth the price asked for it. It is a book of about 200 pages, 9 in. by 10 in., which can be read through in half an hour.

It is bound in rough grey paper with a vellum back and leather label stamped in gold. The first two-thirds deal with Lawrence's days as a private in the Air Force, which he joined in August 1922 after resigning his rank as Political Adviser in the Colonial Office. The remainder tells of his less harrowing days in the Cadet Corps. To protest the betrayal of the Arab cause at the Peace Conference, at which his promises to Arab leaders were broken, Lawrence refused his Colonial Office salary for six months, worked in an architect's office, went hungry, was down to 15 pence when he enlisted under the name of Ross. At night in the barracks he wrote the notes that make up The Mint, faithfully copying his companions' "indescribably profane and obscene conversation.'' Somewhat mysteriously Dr. Canby likens the result to Tom Brown's School Days, although he describes The Mint in terms that scarcely suggest Thomas Hughes's high-minded classic: "It is an old story:--the sadism of dogs in office, the surprising resiliency of human nature in these men who were being broken ... to obedience, blind, stupid obedience to fit them for service in a new realm where intelligence and self-dependence were indispensable." What Dr. Canby did not say is that The Mint, in its general mood and in its unsqueamish record of obscenity, belongs with such contemporary records as Louis-Ferdinand Celine's untranslated La Mort A Credit (Death on the Instalment Plan) and Henry Miller's obsessed story of expatriates in Paris, The Tropic of Cancer. In the Library of Congress the two copies of The Mint are kept in the office of the secretary of the Library, mild, good-natured Martin A. Roberts, who permits them to be examined by reputable scholars, writers and critics who can produce convincing documentary evidence of the seriousness of their purpose. One volume of The Mint is uncut. Readers who are permitted to examine the other do so in the Secretary's presence, but can make no notes and are not supposed to quote Lawrence's words.

The first sentence sounds Lawrence's theme: "God, this is awful." Then he settles down to prove it with explicit descriptions of the hardships of barracks life and phonographic reproductions of the unqualified filth of his fellow-soldiers' speech. Most of the recruits had been taken off the dole, some were demoralized down-and-outers, a few were petty criminals who had escaped punishment by joining the Air Force. Even readers less puritanical than Lawrence may feel that he fell in with a particularly foul-mouthed crew. One pious soldier with whom he had attended church led the company the next night in singing that international smut champion. Here is the Story of the Captain's Wife, which proceeds through an unspeakable catalog of that exceptionally ill-favored lady's physical characteristics.

As is the case with Celine's book and Miller's Tropic of Cancer, the obscenity of Lawrence's report has no Rabelaisian gusto to make it bearable or give it meaning: it is monotonous, mechanical, uninspired and gross, a neurotic explosion of disgust rather than an uninhibited outbreak of masculine high spirits.

Lawrence's hardships were mainly his riding at the hands of a sergeant. He was put to work on that branch of the service euphemistically known as garbage patrol, the least offensive part of which consists of cleaning latrines. Despite his care in concealing his identity, his secret was almost revealed. Describing his perils, Critic Canby says quaintly: "He had to be on his guard when inspectors looked with amazement at his shelf of books and called him 'toff.' " He let his guard down occasionally, however, for once the King's patent appointing him minister plenipotentiary fell from his loose-leaf notebook. Another time when he was on garbage patrol "a letter soaked in the swill, when opened, offered him the editorship of a magazine of belles lettres." Perhaps more disturbed than Lawrence realized by such happenings, his hard-boiled companions picked on him, struck him, threatened him. Eventually he won their esteem, organized their resistance against their officers.

Last part of The Mint is the antithesis of the first. Its prevailing note is peace and calm, for it describes the period when Lawrence had found his inward satisfaction as an airman and when he was supported by a vague religious feeling based on his ideas of the brotherhood of man and confused pantheistic concepts of God. As Lawrence's affirmation it is diffuse, unconvincing, occasionally rising to lyric heights but still sounding forced when measured against the brutal reality of the first part.

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