I wrote Books 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 10 in Paris...Afterwards in England I wrote Book 11 and then lost all but the Introduction and drafts of Books 9 and 10 at Reading Station while changing trains…My war time notes, on which it was largely constructed, were destroyed as each section was finished. Only three people read much of it, before I lost it. A month or so later I began in London to scribble out what I remembered…Naturally the style was careless. (Preface)
For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day, the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. (Chapter One)
-Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, Lawrence
It seems quaint today to lose your written work, all 250,000 words, in a train station and not as is more usual in a computer crash or a failure to push the save button. And then so heroic to recreate all that work in the following 3 months as did Lawrence, and once in a single twenty four hour day- “sunrise to sunrise” as he said- when he rewrote Book 6’s 75 pages.
That rewrite came to 400,000 words, and a year later he cut it to 335,000, this version not published in full until 1997. On my bookshelf, I have copy number 98 in the limited Doubleday 1935 edition of 750, consisting of a word count cut back to 250,000. However many words you care to read, each of them regained- welled up by will again- one by one from his memory after all had been lost, they still fly by.
But what if your written work is not left behind but rather combusts before your very eyes, as did my notebook when interviewing an Agadezi on the roof terrace of the Hotel de l’Aïr, overlooking the Grand Mosque’s wood spar-impaled, red mud-daubed, four-sided minaret. He was smoking a cigarette and put it down near my book. He was gesturing broadly, I was looking intently at him to catch his words as they came from his mouth in order to get them transcribed correctly, and suddenly we both smelled them burning.
His words on my paper were going up in smoke. We put out the fire tamping it with the palms of our hands, and only some pages were all consumed, the others merely scorched. I quickly rewrote the pages I’d lost as I best remembered them, including the words of others I’d previously interviewed. The style was careless but it didn’t matter at that note-taking stage, much more careless than Lawrence’s polished finished work, because Seven Pillars in its published third draft is a lodestone of first person narrative about other places, other people, written by a man who by then was calling himself T.E. Shaw, “somebody else” as Rimbaud called himself after a similarly soul-shaking sojourn in those parts.
