Second draft

However, urged on by Hogarth, and with his few surviving records - or perhaps even that first draft! - Lawrence began a second version of the text early in 1920. The original Introduction and drafts of Books 9 and 10 were, by his own account, still to hand, and according to Notes he also had two diaries and some surviving field-notes to aid him. At the suggestion of Geoffrey Dawson, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who was at that time at the end of the first of two periods as editor of The Times, Lawrence was elected a Research Fellow of the college, in November 1919, his subject being 'the antiquities and ethnology and the history (ancient and modern) of the Near East'. The Fellowship was for seven years, and the intention was to provide him with accommodation and a basic income to enable him to work on his Arabian story. It did indeed provide the money - there was an annual stipend of £200 and the usual rights to rooms and at the Common Table - but the Statutes did not demand residence, and the atmosphere of Oxford college life was evidently unsuited to the task which lay before him. In the event he was relatively little in college, and spent much of his time over the next few months in an attic loaned to him by the architect Herbert Baker above his drawing offices at 14 Barton Street, Westminster - a dark oak-panelled room with a large table and desk and two heavy leather chairs as the main furniture. Here Lawrence was able to pursue the solitary and spartan lifestyle which seemed so necessary to fuel his creative spark.

Differing information about this second draft includes the statement in the Bod ms that he commenced the work in Oxford, although to Liddell Hart he said that the only writing he did at All Souls was his introduction to the new edition of Doughty's Arabia Deserta. (1) In the Bod ms he also noted that it was started on December 2nd, 1919; in Notes he says 'A month or so later' [later, that is, than 'about Christmas, 1919'] 'I began, in London, to scribble out what I remembered of the first text'. As to its completion - writing to the American publisher F N Doubleday on 21st July 1920, he stated 'the original-and-to-be-kept-secret version was finished on July 12th', while in the Bod MS the date is given as May 11th, 1920, after which it was 'corrected & added to slowly for nearly two years', and this would fit in with his general claim that it was re-written in less than three months, if he did indeed begin a month or so after Christmas, although an earlier start seems more likely.

In Friends (2) Vyvyan Richards sets the scene at Barton Street: 'His record run was over the Easter holiday. He had forgotten that most shops would be closed and so he wrote for four days and most of the nights at a stretch without food - though a little further afield he could easily have found a restaurant open, of course. He sat, fireless, in very cold weather, wearing a leather, wool-lined flying suit, with the fattest fountain pen I have ever seen - where he got it I don't know - and wrote in a splendid great Kalamazoo note-book, leather bound and secured with a patent lock that delighted him.' This is the cover which was to hold the manuscript's third and final draft. Herbert Baker recalled that Lawrence kept chocolate in the room as emergency rations - 'it required no cleaning up, he said'. (3)

Lawrence himself records in Notes, as an example of these long bursts of activity, 'Thus Book VI was written entire between sunrise and sunrise', which, since it is unlikely that he would have set the work aside to write a letter between those two sunrises, fails to tie in with a note to Vyvyan Richards, dated as 27.2.20, in which he commented, 'About the book-to-build-the-house. It is on paper in the first draft to the middle of Book vi: and there are seven books in all. But the first draft is a long way off the last one and I feel hopeless about ever finishing it.' (4) The 'seven books' is a further conundrum, since ten Books plus the Introduction were evidently the pattern for both the first and third drafts; the 'house' reference arises because at the time he and Richards had vague plans to build premises on a plot of land at Pole Hill, Chingford, where they would print fine books together - and there was the hope that SP might help to finance the scheme.

The style of the second text was, Lawrence confessed, careless, poured out as it was at speed in an effort to get it all safely down on paper once again. Although only a few new episodes were introduced, it was more than 400,000 words in length, over half as much again as the original manuscript. He worked on amendments and corrections throughout 1920, and was able to refer to the files of the Arab Bulletin to check some details.

By the spring of 1920 the resolution to get the book into print had begun to form in his mind. He told one would-be publisher that he would not publish in England at any price, but hoped to do something for America, and he offered this project to Doubleday, with whom he had formed a close friendship in Paris during the Peace Conference, and was corresponding on the subject of an American reprint of Arabia Deserta. So it was that the idea of an abridgement was first mooted. Lawrence mentions it in a letter to Doughty (5) on 7th August 1920: 'About my own book. I'm going in the next two or three months to re-write it in short form, as a story of adventure, for America. It will appeal to Boy Scouts, I hope.' While in that same month he told Richards that 'To finish my "Boy Scout" book by Sept. 30 will mean my spending August & September in All Souls'. (6) The work was begun, but by the end of August had been abandoned.

It is probable, however, that Doubleday saw the work so far in hand, for on 7th October 1920 he wrote to Lawrence informing him that he had put his manuscript in the hotel safe at Brown's in London. Since it would appear that at this time the only other manuscript extant was the carelessly written second draft, which, Lawrence told Liddell Hart, was not circulated for anyone to read, this note presumably refers to the attempted abridgement.

1	Biog LH, p 145
2	p 386
3	Friends, p 249
4	L 121
5	L 129
6	L 132, August, 1920

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The writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom - full listing