Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), 'Lawrence of Arabia', met Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) on one occasion, and they seem to have got on well. It was in the warm summer of 1920, on Sunday 18th July, at the home of the novelist Hugh Walpole.
And, thanks to Walpole’s diary, we have a glimpse of the meeting.
Aged 31, Lawrence was in the middle of re-writing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, having lost the manuscript the year before. It wouldn’t be published until after he died. The exploits for which he was famous were over, and he was serving as an advisor to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office – a desk job he quickly got bored with.
Lawrence had recently become a household name as a result of the romantic dramatization of his role in the Arab revolt, in a theatre show first produced the year before by the impresario Lowell Thomas, who popularised his role. The show had just been relaunched, in early 1920, with Lawrence in a more prominent role than in the original production. He was later to regret it, but he willingly took part in promoting the show, posing for many photographs. He was in a sense the swashbuckling hero of jingoistic magazines of the time – he describes himself as a matinée idol.
Now, Lawrence was concerned to finish his book, wondering if his political ambitions for the Arabs he represented at the 1919 peace conference were going to come to anything.
The 64-year-old Conrad, suffering from rheumatism or gout, and prone to depression, was also in retrospective mood. He was looking back over his work, publishing some letters and notes on his books at around that time, and only slowly beginning another book. With an eye on his legacy, he harboured hopes of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this never came about.
And it’s clear from Conrad’s letters of the time that he was not enjoying writing – he wrote very little in 1920 and was distracted by his wife Jessie being ill and his sons struggling to get on in life. He wrote that he felt “uncertain and directionless, like a ship whose crew has gone to land leaving all her sails in disarray”.
Each were at the peak of the fame they would experience in their lifetimes, and they perhaps shared a sense that this was passing: Lawrence in growing disillusion, and Conrad knowing that his best years were behind him.
Here is Walpole’s diary entry.
“Conrad very cheerful. Really has started the Napoleon novel. Showed me some of the second chapter and I was surprised to see how many foreign phrases that were in this first draft. I am thus the first person in the world, after his typist, to meet Cosmo and Henrietta. When I criticised Mrs Travers a little, he said: “Of course, mon cher, it is not very good. I did my best work long ago.” Cunningham Graham and Lawrence the Arab man came down. The latter mild, small, modest, with fine eyes. Said the legend about him all untrue. Talked of printing and the Crusades.”
And there are two more glimpses of the encounter. One is mentioned in a letter by the architect Sir Herbert Baker who knew Lawrence at around this time, who said that “when meeting Conrad he probed him on the methods of his craft; Conrad admitting but little conscious design. Lawrence would say that he himself had over-studied his own craftsmanship.”
The other is a description of Conrad by Lawrence years later, in 1935, in a letter to the artist Bruce Rogers: “What I shall always remember is his lame walk, with the stick to help him, and that sudden upturning of the lined face, with its eager eyes under their membrane of eyelid. They drooped over the eye-socket and the sun shone red through them, as we walked up and down the garden.”
How curious that each man’s eyes are remarked on.
Of course they talked about writing, but perhaps while walking up and down the garden and not in Walpole’s hearing. Lawrence may have mentioned his admiration for The Mirror of the Sea, which he told people was his favourite Conrad book, on a par with Moby Dick. He received a signed copy from Conrad two years later.
And Conrad may have mentioned his current project, Suspense, which is the Napoleon novel Walpole referred to. It was never finished, though. Instead, Conrad was soon working on what would be his final novel, The Rover. This is a story about age and retirement, with obvious autobiographical ideas in the tale of a retired sailor who questions his own purpose before being dragged into one last adventure.
Whatever else they might have discussed, beyond “printing and the Crusades”, they seem to have found each other good company.
And they did have some things in common.
They both had an interest in the intelligence services, for example. Laurence had served in this capacity in the War, while of course Conrad had explored the subject in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. And the sort of ambiguous life that Lawrence had lived, in two cultures, with his increasing sympathy with the ‘native’ culture, is exactly the topic of The Heart of Darkness.
In the months following the encounter, Lawrence abandoned his efforts on behalf of the Arabs in the post-wat settlement, and he seems to have experienced a kind of mental breakdown, perhaps out of frustration or guilt. His life turned a corner soon after, when he joined the RAF under an assumed name, trying to escape his own fame.
In his memoir of his father, written in 1970, Conrad’s son Borys describes a man of old-fashioned values who discouraged displays of emotion in his family. Perhaps he was often reticent with visitors, especially when feeling as unsettled as he did around the time that Lawrence visited. Yet, as we read in Walpole’s diary, it was a good day: he was “very cheerful”. He enjoyed the meeting.
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The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938)
The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 7, 1920–1922 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/247648/pdf
Joseph Conrad and T E Lawrence, Ton Hoenselaars and Gene M. Moore, Conradiana Vol. 27, 1 (Spring 1995)
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-09387-8_54.pdf
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