Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Martha's Vineyard

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The Most Important Book I Ever Read

August 29, 2010

Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem.

I'm holding in my hands what may be the most important book I ever read. No, it's not by Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Coleridge, or any of the other literary giants whose work has awed me over the years. It's not by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, or any of the feminist writers who expanded my vision. You've probably never heard of it: Lawrence of Arabia, by Alistair MacLean. It's a young adult biography of T. E. Lawrence, number 52 in the World Landmark series of history books for young people.

I had a subscription to the series, a gift from my parents, so the book probably arrived in my family's mailbox when it was hot off the press in 1962. I was in fifth grade, approaching my eleventh birthday. Thanks to a fourth-grade project on Saudi Arabia, I was already interested in the Middle East, but I don't think I'd heard of T. E. Lawrence. I didn't know that Alistair MacLean was famous for writing The Guns of Navarone, the movie of which had come out the previous year.

This was the book that introduced me to a man who has fascinated me ever since. True, the fascination was further encouraged by David Lean's film of the same name: the cinematic Lawrence of Arabia was released before the end of 1962, after my interest in its subject had been well piqued, and I saw it with Grandma on its first U.S. run, in April 1963.

By then I'd found Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the abridged version, Revolt in the Desert, on Grandma's bookshelves and read both of them. So I, the budding preteen Arabist, got to explain the events depicted and alluded to in the movie to my friends and family, many of whom had a hard time following the story and understanding the politics. I knew where liberties had been taken with the historical record, and I knew which characters were real (Prince Feisal, Shaikh Auda Abu Tayi, General Allenby) and which not (Sharif Ali ibn al-Kharish, played by Omar Sharif, upon whom I like just about everyone else had a terrible crush). I loved pointing out that Peter O'Toole, at six-foot-two, was playing Lawrence, who in real life was five-foot-four.

When I left home for college and the wider world, this book stayed behind. For decades it lived on gray metal utility shelving in the damp, unfinished basement of my parents' house, along with other books and memorabilia from my early years. When the house was sold, in the summer of 2009, the contents of the basement were junked as too moldy and mildewed to be worth sorting through. Losing all those relics was like a seismic shock in a place I used to live. The initial jolt faded in a few weeks.

Regret for the loss of this particular book didn't fade, however. Its dimly recollected cover image became ever more vivid in my mind: a drawing of Lawrence in Bedouin dress, a dagger in his belt and binoculars around his neck. I looked it up online: inexpensive copies weren't hard to find, but I put off buying one, and put it off some more.

My world has been powerfully affected by books. Books have changed or greatly expanded my understanding of the world, myself, or my work in the world -- often all three. The most important ones have become part of my foundation, part of the path I walk on and simultaneously the signposts and lodestars I need to find that path. The most crucial ones have been with me through countless moves; when they go missing, I eventually replace them. This one, though, I had left behind and not gone looking for. Perhaps it was best left back there. How could a book I'd read in fifth grade possibly live up to the place where my memory had enshrined it?

My passionate interest in the history and politics of the Arab world continued through junior high and high school. My self-directed studies introduced me to subjects that weren't covered in class and perspectives that rarely surfaced in the newspapers, which in those days I read voraciously. For a history project my senior year of high school, I rewrote the parts of the Treaty of Versailles that pertained to the Middle East. Also as a senior, I was a finalist in a school speaking competition. My subject? The secret Sykes-Picot agreement made by the British and the French in 1916. You've never heard of it? Neither had any of my classmates, or most of my teachers.

I started college as an Arabic major, and though I finished with a degree in history from a different school, what I learned from my years of study shaped my worldview. At first glance, there would seem to be few points of convergence between my life and that of a young war hero who spent the rest of his not-very-long life seeking obscurity in the Royal Air Force and speeding through the English countryside on ever-more-powerful motorcycles. But in Lawrence's dilemma, of being caught between worlds and unable to ignore the contradictions that were pulling him apart, I'm still finding echoes of my own. If we were stranded together on a desert island or in a lifeboat, I think we could have quite a talk, once each of us got over our fear that the other one couldn't possibly get it.

Finally I scored a copy of the book on eBay. The copy I read as a kid had a proper dust jacket. This one doesn't. It's a library edition, cast off by the Northside Junior High Library in Greenwood, South Carolina. For weeks I didn't dare open it. Recently I mustered my courage and started reading. Know what? It's still one helluva story, and a pretty good book.

Susanna at 59 does not read with the eyes of Susanna at not quite 11. That Susanna was known to her fifth-grade classmates as Walking Encyclopedia; without knowing it she was an editor in the making, but she wasn't an editor yet, so almost certainly she didn't notice that the word spacing is a little loose, or that "coöperate" is spelled with a diaeresis over the "o" -- a rare styling in American English these days. Now I notice that the book is almost straight narrative from one end to the other. It relies mostly on telling, not showing, though MacLean draws in some good anecdotes that weren't strictly necessary. His first chapter does an admirable job of presenting a complex backstory and essential intelligence: the nature of the land; a working definition of what constitutes "Arabia," or the heart of the Arab world, as we're more likely to call it today; the lives of the Bedouin (so styled), a sketch of the Ottoman Empire in the final phase of its long death throes (the stock phrase "the Sick Man of Europe" is not used), and enough about the British Empire and the war in Europe to make Britain's interests in the region clear. To pull this off in 17 pages -- several of which are illustrated and so don't carry anywhere close to the book's average of 250 words a page -- is downright impressive.

The next chapter goes into Lawrence's child- and young manhood. In the middle MacLean interrupts the biography with one of his rare forays into analysis and speculation: "Looking back over T. E. Lawrence's early days, one is struck by the strange fact that nearly all his interests, activities and hobbies were exactly the ones he would have chosen had he been consciously aiming toward his ultimate destiny."

As a young person I was almost certainly drawn to that idea, and to the notion that each of us -- or at least the more interesting of us -- has an ultimate destiny out there waiting for us, if only we can find the right road to it. Now I suspect that some of us are drawn on, ever onward, following portents and will-o'-the-wisps the way Merlin followed Morgan le Fay, without really knowing where we're going. Lawrence might well have been one of them, but since he was caught up in circumstances for which his preparations -- if preparations they were -- were so perfectly suited, it does look as though Fate had a hand in it, doesn't it?

Fate, it occurs to me as I read, is the ultimate deus ex machina, and a handy plot device if you've got a limited number of words with which to tell a complex story about a complicated person to a target audience of mostly 10- to 12-year-olds. With Fate to fall back on, there's no need to mention that Lawrence and his four brothers were all "illegitimate" by the standards of the day, or to delve into the class and cultural norms that he was flouting from an early age. This Lawrence of Arabia ends when the First World War ends, with a short coda about the role Lawrence played during the peace conference and its immediate aftermath. Here is the last paragraph:

"Colonel T. E. Lawrence was to live for another fourteen years before he met his death in May, 1935, in a high-speed motorcycle crash. But our story of Lawrence of Arabia ends on July 4, 1922. On that day, at the age of 33, he resigned from the Colonial Office, his task completed and his duty done."

It's those fourteen years that so intrigue me. How does a man come to terms with cataclysmic events that came about partly through his doing, even though in many ways they were beyond his control? How does he escape from a stage and a role that were partly of his own making? How do any of us deal with knowledge about ourselves and our world that we desperately wish we had never acquired? If we can't stuff the genie back into the bottle, or Pandora's troubles back into her box, how do we live with what we know?

Fortunately, Alistair MacLean's Lawrence of Arabia didn't end with its last paragraph. That last paragraph is followed by a one-page bibliography. Before long I had read most of those books, and they led me to more. In the wake of the movie, more books were written. I read them too. In my own travels through worlds that sometimes seem mutually incompatible and even incomprehensible -- as Arabic major and antiwar activist, feminist bookseller, year-round Martha's Vineyarder, features editor of a small-town newspaper, coffeehouse volunteer, onetime horsegirl who returned to horseback riding in her late forties, among other things -- Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom has always been on my bookshelf. This passage is one reason among many:

"In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith."

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