Unicorns in a stable: T. E. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow (1941) was inspired by Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, whose hero has a suppurating wound that makes him a social outcast and exiles him to a remote island. But, as the master of powerful bow, he is recalled when his skills are needed to defeat the Trojans in battle. Wilson believed that great achievements and works of genius can come from deeply flawed men. Lawrence and Wittgenstein, both wounded heroes, fit this tragic pattern.
Winston Churchill deemed Lawrence “one of the greatest beings alive in our time” and added that Seven Pillars of Wisdom “ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language.” Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein “the most perfect example I have ever known of a genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating. . . . Getting to know Wittgenstein was one of the most exciting adventures of my life.” Lawrence (1888-1935) and Wittgenstein (1889-1951), exact contemporaries, were physically small: Lawrence 5’5”, Wittgenstein 5’6”. But their extraordinary lives were driven by a Nietzschean Will to Power, and their intense stares and commanding characters had an astounding effect on everyone. They lived ascetic lives, refused to acquire possessions and were tormented by a sense of guilt.
Both were aristocrats, Lawrence with an ironic twist. He was the illegitimate son of the heavy-drinking Anglo-Irish landowner Sir Thomas Chapman and his humble housekeeper. Wittgenstein belonged to Vienna’s richest family and lived like a prince in their palace. Both men had four brothers. Two of Lawrence’s brothers were killed in World War I and he died in a suicidal motorcycle crash. Wittgenstein’s brother Paul, a concert pianist, lost an arm in World War I and three others committed suicide.
Both these highly educated men were experts in several fields, and combined the roles of monk and mechanic. Lawrence was an outstanding scholar, linguist, archeologist, explorer, cartographer, military commander, persuasive diplomat, designer of air-sea rescue speedboats and author of a literary masterpiece. Trained as an engineer, Wittgenstein invented an aeronautical device that anticipated jet planes, and planned the severely functional architecture (including door latches and radiators) for his sister’s impressive house in Vienna.
Their severe tastes and hermetic instincts cut them off from the ordinary pleasures of life: home, comfort and money. Rootless, restless and agonised, they frequently moved through several foreign countries. Lawrence lived in the deserts of the Middle East, fought in the wastelands of Arabia and in 1928 retreated to a remote RAF fort in Miranshah, on the frontier of India and Afghanistan. Wittgenstein habitually withdrew to the cold and desolate regions of northern Europe, to humble dwellings in the west of Ireland, Norway and Iceland. Lawrence’s austere cottage, Clouds Hill in Dorset, was stripped down to the essentials and had no lavatory. Wittgenstein’s rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, were also stringently Spartan.
Both were extremely brave and daring. Wounded several times, Lawrence led the Arabs in a triumphant war against the Turkish army. Wittgenstein, who fought on the Italian front, declared, “When one hears rifle fire, one doesn’t run.” In World War I he asked to be sent to observation posts, the most dangerous place at the front, and often attracted enemy bullets. Wounded and decorated for courage under fire, he was recommended for Austria’s equivalent of the Victoria Cross, but the battle was lost and he did not receive it. Lawrence, posing as a light-skinned Circassian on a reckless reconnaissance to Deraa in southwestern Syria, was captured, tortured, raped and then released by the Turks. Wittgenstein was captured by the Italians just before the war ended in November 1918 and spent ten months, until August 1919, in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Most significantly, each man was a guilt-ridden homosexual. Lawrence, always haunted by the fear of defilement, identified with the most contagious, revolting and absolute outcast in Leviticus 13:45: “And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering on his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.” Lawrence told E. M. Forster that since Deraa—when he broke down, surrendered his bodily integrity and masochistically enjoyed being beaten by the Turks—“I have gone about whimpering to myself Unclean, unclean.” Obsessed, like Wittgenstein, with cleanliness and baths (his only luxury at Clouds Hill), Lawrence wrote in a morbid, confessional letter to Mrs. Bernard Shaw, that his offence at Deraa would “hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among decent ghosts, hereafter, crying ‘Unclean, unclean!’” He still felt condemned by the disapproving dead.
Lawrence stamped on the cover of Seven Pillars “the sword also means clean-ness & death,” which suggests that for him being alive was unclean. In his book he wrote that after Deraa he became “so stained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world would make me feel clean”. Only death “would be a clean escape”. As a self-imposed punishment for his enjoyment of killing men in war and his masochistic pleasure in being beaten, Lawrence paid an airman to whip him every year on the anniversary of his humiliation in Deraa. He was attracted to the desert because it was clean, and even imagined the total extinction of all unclean mankind: “What is wanted is a new master species—birth control for us, to end the human race in fifty years—and then a clear field for some cleaner mammal. I suppose it must be a mammal.”
Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars to S.A. (Sheik Ahmed, also called Dahoum), an Arab youth, now dead, he’d once loved. In the first chapter of this book he provocatively and defiantly exclaimed that among his innocent and comradely followers homosexuality had replaced filthy prostitutes: “In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies” [my italics]. In a letter to another young lover, the beautiful, blond and blue-eyed airman R. A. Guy, he wrote: “My pleasure in the R.A.F. was party, largely, due to the pleasure I got from your blue and yellow self: and I owe you a deep debt for many happy times.”
Wittgenstein also fell in love with men and felt guilty about it. He wrote that Ben Richards, an undergraduate medical student at Cambridge, “has a thing about me. Something that can’t last. Whether it will work out I do not know, nor whether I can endure this pain. Demons have woven these bonds and hold them in their hands. They can break them or they can let them survive.” His biographer Ray Monk records that with the mathematician Francis Skinner, Wittgenstein was “very sensual, susceptible, indecent with him: ‘Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that there was nothing wrong in it, then with shame.’ ”
Like Lawrence, Wittgenstein was pursued by demons. He also felt guilty about his inherited wealth, intellectual arrogance, inhuman verbal and physical cruelty. As a teacher in a remote Austrian village, he severely beat his pupils and fled the scene. Cruelly contemptuous, he instructed some of his bright university students to give up philosophy and work as manual labourers in a factory. One gifted but vulnerable disciple lamented that Wittgenstein’s savage comments “destroyed his intellectual foundations, his religious faith and his powers of abstract thought”. Like Lawrence, Wittgenstein had a passion for order and cleanliness, and Monk described his physical and intellectual life as “a cleansing process—the compulsion to dig to rock bottom and rebuild from there.”
To assuage their guilt, Lawrence and Wittgenstein sought refuge in degrading menial work. Lawrence left promising careers in the army, diplomacy and government, and rejected the offer to be High Commissioner in Egypt in order to become a private soldier in the Tank Corps and the RAF. The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, who knew Lawrence, noted, “This metaphysical boy-scout was saying farewell to ambition, in an act of social suicide. The spectacle of this stupid waste of so much ability always depressed me. It was a sort of hari-kiri he was indulging in, this self-immolation.” Wittgenstein had a series of humble jobs: gardener in a monastery, dispensary assistant in a 1942 London hospital and elementary schoolteacher. His sister compared his teaching job to using “a precision instrument to open crates.” These degrading roles, as Lawrence observed of himself, were “like having a unicorn in a racing stable. Beast doesn’t fit.”
Lawrence’s elaborately styled Seven Pillars (1935) and Wittgenstein’s concisely written Philosophical Investigations (1953), were both published posthumously. Lawrence donated the substantial royalties of his books to military charities; Wittgenstein gave away his enormous fortune. Both authors were made into myths: Lawrence through the worldwide publicity of the journalist Lowell Thomas, Wittgenstein through the memoirs of Russell and his own disciples. Each inspired many biographies and dramatic portrayals in literature and film, which enhanced their vivid images after their deaths. Lawrence was idealised in poems by W.H. Auden, Robert Graves and Archibald MacLeish. He was the model for Private Meek in Bernard Shaw’s Too Good to Be True and the heroine in Saint Joan, for Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Ransom in The Ascent of F6 and Terence Rattigan’s soldier in Ross; for the fictional heroes of André Malraux’s The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, John Buchan’s Greenmantle and Henry Williamson’s The Gold Falcon. David Lean spread his fame throughout the world in his superb film Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Wittgenstein, meanwhile, inspired Thomas Bernhard’s novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew (a title borrowed from Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew) and Michael Frayn’s Headlong, and Terry Eagleton’s script for Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein (1993).
With amazing physical endurance, Lawrence defeated the Turks in the Arabian campaign and reached Damascus before General Allenby’s British army. At the Versailles Conference in 1919 and the Cairo Conference in 1921 he helped install the Arab kingdoms in the postwar Middle East. His original theories of guerrilla warfare influenced the victorious 20th-century campaigns of Mao Tse-tung in China, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam, George Grivas in Cyprus. His innovative ideas are still taught in military academies throughout the world. Wittgenstein profoundly influenced the entire course of modern philosophy, and the authors of Wittgenstein’s Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidenow, conclude that his “reputation among 20th-century thinkers is unsurpassed”. Though these two charismatic geniuses never met, their personalities and achievements, sufferings and sacrifices, were remarkably similar.
Jeffrey Meyers has published The Wounded Spirit: A Study of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1973), T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography (1974) and T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (1989).
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