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CATALOGUE

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Works

Military Report on the Sinai Peninsula
The Mint, 1928 text

Translation

The Forest Giant

Letters

T. E. Lawrence Letters series
Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw
Correspondence with Henry Williamson
Correspondence with E. M. Forster and others

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 Page updated
 8 January 2010

 

From 'The Mint' to 'Confession of Faith'

 

Our edition of The Mint is rather different from what we normally do, and it raised some interesting questions. Notably, what kind of book might Lawrence have written if he had expanded The Mint, as he spoke of doing fifteen months before the end of his service career:

"You know I have been moody or broody for years, wondering what I was at in the R.A.F., but unable to let go - well, last night I suddenly understood that it was to write a book called Confession of Faith, beginning in the cloaca at Covent Garden, and embodying The Mint and much that has happened to me before and since as regards the air. Not the conquest of the air, but our entry into the reserved element, 'as lords that are expected, yet with a silent joy in our arrival'. It would include a word on Miranshah and Karachi, and the meaning of speed, on land and water and air. I see the plan of it. It will take long to do. Clouds Hill, I think. In this next and last R.A.F. year I can collect feelings for it. The thread of the book will only come because it spins through my head: there cannot be any objective continuity - but I think I can make it whole enough to do. The Mint, you know, was meant as notes for something (smaller) of the sort. I wonder if it will come off. The purpose of my generation, that’s really it." (Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 9 Dec 1933, TEL Letters Vol. IV p. 210).

Lawrence died so soon after retiring to Clouds Hill that it's not possible to know whether he would have developed The Mint in this way. A few notes of incidents, apparently for Confession of Faith, were found among his papers (and published in Garnett's Letters)

What we know about the Confession of Faith project comes down to this.

  • It would begin with The Mint.
  • It would be autobiographical, and more or less follow the chronology of Lawrence's service career: almost all Lawrence's writing was autobiographical.
  • There would be some similarity in approach to the Uxbridge section of The Mint (Parts I and II). The remark about lacking 'objective continuity' suggests that, like The Mint, the new material would consist of passages about fairly unrelated incidents designed to create an overall impression.

Any different approach would have left a marked break where the new material began.

Part III of The Mint, describing Lawrence's happiness at Cranwell, may give a further clue about what he might have done. The first two parts, written up from his original Uxbridge notes, make up just under 80% of The Mint. He felt that the Uxbridge account was too grim to circulate on its own, and did not fairly represent Air Force life after Uxbridge. So he added Part III as a counterbalance. He wrote it partly with the help of descriptions sent to friends in letters and notes. Charlotte Shaw, for instance, copied some relevant passages for him. To some extent he must have written it from memory, which would not have been difficult since he was still working in hangars and living in an RAF station. In one or two instances he was able to incorporate existing material. Thus his anonymous article 'Ramping', rejected by a motor-cycling magazine, became 'The Road'.

As he later recognised, Part III was inadequate. It was simply too short to counterbalance Parts I and II. The shift in mood was so brief that it was Part III that seemed untypical of Air Force life, rather than Parts I and II. As completed in 1928, The Mint was still, as Lawrence admitted, a fragment. Confession of Faith could be far more rounded.

In a sense, by 1935 Lawrence was in a position to carry through his original scheme for The Mint. At the outset, he had seen the Uxbridge training as a gruelling introduction to the description of real service life that would follow: "My determined endeavour is to scrape through with it, into the well-paid peace of my trade as photographer to some squadron. To that I look forward as profession and livelihood for many years" (The Mint). That original career progression had been broken, and he never formally became an RAF photographer (though he occasionally helped out with photographic work at Miranshah). On the other hand, he had since found another worthwhile RAF career, working on RAF marine craft. There was now material, in principle, to extend the autobiographical patchwork narrative from recruit through twelve years of service life - and, through this vehicle, to convey some deeper ideas.

How would he have set about assembling this extension of the text? In part, doubtless, he would have used passages from letters, as he had for Part III. In fact, one can wonder whether some of the descriptive letters he sent Charlotte Shaw over the years were not half-intended as notes for a future book. He knew she kept his letters. Years before, in his Oxford thesis, he had drawn on the descriptions of castles sent home during his teenage cycling tours in France. Including the descriptions in those letters had served two ends: it preserved the description, and provided content for a letter.

Over the years I had been increasingly aware of the cumulative extent of Lawrence's descriptive writing about service life, particularly to Charlotte Shaw. When Castle Hill Press subscribers asked for an edition of The Mint to go alongside the 1922 Seven Pillars, the idea came of creating a patchwork service autobiography in the format of a diary. To be sure, the result wouldn't be the book Lawrence would have written; but it would be his writing, and it would bring together the kind of source material he would have called upon to develop Confession of Faith. I thought the idea could work, and was certainly worth a try. The result, 'The Mint' and Later Writings About Service Life, would at last balance Lawrence's description of Uxbridge with a much fuller account of his later service experience.

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