The Outsider (14 page)

From the beginning James
’
s work dealt with the problem, What should we do with our lives? (The phrase is the property of H. G. Wells.) His favourite heroes and heroines are young people who, like Hesse
’
s,
‘
confront life
’
with the questions, How must it be lived to bring the greatest self-realization?

Roderick Hudson, the hero of the first important novel, is a young sculptor who is frustrated and bored in the small-town home environment; a generous patron takes him to Rome and
releases him from the necessity of drudging in an office for a living. Roderick promptly gets himself embroiled in an unhappy love affair and gradually loses his idealism and his talent. James has shown Roderick
’
s immense expectation of life petering out as soon as he flings himself into the business of living it.

In
Portrait of a Lady
the heroine is a young woman who, again, confronts life with the question-mark. Her social success in English society leads a very eligible English Lord to propose to her; she refuses him because she feels that life is far too full of exciting possibilities to narrow it down so soon. Later, the possibilities resolve themselves in a love-marriage that is a failure, with the same prospect of future unfulfilment as in
Roderick Hudson.
She too is
‘
defeated by life
’
, by her own inability to live at a constant intensity.

James is something of a defeatist where the Outsider
’
s problems are concerned. Much later in his life he returned to the problem of self-realization. He put into the mouth of Lambert Strether, the middle-aged hero of
The Ambassadors,
a speech that begins:
‘
Live, live all you can; it
’
s a mistake not to.
’
But Strether
’
s own attempt to
‘
take the world into his soul
’
is miserably unsuccessful. He comes to Europe from a small American town to drag back with him a young American who likes Europe far too much to go home. Once in Paris, he is so overwhelmed by realization of what he has missed in his own narrow life that he advises the young man not to go back on any account, and announces his own intention of staying on. His course of
‘
self-realization
’
ends by scuttling the security he has left behind him in America and committing him to a very uncertain future. At this point James leaves him.

Finally, the idea behind the novel,
Wings of the Dove,
of a young woman
‘
in love with life
’
who yet knows she has only six months to live, is calculated to set the problem in a light where it could hardly fail of some solution. Yet what actually happens is that Milly Theale is betrayed by her best friend and her lover, and dies in the knowledge that she has been defeated by life as well as by death.
‘
At the last she hated death; she would have done anything to live.
’
The problem of self-realization, the Outsider
’
s problem, is left unsolved. It would seem that James
’
s contribution to it could be summarized in Elroy Flecker
’
s
‘
The dead know only one thing: It is better to be alive
’
.

THE ATTEMPT TO GAIN CONTROL

The outsider problem
is essentially a living problem; to write about it in terms of literature is to falsify it. Up to this point, analysis of writers has been necessary, for the writer
’
s business is self-expression, and they have helped us towards clear and scientific definition of the Outsider
’
s problems. But these men, Barbusse, Sartre, Hemingway, even Hesse, were not deeply and permanently concerned with the Outsider; the measure of their unconcern lies in the fact that they passed on to other subjects. The writer has an instinct that makes him select the material that will make the best show on paper, and when that has failed or been carried to a limit from which he finds it difficult to go forward, he selects a new approach. This can be seen by referring to the development of any of these writers of the previous chapters: Sartre passing from Roquentin to Communism; Hemingway from Corporal Krebs to the big-jawed, hard-fisted heroes of the later books; Barbusse from
L’Enfer
to
Le Feu
and so on to Communism. Unless a writer has unusual sincerity and unusual persistence, this is almost certain to happen to him (Mr. Eliot is the only example I can call to mind among modern writers whose development has been a consistent, unswerving line). The reason is simple: beyond a certain point, the Outsider
’
s problems will not submit to mere thought;
they must be lived.
Very few writers treat writing (as Mr. Eliot does) as an instrument for living, not as an aim in itself.

This conclusion is not intended as a criticism of the writers I have just spoken of. A writer
’
s conscience is his own business. We must accept what they have given us and be grateful enough to get it. But it means that, in order to pursue the Outsider
’
s problems further, we must turn to men who
were
more concerned with living than with writing.

The three men we are to consider in this chapter had one unfortunate feature in common; they all believed, like Barbusse
’
s hero, that
‘
they had nothing and they deserved nothing
’
. This is not a belief that puts a man at the best
advantage for wrestling with a living problem. All three ended tragically; that is to say, all three
wasted
themselves and their possible development. Looking back on them, looking at a canvas by Van Gogh, or at the manuscript letters of T. E. Lawrence, or at Nijinsky
’
s
L’
Apres-Midi d
’
un Faune
in the British Museum, we can feel the full poignancy of the fact that
these men did not understand themselves,
and consequently wasted their powers. If they had known themselves as well as we can know them, their lives need not have been tragic. The Outsider
’
s first business is self-knowledge.

* * *

Close study of T. E. Lawrence is made difficult by the fact that no reliable, unbiased biography has yet been published. Lowell Thomas and Liddel Hart treat him simply as a soldier; Mr. Aldington
’
s book is so hysterically biased against him that it has virtually no value except as a corrective to other books that treat him as a legendary Sir Galahad. Until an exhaustive, unprejudiced biography is published, we have nothing but the bare facts of his life, and the evidence of his own writing, to go on.

The facts of his life are briefly these:

Lawrence came of a fairly-well-to-do family; he was one of several brothers. At school he was brilliant at subjects he cared about, and had no energy to spare for the others. He always cared about history and literature. In his early teens, this developed into a passionate interest in medievalism; he read Malory and William Morris, and cycled around Oxfordshire taking rubbings of church brasses. He was always physically hardy and virile, though he never played competitive games. He cycled around in France looking at castles and cathedrals; later, ignoring the assurances of experienced travellers that it was an impossibility, he travelled through Arabia on foot and alone, examining Crusaders
’
castles and collecting notes for his Oxford thesis. A year later, he accompanied Leonard Woolley and the British Museum Archaeological mission to Egypt. There he picked up some Arabic, and learned a great deal more of archaeology; he still read Malory and Morris, and made plans to buy a disused windmill when he returned to England, and use its power to drive a printing press which would print books on hand-made paper; they would then be
bound with vellum that would be stained with Tyrian dye.

At the outbreak of war, Lawrence was posted to Egypt as a Staff Captain in the Maps Branch of the Intelligence service. He found it boring, and when an opportunity came to take a part in the rebellion being fomented by King Hussein of Mecca against the Turkish government of Arabia, Lawrence sailed for Arabia without bothering to tell his Intelligence chiefs what he intended to do. He quickly made himself indispensable in the revolt; as the advisor of Fiesal, King Hussein
’
s son, he steered it to success in a period of less than two years. His book
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
is a record of those two years.

The war had given him new insights; he returned from it a wiser and in no way a happier man. We have already examined that leaking-away of the springs of motive that results from too much experience flooding an over-sensitive person, so we have no need to regard his conduct during the next seventeen years as part of a
‘
Lawrence enigma
’
. He acted as we would expect an Outsider to act. After a three-years battle in the council chamber to establish the Arab right to their own country, Lawrence joined the Tank Corps as a private, and later the R.A.F. He did no more archaeology, and refused offers of various jobs from people who wanted to help him, including the Governorship of Egypt and the Secretaryship of the Bank of England. He appears completely to have lost belief in himself, although this loss of belief did not extend to the rest of humanity (as with Evan Strowde) and he had always an exaggerated respect for certain writers and artists who certainly had not a quarter of his spiritual power.

Later, he bought a cottage at Clouds Hill in Dorset, installed many books and gramophone records, and spent most of his spare time there. After
The Seven Pillars
he did no more creative work
[The Mint
is hardly more than a journal). He was killed in a motor-cycle accident in 1935, and even at the end, with his skull and ribs smashed beyond hope of recovery, his prodigious vitality kept him living for three days when another man might have died in a few hours.

This second period of his life is the most depressing to consider, for it is not difficult to see the causes that sapped his motive power, and to see that a few insights into these causes might have showed him how to harness his enormous willpower to creative activity. It is like considering some immense
machine that is made useless by a small break in the circuit. The rest of this account of Lawrence must be devoted to a study of
The Seven Pillars
and Lawrence
’
s own diagnosis of his Outsider problems.

A letter to Edward Garnett (23 October 1922) makes this very clear. Lawrence writes:

I have looked in poetry everywhere for satisfaction: and haven
’
t found it. Instead I have made that collection of bonbons, chocolate eclairs of the spirit, whereas I wanted a meal. Failing poetry, I chased my fancied meal through prose, and found everywhere good little stuff, and
only a few men who had tried honestly to be greater than mankind;
and only their strainings and wrestlings really fill my stomach.

I can
’
t write poetry, so in prose I aimed at providing a meal for the fellow seekers with myself....

That Lawrence lacked the healthy conceit of the man of genius is one of the root causes of his tragedy of waste.

Before passing on to this, we can mention a revealing passage on Lawrence in the volume
T. E. Lawrence by His Friends.
Eric Kennington
’
s account of Lawrence is one of the best balanced articles in the book. A memorable paragraph tells how he showed a copy of
The Seven Pillars
to a strange, clairvoyant old schoolmaster.
¹
The schoolmaster
’
s comment was:
‘
Reading this book has made me suffer. The writer is infinitely the greatest man I have known, but he is terribly wrong.
He is not himself.
He has found an
“
I
”
but it is not a true
“
I
”
, so I tremble to think of what may happen.
He is never alive in what he does.
There is no exchange. He is only a pipe through which life flows. He seems to have been a very good pipe, but to live truly one must be more than that.
’
This comment not only penetrates to the roots of Lawrence; it is an accurate characterization of the Outsider.
‘
He is never alive in what he does.
’
This is Meursault and Krebs.
‘
He is not himself is even more revealing, for it suggests that the Outsider
’
s business is to find a course of action in which he is
most himself
that is, in which he achieves the maximum self-expression.