Aircraftsman Shaw

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 22

Aircraftsman Shaw

"(~REAT wits are oft.to madness near allied." This sufficiently hackneyed quotation probably provides the BBC with justification for including T. E. Lawrence in their programme of English

Eccentrics. So far I know of nothing in the series which throws doubt on the assumption that an eccentric is a harmless grotesque, addicted to unusual clothes and dwelling-places or an undue solicitude for the spiritual welfare. of pet pigs; one who moves us to mirth as well as pity. Now Lawrence was not one of these. It is true that he wore Arab clothes when attending the Conference of Versailles, but this was no more than a dramatic and none-too-suc-cessful gesture. He had none of the calm, bland, surrealist sanity, the rational explanation of Carrollian fantasy, which characterises the true eccentric and was portrayed for all time in Lear’s limericks. His later oddities, the change of name, the insistence on anonymity, self-burial in the life of a private soldier, the acute embarrassment that this inflicted on the other private soldiers, who knew not what to make of him-none of these things fall to the least extent within the definition of eccentric which we accept and which the rest of this Series takes for granted. They were the product of some extraordinary mental and spiritual torment which nobody has yet begun to explain, something quite outside the normal range of experience which descended on one of the most arresting figures of the 20th Century and turned the whole course of his experience outside the channels of accepted reality.