The wounded spirit;: A study of Seven pillars of wisdom

by Jeffrey Meyers

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, 1st Edition. 200pp. Map plate. Good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscription or ownership marks of any kind, 3 pinholes to to upper hinge holding firm, light sporadic foxing to fore-edges of leaves not intruding or detracting. bound in brigh gilt lettered red cloth, together with original unclipped coloured portrait pictorial dustwrapper rubbed to upper edge.

Genres: History, Biography

200 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1973

About the author

Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently been given an Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thirty of his books have been translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeffrey Meyers' The Wounded Spirit examines the memoirs of soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence from both biographical and literary perspectives. Meyers notes that while questions persist about Lawrence's truthfulness, few of his critics seem to accept that Seven Pillars of Wisdom, like all memoirs, is a work of creative nonfiction more than a straight factual account of the Arab Revolt. He notes as well that Lawrence felt driven to frame his memoirs as a great work of literature, driven by colorful prose, evocative imagery and grandiose scope. Meyers calls attention to Lawrence's professed literary influences: Charles Doughty, the explorer-travel writer whose Travels in Arabia Deserta helped inspire Lawrence's archaeological career; Tolstoy, to whom Lawrence owed his sweeping portraits of battle; Nietzsche, his profession of the need for "will" and determination to overcome earthly weakness; Conrad, for Lawrence's mixed resentment for imperialism and exoticizing the natives he lived and fought with; and Melville, for his depiction of homosocial male relationships under the stress of travel and combat. He notes that Lawrence's original draft (the Oxford Text) is much more bitter and sour, both towards his British minders and Arab allies, and the version published in 1935 elides many passages of political commentary and disillusionment so as to conform the expectations of "epic" literature. Far more than blaming others, the finished Seven Pillars reflects much of Lawrence's criticism upon himself, from his role in deceiving the Arab rebels to shame of his own suppressed homosexuality, which provide the book with passages of tortured introspection. Some have denigrated Seven Pillars as untruthful, others as an overwritten mess; but Meyers, by contextualizing what Lawrence tried to achieve in writing it, restores the book to its rightful place in the English literary canon.