The Hero as Rookie

THE MINT (250 pp.) --T. E. Lawrence -- Doubleday ($20).

In 1922 a hungry, undersized Englishman who gave his name as John Hume Ross enlisted in the R.A.F. He found the going rough, and he was not much of a soldier. He tried manfully to enjoy the ruggedness of his unaccustomed surroundings, but his accent was Oxford, and he was shocked by the obscenities that peppered everyone's speech but his own. Sometimes physical training made him ill. Each night he scribbled notes before lights out. The men wondered about this queer one, but not for long. Four months after he enlisted, the newspapers printed the sensational story: Airman Ross was really England's colorful World War I hero Lawrence of Arabia.

T. E. Lawrence had come upon hard times. The former colonel who was esteemed by such men as Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw was discouraged, dissatisfied with himself, and, by his own account, penniless. Perhaps, he reasoned, a hitch in the R.A.F. would give him peace of mind. It is doubtful that restless, unstable T. E. Lawrence ever found peace of mind, but the notes he took in barracks became a book whose history is as odd as his own bizarre career. The Mint was finished in India in 1928 (Lawrence had been discharged from the R.A.F., enlisted in the Tank Corps under the name of Shaw, went back to the R.A.F. in 1925). But Lawrence did not want the book to be published until 1950, because, he said, he had named people who might be hurt. Only a few literary friends were permitted to see it.

After Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935, Critic Edward Garnett turned over a typescript of The Mint to a New York publisher. Only 50 copies of the book were printed. Ten were offered for sale at $500,000 apiece; there were no takers. Now the book is published, at $20 a copy, in a special edition of 1,000, which is already oversubscribed. Perhaps in the fall the average reader will get a go at it in a cheaper edition. He may well wonder what all the fuss was about.

In The Mint, the brutalities of noncoms, the indifference of officers, the rude comradeship and intellectual sterility of barracks life are set down with hard fidelity. But Lawrence, a romantic misfit, was overcome with tiresome self-pity. He tried to understand what barracks and discipline do to men's lives, but Lawrence's writing was best suited to description, and it became cluttered when he tried to think. Set down as it is in short jerky chapters, The Mint has no final impact. Above all, it comes too late. A generation of men who know KP chores, the squeeze of discipline and the harmless obscenity of barracks lingo are not apt to be impressed by these documentary notes. To their wives, the book will seem like a more literary version of some of the hurt letters their men wrote during the first weeks of basic.

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