It was Morris who inspired Lawrence with the idea of setting up a hand-press, for printing seemed the ideal occupation for the kind of artistic dilettante he saw himself becoming in the future. When he thought of a career, he could not tolerate the idea of being pigeon-holed into one profession or another. Moreover, printing seemed to have a mystique about it which appealed to him: ‘Printing is not a business but a craft,’ he told his mother later. ‘We cannot sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than a picture could be painted on that system.’ 26Like Morris, Lawrence was also attracted by the sensual quality of a well-produced book, not merely the aesthetic appeal of the type-face, but the feel of the paper and the texture of the binding. His letters are full of esoteric references to the merits of vellum or the intricacies of obtaining fine purple from the Levantine murex. While rooms in Hammersmith Mall had been good enough for Morris, however, for Lawrence and Richards only a proper ‘medieval hall’ would suffice. This notion might have come to them on a pilgrimage they made to a sort of Morris shrine at Broad Campden, where a couple called the Coomeraswamis had converted a fourteenth-century chapel into a house packed with Morris memorabilia, including a copy of the exquisitely bound Kelmscott Chaucer,‘the prince of modern printing’. Here they were also privileged to see the actual press Morris had used in his Kelmscott studio, which was still functioning, and Richards took pains to record that their reaction was not merely sentimentaclass="underline" ‘ … it was a notable stimulus,’ he wrote, ‘to the practical enthusiasm which was taking root in our minds. We, too, would print, and would get enough by it, we hoped, to live without bowing to any form of professionalism.’ 27The visit also stimulated Lawrence to read Morris’s novel The Roots of the Mountains,a fantasy about Gothic mountain tribes who lived communally in halls, slept in ‘shut-beds’, held ‘folk-moots’ and fought gallantly in battle. Rootsled him to other novels: The Well at the World’s End, The Wood Beyond the World, Sigurd the Volsung –each transporting him into a fabulous, heroic world. While his feeling for more celebrated authors waxed and waned, his taste for Morris would last all his life: ‘I suppose everybody loves one writer unreasonably,’ he would tell Charlotte Shaw. ‘I’d rather Morris than the world.’ ‘My reason tells me he isn’t a very good writer: but then, he wrote just the stuff I like.’ 28Lawrence thought the idea of a medieval hall more authentically Morris than Morris’s own ‘Red House’ at Upton, and once dragged Richards over to look at a disused stone chapel near Weymouth which he considered buying. It had, said Richards, a ‘naked simplicity’ which appealed to Lawrence. The Morrisian fantasy – for Morris’s ‘medieval’ was no more truly medieval than Lawrence’s – exerted enormous power over him. There is more than a hint of the communal halls of Roots of the Mountainsin his later attachment to the life of the barrack-room, and as Richards himself pointed out, for Lawrence ‘the desert tents of black goats hair were many pillared dark halls too’. 29
Lawrence’s excursions while at Jesus College were not exclusively into the intellectual and aesthetic spheres, however. In the summer of 1908 he asked Richards to join him on a peculiarly urban adventure – the running of the Trill Mill Stream. This is the first image we have of Lawrence the organizer and man of action – a persona he frequently sought to deny in later years. He had always been interested in boating and canoeing, and in his first year at Jesus had discovered references to a medieval watercourse – the Trill Mill Stream – which now passed beneath the city. After some careful local detective work he came to the conclusion that the stream began at the mouth of a sewer near Hythe Bridge, and he determined to discover whether it debouched into the Isis at Folly Bridge as he suspected. Richards was only one of a group of friends he gathered together in three canoes for the adventure, the others being Midge Hall, Theo Chaundy, A. T. P. Williams and H. E. Mather – the water enthusiast with whom Lawrence had made the unsuccessful ascent of the Cherwell in 1906. On the appointed day the canoes were lowered into the sewer at Hythe Bridge, lit with candles and acetylene lamps. The tunnel was very narrow and the young men had just enough room to crouch forward in the canoes with their arms touching the sides. It was no place for the victim of claustrophobia. Lawrence remarked that it would be interesting to see which of their light-sources would expire first as the air became foul, and wondered aloud what the attitude of the incumbent rats would be. ‘Anyway,’ he said, as the canoes slipped into the darkness, ‘there’s no room to turn back.’ 30Lawrence was electrified by an exquisite thrill of fear, which had once again prompted him to bravado. Secretly, he was terrified that the water might flow through a grating, in which case the canoes might be stuck, or that a sudden shower outside might raise the water-level and drown them. Fortunately there were no obstacles or hitches of any kind, and Lawrence camouflaged his relief by firing blanks from his pistol under the gutter-gratings to attract the attention of pedestrians above. The canoes shot out into the daylight near Folly Bridge only twenty minutes after setting out.
Since Lawrence was more intent on such extra-curricular activities, or on escape into Morris country, than on his lectures, he was amazingly fortunate that in 1908 the History Examiners introduced the option of presenting a thesis on any question connected with a special subject. Lawrence realized that if he chose ‘Military History and Strategy’ as his special subject, he could present a thesis on crusader castles which would deploy all his hard-earned knowledge of medieval defensive warfare. In summer 1907 he had made his second cycling tour of France with Beeson, and now, in summer 1908, he decided to make a third tour to look at the crusader castles he had missed, and to glimpse some of the cathedrals which had so inspired William Morris in the 1850s. This would be his most ambitious expedition yet: he would ride all the way across France to the Mediterranean, and this time he would do it alone.
He arrived at Le Havre in mid-July, and battled in violent hailstorms through Gisors to Compiиgne, and from there to Provins, near Paris, where he discovered a unique twelfth-century keep and ruined town walls, which almost defied his cerebral game of attack-defence. He wandered around them for hours trying to puzzle out what the designer had intended, and came to the conclusion that they had been built as an experiment: ‘… the keep would have been almost incapable of defence,’ he decided, ‘yet in spirit it is half a century ahead of its time.’ 31Living on bread, milk, peaches and apricots, he rode into Champagne, where the weather became ‘fearfully hot’. His days followed a strict regime: up at dawn, he would reach his castle usually by midday, and investigate it for a couple of hours. In the afternoon he would ride on, reaching his hotel by seven or eight in the evening. The sheer imperative of the journey soon eclipsed even his joy in reaching the castles, though he would occupy his mind in composing whole pages of his projected thesis as he pedalled. The Champagne country was stunningly beautiful and he felt himself filling with energy as he cycled, through cherry-orchards and across sparkling streams, past fields of ripe golden barley and wheat. He watched peasants advancing to the harvest in cohorts, their sickles flashing like swords in the sun, the great wains of hay being drawn by bilious-white oxen. Steadily he made his way south, and by late July he was steering a course beneath the austere volcanic plugs of the Auvergne, past gardens enclosed with massive dry-stone walls, toiling up thousands of feet and consoling himself with the thought that such agony as his was undreamed of in classical times – a combination of the tortures of Sisyphus, who had to roll a great stone endlessly uphill, of Tantalus, who was condemned to grasp at fruit just beyond his reach, and of Theseus, who was forced to remain forever sitting. His reward was a 4,000 foot free-wheel descent into the Rhфne valley, so perilous and exciting that he felt sick when he reached the bottom. He rode on through Provence and the lovely but mosquito-infested marshlands of the Camargue, where he contracted his first dose of the malaria which would plague much of his life. At last, he arrived at the lonely, olive-covered mountain of Les Baux, from where he looked down a precipice and far across a plain. Suddenly, as he watched, the sun leapt from behind a cloud, illuminating a silvery shimmer. It was one of the most thrilling moments of his life, and he celebrated it in a way that only an Oxford man of that era would have done, screaming out the words of Xenophon, so loudly that it disturbed the nearby tourists: ‘Thalassa! Thalassa! TheSea! The Sea!’