Ambiguous adventures: Edmund Spenser and T. E. Lawrence, imperialists manque

The immediate reasons for linking Edmund Spenser and T. E. Lawrence are to be found in Lawrence's correspondence. Spenser receives reflective mention from Lawrence at each of the four major moments in Lawrence's adult life: at Carchemish (1910-1913); with the Arab Bureau (1916-1918); in the writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1919-1925); and in the last year of his life (1934-1935). He admits, for example, that he "lived on Spenser" until "1916 or so"; and he discusses taking Colin Dale as a pseudonym, thus echoing Spenser's naming himself Colin Clout (OED, clod or patch of dirt). Moreover, Insofar as Spenser and Lawrence were both writers and government servants helping to promote demonstrably ambiguous British imperial policies, they suffered certain losses that make them more readily akin to the colonial other than perhaps they possibly could have imagined at the outset of their professional adventures. In short, Spenser and Lawrence failed in their political purposes, as perhaps all agents of empire must in the given that all kingdoms, all empires must of necessity wax and wane. Their failures were of such a piece with how they represented themselves in their writings that we can think of their failures in terms of integrity challenged in extremis. For their being bookends, as it were, of British imperial endeavors, their example and their vulnerabilities particular to their government service lead this writer to wonder at the need there seems to be to wound or supposedly opposite numbers and ourselves in order to experience a shared humanity between "us and them." Games of empire are nothing like a zero-sum game. No one wins.