The Mint (book) - Reception

Reception

E.M. Forster corresponded with Lawrence, and in 1929 Forster wrote two detailed letters, as a sharply literary friend, criticising The Mint. There were many features that Forster liked, including the word picture of the drill sergeant "Stiffy" and the energy and style of parts I and II. Forster was not happy with the conclusion to the book which he felt to be insipid and trying too hard to be fair. But he much liked chapters 9 and 10 of part III, on the day of Queen Alexandra's funeral, and "Dance Night", when a soldier has his first sexual encounter. Reviewing Forster's letters, Jeffrey Meyers writes that "Forster rightly judged The Mint unequal to Seven Pillars".

The critic Irving Howe described Lawrence's The Mint in The Hudson Review as a "severely chiselled picture of barrack life: Joycean in style, sometimes brilliant in evocation, structured as a series of set-pieces, showing a decided advance in control over The Seven Pillars of Wisdom but too markedly an exercise, a self-conscious effort to write."

Jeremy Wilson writes that "The Mint, written in a very different style to Seven Pillars, is, like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work of observation written by a highly intelligent man who found himself effectively imprisoned. Lawrence distilled its spare descriptions from events that he had witnessed over and over again. Both Seven Pillars and The Mint were for many years ranked among Penguin's Modern Classics."

Thomas J. O'Donnell studies and compares The Mint and Seven Pillars for clues to Lawrence's personality, writing that "in The Mint Lawrence in fact does assert his will to mastery, asserts himself against authority, and leads from the ranks", using his writing to "keep him known, embody his complexities, and perpetuate his dramatization of self".