The Ironies of T. E. Lawrence’s Relevance and Reputation - Lawrence as Model Hero

Lawrence as Model Hero or Mythmaking Fraud The ups and downs of Lawrence’s reputation illustrate how both his own words and those of others can become entangled in diverse interpretations. Politics, class, gender, and moral complexities all figure in these complications. Few heroes and autobiographers have had their credentials for integrity so savagely tarnished in the public mind as those of T. E. Lawrence. He was, it is alleged, not the man, not the hero, nor even the writer he thought himself to be. Lawrence’s mercurial temperament, sexual confusion, and suicidal inclinations made him an easy prey for the poet and novelist Richard Aldington, his bitter and yet influential detractor. In doing so, however, Aldington revealed on almost every page his own deep-seated prejudices and rage against the English social order. Aldington claimed he originally intended to extol Lawrence’s life but reacted in indignation when he discovered all the alleged lies and misconduct.26 As a symbol of manhood, honor, and imperial determination, Lawrence’s career and personality was bound to lose its appeal, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War.27 Richard Aldington’s malicious critique of Lawrence’s life helped the modern world to abandon the notion of heroism as an empty and even demeaning concept. A further sign of honor’s decline appears in movie director David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It is a profound cinematic rendering with one of the best assemblies of actors ever to be presented on the screen. Yet, Lawrence of Arabia is not entirely true to Lawrence’s life and character. (What historical film ever is?) In any event, the film’s anti-war message aided a growing popular and intellectual skepticism that wars could be necessary and inspirational. During the first years after the First World War, however, Lawrence had few military rivals for public adulation. Certainly not General Haig or Marshall Foch. In this period, Lowell Thomas, an American reporter for the Chicago Evening Journal, made a hero larger than life out of the celebrated but diminutive British veteran. Without the enormous effort of Lowell Thomas’s exaggerations of his exploits, Lawrence might have never become a transatlantic semidivine figure. Over a million English theatergoers watched in wonder Thomas’s extravaganzas of lecture and film at Covent Garden, Royal Albert Hall, and Queen’s Hall with royalty in attendance.28 By his tours throughout the United States, Thomas also created an American celebrity as well. But his extravaganza at Covent Garden was a highlight.29 As one of the earliest developers of the documentary film, he inspired the English nation with rekindled faith in the Empire by his representation of a Lawrence larger than life. Indeed, by the time the Turks surrendered on 30 October 1918, Great Britain was the chief power in the Middle East. Audiences rejoiced in a grand spectacle and celebration of Anglo-Saxon heroism. One remembers that in the 1920s Americans, most especially, were intrigued with the Bedouin mystique, especially on the silent screen. The Sheik, the immensely successful 1921 movie, featured Rudolph Valentino, then the foremost matinee idol. The public was clearly starved for examples of old-fashioned heroism. Both British and Americans had all witnessed films and photographs of the “long drab pageant of the First World War,” as an English paper put it.30 At the same time, Lawrence’s war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), was published in part to furnish a more credible history of his role in the Near Eastern campaigns than the one that Thomas and newspaper articles had fabricated.31 Vexed to near madness by Thomas’s super-hero fantasy, Lawrence found himself pursued by the journalistic paparazzi of the day. He wondered if he had not become another man’s possession at the expense of his own identity. “Have I deserved a Lowell Thomas?” he bitterly wrote his friend, the English novelist E. M. Forster. Lawrence pointed out that Thomas had spent no more than three days in his company, had never accompanied him on desert campaigns, and only read reports of such operations later. In fact, Lawrence wrote indignantly to Forster, that Thomas was guilty of “red-hot lying.” To another correspondent he complained, “The Arab war was not nearly as silly as he makes out: and I was not in charge of it, or even very prominent. Only I was in fancy dress, & so made a good ‘star’ for his film.”32 Not every Englishman, particularly those who served with Lawrence in the Middle East, however, was smitten by his valor and perspicacity. For instance, a Major R. M. S. Barton accused his onetime colleague in Egypt of being “an exhibitionist of the first water.” He and others complained that British gold, which Lawrence had much to distribute, was the chief reason the so-called “Prince of Mecca” won so great a following among the Arabs. It was “disgraceful” for Lawrence to glamorize “Arab garb” instead “of turning out in the King’s uniform.” Six years in the Near East convinced Barton that the Muslim “was a treacherous cut throat, a robber of the dead after desert battle, a mutilator and murderer of the wounded whom he robbed as well, hanger-on the flanks of armies in open desert battle with a wary eye in which way the cat was going to jump.”33 Maj.-Gen. George Rankin, an Australian officer, called him “one of the greatest imposters of the 1914-18 War.” He failed, Rankin claimed, “to control the primitive savagery of the Arab rabble at his heels.”34 After running into Lawrence at Jiddah in 1917, Colonel Cyril Wilson reported to Cairo, “I look on him as a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs &c. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, H. M.’s ships and everything else.” Everyone from generals and admirals “down to the most junior fellow” thought the same of him.35 Indeed, Lawrence’s arrogance was a source of considerable irritation for many who knew him in the Middle East.. For instance, he indulged himself in a wrongheaded monologue to the dismay of Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jewish agronomist. The subject was wild desert wheat, Aaronsohn’s specialty. “As I was listening to him” expound in ignorance on Galilean wild wheat, “I could almost imagine that I was attending a conference by a scientific antiSemitic Prussian speaking English.”36 (Lawrence was not, though, anti-Semitic.) At the same time, the self-confident Arabist often deferred to the judgment of the brilliant British expert on the Middle East, Gertrude Bell, and took her advice. According to her biographer, “he admitted that owed her much of the information that had helped him to rally the tribes in the desert at a critical moment during the Arab Revolt.” The pair collaborated smoothly in Cairo, preparing the way for the Sharif Faisal to become the caliph presiding over a loose confederation of Arab states.37 The most formidable attack against Lawrence was the one that Richard Aldington spent years preparing after the Second World War. The author of T. E. Lawrence, A Biographical Enquiry was himself a Great War veteran, gassed on the Western Front.38 Unlike Lawrence, Aldington had no aristocratic lineage. No graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, he did not finish his studies at University College, Teddington. The problem was the sudden failure of his middle-class lawyer father’s finances. De-classed, so to speak, Aldington came to despise the English establishment especially after the useless slaughter in the trenches. Nevertheless, he was proud to be one of General Sir Douglas Haig’s “scourged.” In 1919, he wrote Death of a Hero, a popular anti-war novel. It roundly censured the English upper classes, which he held accountable for the disastrous war. Associated with Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford (Hueffer), T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, among others, he was most prolific throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Aldington’s poetry, lately neglected, did not follow Rupert Brooks’s romantic example but belongs with such mordant realists as Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon. Aldington wrote fiction, biographies, and, for a time, screen plays in Hollywood. In the 1950s, however, he fell out of favor with publishers and public alike. Illhealth and meager finances added to his misery.39 The fall from grace further embittered him. He undertook the Lawrence biography when emotionally exhausted after completing a life of D. H. Lawrence, a sometime close friend. It was the first to be published on that novelist. His bile found an outlet in the attempt to take possession of Lawrence’s reputation and destroy it as if Lawrence were still alive to feel the humiliation. To summarize his case, three major issues stood out. As one of his enemies summarized it, “(a) his illegitimacy; (b) suggestions that he was a homosexual pervert; (c) [the assertion that] he was a habitual and boastful liar.”40 On the first point, Aldington maintained that Lawrence was affected from an early age by the family secret, about which T. E. only learned in 1919 when his father had died. That fact alone, Aldington contended, explained Lawrence’s “abortive career and tortuous character.” Aldington wrote sarcastically, “‘Call me Ishmael!’–the opening words of the Moby Dick he took as one of his literary idols--suited him quite as much as Melville.”41 Robert Graves, Lawrence’s best friend and first biographer, declared that the notion of a “bastardy complex” was nonsense. Graves wrote that Lawrence had told him, “My mother was shocked” that he and his brother Arnold “weren’t shocked at her news and that we took it so lightly.”42 Lawrence had not, however, wished the information to be made public. In fact, when Graves was preparing his biography of Lawrence, his friend wrote him, “There are certain things about my family, which must not be said. Not that I care, but other people had such odd views about marriage.”43 Mrs. Lawrence, a very devout evangelical Anglican, considered herself in a state of sin. She and her husband were not actually married becaused he already had a wife in Ireland. Victorian as she was, the old lady feared disgrace and exile from good society, even though by the 1950s few would give it a moment’s thought. Indeed, Aldington may have scored a point on this issue. Beneath the surface of a “happy childhood,” the boys had early recognized what Arnold Lawrence, T.E.’s younger brother, called “a spirit of sin, unnaturalness. Hush hush was great. It perplexed the children, leading to doubts and ultimately to a lack of confidence.” Arnold thought his brother had been “injured by his mother.”44 As for the question of his homosexuality, the evidence, as it so often is in such cases, very problematic about how far he went in pursuit of satisfaction. Lawrence was more tolerant of homosexuals than most of his contemporaries. Yet he could also be ambivalent about the active ones. He wrote Graves about a mutual friend, Siegfried Sassoon. Graves had met and liked the poet in wartime France. “S[iegfried] S[assoon],” Lawrence wrote, “comes out very well in Goodbye to All That–homosex & all. He’s a fighting man, & generous. Hates his family millionaires.”45 Lawrence refused to read Forster’s Maurice, his homosexual novel, written in 1913-14. He told the author that he feared he would not like it. “I’m so funnily made up, sexually,” Lawerence admitted.46 When reviewing Lawrence’s sexual inhibitions, Graves had in mind, one must suspect, Lawrence’s trauma when Turks had seized him at Deraa in 1918. It undoubtedly affected his sexual nature--if that is, if it happened at all. Contemporaries and historians offer different opinions on the misfortune: skepticism; outright denial that it took place; and sympathetic acceptance of his word. Lawrence himself presented differing accounts, understandably so, since it was matter of deep humiliation. “I went in to Dera’a in disguise to spy out the defences, was caught, and identified by Hajim Bey the Governor. . .Hajim was an ardent pederast and took a fancy to me.” The Governor “tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty.”47 Suleiman Mousa, an Arab historian, argues that Lawrence could never have undergone the experience at all. The Arab writer insists that he recovered much too quickly for it to be true. Besides, Hajim Bey, Mousa contends, was no pederast. However, Raphael Patai points out that both Arabs and Turks considered the homosexual act “as an assertion of one’s aggressive masculine superiority while the acceptance of the role of the passive homosexual is considered extremely degrading and shameful because it casts the man or youth into a submissive, feminine role.”48 That cultural attitude would have made Lawrence feel even more brutalized and humiliated than if solely western standards were applied. Along with Aldington, Lawrence biographers A.N. Wilson, Lawrence James, Desmond Stewart, James Barr, and Adrian Greaves all have found reasons to doubt Lawrence’s word about the rape.49 None of their rationales is convincing. How often it is that female victims are slow to recount the experience. Rare it is for a man, even one with masochistic tendencies, to confess such an experience.50 The response to male rape, as prison researchers conclude, takes many forms: denial, anger, confessed guilt, repulsion, depression, and a lost sexual identity or confusion. At one time or another, Lawrence exhibited each of these characteristics.51 But Aldington took the easy and conventional path of utter condemnation and ridicule about the episode and its psychological consequences. With regard to Lawrence’s infatuation with men, Robert Graves was wrong on one major point. He thought that the initials “S. A.,” to whom Lawrence had sworn everlasting love, stood for Sarah Aaronsohn. She and her intellectual father Aaron Aaronsohn were spies for the British. Sarah was caught by the Turks and flung into prison months before Lawrence underwent the ordeal at Deraa. And then she died.52 The legend of a relationship between Lawrence was totally false; they actually never met. Anthony Nutting, another Lawrence biographer, claims that the initials “‘S. A.’” were nothing more than an imaginary conception, unrelated to a particular person or place.” Nutting also disbelieved the validity of the Deraa torture and rape.53 But “S. A.” was really Sheikh Ahmed. Dahoum, as he was called, was a good-looking fourteen-year-old camel driver. In 1911, Lawrence found him among the native workers at an archeological site in Syria. Tribesmen were concerned about the nature of the relationship, but it is doubtful that Lawrence ever touched him inappropriately.54 Lawrence, a fine photographer, did have Dahoum pose in the nude before the camera. The boy and another Arab youth accompanied Lawrence back to Britain in 1913, where Lawrence’s mother found the youngster a delight. When in 1918 Dahoum died of typhus behind Turkish lines, Lawrence was thrown into the deepest kind of grief. The dedicatory poem, “To S. A.” opens the Seven Pillars. The first lines declare, “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/ and wrote my will across the sky in stars.” He had undertaken his mission, he wrote in the poetic epigraph, “To earn your Freedom.”55 Readers of Seven Pillars will readily apprehend Lawrence’s tendency to grandiosity but also his very human side. Likewise, in the R. A. F., years later, Lawrence fell for an Apollo-like blond airman, R. A. M. Guy. “People aren’t friends till they have said all they can say,” he wrote Guy. “We never got to that, but we were nearer it daily. . .and since S.A. died I haven’t experienced any risk of that happening.”56 Robert Graves learned from Lawrence that he had never much wanted sex. “1-3/4 minutes” of pleasure, as he described it, was simply not worth the trouble. Even the thought gave him “a dirty feeling.”57 Some of his friends commented that Lawrence hated to be touched in any intimate or even casual way. Lawrence’s sense of guilt was so powerful that he took pleasure, not in delivering pain but receiving it. John Bruce, a Scottish Tank Corps chum, reported years later that Lawrence had him birch him severely some nine times. Lawrence mentions in the Oxford 1922 text of Seven Pillars that the flailing he had received at Dera’a had “resulted in a longing for a repetition of the experience.” He continued, “It could not have been my defilement for no one ever held the body in less honour than I did myself.” Instead it was “the breaking of the spirit by the frenzied nerve-shattering pain which had degraded me to beast level.” The incident “had journeyed with me since, a fascination and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps but like the striving of a moth toward its flame.”58 To confess to sexual deviancy is quite singular at a time--the 1920s--when reticence about every sort of private feeling was still the convention. Depression, post-traumatic consequences of that rape, and sexual disarray were probably responsible for this emotional aberration. Nonetheless, his openness rather resembled the penitential flagellations of an ascetic monk about which this student of gothic history well knew. Immersed as he was in the lore of the Middle Ages, Lawrence, as agnostic as his mother was pious, found in such a practice a form of spiritual cleansing. But it also signified the end of a literary Victorianism. This new and modern spirit contradicted the Stoic code of honor that Lawrence continued throughout his life to espouse. Lawrence, writes one historian, made “an anachronistic attempt at an honorable integrity of life that is doomed to failure in the postmedieval world.”59 It is most unlikely that Lawrence ever translated the erotic fantasies that Graves mentioned into any gratifying indulgence. He was too puritanical and careful of his reputation for that, even though explicitly homoerotic passages appear in Seven Pillars and The Mint, his account of his R.A. F. years. Alec Dixon, another of Lawrence’s Tank-Corps mates, was very skeptical that Lawrence was a practicing gay. Aldington’s book, he fumed, “was a problem for psychiatrists, rather than for historians.” Instead, what Dixon noted was Lawrence’s astonishing impact on his fellow soldiers. Whenever he appeared, they even stopped swearing. The men suppressed the usual mean-spirited “backchat when in his presence,” he recalled. “Never,” Dixon insisted, “was there a hint of sexual impropriety in the barracks.”60 Aldington, however, did not record Lawrence’s sexual eccentricities with much sympathy. Rather, he used the purported hero’s ambivalence and suggestive hints to score more points of censure. Finally, Aldington accused Lawrence of gross prevarications and outrageous overstatements. He disparaged his early archeological efforts. Aldington wrote a friend in 1953 that “the lazy little bastard (literally) never troubled to write any paper on Carchemish,” the Hittite dig that Lawrence’s Oxford tutor, D. C. Hogarth had organized in 1910.61 More seriously he mocked the very nature of Lawrence’s tactics in fighting a guerilla war. He claimed that the blowing up of trains (Lawrence had destroyed 79 of them) and munitions bunkers was among “the more inglorious forms of modern warfare.” It was particularly true, he sarcastically reasoned, for someone like Lawrence who was steeped in “the high principles of ‘manuals of chivalry.’” Surely Sir Gawain would not have found glory in “upsetting an enemy market-cart in a ditch and leaving the wreck of humanity and goods to the tender mercies of the local villeins,” Aldington sneered.62 Aldington’s misunderstanding of guerilla warfare is breathtakingly obtuse. Instead, Lawrence had wisely argued that “to make war upon rebellion [as the Turks had to do] is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”63 Lawrence knew that military victories were not enough, that diplomacy and a reaching out to the general populace were essential. Jeffrey Record, a U. S. professor of military strategy, argues, “Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages fatal inattention to the challenges of converting military wins into political ones.” Lawrence made that point clear long before Americans applauded “Mission Accomplished” with the fall of Saddam Hussein.64 Central to Aldington’s case for deliberate lying was Lawrence’s claim for high office in letters to Charlotte Shaw most especially. Aldington’s accusations about his untruthfulness rested primarily on an invitation for Lawrence to accept a major postwar appointment, one he claimed to have promptly refused. In 1922 General Sir Edmund Allenby, High Commissioner of Egypt and Lawrence’s onetime commander, had threatened to resign unless the government of Lloyd George accepted his recommendations for administrative reform. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, approached Lawrence as a possible replacement. In a March 1922 letter to Robert Gilbert Vinsetart, Lawrence reported, “There was a question of me for Egypt, if Lord Allenby came away.” Churchill admitted a “virgin mind” about “Arab imbroglios and complications.” So, he relied on the judgment of his subordinate. Their friendship was close and enduring.65 Lawrence was impressed with Churchill’s writing style and grasp of narrative.66 The cabinet officer could well have informally sounded Lawrence out regarding the high position. According to a military advisor’s note of 1921, Churchill’s “attitude to Lawrence ‘almost amounted to hero-worship.’” By and large Lawrence’s advice was heeded regarding appointments and boundary lines, the handling of French complaints, and other substantial matters. Churchill had appointed him for a time to be the an official Adviser on Arab Affairs.67 The suggestion that Churchill made about the High Commissionership of Egypt, of course, depended upon Allenby’s vacating it. In checking Lawrence’s claim, Aldington, however, arranged for intermediaries to ask individuals in the know but had them set the date of 1925, when Allenby actually did resign. Three principals--Sir Ronald Storrs, Admiral Leopold S. Amery, and Lord George Lloyd, who allegedly would have known about such an offer--all denied that it was made in that year.68 Aldington used this information to discredit Lawrence’s truthfulness. Only Churchill could resolve the issue that overshadowed all of Aldington’s other accusations. At Philip Sassoon’s dinner party, Tom Mitford sat between Aircraftsman Shaw [T. E. Lawrence] and Winston Churchill. “Winston admires him enormously,” Mitford wrote Lady Redesdale, his mother. Turning to Shaw, Churchill declared that “If the people make me Prime Minister I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Mitford reported that Lawrence “politely refused, happy as he was in the RAF.69 Under such circumstances, Churchill as Colonial Secretary would have most likely have sought to appoint Lawrence to the post in Cairo years earlier In any event, Aldington had little respect for Churchill as well. He placed him as another inmate belonging to the “filthy world” that Lawrence had fashioned.70 By this time, Aldington had begun to feel the weight of the entire British establishment descend on him. Liddell Hart organized a campaign to disgrace the biographer well before the book had reached the public. He had an overly enthusiastic opinion of Lawrence, much to the latter’s exasperation. In 1934, Lawrence wrote that Liddell Hart, whose book on the Middle East extolled Lawrence’s skill and knowledge, had surrendered too readily “to my ‘charm.’ Had he maintained his critical distance and examined my tactics with a cool head” it would have been a better book. “I’m rather sick of my virtues.”71 At first, the “Lawrence Bureau,” as Aldington derisively called his opposition, sought to have his “Biographical Enquiry” totally suppressed. Arnold Lawrence very much wished the book never to appear. Eventually he resigned himself to the inevitable although worried about its effect on his aged mother. William A. R. Collins, the publisher, sympathized. Yet, writing Liddell Hart, he stated, “I don’t think you understand what a terribly difficult position I am placed in.” Collins was under legal obligation to complete the transaction.72 Aldington reacted explosively to the assaults on his character and credibility. He complained that Lawrence’s “fanatical admirers” had sought through friends to have the directors at Collins cancel the book. “I was betrayed,” he stormed. But, still worse, the New York publishers “were even more endowed with the spirit of self-preservation than the British” and proved to be “moral cowards.”73 He was further distressed when he learned that Churchill, on 10 Downing Street stationery, had urged Collins to withdraw the book. The Prime Minister, Aldington surmised, wished to imply that the Empire’s security would be compromised unless it were scuttled. Under English common law, one cannot sue for libeling a dead person. But the Laurentians, as we might call them, could prompt Aldington himself into suing them for slander. In any subsequent trial, the defense team could then challenge the validity of the plaintiff’s charges. Robert Graves declared that when he was writing his Lawrence biography, “Whatever I checked in T. E. stories always proved true or even understated. I knew T. E. for fourteen years intimately, and never caught him out in an untruth, though he often foxed his enlistment.”74 He pointed out to Liddell Hart an example that the Marquis of Queensbury had set. To split his son Lord Alfred Douglas from Oscar Wilde, the irate father had posted an insult in Wilde’s club. Graves noted that “the old boy took legal advice &, instead of putting up ‘Oscar Wilde is a bugger,’ wrote ‘Oscar Wilde is posing as a somdomite’–he didn’t know how to spell the last word, but it went all right.”75 Wilde, of course, fell into the legal trap and humiliatingly ended up in Reading Gael. What incensed the “Lawrence Bureau” was not just Lawrence’s diminishment but what they called the ungentlemanly nature of Aldington’s disrespect for his mother. “The only thing I care in the least about. . .to the point of. . .physical violence,” wrote Graves from Majorca, “is the business about Mrs Lawrence whom I know, loved, and admired, and who will be once more reminded of her sin--which was not a sin in my eyes, nor in those of Arnie or T. E., but was a mortal sin in her own, which is what matters.”76 Indeed, Lady Nancy Astor got the impression at one point that even the publisher had agreed not to produce the book until Mrs. Lawrence had died.77 Aldington’s exposure of Lawrence’s sexual life was also a matter of great concern. Liddell Hart and others pointed out that previous biographers were aware of Lawrence’s peculiarities but forbore to mention them out of a sense of decency. Sarcastically, Aldington mocked such fastidiousness. He boasted to have “the toughness of a hippo’s hide.” He warned a friend, “Beware of offending the International Order of Pederasts!” In 1961, he wrote how pleased he had been to have exposed before Lawrence’s friends “their favourite (and most mendacious) pansy hero.”78 Moreover, he had some very loyal adherents. Rob Lyle wrote an extensive piece in his behalf for the London Magazine. He even quoted a Turkish cavalry officer who ridiculed Lawrence’s “romantic nomads with itching palms.” They naturally followed the “man with the money bag.” He was therefore, the officer charged, as “sacred as the image of a Buddha to a Chinaman.” Lyle also took at face value the remarks of Major-General George Rankin. The Australian general claimed that “the Arabs were craven in the face of any real opposition, preferring to skulk behind the battle.” Meanwhile, he boasted, the British regulars bravely took the brunt of enemy response.79 It was a typical reaction of a conventional soldier when assessing a guerilla style he did not fathom. Aldington also expanded on his negative themes in the same journal.80 Another factor in the establishment’s reaction to Aldington’s attack was his denigration of Lawrence’s military acumen and impact. There was hope for a time that a royal commission could investigate the facts and restore Lawrence’s credibility about affairs in the Middle East.81 Actually, when the Foreign Office files at Kew Gardens were finally opened in the 1990s, they generally verified Lawrence’s desert narrative.82 Nonetheless, Aldington exulted that his pro-Lawrence opponents had failed to prevent publication. As he put it, they “were driven to plot the most dishonourable press campaign of the decade, in which one man had to face fifty screaming journalists!”83 Indeed, he was not exaggerating. The Lawrence collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Archives in Austin, Texas, shows that months before the book was disseminated, Liddell Hart wrote to nearly every major English newspaper and magazine to counter the upcoming charges. He also apprised those who might be asked in future to review the book that they should expect scurrility and sensation on every page. The “Lawrence Bureau” was only partially successful in damaging Aldington’s credibility. Although Sir Ronald Storrs had not corroborated the Egyptian offer story, he was a staunch advocate for Lawrence’s reputation. He was gratified that the biographer’s “goose was in the process of being cooked–on this side of the Atlantic at all events.”84 Lowell Thomas, meantime, was busy controlling damage in America. In a new 1962 edition of his 1924 book, With Lawrence in Arabia, he recalled that he had compared Lawrence to “Achilles, Siegfried, and El Cid” as another legendary hero. He was unrepentant about his own journalistic distortions of Lawrence’s adventures and denounced Aldington for accusing him of “fanciful yarns.”85 Thomas cited major British officials in the Middle East who remembered and admired Lawrence: Storrs, Major General G. L. Verney, Colonel S. F. Newcombe, and others who had served with Lawrence in the Near East. Soon, both English and American book reviewers quickly realized that Aldington nourished an indignation far beyond Lawrence’s alleged misdeeds even though they took for granted the accuracy of his remarks. Liddell Hart and his collaborator Eric Kennington, who had drawn Lawrence’s portrait and carved his bust, soon abused them of that assumption. Kennington rejoiced that Aldington had been rejected by fourteen publishers in America until Regnery, a small firm, had accepted it.86 So what was all the trouble about? We must remember that the decade of the nineteenfifties was a time of rude awakening from imperial dreams. The country was no longer the power it had been. Heroes like Lawrence were in short supply. Lawrence himself had questioned the legitimacy of imperial rule and resigned from the Colonial Office.87 Yet he had not publicly denounced imperial policies; he had turned his own sense of alienation inward in despair, not outward in rage. By the 1950s, the illusions that honor had so long exalted the glory of fighting, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the reward of long remembrance had long since vanished. Two world wars had made the concept seem obsolete. Even the word honor itself had lost its former distinctiveness in everyday life. Soon the angry young poets like Ted Hughes and playwrights like John Osborne would challenge the old establishment that Liddell Hart, Storrs, Churchill, and the upper classes had so long dominated. Even the royal family was beginning to lose respect in the columns of the tabloids. Noel Annan, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, remembered that members of his generation were taught the ideals of the English gentleman–men dedicated to “an overpowering sense of civic duty and diligence.” Their elders “were indignant when told that they exploited idealistic movements. . .or betrayed idealists such as E. D. Morel in the Belgian Congo or T. E. Lawrence of Arabia.” The leaders of the social order were a “cold-hearted” elite, Annan adds, but their regime between the wars was already “looking somewhat moth-eaten.88 Half-crazed with depression though he was, Aldington had touched a raw nerve. Liddell Hart and others recoiled from thinking that Britain no longer exercised dominion in the world as it had in their youth. Aldington had helped to strip illusion away. What strikes one, however, is how Aldington and Lawrence shared some characteristics. Both had undergone appalling war experiences. So too had Graves and Liddell Hart, but Aldington and Lawrence both carried their alienation deeper into their souls. Also, Lawrence as well as Aldington possessed extraordinary literary gifts. Neither one had ever made a secure living. Each of them felt isolated from the upper reaches of English society. In fierce rejoinder, Aldington, however, rebelled, shouted, and stamped his foot. Lawrence retreated into an oddly complex anonymity. In any event, something beyond the obvious explains Aldington’s malignance. Far below consciousness, Lawrence’s relentless critic may have seen something of himself in the subject of his biography. He shrank back in horror and fury. I can offer no evidence for that interpretation, but the rage he felt had to have some underlying motive, about which Aldington may not have been conscious. Another factor of which Aldington might have been well aware, though, was his contempt for the ideology of the ruling class–the public school notions of honor. Calls for sacrifice, duty, patriotism and other cheerleading cliches seemed not only false but downright perverse, satanic. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s that revulsion against glory and honor stimulated a virulent pacifist reaction. The journalist Vera Brittain reported that before he was killed her fiancé on the front lines in France had written that those who thought “war a glorious, golden thing” and invoked such terms as “Honour and Praise and Valour” should “look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and shinbone and what might have been its ribs” and then recognize just how “grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of putrescence!”89 Aldington’s Death of a Hero and his other novels depicted an English society sadly corrupted--conformist, materialistic, and self-serving. As for the war, he described what he must have witnessed himself--“dead bodies in field grey” in a German dugout. The place was littered with “oddments of forgotten equipment, and cigars. There were French tables and chairs with human excrement on them.”90 Disillusioned by his experiences in war, Aldington hated Lawrence because he represented a despicable and fallacious ethic which had brought on the misery and bloodshed. When Lawrence coyly shied away from fame, he was simply calling attention to his heroic image. By claiming to repudiate his allegedly undeserved celebrity, Lawrence demonstrated that he had so much glory, Aldington, believed, that he could afford a show of rejection. For Aldington it was another example of the duplicity Lawrence admitted to have practiced upon the Arabs. Lean and Lawrence The Lawrence that the public knows today owes less to the many biographies than to his representation on the screen. This Lawrence, who finally reached the masses, is perhaps no less intriguing in character than the one who died on his Brough Superior in 1935. There had been many attempts to recreate the drama of his life, beginning on the 1920s, with Lawerence appalled at the very thought. Herbert Wilcox, Rex Ingram (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), Anatole de Grunwald, Alexander Korda, J. Arthur Rank, and Leslie Howard all took up the challenge without ultimate success. Yet, especially just after Lawrence’s death, such a film would be sure to win a huge audience. Working-class Britons went to the cinema at least once a week. Most of them veterans of the Great War, they would have welcomed a film drama of England’s most renowned hero in their lifetime. John Buchan, a well known writer then seated in the House of Commons, had gushed, “Whether we are interested in the film or not we cannot deny its enormous public importance.” Such a “powerful engine of propaganda” would excite every class of patriotic citizens and inspire the next schoolboy generations across the nation.91 After buying the rights from Korda, Sam Spiegel and David Lean enthusiastically took up the challenge. The undertaking would be most formidable because of the hostile environment of sand and heat that they would have to encounter, but the partners saw great possibilities. Lawrence’s distant cousin, Peter O’Toole, won the leading role.92 But he was not their first choice; instead Marlon Brando and then Albert Finney were offered the part. Finney had lasted only four days on the set. Neither of them relished months of work in the desert sun, and Brando was still occupied with a remaking of Mutiny on the Bounty.93 After Brando rejected the part, David Lean then, on the advice of his friend Katherine Hepburn, picked the almost unknown O’Toole, a West End theater actor with only one low budget film entitled The Day They Robbed the Bank of England to his credit. O’Toole later declared Lean to be “the most important influence” in his life. The director gave him, he confessed, “discipline”--sorely needed given his alcoholic tendencies--and “tolerance.”94 The Columbia Pictures’ box-office hit is as sweeping in scale and as compelling in theme as David O. Selznick’s “Gone with the Wind.” Lean and Spiegel had just won laurels for their Bridge over the River Kwai and went on to garner seven Oscars with Lawrence of Arabia, although O’Toole was inexplicably passed over for “best actor.”95 The cast included Jose Ferrer as the pederast at Deraa, Alec Guinness as Lawrence’s ally the Emir Feisal. In Rattigan’s Ross, Guinness had played Lawrence. The climax of the play was a re-enactment of the rape incident at Deraa. The actor leaves the stage, crippled mentally and physically in the way that Lawrence in real life might have felt. Omar Sharif playing Sherif Ali, Lawrence’s sidekick, Anthony Quinn as the Bedouin gold-loving Auda abu Tayi, and Claude Rains as Mr. Dryden, a fictional composite, but probably suggesting the highly gifted Sir Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary of the Residency in Egypt. While no more unfaithful to history than most costume dramas, the Lean-Spiegel film could not possibly render all the intricacies of Lawrence’s life. Partially influenced by Aldington’s venomous reading of Lawrence’s past, Robert Bolt provided the final script. A most successful author, Bolt had composed the play A Man for All Seasons (1960) and the screenplay for Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1966). Director Lean and producer Spiegel were intent on creating a less than sentimentalized hero. In the film, he is a man of paradox--heroic and sadistic, selfpromoting and self-effacing, arrogant and penitent. The director explained his reading of Lawrence’s character: “It’s the story of a man who enters a dream, the dream becomes a nightmare, and he wakes up and runs away from it all.” Others think the dream a huge triumph-“except him. He’s an idealist who comes unstuck and is terribly ashamed of the unsticking.”96 Lean’s hero is vaguely homosexual insofar as movie censors would permit, and yet, in defiance of the stereotypical gay, he emerges as a bold leader of great strength. The result was dramatic ambiguity, but that may not have been far from the truth. Oddly, Lean’s Lawrence came closer to the reality than Lawrence’s many biographers. As Christopher Isherwood put it, the hero “suffered in his own person, the neurotic ills of an entire generation.”97 Working with Lean, Bolt caught something of Lawrence’s spirit–perhaps despite his own feelings. He was far less smitten than Lean with the complicated other-worldliness of the Arab fighter. He once referred to Lawrence as “a romantic Fascist.”98 Michael Wilson, screen-writer for the Bridge over the River Kwai and Oscar winner for A Place in the Sun (1951) had prepared the original Lawrence script. To a curious degree, he relied for a number of scenes on the prior work of John Monk Saunders, who had prepared the script that Korda had hoped to use. Lean thought the result was “awful.” Nonetheless, these parts of the film appear in the Lean-Spiegel final take, most especially the arresting scene when the mysterious stranger, Sherif Ali, encounters Lawrence at the well and a laconic dialogue ensues between them. Other moments are also clearly the work of Saunders. The HUAC committee had placed Wilson on the Hollywood black list. Yet, he managed to write under pseudonyms for a time. His screenplay stressed the tribal rivalries and political tensions between the various parties--the English hierarchy, the Bedouins, and others. Unhappy with Wilson’s reading, Lean took little interest in politics and sought a psychological angle instead. Bolt, who replaced Wilson, provided it. The latter received no credit even though many scenes were his and not Bolt’s.99 Son of a Midlands shopkeeper, Robert Bolt, like Aldington, was not to the manor born. He, too, warred against conventional assumptions and Cold War capitalism. Bolt was once arrested for protesting nuclear proliferation.100 It is no wonder that Lean and Spiegel’s Lawrence depicted the horror, venality, and ugliness, not the romance of war. Their Lawrence is a troubled sadist with successive scenes to illustrate the hero’s half-disguised joy in giving pain or delivering death to others. True, Lawrence himself confessed to masochistic feelings: “pain, was a solvent, a cathartic, almost a decoration to be fairly worn.”101 But he was referring to selfinflicted agony, not a deliciousness in harming others. Nonetheless, O’Toole’s role comes close to some important aspects of Lawrence’s life. This is valid even though the actor was almost a foot taller than Lawrence and no natural blonde. We see Lawrence not just as a flawed and confused hero and as a demi-god on the order of the Greeks’ vision of Parnassus. But what sort of godlike figure is he? On the one hand, Lean has Lawrence with difficulty mount his camel in the blinding, oppressive heat of the desert. The scene suggests the sight of a wilderness anchorite or prophet receiving spiritual wisdom out of the barren, wind-swept surroundings. In the desert the psalmist Moses addresses God: “You turn men back to dust, saying, "Return to dust, O children of the earth.”102 Lean may have had that idea in mind. Yet, there are other scenes in which the issue of a questionable masculinity arises. In one of them, General Murray, who dislikes Lawrence, declares “You’re the kind of creature I cannot stand.” He sends him off to find the Arab leader Feisal, a dangerous task that leads Murray to mutter, “Who knows–might even make a man of him.” Thus, O’Toole’s Lawrence travels an arc from a fey aesthete playing at war into a superhuman warrior, and then, particularly after the scene at Deraa with Jose Ferrer playing the commandant, he gradually becomes, less of a white robed deity whom primitive Arabs worship. He is, after all, a man of ordinary stature, simply a member of the human race. After Ali, (Omar Sharif) spills flowers at his feet, and calling him a conqueror deserving “flowers for the man.” He replies, “I’m none of these things, Ali.”103 His weaknesses as a man become his strength as a different and more authentic man. Lean creates in the desert a character almost human in nature. When traversing Lawrence’s battles and train ambushes in the Arabian desert, Lean declared that he understood how prophets emerged from such surroundings. “When you are there,” he said, “you feel terribly small and, in a strange way, also very big . Because this vastness. . .it’s a sort of pitilessness combined with enormous beauty.”104 A vast space of sky and sand, bleak and dry as bones, complements O’Toole’s Lawrence in his affectless melancholy and yet magnetic wildness of spirit. This double representation of the hero as both human and half-godlike finally rakes him down to earth in his complexity and joyous killing. As Lawrence himself confessed to Graves, “I have two selves,” both of which, he added, were “mutually destructive.” “So I fall,” Lawrence grieved, “between them into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false god in which to believe.”105 Graves substantiated that self-assessment when he wrote Liddell Hart that “T. E. was an intuitive, affectionate, Galahad-like man of action who came a frightful crash before his War was over, and is to be judged therefore as a broken hero who tried to appear whole and make the best of it.”106 Yet, there was also truth in Liddell Hart’s praise of his “sense of personal honour,” which “was allied to a care for his country’s honour.”107 On the screen or in his actual history, we cannot identify with Lawrence. We can only take his sad, human measure and compare it to our own. As if Aldington’s earlier assault were not enough, Robert Bolt’s screenplay excited the anger of the Lawrence Bureau, especially T. E.’s brother Arnold. He wrote Sam Spiegel that the original treatment which Arnold had approved, had been scratched in the final script. Lawrence’s brother wrote, “as his literary executor, I have objections so strong that I may eventually feel obliged to consider whether to make them public.” He legally refused to permit Spiegel to title the movie as Seven Pillars of Wisdom.108 Learning of Arnold’s distress from the producer, Robert Bolt wrote him before the film was distributed, “it is simply not in me to deploy twelve months of nervous effort and concern about a figure to which my attitude was anything but of the deepest interest and respect.”109 The reply could be read positively or negatively. Such was Bolt’s attitude itself. In a New York Times Magazine article in 1962, Bolt never alluded to Aldington’s biography. He followed, though, Aldington’s line both in content and theme. “Take a man born a bastard and unable to speak of it. Let him be clever, imaginative, and vain, and given to cruelty.” Then, Bolt continued, “endow him with courage, physical toughness and above all a capacity for stoic suffering.” In addition, “place him in the landscape and among the people where this minor virtue is so highly regarded that nothing else much matters. Give him gold to distribute.”110 Are courage, physical toughness, and stoic endurance of pain merely minor virtues? Does honor in war mean so little? For Bolt, in his well known antipathy to war, clearly wished to send the same message that Aldington did. Like Aldington, Bolt suffered acutely from poor health and depression. While making a subsequent film with David Lean about the mutiny on The Bounty in Tahiti, he broke up with his wife, the actress Sarah Miles. He drank, smoked, and wenched to the point of a later heart attack and stroke.111 Arnold Lawrence issued his own reaction to the film in the New York Times. He claimed--with justice--that contrary to the film’s presentation, T. E. by no means killed out of delight.112 A massacre of Turks had certainly taken place at Tafas, and T. E. never denied it. The situation, however, suggests no calculation but impulsive, uncontrollable revenge. About 2000 Turkish soldiers had just slain nearly forty women and twenty small children in the Bedouin village belonging to the same tribe as Lawrence’s men. Other British soldiers there defended Lawrence who had taken no pleasure in the violence, ghastly thought it was when all the prisoners were gunned down. The account of F. G. Peake, who visited Tafas not long after the incident, would seem to exonerate Lawrence from gleeful malevolence. He reported that the Arabs were out of control over the slaughter surrounding them. They were determined to inflict vengeance against the Turkish perpetrators. Lawrence coolly observed that one had to see the atrocities of the Turks before condemning the Bedouins’ reaction. “As for the villagers, he wrote, “they and their ancestors have been for five hundred years ground down by the tyranny of these Turks.”113 Later on, Lawrence himself explained, “”We do these things in sheer vapidity of mind, not deliberately, not consciously even. To make out that we were reasoned cool minds, ruling our courses and contemporaries is a vanity. Things happen, and we do our best to keep in the saddle.”114 He was not glorifying or even excusing such atrocities but simply stating what all too often occurs under the stress of war. Further evidence of Lawrence’s basic humanity comes from George S. Hynes. He was in the Royal Flying Corps, one of eight servicemen to have Lawrence as their superior officer. Hynes recalled how Lawrence had once been obliged to shoot a defenseless Bedouin. The Bedouin had murdered “an Ageli tribesman.” Fulfilling the law of desert honor fell on Lawrence’s shoulders. Having an outside authority to perform the act was the only way to prevent further blood feuding. Hynes declared that Lawrence performed the duty only reluctantly. It was the “most horrible ordeal he had to endure--and I believe Lawrence was very deeply agonized throughout his life by the incident.” The veteran added, Lawrence was “a man who could not injure another” without due cause in war or peace. The killing solidified the sense of trust and confidence of the “nomadic tribes towards a perfect stranger--an ‘infidel.’” Likewise, Hynes speculated that he had probably crashed his motorcycle in 1935 to avoid fatally injuring two schools boys on their bicycles.115 Bolt and Lean, though, portray a different Lawrence. Spiegel replied to Arnold Lawrence’s protests by pointing out to the American press that the adoring brother sought “to preserve the Lawrence of Arabia legend in Victorian cleanliness.” No one was more adept than T. E., he added, in “planting false footprints,” a reaction that indicates Aldington and Bolt’s influence.116 Spiegel then elaborated on things not too prominent in the film itself. He attributed Lawrence’s unrequited homosexuality to “all sorts of masochism” out of his conflicts and sense of guilt. Arnold had to admit defeat. He wrote his colleague Liddell Hart that further challenge to the film would be hopeless. Yet, Lawrence’s brother was not the only critic of the film. Lowell Thomas was portrayed as the bumptious journalist Jackson Bentley, well played by Arthur Kennedy. The fictional reporter, camera always in hand, trails after his hero. The depiction deeply offended Thomas. Out of prudence, however, he chiefly criticized the film’s distortion of the figure, General Lord Edmund Allenby, played skillfully by Jack Hawkins as a cynical manipulator.117 For all the misrepresentations in the film, one must be aware that fiction and history are seldom compatible. The dramatic as opposed to the historical point of view has its legitimate claims. Bolt’s decision to create a flawed, wholly alienated, half-mad hero made for an arresting portrait. In this case, as Lawrence had often said about his own Seven Pillars, the film was more artful fiction than objective history. That, too, was an ironic outcome since we can more easily accept the film while disputing the various historical interpretations. One might wonder to know what T. E. Lawrence himself would have felt about the lengthy disputes about who he was, from his death to the making of Hollywood film. Melancholic, sensitive, and intellectual though he was, he would have had every reason to feel abused and humiliated. But doubts arise. Instead, this remarkable character, with all his faults and wild contradictions, would have laughed at the uproar and followed all its twists and turns with considerable pleasure. It was entirely fitting that his fame in our times should be represented not by Lawrence himself but by an actor in a film. After all, Lawrence himself prided himself on his roleplaying in Arabia. His shade must be gratified that the actor, who took his part, is well over six feet tall, a height that Lawrence so much envied and wished he had possessed. What is most ironic is that Lawrence was one of the most heroic of men. His devotion to an obscure life in the armed services undercut his further literary aspirations after the anguished writing of The Mint. Yet, when he did successfully bring honor, history, and creative art together, as he did in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he achieved a grandness of spirit and a prophetic wisdom that speaks to our day from scores of years ago. We seldom encounter such wholesouled greatness and prophetic vision that transcends pain and doubt, particularly in these clouded times.