T.E. Lawrence unveiled
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift.
Shelley, “Adonais”
Our Sidney and our perfect man.
Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”
T. E. Lawrence By His Friends (1937), edited by his youngest brother Arnold, an archeologist, includes 82 contributors, from Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Allenby to ordinary soldiers and airmen who served with Lawrence. His personality gripped the imagination of his countrymen, but the motivation of the legendary and elusive figure was difficult to understand. A synthesis of all the authors in this composite biography illuminates his guilt, shame and self-punishment, his contempt for authority, personal eccentricity and sexual perversity, the complexity and mystery of a character as flamboyant as Lord Byron, as warped as Jonathan Swift. The phrase By His Friends suggests that the chapters are adulatory and idealised rather than critical and severe. A shorter edition of 1954 was meant to challenge and deny the fierce condemnation in Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955).
Lawrence was the son of an Irish baronet, Sir Thomas Chapman, and a strong-willed serving maid who persuaded him to leave his wife and four daughters. They never married and had five illegitimate sons. Lawrence’s childhood was dominated by his parents’ dark secrets and agonising sense of sin. His mother’s contribution to this book, which doesn’t mention his father, paints an idyllic picture of their family life with herself as a loving and contented woman. Lawrence saw her quite differently, and his letters to Bernard Shaw’s wife described his mother as imperious, oppressive and frightening: “I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings, or convictions, or way of life. If she knew they would be damaged: violated: no longer mine.”
The family lived, isolated from their neighbours, in seven different places—the first five in Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, Jersey and Brittany before moving to the New Forest and Oxford—in Lawrence’s first eight years. They could never return to Ireland, and Lawrence never knew his half-sisters. Their frequent moves were motivated by his father’s restlessness and the family’s need to avoid scandal. Lawrence—only five feet, five inches tall—didn’t grow much after breaking his leg in a fight at school. Two of Sarah Lawrence’s sons were killed in World War I; Lawrence himself died in a motorcycle accident. Illegitimate herself, Sarah felt she was being punished for her sins. In 1931 she joined her oldest son, a medical missionary in China. She died in Oxford, aged 98, in 1959.
Lawrence’s life was marked by startling changes of names, locales and occupations. He was variously called Chapman, Lawrence, Ross and Shaw, but felt T.E. was the only part of his name that belonged to him. His disproportionately large head, equal to the terrific chin beneath, dominated his short, slight body. His impassive face, downcast eyes, soft reluctant speech and impersonal courtesy were impressive, disturbing and sometimes disagreeable. He had a striving for technical knowledge and personal perfection, a quest for speed and endurance on his motorcycle, a narcissistic display of eccentric behavior and unconventional dress. Solitary, austere and inexorable, he moved upon a plane apart from and above most people.
Like the brilliant and versatile Odysseus, Lawrence had a formidable brain and many talents. Strong, resourceful and a born commander of men, he had high ideals, great ability, wide knowledge and indomitable courage. In an incredibly short time, he mastered revolver-shooting, intelligence work, the use of explosives, leadership and the art of war. He had a deep understanding of other men and exceptional intellectual gifts, was quick to make crucial decisions and to inspire instant action in any emergency. He excelled in archeology, raising a rebellion, leading an army, writing a book, organising an air-race and designing a speedboat.
He was able to impose his overpowering will on the Arab revolt against the Turks, and became their leader by eating their food, wearing their clothes, living on their level, yet surpassing them in every way. He thrust himself into discomfort and hardship, and measured his body against river and desert, cold night wind and blazing sun. He steeled himself through a rigid asceticism, kept his mind in complete control of his body, and tried to transcend the physical through painful endurance and self-denial. He suffered terribly during World War I by submitting himself to the lives of alien people; from wounds in battle and air crashes; from privation, sun-blasting, disease, scourging and the crushing of nerves that tried to deny physical pain. During the Arabian war he devised the brilliant strategy of leaving the Turkish garrisons isolated and ineffectual in the desert, and repeatedly attacking the Hejaz Railway that connected them. His triumph in Arabia compensated for the British defeat at Gallipoli in 1915 and the cruel slaughter of the innocents on the Western Front.
The greatest horror of Lawrence’s life took place when he was captured by the Turks at Deraa in Syria, and forced to surrender his bodily integrity after he was beaten, tortured and sodomised. After his will had failed to master his flesh, he always hated his body and had a morbid horror of being touched. In retaliation he slaughtered the enemy whenever possible, but confessed, “This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them.”
He felt guilty about the shameful stigma of his illegitimacy, the pleasure he took in the Turkish massacres, his forbidden homosexuality and his self-condemned political betrayal of the Arabs, though their leaders became kings of Iraq and of Transjordan. Though Lawrence thought he was unworthy of the worldwide postwar fame thrust upon him by the publicity of the journalist Lowell Thomas, he was fascinated by his newfound public image and then despised himself for being interested. He loved his fame, but also wanted to hide from it, was retiring yet craved to be seen, sincerely shy and naively exhibitionist.
Lawrence called himself “an extinct volcano, a closed oyster”, and nourished an inward wound, a broken spirit. Deraa was the stain that had to be obsessively cleaned. He identified with the outcast leper in Leviticus 13:45, “Consider wandering among the decent ghosts, hereafter, crying ‘unclean, unclean!”, called his personal charm “an unclean thing” and had a guilty desire to purify himself and achieve cleanliness. He looked clean-cut, and his brothers were also clean in limb and life. He liked the cleanness of stainless steel and chromium plate, and poured water over his hands instead of plunging them into water as a “cleaner” way to wash. He said Egdon Heath, near his cottage at Clouds Hill in Dorset, had a “clean emptiness” and thought military service would be a cleansing experience.
Lawrence’s inhuman endurance matched his need for self-punishment. He achieved subjection of the body with self-punishment advocated in the lives of the saints, and suppressed the physical through starvation, asceticism, masochism and even ritual floggings on the anniversary of Deraa. He wanted “to forget and be forgotten”, and would have gone to prison if he could get there without committing a crime. He thought that if he touched bottom, part of his guilt would drop from him. For him, his penitential enlistment as a private soldier in the Tank Corps and airman in the RAF was the modern equivalent of entering a monastery. Lawrence’s self-immolation was like Arthur Rimbaud’s renunciation of writing and self-annihilating retreat to a savage life in Ethiopia.
Lawrence was the most famous colonel and the most famous private soldier in the British Army. With both Arabs and ordinary privates he lived in a military setting with rough uneducated men. When publicity forced him out of the RAF, he was confined to a small hut in the Tank Corps with eighteen other soldiers. Haunted by their animal spirits, which he had desperately tried to suppress in himself, he confessed, “the army is unspeakable: more solidly animal than I believed Englishmen could be.” When he was allowed to reenlist in the RAF, he worked, ironically, on boats in the water instead of planes in the air. He soon assumed the role of housemaster and declared, “I have only been here a few weeks but they are all doing exactly as I tell them already.”
He usually rebelled unceasingly against sex, and his hatred of physical contact was an instinct that, as he himself recognized, was both irrational and indelible. Nevertheless, at the archeological dig at Carchemish, he was emotionally and sexually involved with a beautifully built and remarkably handsome Arab boy, Dahoum. In the RAF he was fond of his favorite airmen, invited them to Clouds Hill and spent his leisure time with them. He told the beautiful, blond and blue-eyed airman R.A. Guy, whom he called Rabbit and Poppet (a pretty young girl): “My pleasure in the RAF was partly, largely, due to the pleasure I got from your blue and yellow self: and I owe you a deep debt for many happy times.”
Lawrence thought it was better to die than submit to growing old. Terrible energies were pent up in his small body, and he constantly increased his speed on land, sea and air from walking, canoeing and camel-riding to racing in armored Rolls Royces, speedboats, airplanes and motorcycles. He described his specially-built motorcycle as a “wild beast,” and his high-speed rides on narrow country lanes were suicidal. After surviving the dangers and wounds of war, and only two months after his discharge from RAF, he crashed his motorcycle, fractured his skull, fell into a coma and lived for seven days without regaining consciousness. He died in May 1935.
Though Churchill was fourteen years older, he hero-worshipped Lawrence as a soldier and author. He declared, “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time” and stated that Seven Pillars of Wisdom “ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language.” Lawrence’s masterpiece is certainly greater than most books written by the Nobel-Prize winners. The Arabs also admired Lawrence and one of them asked, “Is this man God, to know everything?” Sheikh Hamoudi, whom Lawrence took to Oxford with Dahoum in 1913, concluded, “Of manhood the man, in freedom free; a mind without equal; I can see no flaw in him.”
Jeffrey Meyers has published The Wounded Spirit: A Study of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1973), T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography (1974) and T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (1989).
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