The guilt that haunted an Arabian knight
HERO: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA BY MICHAEL KORDA (J R Books £25)
Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia in the 1962 film
Today we watch the Arab world steering itself as if out of a long coma towards self-rule. It is 90 years since that process began - inspired, guided, fought for, and finally betrayed, as he himself thought, by T. E. Lawrence ‘Of Arabia’.
He had encouraged the revolt of the Arabs against Turkish rule, with the promise that the more they fought and captured the greater would be the unified Arab state that victory would create.
Yet he knew that Britain and France intended to keep their hands on Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), if not as colonies, at least as zones of influence. No fully independent Arab state was likely to be allowed to flourish.
Some see this as the tragedy of Lawrence’s life for which he felt eternally guilty. On the other hand, despite Lloyd George and President Clemenceau of France striking such a deal, Lawrence succeeded under Churchill at the Colonial Office in creating the kingdoms of Iraq and Transjordan, on whose thrones were placed the Arab brothers he trusted, Faisal and Abdullah.
In Jordan Abdullah’s heirs reign still. Iraq assassinated its king and substituted dictators, notably Saddam Hussein. Arab self government in a democratic sense has yet to begin. Lawrence foresaw this. In 1927 he wrote of Iraq in a letter to Bernard Shaw’s wife, Charlotte: ‘Well, someday they will be fit for self government but whether seven or 70 or 700 years hence, God knows.’
This letter, strangely, is not quoted in this admirable, up-to-date, balanced study of Lawrence. Michael Korda is well aware of all the biographies and controversies that have gone before. No hero has been more intensively psycho-analysed after death than Lawrence. The verdicts always come out differently on so enigmatic and contradicted a character.
People who remember the David Lean film see him towering over the desert like Peter O’Toole. But Lawrence was 5ft 5in. When photographed in uniform against giant generals like Allenby, there is something pixie-ish about his riveting little figure. And such was his self-confidence and intellectual superiority that it was nearly always he who called the shots.
But of course the Arab robes, the gold-banded head dress and curved dagger (obtained from Mecca) helped enormously to create the legend. He wanted very much to be a hero and from youth had hardened himself to withstand feats of physical endurance, pain, hunger, sleepless persistence, until he became a compact little powerhouse.
Sex was something he either lacked entirely or thoroughly repressed. Attempts to show he was homosexual are contradicted by all those who were in a position to know, not least his fellow airmen, or soldiers in the Tank Corps, who stayed at his Dorset cottage, Clouds Hill.
He loved a ‘donkey-boy’, Dahoum, whom he made his protégé during his happy pre-war archaeological digs at Carcemish. Their relationship was on an innocent, fatherly basis. He educated this clever youngster and even brought him home on leave to Oxford with another Arab friend. They caused a sensation in their robes.
Dahoum means darkness. His real name, Salem Ahmed, is believed to be the ‘S.A.’ to whom Lawrence’s epic Seven Pillars Of Wisdom is dedicated. The dedicatory poem suggests that he fought his Arab campaign for the sake of Dahoum (or perhaps all Arabs like him). But when he reached Damascus he discovered that the boy had recently died. This may well be why he immediately asked Allenby to send him home, leaving the scene without savouring his triumph.
T E Lawrence on his Brough motorcycle
Lawrence hated to be touched. He avoided shaking hands. This made all the more traumatic his experience at Deraa, the Turkish stronghold which he was reconnoitring disguised as an Arab.
He was seized by a sentry and taken to the Turkish Bey for the Bey’s sexual enjoyment. Before that he underwent savage whipping and rape by the Bey’s soldiers. It is one of the most vivid passages in Seven Pillars, almost pornographic in its carefully observed detail.
Lawrence was not recognised and was allowed to escape, severely damaged not only physically but spiritually. He could not forgive himself for allowing himself to be raped.
‘To earn five minutes’ respite from a pain which drove me mad I gave away my bodily integrity,’ he confessed to Mrs Shaw (herself a total abstainer from sex) some seven years later. He never forgave himself, nor recovered from it.
He admitted that ‘A delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me’ and this appalled him most of all.
Lowell Thomas, an American documentary maker sent to make a propaganda war film for American consumption, had spent a few days filming with Lawrence and his Bedouin in the desert. Later he turned this into a theatrical show - a stirring lecture illustrated with film and slides called With Lawrence In Arabia.
A smash hit in New York, it was brought to London’s Royal Opera House in 1919. The Western Front had been a disaster in human terms. People longed for a story of successful heroism and Thomas gave it to them in the form of Lawrence. Over two million went to see it, from the King and Queen downwards.
After that Lawrence became a media celebrity on a then-unprecedented scale. He complained to friends in his letters of the ‘vulgarity’ with which Thomas had hammed up his story. It also made private life impossible for him because of constant Press pursuit. Korda finds a similarity between Lawrence and Princess Diana in their love-hate relationship with publicity.
Lawrence himself went to see the show not once but at least five times. And he did not in the least mind that fame brought him the friendship of the great and famous, Bernard Shaw and his wife, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, even Noel Coward among them.
Yet when George V at a private audience tried to give Lawrence his decorations, the CB and DSO, Lawrence gave them back, explaining that he couldn’t accept honours for fraud - the false hopes that he had fed to the Arabs. Pride and self-loathing were curiously close companions in his make-up.
At 33, he had to find something new to live for and decided to join the RAF, under an assumed name. It took all the mighty influence of his friend, the Chief of the Air Staff Sir Hugh Trenchard, to get ‘AC Ross’ enlisted.
I find this part of his life as fascinating as the previous half. Michael Korda makes it so with details new to me and chunks from Lawrence’s many fascinating letters. It was a chequered career. When his real identity was outed in the Press, the RAF discharged him. After an unhappy interlude in the Tank Corps he begged to be readmitted as an airman.
It took the pressure of Bernard Shaw on the prime minster, Baldwin, to override the air minister’s refusal to have him back.
By now his assumed name was Shaw - in honour of the playwright. He spent his later years working happily on improving the engines of air-sea rescue launches that were still in use during the Battle of Britain.
He made many friends in the ranks as well as in grand country houses, like Lady Astor, whom he visited on his powerful Brough motor cycle.
A ton-up biker, he said it would probably end in tragedy and it duly did when he was 46 on a narrow Dorset lane. He had just very reluctantly been retired from his beloved RAF and wrote to Lady Astor: ‘There is something broken in the works ... my will I think.’
He left not only his legend as a warrior but a lasting memorial as a writer. Seven Pillars Of Wisdom contains some of the finest battle descriptions anywhere, even if it tries a bit too hard at times to be a Homeric epic.
Typically, he wanted it published in only a limited edition, to evade public scrutiny. When a best-selling condensation of it appeared in order to pay the costs he refused to take any personal profit. What a brilliant, obstinate, lovable, maddening contrary, mixed-up genius of a man! Even over 700 pages he never bores you for a moment.
