Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality

Strong praise and strong blame are results of half-knowledge; to know the real motive or mood of heroism is often to make it accidental or involuntary or instinctive. You cannot admire the stars, since they are only fire and mud in nature. T. E. Lawrence In the course of time, changing historical circumstances often transform an iconic figure's reputation.11 I wish to acknowledge with much gratitude the constructive criticisms and suggestions of the Johns Hopkins University History seminar; Anne Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida; Susan Marbury; Joseph Thomas; Lawrence Friedman, Harvard University; Roger Louis, University of Texas; David Hackett Fischer, Brandeis University; Abdul-Karim Refaq, College of William and Mary; Peter L. Hahn, Ohio State University; Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston University; and Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University. So it has been in the case of T. E. Lawrence. At first his astonishing exploits in Arabia and his flamboyant personality won him the laurels of a conquering hero in England and America. He came to symbolize the values of boldness, military ingenuity, and literary skill. These attributes thrilled the British public, most especially at a time of a war-weariness and a yearning for something to cheer. His death in 1935 did not dim his glamorous image, which was to suffer in the 1950s and 1960s, when claims about the futility of warfare cast doubt on the legitimacy of Lawrence's reputation. Heroism and honor, too, lost their luster. Lawrence himself, as the epigraph suggests, was skeptical about heroism when it became less of a personal virtue and more of a flawed perception by others. David Lean's classic film only partially restored his heroic stature when it appeared in 1962. Another perspective has lately emerged, which has regained him a measure of renewed respect, at least in military sectors. The transition in Iraq to a more constructive collaboration with the native forces owed something to Lawrence's experience with guerilla warfare in World War I. The changing image of the man suggests that there have been, almost from the very start of his renown, several Lawrences. Each has reflected the contemporaneous needs of Anglo-American society. Lawrence's cryptic character makes interpretation difficult. He wrote his friend Robert Graves, the poet and novelist, “I'm rather a complicated person, and that's bad for a simple biography.”22 T. E. Lawrence to Robert Graves, 28 June 1927, in Robert Graves, ed., T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Robert Graves: Information about Himself in the Form of Letters, Notes and Answers to Questions, Edited with a Critical Commentary (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 58. * * * In treating the first of the several Lawrences, we begin with the idolization that he received not only from the British and American public, but also from members of the English literary and political upper classes. American and British ideals of honor and military valor coincided at this juncture. After all, they were close allies, and Woodrow Wilson was a devout believer in America's Anglo-Saxon heritage. To both nations, Lawrence seemed the very model of a hero. Yet, there were differences from the start. The American mistrust of colonialism would ordinarily have tempered any admiration of an English representative of that form of rule. But the exotic setting of the Arabian desert, the showiness of Lawrence's resplendent Arab costume with curved gold sword, and the daring of his expeditions against the Ottomans inspired awe. An American journalist declared, “the imagination of matter-of-fact Westerners, who are suddenly spirited away on the magic carpet of memory to scenes familiar through the fairy story-books of childhood” inspired this widespread response to Lawrence's wartime career.33 Lowell Thomas, “The Greatest Romance of Real Life: The Uncrowned King of the Hejaz Desert,” The Strand Magazine 59 (January 1920): 40. During that era, Lawrence had also epitomized for the British establishment what one writer calls the role of “Imperial Hero, an agent of his time and class.”44 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), 399–400; William Chace, “T. E. Lawrence: The Uses of Heroism,” in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 156. Writers and thinkers had begun to dispute the legitimacy and relevance of the English Victorian hierarchy. The war had dismantled longstanding ideals of gentlemanly nineteenth-century warfare—as imagined if not practiced. By the 1930s, nostalgia for the old verities could not entirely overcome the way in which the blood-drenched conflict had begun to erode the rigid social order. Novelist E. M. Forster, Lawrence's close friend, noted in an obituary, this was “the last effort of the war-god before he laid down his godhead and turned chemist.” Clearly he had in mind the horrors of mustard gas and the trench life of the Great War. Forster, although a beneficiary of the existing political structure as a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, guessed that, for all his qualities of mind and heart, Lawrence would someday arouse controversy. “Now that he has gone away,” the novelist foretold, “there would also be ‘sharks’ circling in the water.” Moreover, Lawrence would be transformed into something the veteran had hated, “a boy scout's hero and the girl guide's dream.” The novelist argued that Lawrence instead “must be analyzed, estimated, claimed. A legend will probably flourish” that would distort “his true bearings.” So even his friends and admirers seemed to exhibit an undertone of perplexity beneath their adulation. That sense of doubt was perhaps related to British power's slow decline. Lawrence himself knew what might come about. He wrote a friend, “They'll rattle my bones after I'm gone.”55 E[dward] M[organ] Forster, Abinger Harvest: Essays on Books, People and Places (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 140. Lawrence is quoted by James Hawes, director of Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, in a brilliant documentary interview, Special Features, Lion Television DDE on PBS, 2003. Entertaining no doubts at all about his hero's purity, bravery, and chivalric manner, however, Lowell Thomas, the Chicago journalist, was the first to launch Lawrence into the heights of glory. In military terms, American notions of honor had not deviated from the adoration of the men in blue and gray in the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt's cowboys storming San Juan Hill. Thomas created a theatrical panorama that seized both American and English imaginations. The extravaganza he produced, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, combined Thomas's lecture on the heroes of the Middle Eastern campaign, film, music played by the Welsh Guards, pantomime, braziers with burning incense, Egyptian columns flanking the stage, and exotically attired female performers doing the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” A publicist friend arranged for Thomas to bring his theatrics to Covent Garden Royal Opera House and the spacious Royal Albert Hall, much to the delight of four million spectators, including the royal family. Thomas also carried his show to the major American cities. A huge audience attended the performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. American Christians were mesmerized by the sight of valiant crusaders storming the fortifications of the Sultan Saladin. There followed the introduction of “Lawrence, the uncrowned King of Arabia and his Arabian knights.”66 See Michael Yardley, Backing into the Limelight: A Biography of T. E. Lawrence (London: Harrap, 1989), 149–58. From the United States, Thomas took the program to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and India.77 Joel C. Hodson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 41. Thomas's book, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), which followed the tour, was a transatlantic publishing hit. One might even conjecture that he helped to create the public thirst for celebrities and their doings with his promotion of Lawrence. On both sides of the Atlantic, the soul-destroying warfare of World War I, with thousands lost in major engagements, was transformed into old-fashioned derring-do. It was something boys in search of manhood could still dream about. The stress on manly adventure dominated popular entertainment—in the fad for American cowboy adventure, the thrill and mystery of sheiks and deserts, and similar outlets for virile expression. Thomas was also deliberately using Lawrence to solidify the Anglo-American alliance. He managed to present Lawrence as the model British imperial hero, while in America he created a fighter for freedom and democracy in the Wilsonian anticolonialist mode. Like most Westerners, Thomas thought Islamic, tribal people could never achieve modern values and a sense of nationalist loyalty and freedom without the energetic guidance of the Anglo-Saxon.88 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 1994), 167–292. Thomas exaggerated the extent of his contact with Lawrence. His stories were sensational and they seriously bent the truth. Lawrence was both gratified and repelled—chiefly the latter. In 1920 he complained, “I am painfully aware of what Mr. Lowell Thomas is doing.” His articles and lectures “are as rank as possible, and are making my life very difficult for me, as I have neither the money nor the wish to maintain my constant character as the mountebank he makes me.”99 Phillip Knightley, introduction, in Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924; London: Prion Books, 2002), viii. Lawrence found himself pursued by the paparazzi of the day. He wondered if he had not become another man's possession. “Have I deserved a Lowell Thomas?” he bitterly wrote his friend Forster. 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.” The star image is a complicated production—part real, part fictional. It may become difficult for the luminary to figure out who he really is. So it was with Lawrence.1010 Lawrence to Ralph Isham, 22 November 1927, in David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 545. Similar statements are made by Lawrence in letters to Sir A. J. Murray, 1 October 1920, Kilgour Collection, BMS 1252, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and to Fareedah El Akle, 3 January 1921, in Malcolm Brown, ed., T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters (New York: Norton, 1989), 183; Lawrence to Forster, 17 June 1925, in ibid., 283; Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 8–14. He did not live long enough to find out. Lawrence recoiled from the heroic role others attributed to him. Dismayed by the perfidy of the Western powers at Versailles, he resigned from an influential post in the Colonial Office in 1922. He left the political world and joined the Tank Corps and later the R. A. F. as a private under assumed names. In May 1935, Lawrence died at age forty-seven in a motorcycle accident not far from his modest cottage, Clouds Hill. His recklessness in battle or on his beloved, mighty Brough Superior motorbike was almost suicidal. The crash occurred only a month after his mustering out of the R. A. F. as an almost anonymous airman. His death only enhanced his public veneration. The poet W. H. Auden mourned, “To me Lawrence's life is an allegory of the transformation of the Truly Weak Man into the Truly Strong Man.” At a memorial service, the chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford, where Lawrence had matriculated before the Great War, likened his three-year career in the Middle East and his death to the destiny of Jesus Christ. Nor was the clergyman the only Englishman to do so.1111 Auden in Arnold W. Lawrence, ed., Lawrence by His Friends (1937; New York: Doubleday, 1954 [abridged edition]), 382. See also William M. Chace, “T. E. Lawrence: The Uses of Heroism,” in Meyers, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend, 131–32, Blackmur quotation, 135. Winston Churchill offered that “his background of somber experience and reflection only seemed to set forth more brightly the charm and gaiety of his companionship, and the generous majesty of his nature.” King George V wrote to Lawrence's brother Arnold, “His name will live in history.” Reflecting an early shift in Lawrence's reputation, however, in 1940, R. P. Blackmur, a well-known literary critic at Princeton, sounded a skeptical note about Lawrence's reputation. He had been “lost but lurking, never to fulfill his promise.” In the 1940s his memory remained fresh in Great Britain, whose armed forces issued his Seven Pillars of Wisdom in paperback for military libraries. He was not cited by Allied generals fighting with massed armies. Another strategist, however, adopted Lawrence's strategies. At the start of the First Indo-China War in 1946, Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnam People's Army informed French General Raoul Salan, “My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it.” The irony should be obvious. The victor of the Vietnam War learned much from Lawrence at a time when, as often happens in the first few years after a death, his public stature was diminishing in the Western World.1212 Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1989; New York: MacMillan, 1992), xviii. Quotation from Adrian Greaves, Lawrence of Arabia: Mirage of a Desert War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007), 232; Air War College: Military Theory, Theorists, and Strategy, T. E. Lawrence http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-thry.htm#lawrence. * * * In the 1950s, King George's prediction of lasting fame was thrown into doubt: a quite different Lawrence was created. The biographer Richard Aldington set out to obliterate the heroic image. He did probe some of Lawrence's weaknesses and illuminated for the first time areas of conflict in the hero's makeup, but Aldington's approach was too polemical and reductionist for reasons growing out of his own miseries. Like Lawrence himself, the author of T. E. Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry was a Great War veteran. He had been gassed on the Western Front.1313 Fred D. Crawford, Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 6. For more on Liddell Hart, see John J. Mearscheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Unlike Lawrence, who attended Oxford, Aldington had not completed his common-school studies at University College, Teddington. The sudden failure of his father's finances prevented it. Declassed, so to speak, Aldington came to despise the English establishment. In 1919 he published Death of a Hero, a popular antiwar novel. In what an acerbic critic calls “a savage debunking of the whole concept of heroism,” the novel roundly censures the English upper crust, whose members Aldington held accountable for the disastrous war. Associated with such well-known literary figures as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Norman Douglas, and D. H. Lawrence, he wrote prolifically, producing poems, novels, and biographies throughout the 1920s and 1930s.1414 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), 182. See also Miguel González-Gerth, T. E. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and the Death of Heroes (Austin: Harry Ransom Research Center, 1994). In the 1950s Aldington fell out of favor with publishers and public alike. Poor health and low finances added to his distress. His former wife, the poet Hilda Doolittle, recalled that, after mustering out of the army in 1918, he had suffered from memory loss and the “dissociation, they called shell shock.” Depressive episodes persisted thereafter.1515 Hilda Doolittle to Conrad Aiken, 26 August quoted in Richard Aldington, A Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), Aldington was when he his Lawrence His found a of in Lawrence from his He had a most of man to his with the British social and political order. Aldington or his he could have a far more Yet, for all his of and he did that had long His cannot be but be with Aldington's Lawrence of major an to his own and a that an Aldington even Lawrence's as a On the of Aldington that the English hero was from an early age by the His Aldington to an public, Lawrence's career and Richard Aldington, T. E. Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry 1955), T. E. L. had learned about his in when he was years His however, did not know that he at the time of his father's death in That still some diminishing in the It is true that before changing the name to Lawrence, his had been Sir Thomas Robert of an his wife, and their four and with their In private Lawrence that and his life most especially in without a and had been to any such Lawrence to 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, After in the and where T. E. L. was the Lawrence in did so for the it T. E. L. and his four of were to in the Great War. Aldington's Robert the charge of a Lawrence had to “My was that he and his brother Arnold at and that we took it so To a friend Lawrence wrote in are rather You so a in the Lawrence to August in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, Robert to Liddell Hart, T. E. Lawrence Harry Ransom Center, University of Lawrence had however, the about his to be made In when was his of Lawrence, his friend wrote are about my which not be that I but people had about Lawrence to Graves, June 1927, Kilgour Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Lawrence to 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, For Lawrence to be in a of Victorian as the old and social the of a the boys had early what Arnold Lawrence, the called “a of was It the to doubts and to a of Arnold thought his brother had been by his So did Lawrence, who that all and would never the that Arnold Lawrence to quoted in Michael Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia Press, Arnold Lawrence to May British as quoted in John E. A of The of T. E. Lawrence Harvard University Press, 1998), Lawrence to 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, for Aldington's about T. E. the a he had an for a died of while in one if they the Lawrence's to him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom suggests a for the boy that a of or Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, A of real name was See “To S. in T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of A New York: that T. E. L. was deliberately and that is really a Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the (New York: C. the that for a who for the British but was and by the After however, that the were See Lawrence and T. E. Lawrence, and the of the (New York: 2007), The to in “I so I of men into my and wrote my will the in To the that might be for we In Seven he recalled his in the with in Lawrence, Seven Pillars of But he found this and even Aldington to by Lawrence had literary E. M. Forster, and others. He did not however, of their He to E. M. his novel. Lawrence informed the “I'm so made Lawrence could also be about very He wrote rather about the of war poet T. E. Lawrence to Graves, October BMS 1252, Kilgour Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. See also Lawrence to Graves, 17 Lawrence to Forster, 1927, in Brown, ed., E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, Lawrence, Lawrence and the of a that Robert Graves, who Lawrence against all brilliant but from as a of by a These he could be found in his are what his His of on his had an But a might have been too, as Lawrence was often “T. E. but he would never have gone for a in with a as E. M. has to Liddell Hart, Lawrence Ransom Center, University of Lawrence's had in mind Lawrence's when seized him at in it did his nature. and different on that that it took and of his Lawrence It was a of “I in to in to out the was and by the was an and took a fancy to The to have I was and after some T. E. Lawrence to 28 June in Brown, ed., E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, A to a most of what had really occurred at did with on his treating the Aldington that it Lawrence's in and a much Arab the whole and claims that was not The however, that both and the of of while the of the role of the is and The the man or into a T. E. Lawrence: An Arab (London: University Press, 1966), The Arab (New York: with doubts about the Lawrence The The and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: 1994), as as and A. See A. Wilson, After the The of in the World (New York: and James the Desert on T. E. Lawrence and War in Arabia, (New York: W. W. Norton, T. E. Lawrence: A New Biography (New York: & On the John a as as one of the most of Lawrence's such an experience could any man's sense of and an an and that which has made me and the of my and Lawrence to 26 in Brown, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Selected Letters, A of the response to as or a lost or It may also a of that almost at the On Lawrence of On and about see Stephen and and Literature (New York: New York University Press, See also my “The of The of T. E. at the and For on see American of Michael on The of and (New York: and the of and American of

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