For Lawrence himself it was something which gave him pleasure or torment according to his mood.
III
Living with a Legend
Towards the end of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley tries to get her artist father’s approval for her marriage to the gamekeeper Mellors. He had been, she reminded him, an officer and was ‘like Colonel C.E. Florence, who preferred to become a private soldier again’. Her father was unmoved. ‘Sir Malcolm, however, had no sympathy with the unsatisfactory mysticism of the famous C.E. Florence. He saw too much advertisement behind all the humility. It looked just like the sort of conceit the knight most loathed, the conceit of self-abasement.’ This fictional reaction to a lightly disguised Lawrence reflected the actual feelings of many of his friends and all his critics.
The charitable view, taken by Sir Lewis Namier, the historian, who knew Lawrence intermittently between 1914 and 1930, was that he was the victim of an inner struggle which he never satisfactorily resolved. ‘He was retiring,’ Namier recalled, ‘and yet craved to be seen, he was sincerely shy and naively exhibitionist. He had to rise above others and then humble himself and in self-inflicted humiliation demonstrate his superiority.’ Lawrence revealed something of his dualism to Meinertzhagen during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. ‘He told me that ever since childhood he had wanted to be a hero, that he was always fighting between rushing into the limelight and hiding in utter darkness but the limelight had always won’1
Lowell Thomas was yet to appear and in the spring of 1919 Lawrence was enjoying striking poses in his Arab costume. It seemed very bad form, coming so soon after his contretemps with the King, about which he boasted, saying that he had torn off his decorations. His flourishes upset professional diplomats; they made Harold Nicolson uneasy and angered Henry Channon, who thought Lawrence displayed all the hallmarks of a ‘bounder’. Cleverness, eccentricity and flamboyance were naturally distasteful to those with much to be modest about. Sir Robert Vansittart, Lawrence’s cousin on his father’s side and a man of some literary pretensions, took it more calmly with the remark that he was ‘A show-off with something to show.’2
The devoted Storrs accepted Lawrence’s mannerisms, although noting that ‘No one could have been more remote from the standard of the public school’, which at that time fiercely deprecated displays of individuality, considered harmful to the ideal of team spirit. Storrs also suspected that in Lawrence there was an internal conflict between the hermit and the exhibitionist, in which the latter invariably came out on top. ‘He himself never despised, sometimes even encouraged, his legendary saga, particularly for eccentric inconsistency; reserving, however, the right (which the great and particularly the creative artist can rarely afford) of occasional self-belittlement.’3
At the heart of these contradictions lay Lawrence’s reaction to what he had become in the eyes of the world. Towards Lowell Thomas, his attitude was ambivalent: the American was a ‘born vulgarian’, ‘a mountebank’ and an ‘intensely crude and pushful fellow’. ‘I could kick his card-house down if I got annoyed,’ he assured General Murray, who was probably annoyed that all credit for the Middle Eastern war was being shared between Allenby and Lawrence. Still, Lawrence reminded him, Lowell Thomas was ‘a very decent fellow –but an American journalist scooping’. Lawrence had been a discreet onlooker at Lowell Thomas’s show on several occasions and had seen Chase’s film accompanied by Young. Young took exception to one sequence in which footage of British officers was preceded by a caption which stated that only Lawrence was allowed beyond Aqaba for service at the front. This was a lie, and Lawrence assured Young that he would see if it could be changed. Later, when Young again saw the film nothing had been altered, although in fairness it may well have been beyond Lawrence’s powers to have the print adjusted.4
During the winter of 1919/20, Lawrence needed publicity. France had secured the Syrian mandate and in June 1920 her army drove Faisal and his adherents out of Damascus into exile. Lawrence, while continuing to produce newspaper and magazine articles which highlighted the part played by the Arabs during the war, was now whipping up support for Faisal’s adoption as King of Iraq. In broadcasting his views, Lawrence did not disdain such popular newspapers as the Daily Express. Without the Lowell Thomas ballyhoo, it is hard to be sure whether what Lawrence had to say would have carried the same weight or been so readily acceptable to editors.
Yet, as he discovered to his irritation, the attention of the press was not like water from a tap, it could not just be turned off. Nor could figures who had aroused public interest be quietly forgotten and allowed to disappear. It was in the nature of human affairs that, when a man known as the ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’ chose to become an aircraftman, there would be much public curiosity. The legend dogged Lawrence and brought frequent inconvenience. ‘My past has intervened and spoilt my present,’ Lawrence complained to Lloyd in January 1929 after his precipitate removal from Miramshah.5 It continued to do so, provoking in him different reactions. ‘I am a local curio,’ he told Namier not long after he had settled in Plymouth, where fellow airmen pointed out ‘Colonel Lawrence’s hut’ to visiting friends.6 This was bearable, but he found snooping newspapermen around Cloud’s Hill intolerable and he landed one a haymaker which knocked him over. These intrusions become particularly irksome in 1935 and forced Lawrence to beg Churchill to intervene with his friends among the press barons.
Lawrence was plagued by journalists, who gave him public exposure when he no longer wanted it. It could be equally troublesome when he moved in unfamiliar circles and what he called his ‘false reputation’ made him feel like an uncaged zoo animal. Meeting George Lloyd’s son on his way back from India, Lawrence found the boy embarrassed and asked whether his father had ‘been stuffing the poor child with Lowell Thomas stories’. Everything had changed, for now, Lawrence insisted, ‘The contrast between my person and my reputation is grotesque.’7 There was an irony in all this since it was his reputation, with or without ornamentation, which provided him with his entrée into the society of accomplished men and women. It was just because he was Lawrence of Arabia that Lady Astor singled him out from other airmen, hailed him in Plymouth and later added his name to her Cliveden guest list.
Lawrence could not escape what the war had made him, even when he wanted to. Nevertheless, his renunciations of his past were frequent and clamorous. On the publication of Lowell Thomas’s book in 1924, Lawrence told Mrs Bernard Shaw, ‘It rankles in my mind to be called proud names for qualities which I’d hate to possess ... or for acts of which I’m heartily ashamed.’ ‘The Arab thing is finished,’ he remarked after publication of Robert Graves’s biography, which he considered over-dramatic and ‘not to be taken seriously’, even though he had collaborated in its production. ‘Reading it,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw, ‘is like the memory of last night’s sardine which sometimes comes to a man, unasked, just before breakfast when the day is clean.’
Changing his name by deed poll to Shaw in 1927 was for Lawrence an outward symbol of his wish for a new identity, although no one was fooled by it. The entry in Who’s Who for T.E. Lawrence reappeared under T. E. Shaw, with a recital of his military and diplomatic services and publications, but without details of his career after 1922. A different surname and allusions to the fact that ‘Lawrence’ was dead but ‘Shaw’ lived and was happy could not sever Lawrence from his past nor erase the memory of his deeds from the public mind. The obscure Blair could become the famous Orwell, but the famous Lawrence could not become the obscure Shaw. Once the Afghan imbroglio was over and Lawrence found work to his liking at Plymouth, he came to terms with the inevitable. He learned to coexist with his legend, even to the point of authorising Liddell Hart to start work on a fresh biography in 1934. Its publication would revive public interest, but at least Lawrence felt assured that his life and exploits were in the hands of a man he liked and respected, who enjoyed a high reputation as a serious and disinterested military histori
an.
There were reasons, apart from convenience, which drove the legendary Lawrence to conceal himself. During his several admissions of personal guilt and self-loathing made to Meinertzhagen in Paris during July 1919, he had confessed that his fame was falsely based and that he was scared of being exposed as a fraud. ‘He hates himself and is having a great struggle with his conscience,’ Meinertzhagen wrote in his diary. ‘His self-deception filled him with bitterness. Shall he run away and hide, confess his sins and become completely discredited—or carry the myth into the limelight in the hopes of not being exposed?’8
This outburst seems strange since, at the time, the ‘myth’ (was this Lawrence’s word?) was as yet unformed. The public was still largely unaware of what Lawrence had done during the war, and there is nothing to suggest that he knew that, within a few weeks, Lowell Thomas would parade him and his deeds before the theatre-goers of London. He was, however, engaged in the preparation of the first draft of the Seven Pillars, which he discussed with Meinertzhagen on several occasions. It was taking shape as a work of propaganda and polemic and, as such, reflected Lawrence’s rage at the way in which the Arabs were being treated at the Peace Conference. What he may have realised was that some of the claims he was making for himself and the Arabs would invite challenge and, with it, his exposure as a charlatan.
Hubert Young found Lawrence’s attitude to historical truth capricious. At some date in the early 1920s he and Lawrence looked over a passage in the draft Seven Pillars in which Young, under a pseudonym, was unfairly treated. Young demanded either an alteration in line with the truth or else his appearance under his own name. Lawrence refused. Young riposted, ‘But the correct account may appear some day.’ ‘Oh no, it won’t,’ answered Lawrence. ‘But it will,’ insisted Young, ‘because I’m writing it, and it may perhaps be said that you put me in under a false name in these pages because you knew you were telling lies about me.’ Lawrence shifted his ground, explaining that that was why Young appeared under an invented name.9
In spite of such juggling with truth Lawrence found himself more or less immune from criticism as a chronicler of historical events. Shortly after Liddell Hart’s biography appeared, he remarked, ‘He makes it all fit in: afterwards; it didn’t happen like that: but who will believe it now?’ He did not consider it worthwhile to refute the more outrageous tales about himself. ‘Where it was merely one of those idle stories which every man collects about him as a ship collects barnacles—well, then I haven’t often bothered,’ he told Robert Graves. The analogy was ill-chosen; an encrustation of barnacles makes a ship less seaworthy, whereas the fables which attached to Lawrence increased his public stature, if not his self-esteem.
There was of course no reason why Lawrence should have blamed himself for stories invented by others, but where did the moral responsibility rest for the fictions of his own making? In the Seven Pillars he described in some detail the destruction of a bridge north of Nasib station on the night of 17/18 September, adding that it was ‘my seventy-ninth’. It was also described as ‘my seventy-ninth bridge’ in his official report, prepared for and published in the Arab Bureau’s bulletin. It was not. An analysis from all available sources gives Lawrence’s total of bridge demolitions as twenty-three, an honourable score. Battle fatigue may excuse the original slip. but not its translation from an official file to Lawrence’s narrative. Quite simply, he lied twice, and he allowed Graves and Liddell Hart to repeat the falsehood. 10
This small, but significant, detail is doubly revealing. It shows that Lawrence could fake Arab Bureau records and explains why those biographers who consulted them came away thinking that the Seven Pillars was an accurate military history of the Arab campaign. On a larger scale, Lawrence misrepresented what occurred when Damascus fell, but here he was constructing propaganda devised to substantiate Arab political pretensions. Tripling the number of bridges he blew up is altogether a different matter. Here he was indulging in self-glorification and myth-making.
The swollen figure of seventy-nine serves only to exaggerate Lawrence’s prowess to a point of distortion. It was a pointless exercise in fraud, since his courage and energy in the field were beyond doubt and required no gloss. This mendacity can partly be explained in literary terms: throughout the Seven Pillars there are passages which reflect Lawrence’s earlier addiction to chivalric romance, in particular the medieval author’s love of overstatement as a device to secure dramatic effect. Figures were particularly vulnerable to this treatment, with digits added or subtracted from the tallies of casualties or prisoners to emphasise either the ferocity of a battle or the totality of a victory. This was also Lawrence’s way. Writing about Allenby’s final victory in 1918, he assures his readers that, because of Arab assistance it was won ‘with less than four hundred killed’. Yet the sum of deaths among Allied forces during September and October was over 1,400 and for the entire Palestine and Syrian campaigns, 16,000.
For Lawrence, the Seven Pillars was a work of high art and not a historical record. Yet, together with Revolt in the Desert and the biographies of Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, it was accepted by the public as an accurate account of recent historical events. Lawrence knew this and, while he dismissed Lowell Thomas’s flights of fancy, he was acutely aware that he himself had embroidered and twisted the truth. He had done so because he was vain: as he admitted towards the end of the Seven Pillars, he had a ‘craving for good repute among men’. This was at times so powerful that it drove him to add artificial lustre to his reputation, as Vansittart suspected. ‘Lawrence,’ he remembered, ‘was always having his biography written, and filled it with flourishes better forgotten for sake of the rest.’11
Lawrence was too intelligent not to appreciate that limelight not only illuminated, it probed. Fear of what it might expose made him wary about remaining too long in its glare. Furthermore, the knowledge of his own complicity in adding false touches to his legend may have contributed to his spasms of grotesque self-abasement which occurred during the 1920s. In September 1925, when the Lowell Thomas biography was on sale, he wrote to Mrs Bernard Shaw:
I’ve changed, and the Lawrence who used to go about, and be friendly and familiar with that sort of person, is dead. He’s worse than dead. He is a stranger I once knew. From henceforward my way will be with these fellows here, degrading myself (for in their eyes, and your eyes, and Winterton’s eyes I see that it is degradation) in the hope that some day I will really feel degraded, be degraded, to their level. I long for people to look down upon me and despise me, and I’m too shy to take the filthy steps which would publicly shame me, and put me into their contempt. I want to dirty myself outwardly, so that my person may properly reflect the dirtiness which it conceals.
Another extraordinary outburst in this vein coincided with the appearance of Graves’s biography and his own Revolt in the Desert. Again Mrs Bernard Shaw was the recipient: ‘I am now an airman, a common airman, dirty in person, living in a barrack, eating badly, off dirty tables, the roughest of mishandled food.... everything about me is cheap, and most things are nasty.’
A deep guilt lurks behind these outpourings. They are not simply a reaction against that vanity which made Lawrence seek and luxuriate in the limelight or enjoy public esteem. He could, as he made clear in his first letter, take ‘steps’ which would reverse the public’s feelings towards him, changing admiration to ‘contempt’. What he must have had in mind was that, if he revealed that he had tampered with the truth, even in comparatively trivial matters, to enhance his reputation, he would be transformed from a hero to a charlatan. Yet he could never bring himself to undermine his own reputation, for to have denied one part of the legend would surely have shaken the whole. Worse, he would have betrayed his own friends who had believed implicitly all he had said and written.
No one ever questioned Lawrence’s basic integrity and those who knew him interpreted his equivocation towards public notoriety in terms of an inner struggle between polarities in his nature. Shyness
, occasional social awkwardness, a dread of failure and, perhaps strongest of all, a residual Puritan conscience were thought to be the reasons why Lawrence shrank from public acclaim. His self-effacement appeared neither natural nor sincere. This had been the judgement both of D.H. Lawrence, who observed his namesake from a distance, and of Young, who knew him well. ‘His attitude to publicity,’ Young remarked, ‘was that of Brer Rabbit to the briar-patch. “Don’t throw me in that briar-patch, Brer Fox,” he would protest, and all the time the briar-patch was where he longed to be.’ Young added that when public attention ‘became embarrassing and even shameful to him’ he genuinely wished to shun it.12
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