PART SEVEN
THE BUBBLE REPUTATION
1935-1995
I
Orthodoxy and Revisionism: 1935—1955
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Alexander Pope, ‘Essay On Man’
‘Riddle’ and ‘enigma’ were words which came easily to hand when newspapermen wrote their obituaries of Lawrence. His life was a sequence of contrasting incidents and his behaviour defied easy explanation. He was simply ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a unique creature who had held a generation spellbound and whose deeds had already become part of national mythology.
And yet, as an anonymous reviewer of the Seven Pillars remarked, ‘without the War and without the Arabs it is unlikely he would have known great fame’.1 This ‘artist man-of-action’ was ‘a story writer who had found the divinely right subject-matter’. The description ‘artist’ would have pleased Lawrence, for it represented his greatest ambition. With ‘story writer’ he would have been less happy. He had been driven to do more than narrate a sequence of exciting events: he had wanted to tell the world about himself. The same revelatory urge ran through his vast correspondence and The Mint. In offering posterity this mass of autobiographical material, he seemed consciously preparing the way for those who, after his death, would ‘rattle my bones’.
This was not a service to history, rather the contrary. ‘He loved fantasy,’ wrote E.M. Forster, ‘and leg-pulling and covering up his tracks, and threw a great deal of verbal dust, which bewilders the earnest researcher.’2 This dust had blinded both Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, as they freely admitted in private. Much later, the Middle East scholar Elizabeth Monroe commented on Lawrence’s ‘evil delight in baffling the world’.3 The red herrings, contradictions and falsehoods which litter Lawrence’s letters and published work ensured that he would remain an enigma and that future historians and belletrists would be kept busy seeking keys to the riddle he had created. After death, as in life, Lawrence would command attention.
On one level, this desire to fox posterity was an extension of Lawrence’s pleasure in perplexing his friends and contemporaries. On another, it was a form of revenge on academic history undertaken by someone who, as an undergraduate, had cocked a snook at his stuffy, fact-bound tutors. In the same vein, Lawrence had enthralled fellow Jesus men with stories of how he had been bushwhacked by bandits in Syria and escaped by the skin of his teeth. The habit grew and in time became uncontrollable. But, did Yeats-Brown really believe that Lawrence had once penetrated Turkish army HQ during the Balkan Wars? Or did James Hanley, the novelist, accept Lawrence’s equally far-fetched claim that he had spent a month in Q-boats during the war?4 Most probably not but, like Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, they were willing to forgive the tale-teller his flights of fancy. More important is whether Lawrence forgave himself such indulgences.
The extended periods of melancholic brooding which marked Lawrence’s later life owed much to his frequently admitted sense of guilt and self-loathing. His Evangelical upbringing would have taught him to set the highest value on truthfulness. By his mother’s canon, lying was quite simply a sin. But Lawrence had released himself from such orthodoxy and was free to legislate his own moral code.
Deception could be excused on the ground that it was committed in the cause of art. Art lay at the centre of Lawrence’s life and supplanted conventional Christianity as his religion. As a young historian he was captivated by the literature and visual arts of the Middle Ages. As boy and man he dreamed of being a printer of fine books; and in his final years he transformed his experiences in war and peace into two books which he hoped would be admired as creations of a genius.
There was always something distinctly Evangelical about Lawrence’s approach to art and his own creative life. The achievement of perfection, like the search for spiritual grace, was a struggle which could consume the soul. Here too was an element of the quest, so familiar from his reading of medieval romance. Both the seeker after oneness with God and the knight errant knew that the pursuit of their goals entailed suffering. This was accepted by Lawrence. Although he looked back on his pre-war existence as an archaeologist as the happiest time of his life, it had not satisfied his deep urge to create. This re-emerged with even stronger force when the war ended and, to a greater or lesser degree, dominated the last years of his life, bringing with it much inner pain.
From childhood, Lawrence had seen himself as different, perhaps even a creature of destiny, although then and later he was tormented by doubt about whether he really possessed the inner power and fixity of purpose of one who could make history on a grand scale. To compensate, he manufactured embellishments which made himself and his life even more remarkable, exciting and different. This process of constant adornment continued until he died and, by it, he consciously made his life into a work of art and himself into a superman.
Doing so may have triggered those bouts of self-reproach which so distressed his friends. But were Lawrence’s sense of unworthiness and self-hatred the products of guilt and shame? Nietzsche, one of his favourite authors, suggested another source for such emotions. ‘Solitary man,’ Zarathustra prophesied, ‘you are going the way of the lover: you love yourself and for that reason you despise yourself as only lovers can [my italics].’ The internal recriminations of the narcissist are as bitter as those between lovers.
Vanity, if not self-love, alone explains why Lawrence, the medievalist, merged in his person the roles of warrior-hero and troubadour, continually adding fresh flourishes to his own legend. Yet what Lawrence did as a young explorer in the Levant or as an officer in the field commands respect and required no ornament. Why Lawrence felt impelled to embellish his achievement and then repudiate the fame they offered him remains inexplicable. This, as much as his many inner contradictions, remains the most enduring Lawrence enigma.
While they were unable to solve the puzzles Lawrence set, those who knew him closely appreciated other and more attractive sides to his personality. He was a man of extraordinary sensitivity who could reveal an uncanny knack of knowing the mood and feelings of those around him. This quality was also present in his understanding of language, music, landscape and the artefacts of the past. He could be compassionate, and he moved with ease in many different societies. As a companion he was charming and affable; those who met him usually recalled his conversation with delight. He was also a patriot who did all within his power to advance what he saw as the best interests of his country. On the eve of his departure from the RAF, he proudly wrote to John Buchan of what he had accomplished, adding, ‘I tell you all this not to boast of it, but to show that you and Baldwin, in gratifying what may have seemed to you my indulgence, have not harmed the public service.’5
Above all, Lawrence had made his life into a work of art and had therefore invited the attention of posterity. As a one-time student of medieval art, he knew that his own life, like a painting or piece of sculpture, would undergo unending re-interpretation by future generations.
First reactions to his death were marked by a profound sense of national loss. He had been a truly heroic genius whose deeds spoke for themselves and an embodiment of the virtues of self-sacrifice and dedication to duty which had made Britain a great, imperial nation. On the evening of his death, Allenby spoke on the wireless in memory of a subordinate whose fame now outshone his own:
Such men win friends—such also find critics and detractors. But the highest reward for success is inward knowledge that it has been rightly won. Praise or blame was regarded with indifference by Lawrence. He did his duty as he saw it before him. He has left, to us who knew him and admired him, a beloved memory.
Private grief mingled with a wider sense of national lo
ss which became more acute in the years immediately after his death. Men of Lawrence’s stamp were needed as never before in a world that was becoming more dangerous and mutable. This point was emphasised by John Buchan in a lecture delivered in May 1939: ‘If he had lived I think he might have done great work on a matter which was very near his heart, and which is of vital importance to the Empire, and that is the reorganisation of our imperfect defences.’ He concluded: ‘I am not a very tractable person, and I am not much of a hero-worshipper; but I think I could have followed him over the edge of the world.’ Such men were precious assets at a time when Britain was preparing for war.
Lawrence had joined that pantheon of illustrious national heroes who had emerged in previous times of peril to lead and inspire their countrymen. Those, like Buchan and Churchill, who were the most fearful for Britain’s future, had been profoundly dismayed by the loss of a figure equal in stature and ability to Nelson or Wellington. Britain had lost not only a genius but a man of destiny. This was the view of Professor Charles Carrington, who, writing under the pseudonym of C.E. Edmonds, produced an ‘instant’ biography of Lawrence which appeared six months after his death. A veteran of the trenches, Carrington identified his subject as ‘the archetype of the Lost Generation’ who, had he been inclined, could have given ‘direction for an era which lacked it’.
The public at large was more concerned with finding out what Lawrence had actually done than in mourning lost leaders. Their curiosity about a man who had been a living legend was satisfied by a cascade of books by and about Lawrence. In July 1935, less than two months after his death, the 1926 edition of Seven Pillars went on public sale. It was an immediate bestseller and within two and a half years had passed through ten editions in Britain alone. There were also three short potboiler biographies by Reginald Kiernan, Edward Robinson and Carrington published between July and November 1935.
Each covered the bare bones of Lawrence’s life in a routine way and added little to what had been said by Graves or Liddell Hart. Edward Robinson’s is perhaps the most interesting. It was compiled specifically ‘for youth’ and its author, a professional journalist, had been attached as a signals clerk to the British detachment at Aqaba during 1917 and 1918. His special knowledge was recognised by Lawrence’s younger brother and literary executor, Professor Arnold Lawrence, who in the book’s foreword, described Robinson as ‘an eyewitness of many of the scenes described’. He had scanned the text, which was in part based upon notes made by Robinson in 1920, and declared that it contained no inaccuracies.
Nor did it contain everything that Robinson had witnessed, for in 1947 he published a second, far more detailed book which was almost wholly about the Arab Revolt. Called Lawrence the Rebel, it contained information from official files then closed to the public and emphasised the part played by Lawrence’s brother officers. It touches on the intrigues and tensions among them and includes references to Vickery’s protests against British officers wearing Arab headdress, Garland’s difficulties with the Arabs, General Murray’s exchanges with Colonel Brémond and, most interestingly, anxieties about a Franco-Italian coup against Aqaba. The sources for at least some of this information may have been Lawrence’s own papers, which had been loaned to the author by Arnold Lawrence in 1935. Robinson also weaves some of his own experiences into the narrative, referring in passing to Guy Dawnay’s Oxonian drawl and Captain Goslett’s pet dog. Lawrence, whom he portrays as reserved to the point of aloofness, does not hold the centre stage, although a fresh dimension is added to his legend with a story that he had ‘managed to get into the inner councils of the Turco-German commands’ by masquerading as an Arab merchant.
This combination of authentic official material and personal memory deserved success, but the book was virtually ignored by reviewers and sank without trace. Those close to Robinson believed that Lawrence the Rebel’s fate owed something to Professor Lawrence’s animus towards its author whom, he alleged, had stolen and later sold some of his brother’s papers.6 Thereafter, he insisted that Robinson was an impostor who had never served with the Arabs. His credibility was not helped by his improbable story of having been lost in the desert for six months during the closing stages of the campaign.7
Lawrence the Rebel, while saying nothing which injures Lawrence, is the first biography which did not adopt the reverential tone that had been set by Graves and Liddell Hart. This uncritical approach was also followed in David Garnett’s edition of Lawrence’s letters, Letters to His Biographers Robert Graves and Basil Liddell Hart, which appeared in 1938, and (though with a few exceptions) in T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, edited by Arnold Lawrence, which had been published the previous year. All of these books owed their existence to Arnold Lawrence, who had preferred ‘indirect’ versions of his brother’s life to a detailed, official biography. He had been instrumental in gathering together the bulk of Lawrence’s letters which, by 1940, had been placed in an archive in the Bodleian Library with strict conditions of access for the next sixty years.
Professor Lawrence faced an extraordinarily difficult and, at times, delicate task as a literary executor. On one hand, he had to satisfy the demands of a public with an insatiable appetite for books about his brother and, on the other, he had to protect a reputation which he privately knew to be vulnerable. Soon after Lawrence’s death he had found in Cloud’s Hill the letters and diaries which detailed his regime of beatings. He concluded that this catalogue of self-inflicted punishment was evidence of how far his brother had been prepared to go to resolve his inner struggles. He alluded obliquely to the subject in his introduction to T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, where he mentioned that in the relentless pursuit of self-discipline his brother had followed the methods used by mediaeval monks.
This reference must have puzzled many readers, but was an insurance against some future revelation which might explain the matter in purely sexual terms. As a man of the world, Professor Lawrence would have been well aware that his brother’s behaviour was capable of being interpreted as sexual masochism, an aberration which would have been either ridiculed or condemned given the moral climate of the time. There was no way of knowing whether this would ever change and it was better for Lawrence’s posthumous dignity that this aspect of his life remained a secret. The professor’s anxieties may have been deepened when, in July 1935, he was approached by John Bruce demanding unpaid fees due him from Lawrence’s mythical uncle. As it turned out, Bruce was willing to remain silent, at least for the time being.8
A further source of unease for Professor Lawrence was the possibility that the public might learn about the circumstances of his parents’ liaison and their sons’ birth. While this might not have troubled him unduly, it would certainly have caused distress to his elder brother, Robert, and their mother. From the start, he had to act with extreme circumspection, for he was, in effect, the custodian of his brother’s honourable reputation and his family’s good name. He had always admired his brother and thought that he had a unique insight into his innermost mind. What lay there, he believed, was uncovered in a brief, intensely personal biography compiled by an Argentinian authoress Virginia Ocampo in 1942, four years after she made a pilgrimage to Cambridge where she met Professor Lawrence who was impressed by the depth of her understanding of his brother. When her book was finally published in English in 1963 as 338171 T.E., he wrote an introduction which paid tribute to the ‘uncanny truthfulness’ of her vision of Lawrence’s soul. The result was, he concluded, ‘The most profound and best balanced of all portraits of my brother.’ There is no reason to believe that he ever revised this verdict.
What stands out from Señora Ocampo’s metaphysical essay is her insistence that Lawrence’s life can only be understood in terms of an unending internal struggle. He is a crippled soul seeking infinity, symbolised by the desert, and is prepared to go to any lengths, including self-inflicted suffering, to vindicate his will. Aware that Lawrence had become the victim of gossip, she insists that he led a continent life and th
at the homoerotic passages in the Seven Pillars were pure and devoid of ‘self-satisfied lewdness’.
This sympathetic and wholly favourable evaluation of Lawrence appeared at the close of the first phase of a literary—historical battle over his reputation. It had begun in January 1954 with the announcement in the Evening Standard that the novelist and biographer Richard Aldington had completed a life of Lawrence which challenged the by now entrenched orthodoxies. To make matters worse, this assault on a national hero appeared in France in the summer with the provocative title, Lawrence L’Imposteur.
This was tantamount to a declaration of war not only on Lawrence but on his circle of friends. If Aldington was right, they had been the victims of Lawrencian mendacity and had, in turn, misled the public. Furthermore, and this emerged as the campaign against him developed, Aldington was suspected of having acted unpatriotically. Liddell Hart, who had made himself commander-in-chief of Lawrence’s defenders, immediately detected a Communist plot (this was the height of the Cold War) on the grounds that Aldington had left-wing views and that Collins, his publishers, employed Alan Maclean, the brother of the defector.9 From the start, stridency and paranoia were the keynotes of the anti-Aldington campaign.
To a certain extent, Aldington was as much the victim of what today would be called ‘hype’ as the collective indignation of Lawrence’s self-appointed and self-seeking champions who condemned the book unread. Defending himself and his book’s conclusions, he claimed that it had begun life in 1946 during a discussion with his close friend, Alister Kershaw. Answering charges of malice, Aldington said that he had begun his research with ‘no preconceived ideas’ and, as the evidence presented itself, he had been forced to draw conclusions unfavourable to Lawrence.10 His intellectual rigour set him on a collision course with Arnold Lawrence and the Seven Pillars trust which controlled copyright material. Compromise was out of the question:
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