The only line for me as a biographer is truth-telling, and I cannot bind myself to write a panegyric of the defunct as will please his weeping family with their black-edged hankies on one hand and TEL’s estate on the other.11
Aldington’s enquiry became a process of excoriation in which he systematically peeled away the layers of hyperbole that had shrouded his subject. As this process gathered momentum, he became convinced that Lawrence had been the mainspring of his own myth which was a collection of fibs, mostly of his own making. Lawrence’s legal champions could not change Aldington’s mind, nor could they completely withhold copyright permission for quotations from his works for these could be paraphrased. They could and did suggest amendments and issued books favourable to Lawrence during the run-up to the publication of the Aldington biography, which was scheduled for the end of January 1955. There appeared during 1954 a bowdlerised version of The Mint, The Home Letters of T.E .Lawrence and His Brothers, and a truncated re-issue of T.E. Lawrence by His Friends, from which the mildly critical and ironic material had been expunged. One reviewer was amused by what he called an ‘exhilarating race over the last year to bring rehabilitating material on to the market ahead of or alongside Mr Aldington’s assault’.12
The volley of pro-Lawrence books represented the direct offensive against Aldington. The ‘indirect’ attack was masterminded by Liddell Hart, appropriately perhaps for a military historian who advocated ‘indirect’ methods of warfare. Liddell Hart’s motives for defending Lawrence were never altruistic; his own reputation was at stake as well as his friend’s, for, if Aldington was right, he had been an accomplice to a fraud. When he first became acquainted with Lawrence in 1921, Liddell Hart was keen to establish himself as both an expert on modern war and a military historian. Vain and ambitious, he cultivated Lawrence with whom he believed he had much in common. Both were amateur soldiers, instinctively hostile towards a military establishment whose blinkered thinking had sent millions to their death.
In 1930 Liddell Hart began his biography of Lawrence in the knowledge that his subject was an outstanding strategist. His study of Lawrence was also an opportunity to ride one of his own favourite hobby-horses, his theory of indirect warfare by which a commander avoided a direct, potentially wasteful encounter with the enemy, and instead engaged him in minor operations designed to wear down his resistance. Lawrence’s guerrilla campaign was a classic illustration of an indirect war, dependent upon manoeuvre and surprise, and it had been successful. Not surprisingly, Liddell Hart pronounced Lawrence, the master of indirect warfare, as a general equal in genius to Marlborough and Napoleon.13 For Aldington to deny Lawrence such eminence was to discredit Liddell Hart’s professional judgement and make him little more than Lawrence’s toady.
Liddell Hart’s indirect campaign opened in February 1954 when he clandestinely secured a copy of Aldington’s galley proofs. By June he had managed to get another copy directly from Collins who seem not to have been fully aware of his motives. This proof (which was subsequently amended) gave Liddell Hart the ammunition for a short but detailed critique of Aldington. Once he had discovered the tenor of Aldington’s book, Liddell Hart swiftly set about forming an alliance of Lawrence’s friends and admirers who were to exert behind-the-scenes pressure on Collins to abandon the book. They included Leo Amery, the second Lord Lloyd, Storrs, Robert Graves, Eric Kennington and the Prime Minister, Churchill, who regretted that there was nothing he could do to defend his friend, since he had no powers of censorship.
Aldington’s willingness to expose details of Lawrence’s birth particularly incensed his partisans, who believed that disclosure would upset Mrs Lawrence, then aged ninety-five. There was nothing that could be done to suppress this information which had been published in France in 1942, in Paris Match in February 1954 and in Thomas Jones’s Diary with Letters, 1931–1945, which appeared the following October. Nonetheless, Lawrence’s adherents denounced Aldington as a bounder and contemplated giving him the treatment that had been usual for his kind sixty or so years before. Graves wanted to strike him in the street, and Liddell Hart toyed with the idea of a public denunciation that would compel Aldington either to sue his traducers for libel or withdraw his book. But Aldington lived in France and, as Arnold Lawrence commented with Edwardian hauteur, he had no London club to which a damning letter could be addressed.
Professor Lawrence was, in fact, very edgy about a legal wrangle which might become messy since there was no way of knowing for certain just what Aldington had uncovered about his brother. As it was, his book contained a chapter that strongly hinted at Lawrence’s homosexuality, drawing on passages from the Seven Pillars and his unpublished letters to Mrs Bernard Shaw. It was left to the Kenningtons, who had been informed about Lawrence’s beatings, to give the details to an astonished Liddell Hart and warn him to stay clear of the courts.14
Meanwhile, Lawrence’s defenders twisted arms at Collins and prepared to engage Aldington head on with Liddell Hart’s seven-page counterblast entitled ‘Aldington’s “Lawrence”: His Charges and the Treatment of Evidence’, which was on the desks of all possible reviewers before 31 January 1955, Aldington’s publication day. Its circulation helped to ensure that two-thirds of Aldington’s reviews were uncomplimentary. Some reviewers, like Graves who slated Aldington in the News Chronicle, did not bother to read the book, but based their criticism entirely upon Liddell Hart’s little diatribe. In Graves’s case, this slovenliness led him to castigate a passage quoted by Liddell Hart which had previously been cut by Collins.15
It soon became apparent that the anti-Aldington campaign had backfired. Aldington’s biography was certainly acerbic in tone and, at times, mean-spirited, but his relentless analysis of the inconsistencies in the received version of Lawrence’s life rang true. Indeed, Aldington had struck the right note for many of his audience who were no longer willing to accept Lawrencian orthodoxy unquestioningly. This scepticism was evident among friends of the Spectator’s reviewer when he canvassed them before Aldington’s biography appeared. They considered its subject ‘a notable but overvalued figure whose reduction to man-size was overdue’. ‘Debunking,’ he concluded, had been a consequence of the Second World War and was now part of the spirit of the age, so that ‘to be told these days that a man of great talent is also an exhibitionist and a charlatan is less of a surprise than it was.’16 The novelist Anthony Powell took a similar line in Punch, where his review was illustrated by a sketch of an effete Lawrence preening himself before a theatrical dressing-room mirror.17 Powell thought that Aldington had written what was ‘in some ways a painful book’ but ‘it is really better that some of the truth should be known, and especially that a lot of nonsense about this country “letting down the Arabs” is shown up for what it is worth’. Lawrence’s legend was part of a wider national myth and the time was now ripe for both to be scrutinised.
In a measured review in the Daily Telegraph, Lord Vansittart recommended Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry as ‘well written’ and deserving to be widely read. ‘Hero worship has been carried too far, and we can all do with some diminution,’ he continued, and it was unrealistic to imagine that Lawrence’s overblown reputation could have been preserved inviolate for ever. Nevertheless, and remembering the man he had liked so much thirty years before, Vansittart was generous: Lawrence was undoubtedly a ‘show-off’, but ‘he had something to show’.18
This assessment provoked a fascinating correspondence. There was a pro-Lawrence camp whose members recalled him with affection as a decent comrade whose flaws were minor. He was ‘a bit of an actor’, according to Sir Wyndham Deedes, and Captain Gilman from Aqaba days remembered his ‘Puck-like mentality’ and an ‘Irish’ love of leg-pulling.
But there were also many who were pleased that the Lawrence bubble had at last been pricked. Major-General Lord Burnham, the managing-director of the Telegraph, tilted at one of the leading mythmakers, Liddell Hart. Lawrence, he wrote, had been ‘a bit of a charlatan and bit of
a poseur’ who had engaged in some ‘splendid adventures’, but he had never been the military genius of Liddell Hart’s imagination. The railway raids had made virtually no impact on the war in the Middle East, and it was silly to assume automatically that ‘every irregular had to be brilliant, every regular hide-bound and slow’. Major-General Sir George Barrow, then in his ninetieth year, also weighed in, recalling Lawrence’s behaviour at Dera (which Aldington had cited) and an off-the-cuff remark of Allenby’s: ‘I had several officers who would have done as well and some who would have done better.’19 (He had also made this observation to Major-General Sir Richard Edmonds.)20 Air-Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris wrote endorsing Barrow’s integrity and honour, which partly took the edge off Liddell Hart’s unkind reference to his age in his counter-attack on representatives of his old antagonist, the military establishment which was now lining up with Aldington.21
Liddell Hart was also embattled on another front, the correspondence columns of Illustrated, a popular magazine which had given Aldington a platform from which to defend his methods and conclusions. Again, Lawrence’s detractors were quick off the mark. One recalled that he had been known among those who served in Palestine as ‘a charlatan and self-advertiser’, while Squadron-Leader Breese remembered Lawrence at Uxbridge. Lawrence had announced himself as a great writer who needed a private room for his work, prefacing his demand with, ‘I suppose you know who I am.’ Breese certainly did; Lawrence had already been identified by an NCO as a trouble-maker, and his untidiness, lateness for a parade and impertinence had put him in line for a discharge.22
Aldington’s biography and the campaign against it and its author which Liddell Hart had orchestrated was having unlocked for consequences. Those who had known Lawrence but had not been overwhelmed by him and who later looked askance at how he and his deeds had been exaggerated were emerging from their bunkers. Some at least of Aldington’s judgements were being endorsed by those, like Vansittart and Barrow, in a position to know and whose opinions carried some weight.
Another can of worms was opened when Liddell Hart launched a fresh offensive against Aldington in the London Magazine in April. His antagonist retaliated through Robert Lyle, a poet, who quoted remarks made about Lawrence by Major-General Rankin in the Melbourne Argus of 2 March. Rankin, who had commanded the 4th Light Horse in Palestine and Syria, remembered a conversation about Lawrence he had once had with Newcombe:
I once asked Newcombe: ‘Why do you stand this little tinpot fake swaggering around taking whatever kudos is going?’ Newcombe replied: ‘I am a regular Army officer, and it is not my job to attract attention to myself. Besides, it wouldn’t help my work.’
Button-holed by Liddell Hart, Newcombe admitted the tenor of what he had said, but failed to remember exactly when and where he had spoken to Rankin. This was enough for Liddell Hart who promptly stated in the London Magazine that Newcombe had never made the remarks.23 It says much for the passion which the Aldington affair was generating that Liddell Hart was prepared to distort the truth in Lawrence’s defence.
By June 1955 he was wearying of the struggle, which, he ruefully admitted, had consumed energies which could have been more profitably expended in writing. As a Parthian shot, he delivered offprints of the London Review exchanges to Cloud’s Hill, where they were given to visitors by Lawrence’s sometime friends and retainers, Pat and Joyce Knowles. When their stock ran dry, replenishments were provided, paid for by Lawrence’s trustees at Arnold Lawrence’s suggestion.
A dispassionate observer of the Aldington—Lawrence imbroglio significantly detected ‘undertones of uneasiness in the reviews, as though it were not Lawrence that was on trial but the reviewers themselves and their generation’.24 In 1969, when the salient facts of the anti-Aldington conspiracy were exposed in Private Eye, the anonymous author described Aldington’s book as ‘a frontal attack not only on a contemporary hero, but on the literary freemasonry of which Lawrence had been a member and which had produced so many books about him’.25
Self-interest was obviously one reason why Liddell Hart, Graves and Garnett combined for what turned out to be a rather squalid exercise in string-pulling and polemic. They were defending their own integrity, for if what Aldington said was true, each had been so mesmerised by Lawrence as to compound his falsehoods. At best they had been extremely sloppy in checking what he had told them. This explains why their stridency matched Aldington’s and why, ultimately, they failed to deflect his criticism. Time wasted arguing over such pedantic points as to whether Lawrence was ever offered the post of High Commissioner in Egypt might have been better used challenging Aldington’s central thesis, which was that because Lawrence told lies on occasions he was incapable of telling the truth at any time. But they had trapped themselves by their unwavering attachment to Lawrence’s integrity and so they could not countenance a defence which even hinted at even momentary mendacity.
II
The Legend Reborn: 1956-1995
The Aldington brouhaha pushed Lawrence into the forefront of public consciousness where he remained for the next forty years. In large part interest in him has been the result of David Lean’s highly successful film Lawrence of Arabia which appeared in 1962, has been seen many times on television, and which was re-issued in a new, uncut version in 1988. The film was the apotheosis of the Lawrence legend, a presentation of history as it should have been. In its way it did for Lawrence what Shakespeare did for Henry V, although Lean and his scriptwriter, Robert Bolt, did not shrink from exposing flaws within the hero’s personality.
While the cinema created a compelling version of Lawrence the hero, he was undergoing fresh and often highly critical scrutiny, much of it the consequence of Aldington’s investigations. He had suggested that there might have been two Lawrences, one the figment of his own and his friends’ imaginations, and another quite different and far less attractive creature. By arguing, and to his own satisfaction proving that Lawrence had been a habitual liar, Aldington had forced subsequent biographers into two camps, traditionalist and revisionist. Lawrence was thrown into that historical—literary arena, hitherto occupied by figures such as Richard III, where champions and their adversaries rode their hobby-horses into battle.
At the same time, national moral, social and political attitudes were changing. The 1960s witnessed a sequence of revolutions and part-revolutions in which tradition of every kind was dissected and invariably found to be wanting. Lawrence belonged to the age of empire which was being abruptly ended and the deeds which had made him famous became tainted as imperial values came under attack. Sexual shibboleths were also tumbling; in 1967 homosexual acts between consenting adult males ceased to be illegal and what had once been a taboo subject was freely aired. The stigma attached to being homosexual disappeared, but gradually. Against this background, and with the help of various revelations, details of Lawrence’s secret life of chastisement became public. Commenting on this, one reviewer remarked in 1969 that: ‘Apart from the Biggles or Henty nature of his desert exploits (which remain remarkable despite Richard Aldington’s exposure of his habitual mendacity) Lawrence’s interest lies in the complexity of his nature.’1 Exploring this nature was synonymous, in the 1960s terms at least, with a quest to uncover the sexual elements in Lawrence’s life. His brother disliked the trend, claiming that a man’s sexuality was his private affair. The trouble was that Lawrence had not kept his to himself.
This period began with the publication of what was the most adoring biography of Lawrence, The Desert and the Stars: A Portrait of T.E. Lawrence by Flora Armitage. It appeared in 1956 and was a passionate answer to Aldington. It suffered, however, from an inappropriate style, derived from that school of romantic fiction so delightfully parodied by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm. One sentence may stand for many: ‘The house at Tremadoc in Carnarvonshire where he was born stood in a garden where the August flowers bowed their heads to the wind, and over which islands of Atlantic cumulus moved in shadowing phalanxes.�
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Lawrence was about to receive romantic treatment of another sort. The Rank Organisation had obtained Korda’s film rights and had earmarked £750,000 for a production which was to be both lavish and have a strong popular appeal, with Dirk Bogarde playing the lead.2 The script had been entrusted to a leading West End playwright, Terence Rattigan, but by 1959 Rank had abandoned the project. Rattigan did not, and from the wreckage of the film scenario emerged his play Ross. It was intended as a psychological study and took as its starting point Rattigan’s assumption that what had happened at Dera held the key to Lawrence’s subsequent behaviour, particularly his search for obscurity .
The play begins with Lawrence in his new identity as Aircraftman Ross at Uxbridge depot, and in an extended flashback it traces his wartime career. His degradation and rape at Dera is the pivot of the plot, for it is presented as a devious chicane by which the Bey seeks to undermine Lawrence’s self-respect and so render him a less effective and dangerous adversary. The ordeal over, the Turk observes, ‘I know what was revealed to you tonight, and I know what the revelation will have done to you.’
While Rattigan had been working on Ross, the American film producer, Sam Spiegel, had acquired the rights for a Lawrence film. Discountenanced by the possibility of a rival production, albeit in the theatre, he encouraged Professor Lawrence to take legal measures to have the play banned.3 Arnold Lawrence, who had profited from the deal with Spiegel, may have needed little encouragement, for he was worried what Rattigan, a homosexual, might make of his brother’s sexuality. Always aware of the allegations that had been made in the past and which had just been revived by Aldington, he was very sensitive about this matter. Some years later, according to the American writer Professor Jeffrey Meyers, he had withheld permission for copyright Lawrence material to be quoted in a scholarly article which hinted at his brother’s homosexuality.4 Be this as it may, the agency for Ross’s extinction was the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Scarborough, who shouldered the twin burdens of courtier and theatre overlord. His powers of censorship included the right to ban a play which portrayed an actual person if its author did not have the permission of the subject’s family.
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