Rattigan was able to frustrate this attempt to halt the production of his play by threatening to have it transferred to television or a New York theatre, both of which were beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil.5 Ross opened at the Haymarket in May 1960 with outstanding performances from Alec Guinness as Lawrence and Harry Andrews as Allenby. Alan Brian rated it the ‘best acted, best-written play in London’, a judgement vindicated by its run of over 700 performances. 6 It enjoyed similar success in New York, where it opened in December 1961 with John Mills in the title role.
Inevitably, given its scale and cast, David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia overshadowed the play. It had its London premiere in December 1962 in the presence of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh and within a year had scooped an impressive bundle of American, British, Italian and Japanese awards, including seven Oscars. These went to Spiegel, Lean, Freddie Young (the cameraman), Maurice Jarre (score) and to those responsible for the sound track, art direction and to the film as a whole, which the Hollywood luminaries judged the best of the year.
Lawrence of Arabia deserved its plaudits and lived up to its poster puff as ‘The Unique Film Experience’, not least on account of its length—three hours and forty-one minutes. It was truly the stuff of legends, an idealised, visually stunning version of history acted out in a dramatic landscape to a powerful Bruckneresque score. It is the past as it ought to have been. Peter O‘Toole was a striking Lawrence, even though he was over six feet in height, and he made much of his subject as a self-conscious actor relishing the limelight. This is nowhere better shown than where he cavorts in his white robes before an audience of approving Arabs. Such flourishes dismayed some of those who had known Lawrence and, predictably, Liddell Hart grumbled.7 He challenged the authenticity of O’Toole’s Lawrence, saying that he had failed to reproduce the ‘manner, speech and behaviour’ of the original. This was just as well, for cinema-goers in the sixties might have reacted adversely to the actual Lawrence’s Edwardian Oxonian accent.8 Liddell Hart concluded that the film was ‘a fascinating and striking work of fiction’.
This was also the verdict of Professor Lawrence who had been disturbed by the vivid representation of his brother’s bloodlust after the Tafas massacre and the scene in which Allenby cynically allowed Damascus to burn in order to bring the Arabs to heel. Referring to The Times’s review of the film the professor summed it up as an ‘adventure story‘ which satisfied ‘the eye rather than the mind’. Viscountess Allenby was indignant about the ‘slanderous interpretation’ of her kinsman by marriage and regretted the absence of a legal remedy.9
Lawrence of Arabia was never intended as a visual history lesson; Spiegel wanted box office returns. The distortions are, however, as unneccesary as they are irksome. Two important characters, Dryden the diplomat (Claud Rains) and Colonel Brighton (Anthony Quayle) never existed but appear in the first instance to be an amalgam of McMahon and Storrs, and in the second, Colonels Joyce and Newcombe. In terms of plot and characterisation they and Allenby (Jack Hawkins) represent in a rough-and-ready way the constraints of old men, realists whom experience has made Machiavellian to the point of dishonesty. By contrast, Lawrence stands for youth and its often tactless sense of vision–a point made at the beginning of the film by Faisal (Alec Guinness). As the story unfolds, this theme develops as Lawrence finds himself faced with decisions which test his loyalty, both to his masters and the Arabs. What he will become is revealed by ‘Bentley’, an American newspaperman who stands in for Lowell Thomas.
Accounting for the film’s success, one reviewer noticed that, as a secret agent, Lawrence possessed intriguing and glamorous qualities which had a powerful popular appeal; this was the time when the Cold War was at its most intense. Lawrence was also ‘a sort of superior Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond’ and, as portrayed in the film, ‘gives us the picture of imperialism we all crave for: the man himself stimulates our nostalgia for lost glory, while his doubts and anxieties act as a sop to our conscience.’10 This was percipient, for a few days before the film’s London opening, the former American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had made that celebrated speech in which he alleged that: ‘Great Britain had lost an empire and not found a role.’ A derelict nation that was fast shedding its colonies and had lost its old status in the world might find some comfort in a film which celebrated its past glories. Moreover, the screen Lawrence was a reminder that the country had once been served by men of genius and superhuman energy.
David Lean was an old hand at directing films in which imperial nostalgia had been mixed with the realism that audiences were now demanding. His Bridge on the River Kwai was, in part, a moving tribute to the martial virtues that had contributed so much to national pride and greatness. Films of this genre enjoyed considerable popularity during the late fifties and early sixties when British and American studios produced such epics as Fifty-Five Days in Peking, Zulu and Khartoum. Each matched Lawrence of Arabia in scale, and all carefully avoided the triumphalist aspects of empire while treating its personalities and values with sympathy.
Ross and Lawrence of Arabia encouraged the publication of a new biography of Lawrence by Anthony Nutting and the re-issue of Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia. Nutting had been a Tory minister who had resigned from Eden’s Cabinet in protest against the invasion of Egypt in October 1956. He went on to advise Lean during the making of the film, but his largely pro-Lawrence biography had nothing to say that was new or original. The paperback of With Lawrence in Arabia was a straightforward attempt to cash in on the interest aroused by the film. Its cover and all but one of its illustrations were stills from the film, and its author was advertised as the man who had created the Lawrence legend. In the introduction Lowell Thomas dismisses Lawrence’s critics with a barrage of encomiums delivered by the great men he had known. For Lowell Thomas, Lawrence’s star was undimmed. He concluded: ‘After forty-five years, do I still think that one day he may be another Achilles, Siegfried, or El Cid? Yes, I do.’
He was correct. The film had assured Lawrence a permanent place among the superheroes of history, but at a moment when the temper of the times was beginning to turn against such creatures. As the sixties progressed, and in great part as a consequence of the Vietnam War, warriors and war were collectively mistrusted, often loathed. This period saw a renewed investigation of Lawrence as a historical figure, a process made possible by the opening in 1968 of official records of the First World War and its aftermath, and the increasing public availability of the private papers of the great men of that era. It was now possible to test what Lawrence had written about himself and the events he had taken part in, as well as to delve deeply into the machinations of the government he had served.
In these circumstances a fuller picture of Lawrence would emerge and with it a reassessment of his importance. His role in the Arab Revolt was closely examined in Professor Suleiman Mousa’s T.E. Lawrence: An Arab View which had been first published in Arabic in 1962. The English translation appeared four years after and ruffled a few feathers. Using hitherto ignored Arab sources, Mousa contended that Lawrence had frequently been frugal with the truth, and went so far as to suggest that he had fabricated his first lone reconnaissance into Syria and the Dera incident. Not surprisingly, Mousa ran into trouble with the Seven Pillars trustees, who allowed him to quote copyright material directly rather than summaries. His publishers, Oxford University Press, were, however, obliged to issue the book with an envoy, in which Arnold Lawrence rebutted some of Mousa’s allegations and defended his brother’s truthfulness.
Penetration of the inner Lawrence and analysis of his internal struggles were the aims of an American professor of psychiatry, John Mack of the Harvard Medical School. Towards the end of 1966 he heard that Robert Graves knew some unknown facts about Lawrence’s sexuality and the following summer Mack visited him on Majorca. Here he heard something about Lawrence’s flagellation and he made further enquiries to Liddell Hart who directed him to Professor Lawrence in Augus
t 1967. Arnold Lawrence was willing to discuss the matter with Mack, who seemed well qualified to evaluate his brother’s behaviour clinically.
In the meantime, John Bruce, now in his sixties and in straitened circumstances, was approaching various newspapers with the story of his relationship with Lawrence. At first, his efforts met with little success, for editors immediately turned to the solicitors of the Seven Pillars Trust who warned them off. Furthermore, there were some details in Bruce’s revelations which did not ring true. Colin Simpson and Phillip Knightley of the Sunday Times went further than most and discovered that Bruce had in fact enlisted in the Tank Corps alongside Lawrence in 1923–they had consecutive army numbers. His tale was not, therefore, all invention.
In March 1968, Simpson and Knightley approached Professor Lawrence, who, over lunch, gave them full permission to go through his brother’s papers which were held in the Bodleian. From the start, he hoped that the matter of the ritual beatings would be handled in a sympathetic way which, in his own words, would show how ‘my brother, while in physical and mental distress, invented the myth of an implacable uncle’s demands, and induced Bruce to execute them’.11 Internal stress rather than any desire for sexual stimulation was the source of Lawrence’s behaviour. This was the diagnosis of Mack, who later regretted that Knightley and Simpson had not ‘placed in a larger psychological perspective’ what he called Lawrence’s ‘masochistic disorder’.12
Bruce received £2,500 for his story which was published as part of a sequence of articles which appeared in the Sunday Times during the summer of 1968. The trailer for the pieces claimed that Professor Lawrence had ‘assisted in every way’, and even reproduced a copy of the note which had given Knightley and Simpson access to documents which were under embargo until 2000.13 The Sunday Times material formed the basis for a book The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia which appeared in the autumn of 1969.
The Secret Lives broke new ground, not only because it described Lawrence’s regime of correction. The research team had trawled newly opened official files and interviewed what was then a dwindling band of men and women who had known Lawrence intimately. Among the revelations was the letter written in 1919 in which Lawrence first outlined his experience at Dera and the interviews with members of the Bey’s family. There were a few red herrings, such as the claim that the excavations at Karkamis were a cover for spying on the Berlin—Baghdad railway. Some of Bruce’s original statements had been amended or cut, most notably the version of his first meeting with Lawrence early in 1922, perhaps because Lord Rennell of Rodd, the owner of the flat, was still alive.
Professor Lawrence was displeased with The Secret Lives. He expressed his misgivings in a letter to The Times written at the beginning of October 1969. The newspaper was unhappy about the missive and had it scrutinised by three lawyers who excised derogatory comments about Knightley and Simpson. Even so the paper was nervous and Professor Lawrence had to make available £7,000 as an indemnity for libel before the letter was finally published on 22 November.14 It took Bruce to task for past inventions (such as his story that he and Lawrence had undertaken an undercover mission on the North-West Frontier) and pointed out some inconsistencies in his account of his everyday relations with Lawrence.
The Secret Lives was, by and large, well received by reviewers because it added novel and perplexing features to the Lawrence story. He emerged (not surprisingly given his wartime duties) as an agent of British imperialism which, in 1968, diminished his stature in the eyes of those for whom the empire had become a source of shame. Despite its implausibilities, Bruce’s account of his dealings with Lawrence made it easier to focus more closely on the workings of his mind and the pressure which he must have been under during the last phases of his life. Bruce’s evidence, coupled with that collected by Mack suggested what many had long suspected, that Lawrence was homosexually inclined, an inference which was strongly denied by Professor Lawrence and Mack. Most importantly, henceforward all Lawrence biographers could supplement and on occasion test his words against other sources.
Professor Mack’s study of Lawrence A Prince of our Disorder, the Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976) was to a large extent a close examination of the inner Lawrence, although he did not neglect the public man and made use of official files. The title, a quotation from Hamlet, announced the author’s purpose which was to extract universal truths from an analysis of interior torments of one highly intelligent and articulate man. Lawrence’s problems of identity and neuroses reflected the preoccupations of a disturbed century. A man seemingly wrestling with himself was peculiarly suited to represent millions of others similarly afflicted with a distemper which, Mack believed, had yet to run its course. He was also, Mack claimed, comparable with Gandhi, in that he embraced liberal and essentially pacific ideals, which qualified him as a hero for the American liberal intelligentsia of the post-Vietnam era.
A Prince of our Disorder was the most detailed and analytical Lawrence biography to date and it won its author a Pulizter prize. It was highly sympathetic to its subject, but its approach and conclusions may not have wholly satisfied Professor Lawrence who, in 1974, approved Jeremy Wilson as his brother’s biographer. Wilson had in 1968 been entrusted with cataloguing the Lawrence papers in the Bodleian Library. An Oxford historian, he had briefly skirmished with John Bruce over the latter’s veracity, and had gone on to edit Lawrence’s anthology of other men’s verses which appeared in 1971 as Minorities.15 Professor Lawrence gave Wilson his full backing for enquiries among those who had known Lawrence or possessed material relating to him, and gave him free access to all restricted material in the Bodleian.
Reviewing A Prince of our Disorder in the Virginia Quarterly Review in autumn 1976, Professor Meyers queried Wilson’s qualifications for the task of writing on Lawrence, and added that a Lawrencian biography compiled with family assistance could never be truly dispassionate. After a robust exchange of letters with the journal’s editors and the university, Wilson agreed with Professor Lawrence to keep their contacts to the minimum. They met rarely thereafter and relations between them became strained, remaining so until the publication of Wilson’s biography at the end of 1989.16 Wilson sensed that the professor may have been anxious about what he might uncover in the course of his research; as it turned out, his fears were unfounded. In the meantime, Professor Lawrence was engaged in the preparation of a fresh and expanded edition of his brother’s letters.
Controversy over Lawrence erupted again in the summer of 1977 with the appearance of Desmond Stewart’s T.E. Lawrence. It appeared that Jeremy Wilson had come into possession of a proof copy and had read Stewart’s version of the story of how Lawrence had fallen foul of ‘Bluebeard’ in 1922. He proceeded to demand that Hamish Hamilton remove the passage on the grounds that it was a misleading interpretation of an unimportant incident. Colin Simpson rejoined by saying that he had been the source of the information which he had found among Lawrence’s then uncatalogued papers in the Bodleian nine years before. He added that he was aware of other Lawrence letters held by the solicitors Kennedy, Ponsonby and Prideaux and that the one referring to the Bluebeard incident had disappeared from the Bodleian soon after he had read it.17 After Wilson promised to tell Stewart privately the substance of the affair, the matter rested.
Stewart treated Lawrence with a benign scepticism and a quality rare in other biographies–humour. He speculated freely and, without any supportive evidence beyond intuition, argued that Lawrence had never been raped at Dera. He offered instead another scenario, el Azraq and one of Lawrence’s Arab companions. More biographies, mostly pro-Lawrence, followed during the 1980s, as well as an ambitious and interesting television documentary in 1986. It was well balanced and avoided debate, although Lawrence’s racism was examined by Professor Edward Said.
With the exception of Jeremy Wilson, who regarded himself as an academic historian, most of the recent work on Lawrence has been aimed at that popular audience whose interest stems from the film. This was
further stimulated in April 1992 by the television drama A Dangerous Man: Lawrence after Arabia It was the brainchild of filmmaker David Puttnam who tried vainly for ten years to get financial support for a play about Lawrence’s adventures during the Versailles conference. It was essentially a film for the early 1990s, concentrating on the behind-the-scenes manipulation of great power diplomacy, the sort which was coming back into fashion after the end of the Cold War.
Having set out with the admirable purpose of revealing who wheeled and dealed and why, the play ultimately fell between two stools. It had all the verisimilitude of history–the costumes, the settings and the issues–but there was also plenty of needless fabrication. For instance, there are two invented diplomats who behave in a shady fashion and seem to be a distillation of Vansittart and St John Philby, who was never present at Versailles. Nor was General Chauvel, who makes a timely interruption to inform Clemenceau of what had really happened when Dasmacus fell. There are also real characters, Meinertzhagen, Faisal and Churchill, who detects in Lawrence another ‘man of destiny’.
Lawrence himself is played by Ralph Fiennes who had previously read all he could about his subject. The play opens with him brass rubbing and, as it develops, much of what has been uncovered over the past twenty or so years is reflected in his actions. Once when approached in bed by the wife of a French diplomat he politely repels her, so hinting at sexual ambiguity. In between incidents which reveal aspects of Lawrence’s complex personality there is the big matter, the reshaping of the post-war Middle East, and here Lawrence and Faisal are babes-in-the-wood at the mercy of cunning wolves such as Curzon. As in Lean’s film, the underlying theme of A Dangerous Man is that of a flawed but fundamentally attractive visionary struggling against dull, unprincipled men, whose instincts and experience incline them towards expediency and safety. The battle between the two sorts of public men, one rare and the other common, has been a constant feature of modern public life. It can be seen in the careers of Admiral Lord Fisher, Lord Randolph Churchill and his son, Winston.
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