Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

by Michael Korda

  He was still working on his manuscript, but without any conviction that it should ever be published. It was a giant, self-imposed task; and whereas most people write in the expectation of seeing their books published and reviewed, Lawrence seemed to be writing to get the war, and his role in it, out of his system. Perhaps for that reason, he included material that might be judged libelous or even obscene, by the strict standards of the time.

  On August 14, 1919, Lowell Thomas’s “illustrated travelogue” opened at least at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Lawrence had not been affected by Thomas’s success in New York—in the days before radio or television, let alone instant telephone communication, New York was far away, and a theatrical success there was merely a curiosity on the opposite side of the Atlantic. But in London Thomas made Lawrence, overnight, by far the most famous and acclaimed British hero of World War I, and what is more, a live hero, who lived only a short train ride from London. Lawrence had cooperated willingly with Thomas and Chase at Aqaba, on what he thought was a “propaganda film” for the American government, made under the orders of Colonel House, President Wilson’s closest adviser. Even so, he gave the two Americans only a few days of his time, and was notably reticent. He saw no harm in pulling Thomas’s leg, or in having a little fun at his expense, and cannot have imagined that the film would ever be made, or indeed that he would live to watch it, still less that it would be enlarged into a kind of three-ring circus. His colleagues at Aqaba had had their fun with Thomas too, telling him tall tales and burnishing Lawrence’s legend. Aqaba was a dull, infernally hot place, and the opportunity of amusing themselves at the expense of two earnest Americans was not to be missed.

  None of this is to suggest that Lowell Thomas was taken in—he was anything but credulous—but he was a showman, looking for a great story and, if possible, for a British hero who could be made appealing to an American audience (not an easy task, given the constraints of the British class system). He saw no profit in skepticism, and never hesitated to turn a good story into a better one, and Lawrence was first and foremost a good story, set against a great background. Thomas made the most of it.

  Although Lawrence has been criticized for cooperating with Thomas, he could hardly have foreseen that a documentary film would fill London’s biggest halls and theaters to capacity six nights a week and two matinees, let alone that the Metropolitan Police would have to be called out in force night after night to handle the huge crowds. On the night the Allenbys attended the show, Lowell Thomas reported that “Bow Street was jammed all the way from the Strand to Covent Garden … and we turned away more than ten thousand people.” Lowell Thomas’s wife, Fran, wrote to her parents that the show was having “a colossal success,” and she was not exaggerating. Lawrence himself saw it five or seven times (depending on whose account we believe), apparently without being recognized except by Fran Thomas, who noted that “he would blush crimson, laugh in confusion, and hurry away with a stammered word of apology.” That Lawrence was not initially offended at being turned into what he called “a matinée idol” seems clear enough. He wrote a nice letter to Thomas, adding that he thanked God the lights were out when he saw the show, and invited the Thomases to Oxford for a sightseeing tour.

  Thomas had not only put Arabia on the map but made T. E. Lawrence a perennial celebrity. The normally staid Daily Telegraph summed it up nicely: “Thomas Lawrence, the archaeologist, … went out to Arabia and, practically unaided, raised for the first time almost since history began a great homogeneous Arab army.” The Telegraph predicted that, thanks to Thomas, “the name Lawrence will go down to remotest posterity besides the names of half a dozen men who dominate history.”

  Lawrence would have had to be superhuman not to feel a glow at all this fame and praise. However much he pointed out that he had not been unaided, that he was only one of a number of British officers helping the Arabs, his modesty only increased his popularity and fame. Here was no boastful hero, but a shy, modest, unassuming one, willing, even eager, to give credit to others. Lowell Thomas, in fact, stated how difficult it was to interview Lawrence about his own feats, then went on to publish in Strand Magazine a series of hero-worshipping articles about Lawrence, which, together with his lecture, he would soon transform into an internationally best-selling book.

  “In the history of the world (cheap edition),” Lawrence complained to his old friend Newcombe about Lowell Thomas, “I’m a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second Knight, a Strand-Magazine strummer.”

  It is against this background that one must view Lawrence’s life in 1919: as an ex-soldier struggling with a huge and difficult book; as a diplomat whose effort to give Feisal and the Arabs an independent state had failed; as a man who, to quote Kipling, “had walked with kings, nor lost the common touch,” and was now stranded in his rooms in an Oxford college, or at home under the thumb of a demanding mother, all the time besieged by admirers, well-wishers, celebrity hunters, and cranks.

  Lawrence tried to take up some of his old interests—he wrote to his friend Vyvyan Richards about resuming their old plan for setting up a printing press together to produce fine, limited editions of great books. It says much for Richards’s affection for Lawrence that he was still open to this pipe dream after an interval of so many years; and it is hard not to believe that at this point Lawrence was simply casting around for some escape from the demands of his book, which was constantly growing in complexity, and from the rapidity with which his real accomplishments were being overshadowed by Thomas’s romantic image.

  It is possible that the completion of Seven Pillars of Wisdom might have solved many of these problems—he had already written more than 200,000 words—but since at the time Lawrence didn’t expect to publish it, the book remained, in a sense, a perverse blind alley. One of Lawrence’s peculiarities as a writer was that despite his immense gifts, he believed firmly that writing was a skill which could be learned like demolition, and he was constantly on the lookout for people who could teach him the formula for writing poetry or constructing a sentence. More often than not, such suggestions, however sensible, were ignored. Like Charles Doughty, whose Arabia Deserta he so much admired, Lawrence seems to have invented his own prose style, which is at once archaic and lush, and becomes simple only when he is writing directly about the fighting. The descriptions of landscapes are magnificent, but throughout the whole long book—it grew to some 400,000 words at one point, and was eventually cut to about 335,000 for the so-called Oxford text of 1922, which is now regarded as definitive—there is a sense of a man perhaps trying too hard to produce a masterpiece. This need not necessarily be a bad thing—neither Ulysses nor Finnegans Wake is an easy book to read, after all; and D. H. Lawrence, whose books T. E. Lawrence admired (although in Lady Chatterley’s Lover D. H. Lawrence made fun of a certain “Colonel C. E. Florence … who preferred to become a private soldier”*), worked hard to produce a prose style distinctly his own. Still, there can hardly be a book in the history of English literature that was ever more thoroughly rewritten, revised, and agonized over line by line than Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the pity of it is that it shows. It was a labor, not so much of love as of need, duty, and pride, and—more than that—another self-imposed challenge.

  Whatever its merits, the first draft of the book, containing all but three of the eleven sections, much of Lawrence’s research material, and many of his photographs, was either lost or stolen from him in Reading Station late in 1919—a catastrophe that can only have added to his depression. Although the full text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom would never be published in any conventional way in Lawrence’s lifetime (he went to enormous trouble and expense, as we shall see, to produce his own limited subscription edition, and to protect the copyright in Great Britain and the United States), Lawrence had occasionally handed the manuscript to his friends for their suggestions or corrections—at least four people seem to have read it in handwritten form. That explains why he sent or gave his only copy to Lieute
nant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, who was then posted to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Lawrence went down to get his friend’s opinion and corrections, and to go back to Oxford with the manuscript. So many versions of what then happened have been related, some of them fanciful, that it has become part of Lawrence’s legend. These include the possibility that Lawrence may have “lost” the manuscript deliberately, in other words, abandoned it; that it was stolen by an agent of the British or French secret service to ensure it would never be published; and that the incident was totally fabricated by Lawrence, presumably out of morbid vanity or to add a note of drama to the writing of the book. All these theories are unlikely—Lawrence was genuinely distraught, and Hogarth was horrified when he heard of the loss.

  The truth is quite simple: Lawrence had neglected to bring a briefcase with him to carry the manuscript, so Dawnay lent him an “official” one. Such a briefcase does not resemble a bank messenger’s bag, as has been suggested, but is made of black leather, with the royal coat of arms stamped on the front flap in gold—quite an impressive-looking object. Obliged to change trains at Reading, Lawrence waited in the station café, and when his train was called he boarded it without picking up the briefcase, which he had placed under the table. Despite great efforts, the case was never found or returned.

  It may of course be true that Lawrence had a subconscious desire to lose it, though this seems rather far-fetched; and it certainly seems odd that a thief would pick up the briefcase, examine the contents, and not think in terms of returning it for a reward—but then, we have no way of knowing whether the manuscript had Lawrence’s name and address on it. In any event, it vanished. Lawrence’s initial reaction was hysterical laughter, perhaps to avoid tears. Of course it may seem odd today to give the only copy even to so trustworthy a friend as Alan Dawnay, but in those days the only way to copy a handwritten manuscript was by photographing every page. Hence most writers either typed a copy and a “carbon” or hired a typist to do it. Oxford must have been full of such typists, given the number of theses and manuscripts being written there, but Lawrence may not have wanted to be bothered hiring one, or may have felt it was too expensive.

  There seems to have been no doubt in his mind that he would start from scratch and write it all over again, and Hogarth urged on him the importance of doing just that. By this time, Lawrence seems to have been fed up with All Souls, or more likely with his mother, since he spent more of his nights at Polstead Road than at All Souls, and he accepted the offer of Sir Herbert Baker, a distinguished architect he had met, to lend him the top floor of a building Baker rented in Westminster for an office. Sitting down to reconstruct a whole book would be a grueling and daunting task for anyone, but Lawrence made it an exhausting and physically punishing marathon, perhaps because only by turning it into a physical and mental challenge could he force himself to do it at all. He wrote at an incredible pace, producing “95% of the book in thirty days,” sometimes writing thousands of words at a sitting, and eventually completing more than 400,000 words. At one point he wrote 30,000 words nonstop in twenty-two hours, possibly a world’s record. It is almost impossible to keep straight the number of parts that Lawrence wrote—he called these parts “books,” and their number varies from seven to ten. Some of the books he would revise again and again over the next six years, particularly Book VI, which describes the incident at Deraa.

  Probably no part of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, even the pages about Deraa, gave Lawrence more trouble than the dedication of the work, which he went to endless pains to get right. He not only wrote it over and over again, but—unsure whether it was prose or poetry—gave it to his young friend Robert Graves, already an admired war poet, to help him turn it into blank verse, and submitted it to at least one other poet for advice. Despite changes made by Graves, it is what it is, neither fish nor fowl, at once awkward and deeply moving:

  To S.A.

  I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars

  To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me

  When we came.

  Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near

  and saw you waiting:

  When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me

  and took you apart:

  Into his quietness.

  Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage

  ours for the moment

  Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind

  worms grew fat upon Your substance.

  Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a memory of you.

  But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now

  The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow Of your gift.

  The identity of S.A. has stirred up controversy ever since the book first appeared in print, partly because Lawrence was deliberately mysterious. It has been suggested that the dedication is to Sarah Aaronsohn, a courageous Jewish spy who committed suicide after being captured and tortured by the Turks; or to Fareedeh el Akle, Lawrence’s teacher of Arabic. Since Lawrence never met Sarah Aaronsohn, and since Fareedeh el Akle lived on to great old age denying that Lawrence had dedicated the book to her, neither theory is plausible. Lawrence himself further confused the matter by saying that S.A. represented both a person and a place; but it seems self-evident from the context that the dedication is to

  Dahoum, his friend in Carchemish before the war, and that it expresses not only Lawrence’s love for Dahoum but his bitter regret that Dahoum did not live to see the victory.

  The first four lines also suggest a very unusual degree of grandiloquence for Lawrence: “I drew these tides of men into my hands” and “wrote my will across the sky in stars” are an usually direct claim to Lawrence’s authorship and leadership of the Arab Revolt, in contrast to his usual practice of giving full credit to other people. If they represent his real feelings—as they may, since the dedication is evidently to Dahoum—this is one of the few places where Lawrence lets his real self and his pride show through, an unexpected moment when the hero appears without apology or disguise.

  Like many great works of literature Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a product of an intense obsession, driven first by Lawrence’s need to explore and explain his own role in the Arab Revolt, and second by his need to portray the revolt as an epic, heroic struggle, full of larger-than-life figures (Auda Abu Tayi, for instance) and noble motives (those of Feisal particularly). Also as with many of the world’s great books, the author was unwilling to give it up, or stop changing and revising it. Seven Pillars of Wisdom remained a work in progress until 1927, and even today is still available in two different versions. Although Lawrence was scrupulously accurate about himself, in this book he approached the Arabs in much the same spirit as Shakespeare approached the English in Henry V, determined to make his readers see them as he did—as glorious figures, inspired by a great ideal. When parts of the story did not reflect this, he played them down as much as possible.

  The top floor of Baker’s building was unheated, so Lawrence worked through the nights in a “flying suit,” believing that cold, hunger, and lack of sleep would concentrate his mind. The room had neither a kitchen nor running water, so he lived off sandwiches and mugs of tea bought at street stands, and he washed at public baths, a London institution that has pretty much vanished.

  In his authorized biography, Jeremy Wilson points out, correctly, that Lawrence got a head start by incorporating into his manuscript all the reports of his actions he had written for the Arab Bulletin, and that he decided to alleviate the comparative dryness of these reports by inserting long and sometimes lyrical descriptions of the landscape. This explains the curious shifts of tone in the finished book, from reportorial to lyrical. Wilson suggests that the second version—the version Lawrence wrote under such intense, self-imposed pressure—was deliberately intended
to underplay the British role in the Arab Revolt, so as to build up Feisal’s claim to Syria. When he wrote the lost first draft, in Paris and on the way to Egypt and back, Lawrence may still have had some hope that the French would relent, or that the British (and perhaps the Americans) would force them to, but by the winter of 1919-1920 he can have had no such illusion, so the second draft may have been written more as a propaganda document than the first. As Wilson puts it, “the book had now assumed a strongly political role"—though what use it would have been to the Arab cause if it was not going to be published remains unclear. In any case, from the beginning, Lawrence had tried carefully to put the spotlight on the Arabs, without in any way diminishing the enormous contribution made by British money, arms, specialists, officers, and men, and by the Royal Navy. We cannot examine the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but in every subsequent version of the book Lawrence seems notably fair-minded toward the Indian machine gunners, the British armored car personnel and drivers, and above all Allenby and his staff, though they are overshadowed by the greater glamour of the Bedouin tribesmen. Still, the book was Lawrence’s story, and his story was among and about the Arabs.