Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

by Michael Korda

  He did not find his commanding officer inspiring, either; and in March 1933 he “applied to be released from further service” as of April 6. Rather unimaginatively, his new commanding officer forwarded the application to the Air Ministry, with the note, “The discharge of this airman will cause no manning difficulty.” The story leaked to the newspapers, which gave it full play, alarming the air member for personnel, Air Marshal Sir Edward Ellington, GCB, CGM, CBE, since everybody from Lord Trenchard on down assumed that Lawrence was being thrown out of the RAF. Until now, Lawrence had asked his many friends in high places to use their influence to get him into the RAF or to keep him there. Now the position was reversed: the Air Ministry, deeply concerned about bad publicity, was determined to keep him in the air force at any price. The secretary of state for air, the marquess of Londonderry, demanded to know why AC1 Shaw wanted to leave the RAF. Sharply prodded by Sir Philip Sassoon—member of Parliament, undersecretary of state for air, and a friend of Lawrence’s—Air Marshal Ellington ordered Wing Commander Andrews, Lawrence’s unfortunate new commanding officer at Mount Batten, to find out whether Lawrence had any grievances, and if so to remedy them at once.

  However, Lawrence had no grievances, as such. He merely wanted a responsible job that interested him, rather than routine station duties; and he told his commanding officer that if there was any special job in which the chief of the Air Staff “could [find him] particularly useful” he would stay on—a modest enough request from an aircraftman to the chief of the Air Staff! Since Trenchard’s successor was Lawrence’s old friend Air Chief Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, a solution was quickly found. Lawrence was posted to RAF Felixstowe, site of the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment, where he would wear civilian clothes in order to avoid publicity and travel around the various boatyards producing launches for the RAF, looking after the interests of the Air Ministry. “Lawrence of Arabia has decided to stay on in the Air Force,” the secretary of the Air Ministry wrote to Trenchard, to reassure him, with a combination of relief and mild amusement. “As he knows a good deal about motor boats he has been given a fairly free hand to go round various motor boat firms in the country.” Lawrence eventually found it more convenient to take a room in Southampton, rather than live at RAF Felixstowe, and was therefore relieved of any of the normal duties of an airman. As usual, Lawrence had gotten exactly what he wanted: a job in which he could help in the design, building, and testing of high-speed motor launches, but without the supervision of an NCO or an officer, or even the need to wear uniform. It was a position unique in the RAF, tailor-made for Lawrence. At the boatyards, where everybody knew who he was, he was referred to with respect as “Mr. Shaw.”

  The long-delayed publication in the United States of Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey brought him a good deal of publicity, since his name was on it. The book was praised by the distinguished classical scholar C. M. Bowra, who “agreed with Lawrence’s view of the Odyssey as a story.” In general Lawrence received praise for his rendering of “scenes of action” and fighting, which, as in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, were his strong points as a writer. He had completed the translation on an elegiac note, writing at the end of the manuscript: “This last page of my version of the Odyssey upon which I have spent almost as long as odysseus and travelled further, which has furnished me with luxuries for five years and so wholly occupied my hours off duty that I had no leisure to enjoy them …” Indeed, Lawrence’s Odyssey is exactly that—his version, not a conventional translation, or a “crib” of the original, but rather a far more ambitious attempt to make the story accessible for a modern reader without trying to convey the poetic form of the original, and without the tiresome repetition of metaphors that had a specific emotional meaning for Homer’s audience. In Lawrence’s version, the Odyssey can be read like a novel, which of course it is, and the fact that his version of it is still in print today is proof he succeeded. Nobody, after all, understood better than Lawrence the difficulties facing a warrior and hero on returning home, or could write more feelingly about it: “surely I am not in clear-shining Ithaca? I think I have lighted on some foreign land, and you are telling me it is my Ithaca only in mockery, to cheat my soul.”

  Again and again, Odysseus reflects Lawrence’s thoughts, and his predicament: that of a man forever trapped in his role as a hero, with whatever regrets and second thoughts about the war he has fought, whose return brings him no peace, since everything at home has changed. Oxford was Lawrence’s Ithaca, but it had changed since 1914, and changed even more with the death of his father and of two brothers, and then, later, with the death of Hogarth. Lawrence had found no peace there, and placed himself in self-imposed exile. “Few men,” he wrote about Homer, “can be sailors, soldiers and naturalists,” yet Lawrence was all three: a gifted and fearless sailor (Jeremy Wilson notes that he took one of the ST 200 launches he had developed on a 740-mile journey from Calshot to Scotland through high seas and “appalling conditions” at “an average speed of 18.3 knots”); a brilliant and courageous soldier; and, as page after page of Seven Pillars of Wisdom shows, a writer about nature of no mean distinction, with amazing powers of observation and a remarkable fund of knowledge about geology, botany, and agriculture. Just as the young scholar and archaeologist had not hesitated to put his hand to generalship, and to invent his own tactics, so the task of translating into modern, idiomatic English one of the world’s greatest classics had not prevented Lawrence from succeeding at giving the work his own special stamp. From time to time, we perceive that Lawrence is mocking both the gods and Ulysses for taking themselves too seriously.

  B. H. Liddell Hart’s book, the third major biography of Lawrence written during his lifetime, was published in 1934. Liddell Hart boldly affirmed that Lawrence was a military genius of the first magnitude. Lowell Thomas’s book had come out first, in 1924, presenting Lawrence as a scholar turned warrior hero, and creating for hundreds of thousands of readers the portrait of “Lawrence of Arabia” that would persist and thrive despite every effort of Lawrence to contradict or obliterate it over the years. Lawrence’s friend Robert Graves had attempted an altogether more serious biography, published in 1927, which Lawrence went to a good deal of trouble to correct in detail, but which still portrayed him as a popular hero, though Graves was far too intelligent to be an entirely uncritical admirer. Liddell Hart was in an altogether different category; a somewhat controversial celebrity himself, he had become, at an early age, the supreme judge and critic of war and generals in Britain, and certainly the first person to make military history both popular and taken seriously as a form of literature. Generals often wrote books about each other, or about the art of war, but these were either far too technical and abstruse for the average reader or, in many cases, self-serving and intended as frontal attacks on the character and abilities of the authors’ rivals. Liddell Hart, from the beginning, sought to treat war as a science, and to write about it in prose that would be at once lively and completely accessible to the average reader. Although he reached only the rank of captain in the war, he evolved a series of theories and formulas about war that made generals and politicians come to him for advice. Liddell Hart could be waspish with those who did not agree with him, and he overwhelmed his opponents by a combination of industry—he was enormously productive—and the sheer breadth of his knowledge. His career as a self-anointed expert was helped by the fact that everyone in Britain from the king down recognized the 1914-1918 war as a military disaster that was only barely redeemed by victory and must never be repeated; hence anybody offering a way to eliminate trench warfare and frontal attacks from battle was bound to attract not only attention, but admirers and disciples. Thanks to Liddell Hart, even the generals who were responsible for the slaughter now discovered—like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, who learned to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life—that they had been practicing, with whatever deficiencies, a fine and subtle art, rather than just send
ing hundreds of thousands of men stumbling forward through mud to their death. Liddell Hart was a formidable logician and analyzer of facts. Had the line “Elementary, my dear Watson!” not already been used, he could have made it his, for in many ways he resembled Sherlock Holmes, although his magnifying glass was turned toward tactics, lines of communication, and fortifications instead of cigarette ash and footprints. An adviser to prime ministers, ministers, and generals, and a philosopher of war, he experienced almost a comedown when he accepted the post of military correspondent at the Times.

  In every way the opposite of Lawrence, Liddell Hart was tall, elegant, storklike, fond of the good things of life, and so fascinated by women that he oversaw the smallest details of the lingerie for both his wives, was exacting and deeply involved in the design of their corsets, and regularly measured the waists of his two daughters. He was in fact a walking encyclopedia on the subject of lingerie—or as one of his biographers, Alex Danchev, refers to it wittily, “l’artillerie de la nuit”—as knowledgeable about bras and merry widows and garter belts as he was about war. A perfectionist in all things, he was obsessed by the ideal of the feminine wasp waist, which was the Schwerpunkt* (to borrow a phrase from German strategic thinking) of his sexual desire. Despite these differences, he and Lawrence got along very well; and Lawrence, in his many letters to Liddell Hart and in his lengthy written commentaries on the text, is perhaps franker about himself than he is with anyone else except Charlotte Shaw. He respected Liddell Hart as a scholar, and was pleased to be taken seriously as a strategic thinker. Their admiration and friendship were genuine.

  Liddell Hart made contact with Lawrence as early as 1927, in one of his many guises as military editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—it was part of his strategy to command as many positions in the field of military commentary and journalism as he could—proposing that Lawrence should write the article on “Guerrilla Warfare.” Lawrence, then in Karachi, declined to write the entry but suggested how it could be pulled out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and Liddell Hart proceeded to do this for the fourteenth edition of the encyclopedia, above the initials T.E.L. This began a learned correspondence between the two men, which continued over the next seven years. Anybody who doubts that Lawrence was an exceptionally well-read strategic thinker need only consult the correspondence between him and Liddell Hart in T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers,† which itself provides something of a textbook in battle analysis and strategy. It was not until 1929 that Liddell Hart was finally persuaded by his agent David Higham to write a book about Lawrence. The book took him four years to complete—very unusually, since he typically dashed off books as quickly as he could, to keep his elaborate lifestyle afloat. The two men met frequently, and nothing ever dimmed Liddell Hart’s admiration for his much smaller friend (in photographs taken of the two of them, Lawrence seems dwarfed by Hart’s height, and in one of these photos he stands on a bollard to bring their heads to the same level). Liddell Hart called Lawrence “the Spirit of Freedom come incarnate to a world in fetters.” This was insightful, for even though Lawrence had placed himself in a military world of tight restraints, he remained what Liddell Hart called an “anarch,”always determined to reach his own conclusions and to do things his own way, though without forcing them on anyone else. Lawrence also told Liddell Hart, who was concerned about the daring way he rode his motorcycle, “It’ll end in tragedy one day.”

  Lawrence, standing on a bollard, with B. H. Liddell Hart.

  Still, there was no sign of gloom on Lawrence’s part, as the inevitable date of his retirement from the RAF in 1935 approached. He was spending (overspending, in fact) on the rebuilding and modernization of Clouds Hill, in anticipation of living there full-time, and seeking translation jobs from publishers to provide a modest income for himself. He would have been gratified by the reviews of Liddell Hart’s biography of him had they not reawakened people’s interest, and had he not spoken so frankly to Hart about his parentage. He had said that “Lawrence” was a name as false as “Ross” and “Shaw,” with the inevitable result that the newspapers sought to find out his real name, and came close to uncovering the secret of his illegitimate birth—about which he no longer cared, but which would have embarrassed his mother and his two surviving brothers.

  The king, in a strange moment of insight, had once called Lawrence the happiest man in the kingdom, and perhaps it was true—he was doing what he wanted to do; he had exhausted his ambitions; he had no ties to anyone or anything. His mother and his brother Bob were back in China; his youngest brother, Arnold, was married and hard at work on a career as an archaeologist. Robert Graves, who knew Lawrence as well as anyone, claimed by way of defending his right to call himself Irish, “the rhetoric of freedom, the rhetoric of chastity, the rhetoric of honour, the power to excite sudden deep affections, loyalty to the long-buried past, high aims qualified by too mocking a sense of humour, serenity clouded by petulance, and broken by occasional black despairs, playboy charm and theatricality, imagination that overruns itself and tires, extreme generosity, serpent cunning, lion courage, diabolical intuition, and the curse of self-doubt which becomes enmity to self and sometimes renouncement of all that is most loved and esteemed.” Whether these are Irish traits or not—and Lawrence’s claim to be Irish was not a strong one—perhaps nobody ever summed him up better, except that Graves left out Lawrence’s curious mixture of vanity and modesty.

  By the end of 1934, Lawrence was again facing the potential of huge publicity. The British Fascists were attempting to claim him as their own, despite the fact that he had turned down an invitation to one of their meetings with a jocular note suggesting that his only interest in them would be if they put an end to the popular press, and that he would dance on the grave of the Daily Express, Daily Chronicle, and Daily Herald. Since he signed his note, “Yours not very seriously, T. E. Shaw,” it can be assumed that he had no interest in becoming a Fascist leader, a fact which was confirmed by no less an authority than the prospective British Führer and head of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Lawrence was not about to exchange RAF blue for a black shirt, and he had no enthusiasm for Mussolini either.

  Lawrence was now working in Bridlington, Yorkshire, on the North Sea, looking after the winter overhaul of the RAF launches and living in the Ozone Hotel. His enlistment in the RAF would at last come to an end in March 1935, but so long as he was still serving, he was determined to give the RAF value for its money. He worried about how he would support himself at Clouds Hill after he left the air force, and whether he would be able to afford his motorcycle. He described his predicament to Lady Astor: “In March 1935 the RAF takes away from me the right to serve it longer, and I relapse into a self-supporting life. My Cottage, 35/—a week, 24 hours a day. I am so tired that it feels like heaven drawing near.” Job offers came in, including one as secretary to the Bank of England, though this was unlikely: it is hard to imagine him in a respectable City position, wearing striped trousers, a black coat, and a hat to work every day, neatly furled umbrella in hand. The truth was that he didn’t really want a job or a position; he simply wanted to make enough money to live his own way. Despite his years of service in the army and the RAF his personality remained basically that of a bohemian and an artist.

  He worried about the possibility that Revolt in the Desert might be made into a film; this had concerned him since 1928, when the trustees (of which he was not one) sold an option on the film rights. Lawrence was concerned not only about the publicity and the question of who would play him, but about the possibility of a ham-handed attempt to build a “sex interest” into the story, by creating a role for a female star. By now the rights had passed into the hands of Alexander Korda,* the Hungarian-born producer who had made Britain’s first internationally successful film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, in 1933. This was the first British film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and its star, Charles Laughton, became the first British actor to win an Academy Award for
Best Actor. Lawrence rightly feared that Korda was much more likely to actually make the picture than the previous owners of the rights. He went down to London to have it out with Korda, but found to his surprise that the film producer listened to him patiently and sympathetically, and appeared to agree. “I lunched with Alexander Korda, the film king,” Lawrence reported to Charlotte Shaw: “He was quite unexpectedly sensitive, for a king: seemed to understand at once the inconveniences his proposed film would set in my path … and ended the discussion by agreeing that it should not be attempted without my consent.He will not announce its abandonment, because while he has it on his list other producers will avoid thought of it. But it will not be done. You can imagine how this gladdens me.”

  Korda would later speak with great fondness of Lawrence, and described him as “the nicest man I ever failed to do business with.” What he had actually agreed to—a fine, but significant, point—was that the film would not be made without Lawrence’s consent until after his death. Far from wanting to include a “sex interest,” Korda had planned to base the script very closely on Revolt in the Desert and to have Leslie Howard play Lawrence. He wanted to have his brother Zoltan, who was about to make Sanders of the River (with Paul Robeson), direct the desert sequences; and to have his brother Vincent do the art direction. Korda liked Lawrence from the start (finding him “très sympathique”), and he also realized that making a film against Lawrence’s wishes would bring down on him a host of protests from just the kind of Englishmen whose respect and friendship he wanted. In any case, Korda regarded the ownership of the film rights of important books as a kind of savings account. He was buying the goodwill of the authors—everybody likes to receive an unexpected check, hence Korda’s purchase of the screen rights to Winston Churchill’s two-volume biography of Marlborough. Also, if he was patient, sooner or later somebody else might eventually want to make a film of even the most improbable book, and he could then sell the rights at a profit. It was a form of saving for his old age, for a man who preferred gambling to saving. In any case, the more options he took on books, the more friends he made. Lawrence understood this intuitively; he wrote to Robert Graves, “Korda is like an oil-company which has drilled often and found two or three gushers, and has prudently invested some of its proceeds in buying options over more sites. Some he may develop and others not.”