‘I am a sublimated Aladdin, the thousand and second knight.’

T.E.L. to Colonel Newcombe

EVERYBODY who adds to the Lawrence legend, and the accretions have been more than even he could have hoped for, feels the need to apologize. Though really there is no need for apology. Thomas Edward Lawrence is an opulent seam whichever way one digs into him. During the twenties and early thirties he was England’s answer to Lindbergh, except that for all his fatal staginess he was bigger, better and richer in human complexities than Lindbergh, though his rôle was much the same. The twenties liked to think that some men were islands. In T. E. Lawrence they recognized the lone hero in excelsis. They liked his indifference to fame at a time when war honours and peerages were being snatched up like bargains. They liked his looks, which were the real McCoy after the pinchbeck sheik stuff of Valentino and the burnoused Lotharios of Miss M. E. Clamp. They also liked his amateurism, his ‘modesty’ and his make-your-own-kingdoms kit. He reappeared on the scene when patriotism had become rather smudgy and before empire worship had been safely channelled off into royalty worship, which left quite a lot of emotion going begging.

There was a new cult of the man who didn’t fit, then called the little man and, after the Second World War, the outsider. Charlie Chaplin’s films epitomized the tragi-comic bewilderment of this individual and created a climate of sympathy for the niche-less. When Colonel Lawrence returned home in 1919, having as it was popularly believed turned down the crown of Arabia, his refusal to come to terms with reality was interpreted as a refusal to come to terms with mammon. Nobody, not even his intimate friends, seems to have realized that when this acting Prince of Mecca was at last forced to strip himself of his robes he was forced to face some cruelly naked truths about himself.

Lawrence was not a liar, as Richard Aldington in particular insists; he was an arch-romantic for whom fact and fiction were intermingled, as in Mallory. His life was an invention in the same way that a novel is an invention. He used himself like a hero and when one lot of adventures had come to an end he plotted a fresh setting, a new name and began another tale. He was able to do this because when he was about ten he discovered that he wasn’t ‘Lawrence’, and although the discovery brought with it a constant fearfulness which mounted at intervals throughout his life to near-horror, it also brought him a unique sense of freedom.

His father was an Irish baronet who had left his wife in order to live with a young Scots governess. On the face of it, the situation was unadulterated triple-decker 1880 fiction. As it was, it was scarcely more interesting than the most mundane matrimonial fact. The Lawrences were respectability exemplified. Even if Lady Chapman’s religious scruples could have come to terms with commonsense, and Sir Thomas had been able to make the governess his wife, they could not have lived more conventionally than they did. Which in itself was a feat, for it was no mean accomplishment at the close of the nineteenth century for a baronet and a governess and their five sons to submerge so faultlessly in residential Oxford. Except for the actual lack of ceremony it was as whole and complete a marriage as the rigid standards of the age demanded. Thomas Edward was the second son of this prim unholy union. Among the essential qualifications for his future rôle of a Great Englishman it is worth noting that this Saxon-faced son of an Irishman and a Scotswoman was born at Tremadoc, Wales. His inheritance, from a mother who sometimes called herself Sarah Maden and sometimes Sarah Junner, and a father who was Sir Thomas Chapman and who called himself Mr. Lawrence, was a nonchalance towards names which was to border on the frivolous.

Lawrence wasn’t liberated by peace; he was cornered by it. Where should he go? What should he do? And, more urgently, who should he be? On Sir Thomas’s side he was descended from Sir Walter Raleigh, a fact he had dazzlingly acknowledged by presiding at the renaissance of Arabia. On his mother’s side he sprang from artisans, a type of man for whom his affections were complex and emotional. For the betwixt and between, for all that existed outside the true gentleman and true peasant classes, he had a distaste which sometimes mounted to hatred and loathing. He had justified his Raleigh blood. Was he also not privileged to justify his humbler origins?

For the man who, as a youth, had spent all his spare time making notes of castles and cathedrals, and subduing the flesh by vast bicycle tours, there was something medievally Christian in making an act of renunciation and entering the simple monastery of a barrack-room to be nothing. Clippers all over—Lawrence enjoyed wearing his hair long—would be his tonsure. Instead of Prince Feisal’s white and gold wedding clothes there would be a bundle of itching serge thrown at his feet by an unconcerned quartermaster, and always there would be the ceaseless penance of listening to Other Ranks’ conversation. He had escaped once and now he would escape again.

Lawrence set about being John Hume Ross with a thoroughness which would have been a credit to any future Method actor. The only mistake he made was the choice of service. The army might have swallowed Ross as it swallowed Coleridge, and as it was re-swallowing all kinds of human odds and ends who couldn’t make a go of it in civvy street in 1922. There was a certain traditional sanctuary there for misfits which even tempted demobbed officers to set aside their crowns and creep back into the secure khaki womb. Colonel Lawrence, C.B., D.S.O., Croix de Guerre, great friendships and all, might have done so too. It is just conceivable. The Prince of Mecca might have found the anonymity he craved at Aldershot. But of course it had to be Uxbridge.

The reasons for Lawrence’s attraction to the Royal Air Force were precisely those why Lawrence did not attract the R.A.F. In 1922 the R.A.F. was a brand new military invention which was still painfully conscious of its social status in comparison with those enjoyed by the Navy and by certain regiments in the Army. It needed individualists but fought shy of eccentrics. It was novel, small and intimate, and still very much the child of its father, Trenchard. While realizing that its rôle would be something absolutely fresh in national defence, it was staffed almost entirely by officers from the older services who were touchily insistent that the ordinary airman should hold his own, bullshit-wise, with any matelot or private. The extraordinary degradation of the individual by this clean buttons-foul mouth policy is described with such vividness in A/C Ross’s The Mint that this book might have done much to alleviate the wearisome obscenity of barrack-room life could it have been published when it was written, instead of in 1955 when the disciples of Norman Mailer had, by their asterisked persistence, almost succeeded in castrating the sturdiest word in the language. ‘Darling,’ as Tallulah is reputed to have said to Mailer at a party, ‘aren’t you the little boy who couldn’t spell f*ck?’ Aircraftsman Ross couldn’t spell it either but he spelt out many other usually unsaid things and The Mint, though a damp squib as a sociological sensation, remains for the specialist a masochist’s tour de force.

‘I wrote it tightly,’ said 352087 A/C Ross, ‘because our clothes are so tight and our lives so tight in the service.’ Screamed at on parades, harassed by total lack of privacy and total lack of comfort, Colonel Lawrence was discovering an exquisite personal pleasure in the indignities heaped upon him. It wasn’t all perversity, however. He was thrilled by the potential of the R.A.F. and he was exalted by the new dimensional freedom suggested by Per ardua ad astra.

‘The Royal Air Force is not antique and leisurely and storied like an army,’ he wrote in The Mint. ‘We can feel the impulse of a sure, urging giant behind the scurrying instructors. Squad 5 is today the junior unit of the service. There are twenty thousand airmen better than us between it and Trenchard, the pinnacle and exemplar: but the awe of him surely encompasses us…. Trenchard has designed the image he thinks most fitted to be an airman; and we submit our nature to his will, trustingly…. Trenchard invented the touchstone by which the Air Council try all their works. Will this, or will this not, promote the conquest of the air? We wish, sometimes, they would temper wisdom to their innocent sheep. For instance, they have decreed that the black parts of bayonets be henceforward burnished….’ The quasi-mystical language is that of Hardy, when he describes the President of the Immortals having sport with Tess.

This utterly sincere enthusiasm for the R.A.F. worried the authorities. If the Air Force could have believed that Lawrence was genuinely without ambition, that 352087 A/C Ross wanted nothing more than Hut 5, things might have become easier. Instead it remembered the brilliant Middle East adventurer who in less than three years had risen from his desk at the Arab Bureau to become the companion of princes and the maker of kings. The revolt of Arabia against the Turks was a fine amateur affair to which people had turned in relief after the bloody professionalism of Flanders. Was it not possible that Lawrence-turned-Ross might see in the infant R.A.F. another fine rich field for amateur adventure? He was, after all, only thirty-four and very famous. Except for a few saints, who had ever heard of a brilliant thirty-four-year-old giving up everything? Was Ross some kind of Trojan horse which had crept into Uxbridge and would he one day rule them all? Would he, this little A/C 2 with the big head and blue eyes, soon be writing to Trenchard as he was already writing to Air Vice-Marshal Swann—‘Dear Swann’? Would he motor-cycle to Buckingham Palace and stroll in and see the King? He had already sworn at the poor man in private audience and walked out on him. ‘Luckily,’ said George V to Sir Horace Rumbold, ‘I have served in the Navy, where bad language did not upset me unduly. Only today I felt I had been played the Confidence Trick….’ If the confidence trick could be played on the King what was to stop it being played on the Air Council?

However, the Royal Air Force had no choice in the matter. ‘Somebody in high authority’—nobody knows who to this day—ordered it to accept the boyish, nervous blond volunteer who turned up at the Uxbridge Depot in 1922. There was never any doubt as to his true identity. Ross they called him, Lawrence he was. The marks of the Deraa flogging made them stare at his back. His papers were forged and his health was much beneath the standard demanded, but, like a genii satisfying a royal whim, the order from the ‘Somebody’ forced the Uxbridge Depot to grant Colonel Lawrence, Companion of the Bath, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Bachelor of Arts and Prince of Mecca, his dearest wish and soon he was drawing his blankets, buying his blanco and getting to know his mates. Was he happy? Could he be?

‘Our hut is a fair microcosm of unemployed England, for the strict R.A.F. standards refuse the last levels of the social structure. Yet a man’s enlisting is his acknowledgement of his defeat by life. Amongst a hundred serving men you will not find one whole and happy. Each has a lesion, a hurt open or concealed, in his late history.’

His lesion or hurt was not in his late history but in his birth, a fact known to some of his friends and to most of his biographers, though not disseminated to the world at large because Mrs. Lawrence was alive, a fact which in no way inhibited Richard Aldington when he attempted, with the minimum of kindness and the maximum of fascination, to prick the Lawrence myth in 1955. T.E., a hagiographer’s dream, needed cutting down to size but Aldington’s method was that of the man who tries to level a table and saws it to pieces. Idolatry apart, there was something there and a very considerable something. Storrs, Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill2, E. M. Forster and Allenby were not the kind of men to be taken in by total imposture, however beguiling. And there is the fact that although Lawrence exasperated, badgered and scared all his friends throughout his life, there are few records of his ever having lost a friend. On the contrary he induced a protective affection in those who had got past his funny mixture of shyness and arrogance. The ordinary officers disliked him because of his unorthodoxy and distrusted him because they saw he wasn’t Ross, a soldier-poet who was trying to forget; he was Lawrence masquerading as Ross for reasons that were faintly sinister. He swept his barrack room and then went off to dine with the great. It made them acutely uncomfortable. They wished he would go away or that he would take a commission and join them in the mess like a decent chap.

Presumably there must have been a strong sexual element in the constant posing and histrionics of his life. Only something as reckless as sex could have allowed him to indulge in his odd showing-off before such disparate audiences as Hardy and E. M. Forster and a hutful of ignorant airmen. His ambivalence was indulgent and unchecked. He flaunted his dual personality and hurt himself time and time again because of the thrill of jumping from Lawrence to Ross or Shaw, and then of jumping back to Lawrence again. He ached for privacy, yet he drew the gaze of the world on to his every action. He never hid without leaving a trail of hypotheses and rumours leading up to his very door. He longed to be lost but he couldn’t bear not to be found. Churchill saw the R.A.F. immolation as a bewildered retreat by a man who could not slow down his swift genius to the jogging pace of peace. In the Allocution he gave during the unveiling of Lawrence’s memorial in Oxford, he said, ‘He was not in harmony with the normal. The fury of the Great War raised the pitch of life to the Lawrence standard. The multitudes were swept forward till their pace was the same as his. In this period he found himself in perfect relation both to men and events. I have often wondered what would have happened to Lawrence if the Great War had continued for several more years…. All the metals were molten. Everything was in motion. No one could say what was impossible…. But the storm ceased as suddenly as it had arisen…. Mankind returned with indescribable relief to its long interrupted, fondly cherished ordinary life, and Lawrence was left once more moving alone on a different plane and at a different speed.’

His legend might have been kept within reasonable limits and served up as a yarn for boys of all ages had it not been for a young American lecturer named Lowell Thomas. In 1918 Thomas was in Europe searching for film-lecture material to show the folks back home that American troops were colourfully engaged in military glory, but unfortunately he found that the drab horror of the Western Front was quite unsuitable for his purpose. With John Buchan’s help he went to Palestine and was very soon face to face with what he had in mind when he set out from Princeton. With, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia,’ Ronald Storrs set the pace for what was to follow. It was a dazzling, heady pace for Lawrence, Lowell Thomas and the world at large. Soon the innocent American and the small handsome Oxonian in his Eastern costume were deep in conversation, while another American ran about the Holy City with a camera. In March, 1919, a film-lecture called ‘With Lawrence in Arabia’ over-packed the Century Theatre in New York and had to be transferred to Madison Square Garden. And on August 14th, 1919, before the kind of brilliant audience usually only seen at first nights, the Lawrence lectures were presented at Covent Garden Opera House by the British impresario, Percy Burton. They were a fabulous success. Eventually Covent Garden proved too small for the Lawrence legend and the entire glamorous set-up, Dance of the Seven Veils and all, was moved to that shrine of national hyperbole, the Albert Hall. The tale of how a dreamy Oxford youth had donned princeliness and led Arabia to freedom was told and re-told all over the world by Lowell Thomas and for those who could not get to his lectures there was a best-selling book to be had. This Barnum and Bailey business left Lawrence with the kind of glittering myth no man could live up to. His attitude towards it, as to everything, was of course ambivalent. He attended the lectures and let the adulation pour over him in fascinated disgust and pleasure. The Press trailed him around. Everything he did was good for a headline. He exulted in his fame and was appalled by it. Eventually fantasy and fact became richly entangled and Lawrence, in what David Garnett calls ‘The years of hide and seek’, tried to gate-crash ordinariness. That he should even have contemplated such a step, knowing himself with the nerve-end intimacy that he did, was either proof of great courage or of a crowning recklessness.

Lowell Thomas’s eulogies were followed by more respectable but still adoring biographies by Robert Graves and Liddell Hart. Before these lives appeared Lawrence, in his tell-the-world, keep-it-dark way, had published Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He wrote the first draft in 1919, lost it and began again. Hints of the book’s literary distinction were heard everywhere, particularly where it was unlikely to have been seen, for Lawrence made it clear from the start that Seven Pillars was not the usual active service memoir, neither was it for ‘general publication’. Lawrence was writing to tell Doughty this on Christmas Day, 1918, before he had written a word of it. The best way to make a demand for a book is to make it practically impossible to get. Rumours of the rare and marvellous typography of Seven Pillars and of its heroic prose haunted the literary world. Those who had been privileged to subscribe £30 for a copy implied that a second Odyssey, or at least a second Arabia Deserta, had come into existence. Lawrence played it cool to his genuine literary friends. While knowing full well that it was mannered to an almost Old Testament degree he could describe it to Bernard Shaw as ‘Daily Mailish’ and to Edward Garnett as ‘no good’. Seven Pillars, like its author, has had to suffer a grubby backwash of reaction. From being grossly over-praised it has become vulgarly belittled. Like Byron’s Childe Harold, it hasn’t the isolated integrity which allows a work of art to exist in its own right. It has to be seen as a part of Lawrence and seen thus it has a compelling interest. The Arabian-Augustan style was a literary disease to which Anglo-Arabians were prone. The elaborate, oblique and subtle vernacular of the East suited Lawrence perfectly. He enjoyed the guile and compliments, the poetry and the picturesqueness. But long before he was to crouch in the tents of the sons of the Sherif of Mecca Lawrence had learnt the value of polished words. They kept people at their distance and he had a horror of propinquity—‘The difficulty is to keep oneself untouched in a crowd.’ Even as a castle-exploring, brass-rubbing boy of sixteen he had learnt that he could keep his mother’s natural demonstrative affection at bay by erecting a cold wall of archaeological description in his letters to her. Occasionally  remorse overcame him and he would add ‘Love, love, love, love, love’ as he signed off yet another fat epistle about buttresses and jambs. In 1917 he had written to her from Akaba, ‘Do you know I have not written a private letter to anyone but you for over a year? It is a wonderful thing to have kept so free of everything. Here I am at thirty with no label and profession—and perfectly quiet.’ To stay unlabelled, to confess all and yet to give nothing away which the common herd could appreciate—how could that be done? By writing, not a mere book, but by adding to Literature itself.

In a curious way Lawrence was successful in his venture. He elevated desert raids to solemn baroque set-pieces of military adventure. He made train-wrecking sound like armour-sparkling forays during the Crusades. He lavished all his very considerable descriptive skill on the tribesmen, so that the book is encrusted with their beauty and cruelty. His references to landscape, to camels, to weather and to anything in the sphere of local colour are exalted and grandiloquent, and he spins out every name of person and place with a similar regard to the flourishing music they make as did Proust when he boosted the raddled flesh of Charlus by trumpeting the Baron’s ravishing titles. Those who did not entirely succumb to the Lawrence of Arabia magic found this name-stuffed prose too much for them and likened it to the ‘begat’ bits of the Bible.

The glamorous Lowell Thomas publicity and the discreet fame of a literary masterpiece found Lawrence at the beginning of the twenties in an heroic vacuum which only some ethereal hero like Baldur or Lancelot could fill. All kinds of people did their level best to help him struggle out of his foggy mythology. Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor of The Times, secured him a fellowship at All Souls, the idea being that now the war was over Lawrence might resume those archaeological studies about which the world had heard so much. But All Souls was in Oxford and Oxford contained the Lawrence home, with its profoundly unsympathetic associations. Lawrence accepted the Fellowship, while knowing full well that no work, no new life existed for him in Oxford, nor ever could.

Winston Churchill then made him his political adviser in the Middle East and the Press hummed with prospective governorships. Publishers wrote to him and offered him jobs of all kinds. In 1927 Colonel Isham, who had bought the fascinating cache of Boswell Papers discovered at Malahide Castle, and who was saddened by the messiness of Lawrence’s life, wrote and invited him to edit the rich haul, now in process of being issued in meticulous order by Professor Pottle of Yale University.

Stories about Lawrence grew and grew, capping each other in their extravagance. A generation which had been pushed around by authority took to this do-it-yourself lone adventurer. The apparent sexlessness of his life and the limbo into which he had so modestly cast himself turned him into a vessel for conjecture and dreams. His slight build and fairness allied to fables of his strength and endurance, plus the fact that he looked years younger than he was, all contributed towards an image of him as the real thing, as against the celluloid sheiks of the cinema. Nothing became impossible or improbable when it was found to be related to Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence complained of persecution but Bernard Shaw was sharp with him. ‘You didn’t keep quiet; and now Lawrence you will be to the end … Lawrence may be as great a nuisance to you as G.B.S. is to me … but you created him and must now put up with him as best you can.’

Lawrence complained again, this time, oddly enough, about the miseries of barrack-room life at Uxbridge. This forced from Bernard Shaw, ‘You talk about leave as if it were a difficulty. Ask for three months’ leave and they will exclaim, with a sob of relief, “For God’s sake take six, take twelve, take a lifetime, take anything rather than keep up this maddening masquerade that makes us all ridiculous.” I sympathize with them.’

But of course to everything which Lawrence said, did or wrote there was also its comfortingly complex reversal and, at the same time as he was complaining to Shaw, he was writing in the day-book which was to become The Mint, ‘And me? I had shrunk into a ball and squatted, hands over face, crying babily (the first time for years) on one corner of the skudding lorry…. I was trying to think, if I was happy, why I was happy, and what was this overwhelming sense upon me of having got home, at last, after an interminable journey.’

Home was to be brief. In less than four months the newspapers rang with the enchantment of having discovered the secret of 352087 A/C Ross. Reporters from the Daily Mail and the Daily Express swooped down on Uxbridge. Robert Graves said that an officer at the Depot had sold Ross’s secret to the Press for £30, a properly Judas-like sum. Certainly on December 27th, 1922, the Daily Express had a field day, for its pages were glutted with its scoop.

The publicity was all the excuse the Royal Air Force needed to rid itself of its distinguished rooky and to his very real distress Lawrence was discharged from the service. A few weeks later he turned up in the Tank Corps—another recent creation—under the name of T. E. Shaw. He was terribly unhappy and shortly after this enlistment he wrote to Edward Garnett threatening suicide if he was not soon reinstated in the Air Force.

‘Trenchard withdrew his objection to my rejoining the Air Force. I got seventh heaven for two weeks; but then Sam Hoare came back from Mespot and refused to entertain the idea…. I’m no bloody good on earth. So now I’m going to quit, but in my usual comic pattern I’m going to square with Cape before I hop it! … I shall bequeath you my notes on life in the recruits camp of the R.A.F. They will disappoint you.’

Garnett was so alarmed when he got this letter that he immediately wrote to Bernard Shaw, who in turn got in touch with Stanley Baldwin in Downing Street. The suicide threat was made on June 13th, 1925. On July 16th, Lawrence’s transfer from the hated Tank Corps to the beloved Air Force was signed by the Chief of Air Staff. Lawrence was ecstatic. ‘My sense is of something ineffable,’ he wrote to Garnett, ‘like ship Argo when Jason at last drew her up upon the beach; surely nothing but time and physical decay will uproot me now.’

He was posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset and shortly afterwards he bought Clouds Hill, a remote cottage not far from the camp, where he could keep his books and write in his spare time. He was now vaguely and subconsciously ‘adopting’ the Shaws. Charlotte Shaw, a charming and interesting woman who seems to have possessed a built-in genius for comprehending the connection between aggressive behaviour and low sexual feeling in men, had a very great appeal for Lawrence. He leaned on her a little, finding her stable and docile and quietly loyal. Their relationship was a remote mother-son affair and his assumption of the name Shaw, plus the fog of romance which by this time was beginning to hide any reality he possessed, led many people to believe that he was literally Bernard Shaw’s son, a notion which flattered both of them. His father had died in 1919, a necessarily vague shade, and by letting such rumours settle he did no great harm and helped to keep facts cloudy. Although Bernard Shaw himself and nearly all Lawrence’s friends were certain that he had taken the name Shaw because of the close relationship which had sprung up between these two Irish outsiders, Lawrence was to write to Ralph Isham in November, 1927, with a very different tale. ‘I chose Shaw at random. The recruiting Staff Officer in the War Office said I must take a fresh name. I said, “What’s yours?” He said, “No you don’t.” So I seized the Army List and snapped it open at the index and said, ‘It’ll be the first one-syllable name in this.”

The getting rid of his rank and decorations had been a very different matter. Lawrence threw them away, certainly, but with the fine carelessness of one who would want to know where to look for them when he needed them. It was the Rossetti gesture. Aircraftsman Ross and Shaw never hesitated to exhume the unquiet corpse of Lawrence of Arabia, to strip from it some influential ornament when an ordinary cap-badge wouldn’t do. A prince turned monk turns his back on privilege. He doesn’t correspond with the hierarchy behind his abbot’s back. It is the frequent invocation of the powerful, all-doors-opening Lawrence which makes any close study of A/C Shaw’s progress such an unattractive business. His dead past was the breath of life to Lawrence. He knew when they ordered him to clean out grates in the mess or sweep floors they were ordering a very distinguished man to do these humble chores. Every such request, meaningless in ordinary circumstances, carried with it a strange emotion for Lawrence the masochist and could, if he had it in his nature, awaken a desire to humiliate in the person giving the order. All through his twelve years of ranker’s life he never ceased to enjoy the practical joke aspects of his position. David Garnett says that ‘Being in the ranks gave Lawrence unbounded opportunities for indulgence in his special brand of humour. Though he might be driven by conscience, or by an abnormal readiness to make himself suffer, he never lost his sense of humour. Life in the ranks was for a large part of the time a secret joke, by which he kept himself in a rich state of amusement at the expense of his officers and sergeants.’ This was inverted snobbery and the fact that he could revel in the changes to be rung on such a situation for so long is one of the clearest indications of his immaturity.

The officers, for their part, were nervous of him and tended to keep out of his way. Writing to one of his brothers from Karachi, Lawrence describes the isolation of his life. ‘…I never go out. So only the airmen know of my existence, and they are too used to me, as a daily object, to be interested in a reputation which comes to them as a faint echo from the London papers…. I am not bothered by anybody at all. The officers steer clear of me because I make them feel uncomfortable.’

The Press played up this loneliness, this stoic withdrawal from the world, this abnegation of the world’s rewards and tributes, with the result that the Karachi Post Office became inundated with parcels and letters. Lawrence refused to accept mail from anyone except friends and no parcels or registered letters addressed to him were even brought up to the camp. During this period, 1927, there are indications in his writing that Shaw was sincerely craving the solitude that Lawrence denied him. But while one side of him could truthfully say, ‘I am afraid of causing more talk,’ his exhibitionism refused to submit to conditions which could have made ‘more talk’ less inevitable. As the twenties drew to their close he began to fret about what would happen to him when his enlistment period was over and in a letter to E. M. Forster he said that he had the promise of a night watchman’s job in a City bank.

Early in 1929 the Press exploded into one of those orgasms of conjecture which can afflict it when the object of its attentions teases it beyond endurance. Lawrence was translating Homer at Miranshaw and was relatively at peace. So at peace was he that he could afford to break the taboo of his birth by telling a friend that his translation might quite truthfully be called ‘Chapman’s Homer’. But ever since the July of 1928, when the New York World accepted a story headed,

a great cumuli of rumours had been building up and when, in December, the Daily News reported that Lawrence was learning Pushtu and that ‘It is inferred that he intends to move into Afghanistan’, the storm burst. Was Lawrence going to organize Right-wing elements in Afghanistan and fight King Amanullah’s social reforms? the Daily Herald wanted to know. Calling Lawrence ‘the arch-spy of the world’, the Daily Herald went from strength to strength. All this was too much for the Government of India and on January 8th the indignant Homeric scholar was hustled out of Miranshaw and flown to Lahore. Four days later he was sailing to Tilbury on the S.S. Rajputana with orders not to speak to anybody. He arrived home to uproar in the papers and to questions in Parliament about his identity. The Daily News was fed-up with the whole elaborate business.

The noisy homecoming was to have an unexpectedly quiet and peaceful sequel. Lawrence was smuggled ashore from the Rajputana at Plymouth and hurried off to a flying-boat squadron at Catte-water, where, as clerk to Wing Commander Sydney Smith, he was to find something approaching contentment. Ernest Thurtle, the M.P. who had asked all the frightening questions in the House about Lawrence’s name-changes, succumbed to the spell of the enchanter when they met and became Lawrence’s friend. Five years remained of the enlistment period, five years in which he could safely go on tangling the double threads of his existence, enjoy deepening friendships in the Bloomsbury of Keynes, Garnett and Forster, speed along the Dorset lanes on the Brough motor cycle the Shaws had given him and entertain simple R.A.F. companions to cocoa and Beethoven at Clouds Hill.

And then? A second abyss, such as that which cut the ground from beneath his feet after Arabia? Apparently not, merely the classic withdrawal to the cottage of the middle-aged literary bachelor. A Georgian solution to the puzzle of life. For Lawrence the situation was one of full-circle. At sixteen he had cut himself off from much of the activities of 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, by retreating to a garden-shed den papered with brass-rubbings of knights and ladies, or by bicycling off for weeks at a time with just enough money to exist on. At forty-seven the retreat equipment was almost identical, a den (Clouds Hill was spectacularly uncomfortable in the conventional sense, a kind of boy’s hide-out with makeshift sleeping and cooking arrangements; a cottage imitating a tent) a motor cycle and £2 a week.

On April 5th, 1935, Lawrence wrote to H. S. Ede, ‘I have no dependants, no sense of public spirit, or of duty to my neighbour. I like to live alone for 80% of my days, and to be let alone by 80% of my fellow-men and all my fellow-women below 60 years of age. The golden rule seems to direct me to live peacefully in my cottage.’

And so perhaps he would have done, for the tenuous, abnormally protracted youthfulness had slipped away at last and with it much of the glitter and poise. Lawrence was one of those men who think and look and feel like twenty-five until they are almost fifty. His end was timely, if only because his was the type to whom maturity is never granted. Had he lived it would have been a kind of agony for him to see the R.A.F. during the Battle of Britain claim the poetic greatness he had prophesied, and not be part of it. He would have been fifty-two and the Spitfire pilots ‘putting out their hands to touch the face of God’ would have been more like twenty-two. It would have been galling for him. Professional heroes are not charitable. They leave the stage as reluctantly as ageing divas. Saki’s Reginald said, ‘To have reached thirty is to have failed in life’ and in a sense it was true of Lawrence. He had made his way by charm, derring-do, physical courage, narcissism and romantic cheek—the whole armoury of youth. Those who fall for these things fall for them unconditionally. His plunge into the R.A.F. at thirty-four was partly an Ayesha-like gesture to recapture youth by submitting to the flames of this most youthful of services. At forty he could tell E. M. Forster, ‘Do not take my illnesses seriously. They are only dispositions: and may be partly due to my refusal to see that I am too old to lead a boy’s life much longer. They do not allow, in the Services, for grown-ups….’

His looks were subtly changing. The first full description of him was made by M. O. Williams in 1913 when he was digging at Carchemish. ‘… a clean-cut blond3 with peaches and cream complexion, which the dry heat of the Euphrates seems powerless to spoil … wearing a wide-brimmed panama, a soft white shirt open at the throat, an Oxford blazer bearing the Magdalen emblem on the pocket, short white flannel knickers partly obscured by a decoration hanging from the belt, which did not, however obscure bare knees, below which he wore heavy grey hose and red slippers.’

The only reason why this exact description should be recalled is that it was written when Lawrence was a nobody and is indicative of how people were already compelled into extravagance when they met him. Another visitor to Carchemish, an American called L. R. Fowle, also felt it his duty to leave something for the record.

‘Lawrence, also fresh from the works, was stepping lightly across mounds of earth, clad in what we Americans would call a running suit, and wearing at his belt an oranted Arab girdle with its bunch of tassels in front to denote an unmarried man. He was out of sight in a moment, and when we gathered for supper a freshly tubbed young man in his Oxford tennis suit of white flannel, but still wearing his Arab girdle, launched into a fascinating study of the excavations.’

Lawrence preserved and managed to project this mint, virginal image of himself for an astonishingly long time. He had the total self-absorption of the dandy. He was as jealous of his person as most people are of the person they love. When his most private and fastidious body was flogged and raped at Deraa, he experienced the kind of agony another man might feel if he had been forced to witness the outrage of his wife. Yet Deraa was also a moment of enlightenment. Pain, which had been ‘my obsession and secret terror, from a boy’, had proved to be a terrible joy. He was defiled, disfigured and he was to ‘carry the burden, whose certainty the passing days confirmed’: how in Deraa ‘that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost’, but he had found a very important part of himself—his masochism. ‘If that Deraa incident had happened to you,’ he told Edward Garnett, ‘you would not have recorded it … the sort of man I mix with doesn’t so give himself away.’

As he grew older he made a virtue of the warts-and-all kind of candour and told James Hanley, ‘People with dirty patches in them skirt round and round them, alluding but never speaking out. They are afraid of giving their spots away.’ Lawrence seems to have realized how greatly he lacked normal reticence and his habit of neither confirming nor denying so many of the wild tales which floated around him like an outsize banner was probably deliberate. He not only confused the world, he confused himself, and that, he found, was a comfort. Although he was far from innocent about the conjectures of Freud and moved in literary circles in which Freudian ethics were used as the basis for poetry and novels, he wrote with the rather alarming pre-Freud freedom of a Francis Kilvert.

The ‘spot’ which he so recklessly gave away, and which always brings his biographers up with a jolt of yea or nay, was quite obviously to do with his feelings for men. Was he or wasn’t he, that is the question. The one thing he certainly wasn’t was heterosexual. Women scared him. A bawdy tumble by a well when some Arab women tried to strip him to see if he was white all over left him frightened in a way the Deraa incident could never have done. Except for the beloved Dahoum, an Arab youth he brought back to Oxford and to whom he possibly dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the outrage at Deraa, he was probably chaste, though not so much because of any moral reason but because he was selfish. He was too obsessively engrossed in himself to give himself in love and too remindful of what the ‘filthy business’ of sex could lead to—the traumatic distress of his own origins—to have any taste for promiscuity.

‘I am a very normal sort of Anglo-Irishman,’ he told Ernest Thurtle. ‘Women? I like some women. I don’t like their sex; any more than I like the monstrous regiment of men. Some men. There is no difference that I can feel between a woman and a man…. I can’t understand all the fuss about sex….’

What did this mean exactly? That men and women are the same? Obviously not. That he feels nothing abnormal if what attracts his feelings should happen to be male—that it is ‘all the same’, mere sexual attraction and something not to be pursued? Possibly. But the rich ambivalence, as usual, provides two answers to every question. He was far from ambivalent towards the mysterious S.A. of Seven Pillars dedication. Dahoum means darkness and was the nickname of a very handsome youth called Sheik Achmed. The boy died of typhus in Syria in 1918. There is little hedging in Lawrence’s many references to him and there is little doubt that he loved him. The dedicatory prose-poem which prefaces Seven Pillars has all the convincing badness, literarily speaking, of a genuine love-letter.

Lawrence’s dandyism was not necessarily an aspect of his homosexuality, as some of his critics maintain. Lawrence lived when to be a gentleman was to be meticulously drab. The short-back-and-sides brigade used this drabness as a virility symbol and ‘suspected’ any man who departed from it. Lawrence’s long fair hair and sumptuous robes were used as a protection from this kind of man. They put him beyond the pale, which is where he liked to be. He had something in common with the young Arab warriors with whom he surrounded himself who spent hours dressing their hair and scenting their bodies but who fought with tenacious brilliance. The Persians had mocked when the Theban Band had beautified itself for battle. Lawrence’s behaviour in Arabia is filled with examples of how to put a late-Victorian classical education into practice.

The obsession with clothes continued when he joined the Royal Air Force. But now it had descended to something less innocent than gallantry.

‘These boys, in fancy dress for the first time, went stroking and smoothing their thighs, to make the wings of the breeches stand out richly. The tailors had taken them in at the knees, by our secret request, so tightly that they gripped the flesh and had a riding cut. Dandies put a wire in the outer seams to spread them more tautly sideways…. These clothes are too tight. At every pace they catch us in a dozen joints of the body, and remind us of it. The harsh friction of the cloth polishes our skins and signals to our carnality the flexure of each developing muscle and sinew….’

The first half of the thirties decade passed with rumours massing, cracking and coming to nothing. A new chill was in the air, which some people welcomed as a break-through to the brave new world and others slowly recognized as political obscenity. In Europe it was ‘follow my leader’. The British Union of Fascists saw in the recluse of Clouds Hill a leader waiting his hour, such as pre-war Churchill at Chartwell and post-war de Gaulle at Colombey-les-deux-églises. They saw his enormous emotional value to the movement and in a sense his respectability. If they won him they would have a first-rate popular hero. In May 1935 there was speculative talk about a meeting between Lawrence and Hitler. On May 13th Lawrence went off on his motor cycle to send a telegram to Henry Williamson asking him to lunch—‘Lunch Tuesday wet fine cottage one mile north Bovington Camp—SHAW.’ He rode back very fast and coming over the crest of the hill he had to swerve violently in order to miss hitting two errand boys on bicycles. He was thrown over his handlebars and terribly injured. He died five days later.

Immediately, a great cry went up. Was it an accident? A Corporal Catchpole, who was near, heard the crash and insisted that he had seen a black private car going towards the speeding Lawrence just before the accident happened. The errand boys did not see the car. Was it suicide? Most unlikely. A man with Lawrence’s knowledge of wounds and death would not have sought oblivion so haphazardly. It was a youthful, even a boyish way to die. Would he have died very differently, in a moral desert and as an internee detained under M.I.5? It is hardly likely. For one thing there was still the friendship of Forster, Garnett, Storrs, Churchill. Besides, as he wrote to Lady Astor at Cliveden,

‘No: wild mares would not at present take me from Clouds Hill. It is an earthly paradise and I am staying here until I feel qualified for it. Also there is something broken in the works, as I told you: my will, I think. In this mood I would not take on any job at all. So do not commit yourself to advocating me, lest I prove a non-starter.

‘Am well, well-fed, full of company, laborious and innocent-customed…. TES.’

That was the key to it, perhaps—‘innocent-customed’. He was pushing fifty and contact with Fascism would be another Deraa, with dirty hands all over him. ‘The difficulty is to keep oneself untouched in a crowd: so many people try to speak to you or touch you: and you’re like electricity, in that one touch discharges all the virtue you have stored up.’ And so it was the act of avoidance until the very end, when the Dorset lane crushed him. Requiescat, concludes Aldington. To which now may be surely added for the benefit of yet further prospective biogaphers, his own plaintive Noli me tangere.

Notes

1 Chapter 4 (passim). Extracts from Lawrence’s letters are taken from The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett (Cape, 1938), The Mint by T. E. Lawrence (Cape, 1955), and The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and His Brothers (Blackwell, 1954).

2 Sir Winston Churchill’s speech was later published as the Preface to The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and His Brothers (Blackwell, 1954).

3 ‘A clean-cut blond …’ and ‘Lawrence, also fresh from the works …’ are quoted in Lawrence the Rebel by Edward Robinson (Lincolns-Prager, 1946).