Books: The Hero Our Century Deserved

T.E. LAWRENCE: THE SELECTED LETTERS

Edited by Malcolm Brown; Norton; 568 pages; $27.50

With hindsight, it is easy to see why a slim, self-effacing Englishman named Thomas Edward Lawrence became one of this century’s most ballyhooed celebrities. Out of the appalling carnage of World War I — the mud-caked anonymity of the trenches, the hail of mechanized death that spewed from machine guns and fell from airplanes — there emerged a lone Romantic, framed heroically against the clean desert sands of Arabia. U.S. journalist Lowell Thomas was the first to recognize that Lawrence’s wartime work — organizing disparate Arab tribes into armed revolt against the occupying Turks, allies of Germany — had pop-myth possibilities. Thomas’ publicity essentially created the figure known as Lawrence of Arabia, but others contributed to the saga. Robert Graves wrote a life of Lawrence that appeared in 1927, when its subject was only 39. Lawrence told his own story in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was published shortly after his death from a motorcycle accident in 1935.

Since then, the Lawrence legend has thrived through a steady stream of biographies and memoirs. His life sparked one of the greatest epic films ever made: David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), recently rereleased in the original, uncut version its director intended. Moviegoers can once again admire Peter O’Toole in the title role and assume that they have seen Lawrence whole. They have not, through no fault of the actor or anyone else involved in that exemplary movie. On the evidence of The Selected Letters, which includes 470 examples, roughly two-thirds published for the first time, Lawrence was a host of different people subsumed under a name that was constantly subject to change.

After the war and the deluge of his fame, Lawrence stunned friends by changing his identity and going underground. As John Hume Ross, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. When his cover was blown by a London newspaper (‘UNCROWNED KING’ AS PRIVATE SOLDIER), Lawrence was forced out of the R.A.F. and subsequently enrolled in the army as T.E. Shaw. In a letter written soon after this move, he noted his divided state of mind and suggested that “perhaps there’s a solution to be found in multiple personality.”

Just so. In a single letter, Lawrence could ring all the changes between boasting and self-abnegation. To a confidante who had read an early version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence noted, “The story I have to tell is one of the most splendid ever given a man for writing.” He also downplayed his own participation in that story, adding, “I’ve been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I’m quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I’m one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.”

But he did not always do that either. The most searing experience of his life occurred over two days in November 1917, when he was captured by the Turks and beaten and raped before he escaped. In 1919, submitting a report of this event to British authorities in Cairo, Lawrence altered key details: “Hajim was an ardent paederast and took a fancy to me. So he kept me under guard till night, and then tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty.” Years later, he wrote a rather different description to George Bernard Shaw’s wife Charlotte, the correspondent with whom he ultimately became most candid (his letters to her appear here for the first time): “For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with — our bodily integrity.”

The facts and rumors surrounding this ordeal have led to the assumption, widely held, that Lawrence was homosexual. Editor Malcolm Brown, the co-author of an earlier biographical study of Lawrence, strongly disagrees, and the evidence of the letters supports his dissent. Lawrence repeatedly expressed his abhorrence of physical contact with any fellow creature, female or male. He puzzled over fairly basic questions: “The period of enjoyment, in sex, seems to me a very doubtful one. I’ve asked the fellows in this hut (three or four go with women regularly). They are not sure: but they say it’s all over in ten minutes: and the preliminaries — which I discounted — take up most of the ten minutes. For myself, I haven’t tried it, & hope not to.”

Self-condemned to spend his days among libidinous soldiers, listening to their “cat-calling carnality,” Lawrence came to believe that sexual desire was somehow blameworthy: “Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch.”

Lawrence’s distaste for himself regularly extended to nearly everyone else. But his chilly stoicism had limits. In one letter, he recalls seeing a small girl playing on the grass in front of a cathedral. “I knew of course that she was animal: and I began in my hatred of animals to balance her against the cathedral: and knew then that I’d destroy the building to save her.”

Reading Lawrence’s story, not as he polished it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom but as he parceled it out to friends, does not finally resolve the enigma of his character or explain his place in history. He would be easier to understand if he were simply larger than life or what his detractors claimed: a self-aggrandizing charlatan. But he took no pleasure in his notoriety; he ran from it. The Selected Letters adds another interpretation to an already overwrought tale. The age demanded a hero, Lawrence qualified, and the 20th century then got what it deserved: a loner, an ascetic, a man who might have been happier as a medieval monk than as the public cynosure he became. No paragon in his own eyes, Lawrence nonetheless remains a haunting presence in the contemporary consciousness, an indissoluble mixture of weaknesses and strength.