Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (73 page)

By the time Lawrence returned to Paris, the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry on Syria had already fizzled out. The French refused to join it, and announced in advance that they would pay no attention to its recommendations. In deference to the French, the British refused to join it, and as a consequence it consisted only of two Americans: Dr. H. C. King, a theologian and the president of Oberlin College; and C. R. Crane, “a prominent Democratic Party contributor.” Neither of them was particularly well suited to decide the fate of Syria. King and Crane spent ten hot, weary days in Damascus, and came to the conclusion that the Arabs “were not ready” for independence, but that French or British colonial rule would be morally unjust. On their return to Paris they recommended that the United States occupy Syria and guide it toward independence and democracy. By that time nobody was listening, least of all President Wilson.

Since there was nothing for Lawrence to do in Paris except go through the files of the British delegation reading unflattering comments about himself, toward the end of the summer he returned to Oxford, where his old mentor David Hogarth, and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the
Times,
had arranged a research fellowship for him at All Souls College. This entitled him to a set of rooms and £200 a year while he worked on his book and returned to work on “the antiquities and ethnology, and the history (ancient and modern) of the Near East.” All Souls, a college that has no undergraduates, was and remains a kind of worldly sanctuary for Oxonians who have retired from public life to pursue their studies or write their memoirs. Election to a fellowship of the college is considered a great honor. With his usual efficiency and command of the Oxford establishment, Hogarth had provided Lawrence with a way to get on with his life and write his book.

In the meantime, the Foreign Office and the War Office disputed over which of them was responsible for Lawrence, and whether he was now a Foreign Office official dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel, or a lieutenant-colonel temporarily assigned to the Foreign Office as part of the British delegation to the Peace Conference, or possibly only an adviser to Prince Feisal. He was blamed by many for “our troubles with the French over Syria,” and one official, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, at the India Office, expressed the vehement hope “that Lawrence will never be employed in the Middle East again in any capacity.” Correspondence about whether Lawrence had been or should be “demobilized” went back and forth. An exasperated officer in the Department of Military Intelligence in Paris cabled to the War Office, “Colonel Lawrence has no Military status in Paris he is however a member of British delegation under foreign office [sic] section it is also believed he is a plenipotentiary from King of Hedjaz but has not yet presented his credentials his status in Army not known here but he continues to wear uniform with badges of rank varying from full Colonel to Major.” A handwritten note on yet another attempt to clear up the matter reads: “I have tried again and again to get the F.O. to say whether Col. Lawrence is their man or not,” and bounces the question on to Allenby. Finally, an abrupt letter from Egypt addressed to Major T. E. Lawrence, CB, DSO, clears the matter up once and for all: “I am directed to inform you that having ceased to be employed on the 31st July 1919, you will relinquish your commission and be granted the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, a notification of which will appear in an early gazette.” Much correspondence and many handwritten calculations ensue in Lawrence’s army file about the size of his “gratuity” on being demobilized, which seems to work out at £213. Some of the correspondence is marked “Submit to King,” which suggests that King George V was not so offended by Lawrence’s refusal to accept his decorations that he was indifferent to the way Lawrence was treated on being demobilized. As for Lawrence, it is uncertain to what degree he cared or even knew—he was in the habit of tearing up, returning, or ignoring letters addressed to him with his rank and decorations.

Lawrence, thanks to his friendship with Geoffrey Dawson, was able to get his point of view printed frequently in the
Times,
to the embarrassment of the Foreign Office and the anger of the French. Lawrence argued that the Sykes-Picot agreement needed to be revised in the light of present realities, that this revision should be done with the inclusion of the Arabs, and that the various pledges the British government had made to the Arabs should be spelled out in detail. In the meantime, Syria continued to be occupied by British troops; this gave the British government some leverage over the situation, since what the French wanted was to replace them with a French occupation force as soon as possible. Moreover, the French wanted it done with appropriate ceremony, in order to impress on the Syrians the fact that their well-being now depended on France. The Union Jack must be pulled down in Damascus and Beirut, with “God Save the King” played for the last time, with pipers, and with all the panoply of British military ceremony, followed by the raising of the French flag and the playing of the “Marseillaise.” To this, after much correspondence, Lloyd George eventually agreed, and by the end of the year, France would be firmly in control of Lebanon, and rather less firmly in control of Syria. Feisal, who, on Lawrence’s recommendation, had stayed in Damascus rather than returning to Paris to endure further humiliation at the hands of the French,
*
now journeyed to Britain, where he was told that he should make the best deal he could with France, and that the British government could take no further responsibility for events in Syria and Lebanon.

Feisal does not appear to have met with Lawrence while they were both in Britain, and Lawrence’s letter to Curzon offering to “use his influence with Feisal” was ignored.

*
Wigram eventually became the first baron Wigram, GCB, GCVo, CSi, PC, private secretary to the sovereign from 1931 to 1936.

*
Later the rt. hon. the Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Ch, PC, QC.

*
She was then married to Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt., still a rising young politician and not yet the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists.

*
Lawrence had what appears to have been a streak of what the French call l’esprit delescalier, that is coming up with the clever last word too late, when one is already on the staircase after having left the room, and then incorporating it into later accounts of the conversation

*
it would include a remarkable number of intellectually brilliant figures, from President Wilson’s powerful adviser and eminence grise Colonel edward house to such future foreign policy heavyweights as John Foster Dulles and Walter Lippmann

*
Although Lawrence’s plan may have been overgenerous to hussein and his sons, it nevertheless recognized the difference between northern and southern Mesopotamia,and would have resulted in an independent Kurdish state and solved at least one of the fundamental divisive issues that plague modern iraq.

*
readers may find an echo of the kind of thinking expressed by members of the committee in scene iV of G. B. Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which the (english) chaplain exclaims to the (French) bishop of Beauvais, how can what an englishman believes be heresy? it is a contradiction in terms

*
This is remarkable, since King George V, like his father, was a notorious stickler for correct dress, both military and civilian, and had an eagle eye for the slightest impropriety or flaw, as well as a very short fuse in this regard.

*
This is certainly a slip of Lawrence’s fountain pen, since Feisal’s memorandum to Balfour was written on January 1.

*
Lawrence was not the only one to float this idea with Wilson; another was Dr. howard S. Bliss, president of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut). But it was shrewd of Lawrence to suggest a plan that would appeal to the democratic ideals of Wilson and would be sure to infuriate the French and alarm the British. if the Syrians, after all, why not next the egyptians, or the inhabitants of Mesopotamia,or worse yet, from the British point of view the indians?

*
The United States ambassador in Constantinople was henry J. Morgenthau, Franklin Delano roosevelt’s neighbor in hyde Park, New York, and eventually his secretary of the treasury. Morgenthau reported the massacres in full detail to the State Department, as well as the matter of fact admission of the turkish leaders that the liquidation of the Armenians was taking place

*
For reasons best known to themselves the French regarded the late Major General Charles Gordon, CB, “Gordon Pasha,” who was killed by the Dervishes at Khartoum in 1885, as the ultimate anti French British imperialist hero adventurer

*
Demand was so great that Lowell Thomas was forced to hire an “understudy” to give some of the lectures in his place. he chose for the job a gifted young speaker named Dale Carnegie, who would himself go on to world fame and fortune as the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and founder of the Dale Carnegie instit

*
This may not have been the best advice. Feisal might have done better to return to Paris and negotiate with the French, rather than stay in Damascus, where he came more and more under the influence of Syrian nationalist hotheads preaching resistance to France

CHAPTER TEN
“Backing into the Limelight”: 1920-1922

A
ny soldier’s return home after a long war is bound to be traumatic, and Lawrence’s was no exception. It was perhaps no accident, but more in the nature of a Freudian slip, that his last major written work would be a translation of the
Odyssey.
Neither he nor Hogarth could have believed that he would settle cozily into life at All Souls, dining at the “high table” in evening dress and black academic gown, chatting with dons and other fellows in the Common Room over a glass of port, and pursuing the research he had dropped in 1914, on the antiquities of the Near East. Hogarth could slip seamlessly back into the life of a scholar, but Lawrence’s war years had been too tumultuous for that, and his devotion to scholarship, or at any rate to the academic life, had been only skin deep to begin with. The war had not taken him away unwillingly from what he loved, but instead offered him a much more intense and dramatic life, as well as a chance to play a significant role in grand events. He was not going back to a desk at the Ashmolean Museum, with a sigh of relief, to study potsherds, and as for archaeological research in the field, neither the British nor the French government would tolerate the presence of “Colonel Lawrence,” a magnet for Arab nationalism and discontent, digging among the ruins of Carchemish, or anywhere else in the Middle East.

All Souls was a refuge of sorts from the outside world, but it was no great distance from there to Polstead Road, where Lawrence’s mother continued to try to dominate his life. For five years Lawrence had been spared his mother’s intense interest and, as he saw it, her unreasonable emotional demands, as well as the hothouse atmosphere of life in the Lawrence household. Sarah Lawrence had not only very high and unforgiving standards of behavior, but an elephant’s memory for slights, or occasions when her will had been flouted. It would be easy to suppose that Lawrence exaggerated his mother’s controlling personality, but those of his friends who met her, including Charlotte Shaw and Lady Astor—the former married to one of the more difficult personalities of late nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century Britain, and the latter no shrinking violet herself—seem to have been terrified of this tiny, and by then elderly, woman. Evidently, Sarah Lawrence always said
exactly
what was on her mind, without any attempt to sugarcoat it. By the early autumn of 1919 she had accumulated enough tragedy in her life to expect some emotional support from her second son, who was, of course, either unwilling or unable to provide it. Polstead Road cannot have been a place Lawrence wanted to visit, but now he was only a few minutes’ bicycle ride away, and without the tempering influence of his father.

Without Thomas Lawrence present, his widow was free to explore many of the animosities and old complaints that Ned had been spared over the years. An example was her fierce quarrel with Janet Laurie, who had fallen in love with Ned’s taller and more handsome brother Will. When the war broke out, it seems that Will, who clearly intended to marry Janet despite his mother’s opposition, wrote to ask Janet if she thought he should come home and join up, and she, after much hesitation, wrote back and told him that “it might trouble him later if he did not.” This was true, given Will’s honorable nature, but once he had been listed as missing, and then declared dead, his mother either heard about or read Janet’s letter (more likely, the latter), and blamed Janet for his death. There was a terrible “row,” and the two women did not speak again until 1932. To do Sarah justice, as a devout Christian she finally sought Janet’s forgiveness, and received it, but in 1919 Sarah’s bitterness over Will’s death was still raw.

Hearing in detail about such issues was exactly why Lawrence had left home in the first place. He was the least judgmental of men, and besides, he was still fond of Janet and would have been reluctant to take his mother’s side or even to hear it. Also, his own attitude toward the death of two of his younger brothers was modeled on Roman fortitude. When Frank was killed, Lawrence had written to his mother urging her to “bear a brave face to the world about Frank….[His] last letter is a very fine one & leaves no regret behind it….1 didn’t say good-bye to Frank because he would rather I didn’t, & I knew there was little chance of seeing him again; in which case we were better without a parting.” This was stoic, but not exactly sympathetic or consoling. Lawrence would doubtless have felt the same about Will.

Lawrence’s depression may be gauged by his mother’s recollection that he sometimes sat for hours at home, staring into space; he did the same at All Souls, to the consternation of the other fellows. At times he broke out of his depression to play undergraduate pranks, or so the poet Robert Graves, a returning officer turned undergraduate, remembered. According to Graves, Lawrence climbed a tower at All Souls to hang the Hejaz flag from its peak, kidnapped a deer from the Magdalen College deer park, and rang the station bell he had captured from Tell Shahm from his window at night. These incidents would not have been out of the ordinary for an undergraduate, but Lawrence was at the time a thirty-one-year-old retired officer, and All Souls was not a place that looked with fond amusement on high jinks by its fellows. The pranks may be seen, not so much as cheerful rebellion against authority, but more likely as an attempt to revert to the happier, easier undergraduate state of mind that Lawrence had known at Oxford from 1907 to 1910. But that world had vanished forever. Oxford in 1919 was a place where the undergraduates were for the most part ex-officers, many of them old before their time. In every college dons were busy putting up a plaque with a long list of those who had been killed from 1914 to 1918. It was as if a whole generation had simply disappeared. Lawrence did not fit in at All Souls any more easily than he did at home.

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 Lieutenant-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.