TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/051589/05158900.061

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BOOKS, Page 80

The Hero Our Century Deserved

By Paul Gray


    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. ToO 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. Them 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.