1lawrence of arabia and american culture the Making of a Transatlantic Legend
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| Lawrence wrote to E. M. Forster that he hoped to be better remembered as a man of letters than as a man of action. This was an unrealistic, yet not altogether unrealized, hope. Lawrence's actions in Arabia--what he called his "eastern chapter"--defined the remainder of his life and were the foundation of his reputation. Try as he might to disavow them, his actions only became larger. As Malcolm Cowley remarked in 1935, the more that became known about Lawrence, the more imposing he became. But what Lawrence actually did in Arabia, though remarkable, was not without comparison. Gertrude Bell, the only woman staff officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo during the war, a fine writer, and, like Lawrence, a "kingmaker" in the Middle East, might be viewed as an equally if not more extraordinary figure. There were as well other exceptional Allied officers, but Lawrence is better remembered than all of them. He outlasted many of his contemporaries in part because what he wrote remains relevant to us. His highly subjective, and in many ways disturbing and fantasized, account of a man caught in the middle of imperial designs and nationalist aspirations has more resonance today than the more factual but dated accounts by his contemporaries. Subsequently, Lawrence nearly got what he wanted. He is remembered, at least in some measure, because of his writing.
An obvious reason why Lawrence is better remembered than his contemporaries is that he was better publicized. As with major American heroes of World War I and the 1920s, such as Sergeant York and Charles Lindbergh, Lawrence had his troubadour. Lowell Thomas told the Lawrence story to 4 million people worldwide and then wrote about and defended him throughout his life. Also like Lindbergh and York, Lawrence had a Hollywood movie made about him. Popular culture counts. Beyond that, the versatility and durability of the Lawrence legend, despite efforts to debunk it, have -135- secured for Lawrence a place in modern history. As Viennese critic Manes Sperber concludes in a collection of essays about culture and society, The Achilles Heel, there are at least "two Lawrence legends: in the first he is a Napoleon, in the second a Byronic Victor Hugo." Sperber, seemingly ignorant of the American contribution to the legend, surmises that if Richard Aldington "had contented himself with attacking the first legend, that of triumphant warrior as portrayed by Lowell Thomas, a purely British legend, he might have succeeded in weakening it considerably." 11 But Aldington, in an attempt to debunk the legend, went after the man as well and actually contributed to the second legend, that of the proud repentant. Sperber believes that this second legend is assailable but probably indestructible because of Lawrence's confessional, Seven Pillars, and because of his act of monastic repentance, joining the Royal Air Force as a private soldier and enduring the indignities of the ranks. Had he, as Sperber and others writing about Lawrence have noted, accepted rather than spurned the rewards of fame, he would have held much less fascination for us. But Lawrence, exhausted by war and personal torment, at first fled from fame and then attempted to deconstruct it by exposing the ironies, falsities, and humiliations of heroism. For that, scholars have found in Lawrence an anti-hero and existential figure far more interesting than the classical type of hero. It is not surprising that Jean-Paul Sartre thought of Lawrence as an existentialist. It is hard to find a better embodiment of the declaration "Non! done je suis." 12 Another reason why Lawrence remains historically relevant is because he serves as a transitional figure between an earlier, supposedly more innocent age and the modern period. Lawrence's place as a transitional figure in twentieth-century culture deserves exposition because he interfaced with literary modernism far more than is generally recognized. Born in the age of Victoria at the height of the British Empire, he was 26 years old when he went to war. Promoted rapidly, he ended the war as a colonel. Afterward, he held various official government positions and wielded considerable political influence for a Whitehall outsider. As a consequence of his war record, a career in government, the military, or academia was fairly assured had Lawrence chosen to accept one of the various positions offered to him. Similarly, as a national hero, he was received as a celebrity by London high society, including being given a private audience by King George V. Thus, Lawrence had the political and social contacts necessary for rapid career advancement, and he could have settled into a comfortable existence had he wished. -136- Instead, Lawrence refused military and civilian honors and set about to destroy the hero identity he had himself labored to construct. To the shock and dismay of friends and professional associates alike, he opted to bury himself in the ranks. His personal "revolt," however, should not have come as a surprise to his military and political colleagues and friends. Lawrence had never really been one of them socially. Despite an Oxford education, he did not have the security of many of his classmates and fellow officers during the war of belonging to the monied and titled class. His father, an Anglo-Irish landowner, had not married his mother but had instead raised a second family with her on a depleted income. Although Lawrence's illegitimacy was not generally known until after his death, he became fully aware of it after his father died in 1919. Lawrence was also intellectually out of sync with the age he lived in. A historian and archaeologist first, he romanticized both the past and the outre. As his brother explained, Lawrence's "medieval researches were . . . a dream way of escape from bourgeois England." He was weaned on the historical romances of Sir Thomas Malory and William Morris. During his youth he cycled in France, studying that country's castles and cathedrals, and his Oxford thesis, "The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture to the End of the Twelfth Century," took him to Syria and the Near East. Later, he worked on archaeological sites in Syria and Egypt. Long before he became associated with Arabia, Lawrence had become an Arabian after the fashion of Charles Doughty. Like many orientalists, he could be as much at home in the Near East as in Europe. He reluctantly entered the modern period and only as a result of the war. 13 But Lawrence, and two of his brothers killed in the war, bought into the nineteenth-century pro-patria myth of British imperialism, "the story England told itself as it went to bed at night." 14 If he did not immediately enlist, setting off for war in the high spirit of adventure to protect England and the empire, he soon acquired some of these sentiments. Like many other young men of his generation he returned with a different perspective on the story. In The Generation of 1914, Robert Wohl considers the impact of the First World War on those who fought it, assessing what they wrote and said. Primarily interested in generational theory, Wohl begins a chapter on England's veterans with what he describes as a fragmentary legend about twentieth-century England: Once upon a time, before the Great War, there lived a generation of young men of unusual abilities. When the war broke out they volunteered for service in the fighting forces. Most of them were killed in the battlefields of Gallipoli, Ypres, -137- Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, and Cambrai. Those who were not killed were mutilated in mind and body. They limped home in 1919 to find that their sacrifice had been in vain. The hard-faced, hard-hearted old men had come back and seized the levers of power. Youth had been defeated by age. Few in number, tired and shell-shocked, disillusioned by what they found at home, they sat by helplessly during the interwar years and watched the old politicians flounder in incompetence and squander their victory. 15 Like millions of others, Lawrence was a casualty of this conflict. He survived wounds of the flesh but not of the spirit. The war, and his part in it, left him disillusioned, alienated, frustrated, and at times emotionally paralyzed. After the Paris Peace Conference he spent time with his mother in Oxford. She remembered that he sometimes sat all morning "in the same position, without moving, and with the same expression on his face." 16 Robert Graves and other memoirists of the war record similar symptoms of what is now called post-traumatic stress syndrome. In much of the postwar fiction of the war writers, characters--such as Hemingway's Jake Barnes-are depicted as casualties, left psychologically and physically wounded, feeling they have been wasted and betrayed. Lawrence had similar reactions. The following is a Lawrence contribution to the "fragmentary legend." It is an excerpt from his original introduction to the Oxford edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, expunged on the advice of Bernard Shaw. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took from us our victory, and re-made it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. 17 The feeling of bitterness and betrayal that Wohl describes is here eloquently expressed first-hand. The passage is perhaps, on its own, enough to explain Lawrence's renunciation of honors bestowed on him by the political and military establishment and his alliance instead with the generation of 1914. To some of these discontents, such as D. H. Lawrence, he was never above suspicion. To most people unfamiliar with his actual wartime and immediate postwar experiences, T. E. Lawrence simply remained an enigma. In whatever manner he was viewed by the iconoclastic generation that came of age during the First World War, Lawrence renounced establishment values and cast his lot with "the moderns." -138- Lawrence's reputation as an author was a consequence of his popularity as a war hero, but it is also tied to his position as a transitional figure. His Seven Pillars can be viewed as a classic narrative of adventure and nineteenth-century Victorian values: hardships overcome, loyalties tested under fire, resourcefulness, and daring exploits by a golden son of the empire. The book could be cited by the established generation as a brilliant, though eccentric, memoir by Britain's most enigmatic national hero. Indeed, as British novelist and critic V. S. Pritchett later noted, Victorian-Edwardian England lingered in Lawrence. Pritchett, writing from the vantage point of the late 1960s, found him a "word prig" whose prose style was "tortuous" in "its airs." Compared to many veterans who acquired recognition as writers after the war, the Lawrence of Seven Pillars belonged to an earlier generation, those critics of society who still believed in progress and whom Stephen Spender labeled "contemporaries." But Lawrence had more in common with the war generation than with England's establishment. Although he did not blindly accept assumptions that have become associated with literary modernism, as a civilian soldier who maintained his intellectual independence, he embodied the sensibilities of the discontents and their representative authors, Joyce, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Pound, and others. Foremost was the feeling that one had made a break, willfully or not, with the recent past. Lawrence's renunciation of everything that had to do with the war, including profit from his wartime experience through public sale of his books, is a declaration that he considered contemporary values unacceptable. 18 Lawrence's reaction to contemporary values appears at first to be a passive one. He opted for a medieval, monastic remedy to modern life by burying himself in the ranks. Like the new generation of authors he admired, however, he made writing a deliberate act of rebellion. His major works during the 1920s are attempts at challenging existing values by, if not inventing a new literature, infusing it with an almost perverse self-analysis. Both Seven Pillars and The Mint exhibit the tendency in modernist literature, as Dennis Brown phrases it, "to radically probe the nature of selfhood." 19 French scholar Jean Beraud-Villars, momentarily forgetting the Romantic movement he refers to, thought Lawrence created the modern literary tradition of the tortured soul. He writes that Seven Pillars when it appeared struck a new note: its balance between romanticism and naturalism was the essence of a new form of literature. Traditional in form, the Seven Pillars is in many ways revolutionary. The public of the time, especially the British public, was not accustomed to so much precision in depicting the horrors of war, -139- nor to such confessions of the inner life . . . no great writer had ever told how he had executed one of his men at point blank range, finished off a wounded comrade, been successively tortured and sodomized by a squad of soldiers. 20 Lawrence's brutal frankness, if not unique or even necessarily honest, is clearly radical. Seven Pillars becomes more than a warped adventure story, textbook in guerrilla tactics, and indictment of the military-intelligence community. It is a case study in alienation, and (published after the Lowell Thomas lectures) the self-deconstruction of a public image, the epitome of Paul de Man's notion of autobiography as the impossible genre. Lawrence's probe of unmentionable subjects, his renunciation of establishment values, and his alignment with the generation of 1914 place him in the radical wing of modernism. He becomes a modern author to be reckoned with. Lawrence also appeals to our fascination with psychoanalysis. His almost pathological peculiarity and his struggle with self-identity are ultimately perhaps the reasons why we cannot dismiss him as a fixture of the past. Like Lindbergh, he is vulnerable, too interestingly complex to forget. His changes of wardrobe ( Oxford blazer, officer's uniform, Bedouin's robes, private's kit) indicate a loss of fixed identity that we find common to our age. Lawrence's adoption of Arab dress and his romanticization of Bedouin culture are surely manifestations of a nostalgic search for a premodern identity. He embodies that reaction to twentieth-century existence that T. J. Jackson Lears writes has led us to a search for "more intense forms of physical and spiritual experience supposedly embodied in medieval or Oriental cultures." 21 Literally, by dressing for the part, Lawrence tried to escape the twentieth century and failed. His transparent efforts at selfadvertisement and his unsuccessful attempt to escape the historical moment appeal to us because chinks in the armor and Don Quixote idealism are what make heroes human instead of cardboard. On the level of popular culture, at least, Sam Spiegel bet on the appeal of failure and human frailty when he chose to make a film about Lawrence instead of Mahatma Gandhi. Still another reason for continual interest in him is the Lawrence mystique. He lived recklessly and died young. Like other twentieth-century cult figures--Isadora Duncan, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John E. Kennedy--he can be viewed as a tragic hero of the youth culture, a type, as the list above suggests, which has particular resonance in the United States. As the late Elie Kedourie noted, Lawrence is also "a symbol of the power of Chance over human affairs." In Kedourie's estimation, "he came, he saw, he conquered and he went away." While briefly on the stage of world affairs, he challenged the status quo establishment in the Near East as well as in -140- Britain by a highly extravagant, and in many ways irresponsible, attempt at exerting his personal will on history. He became a partisan par excellence and a seeker after sensation, testing, Kedourie concludes, "what the power of one will could accomplish." 22 The Lawrence mystique also includes fact and speculation about his activities as an intelligence agent. Even after he left the Colonial Office, the British public and foreign governments alike refused to believe he was not deeply involved in Middle East affairs, even espionage. To suspicious minds, his retreat into the RAF was a cover for clandestine activities; in fact, it was a kind of penance. In this view, Lawrence has come to represent a character type that has been especially popular in film and fiction during the Cold War years. In one of several recent articles addressing Lawrence's mystique and the Middle East, David Fromkin traces the evolution in fiction of the morally tarnished intelligence agent from authors Somerset Maugham to John Le Carre. Their novels chronicle officers in the field . . . acting in good faith, but then discovering that their own political or military or intelligence leaders are at least as cynical and immoral as the enemy's. [The theme] is one recounted time and again in American popular literature and films of the past few decades. The exploration of the moral ambiguity, or even moral guilt, of our own side . . . can be traced to Seven Pillars." 23 Finally, the overarching appeal of the Lawrence story is its transatlantic origin and currency. The Lawrence of Arabia legend is a supranational tale that involves the United States and Britain as well as France and Germany and the countries of the Middle East. The French, whose colonial ambitions in the region Lawrence tried to undermine, have one version of the Lawrence story. Turks, understandably, have quite another, as do the various groups and generations of Arabs. Postnationalist Middle Eastern scholars such as Elie Kedourie, Suleiman Mousa, and Edward Said have reevaluated the Lawrence legend from an Arab perspective. Theirs is a far more nuanced, if not necessarily more accurate, view than the oriental adventurer or super spy stories popular in the West. 24 For better or worse, the popular manifestation of the Lawrence of Arabia legend owes much to its American beginnings and propagation. It began in the United States in 1919 with Lowell Thomas's Allenby-Lawrence lecture and was then imported to Britain by the English-Speaking Union. As an unprecedented cultural event, Thomas's lecture filled a postwar need for concrete symbols of heroism and helped, as an example of continued Anglo-American cooperation and appreciation, to ease tensions between the two nations arising from the peace conference and war debt. It also -141- brought the various peoples of the Middle East, ranging from Zionist colonizers to Syrian nationalists, to the attention of the public on both sides of the Atlantic. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Lawrence legend returned to America in new form through Lawrence's writings. As a literary-intellectual, he enjoyed considerable attention in this country. His books were sometimes first published and reviewed in the United States where they sold extremely well. He became friends with American intellectuals, and they influenced, and were influenced by, his writing. Several decades later, the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia replaced Thomas's Allenby-Lawrence lecture as the single most influential commercial use of the Lawrence legend. Like the lecture, it was an Anglo-American enterprise. Throughout its history, the Lawrence story has been an Anglo-American one, and Lawrence of Arabia is anything but "a purely British legend." -142- Appendix: Notes on Sources about Lowell Thomas BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
GOVERNMENT RECORDS, WILSON ADMINISTRATION MEMOIRS, AND THE LOWELL THOMAS COMMUNICATION CENTER ARCHIVES For details about Thomas's eighteen-month assignment overseas during the First World War, it is necessary to rely heavily on his own accounts and on materials in the Lowell Thomas Communications Center Archives (LTCCA) at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. References to this -143- period of his career are curiously absent from government archives and official memoirs. For instance, although the summons from Secretary of Interior Franklin K. Lane which Thomas refers to in his autobiography would have been consistent with Lane's war efforts and undoubtedly occurred, no available proof exists in the records of the Department of Interior that Lane initiated Thomas's assignment (Record Group 48, National Archives). Moreover, he is not mentioned in biographies about Lane or in Lane's surviving letters, Lane and Wall, The Letters of Franklin K. Lane: Personal and Political ( 1922). Keith Olson, Lane's biographer, also found no references to Thomas while researching for his work on Lane, Biography of a Progressive ( 1979). [ Interview with Olson, February 1991]. Fred Crawford, however, notes that Thomas's 1917 diary entries describe meetings with Lane and his assistants. [ Letter from Crawford, 27 February 1995]. It would seem that Thomas lobbied Lane's office for accreditation and permission to proceed. Documentation relating to Thomas and his propaganda mission is absent from other official government records in Washington as well. No references to Thomas are made in the memoirs of such important government officials of the period as Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and George Creel, head of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), all of whom, Thomas wrote, supplied him with letters of introduction. I found no mention of Thomas in their memoirs or papers housed at the Library of Congress, or in the surviving records of the CPI. The papers of the Committee on Public Information, Record Group 63, National Archives, and the Creel Correspondence at the Library of Congress, hold no references to Thomas that, after extensive search, I have been able to find. Yet, the LTCCA contains a copy of a letter from Rome, dated 10 January 1918, from Thomas to George Creel, which suggests that Thomas was, if not in some manner responsible to the director of the CPI, interested in making himself known to him. Some Committee materials have been inadvertently and systematically destroyed. CPI correspondence to, from, and about Thomas may be among this material. In Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies ( 1990), Christopher Hitchens writes that "Thomas had been dispatched to the Middle Eastern theater by the Creel Committee," but he does not cite a source and I have not been able to confirm this statement. References to Thomas are missing in the public records of other prominent officials at the time. Relevant papers of Josephus Daniels--his diaries (Containers 1-10), letterbooks (Containers, 290-332), introduction-patronage files (Containers, 360-383), and press files (Container 573)--at the -144- Library of Congress hold no references to Thomas. No mention of him is made in Newton D. Baker book Why We Went to War ( 1936) or in his relevant papers, including his general correspondence (Container 3) and Letterbooks (Container 275). Similarly, the State Department Name Card Index from 1910 to 1929, where one might expect to find reference to Thomas when he was overseas and in contact with U.S. Embassy personnel, does not contain cards for Thomas prior to 1922 and in any way related to his period as a war correspondent. |