Autopsy of a Hero

"His name will live in history," wrote King George V at the death of Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Soon afterward, in a biographical sketch, Winston Churchill added: "That is true; it will live in English letters; it will live in the traditions of the Royal Air Force; it will live in the annals of war and in the legends of Arabia."

Lawrence, the pint-sized, introverted Oxford scholar who rose from an obscure post in the Civil Service to lead the desert Arabs in revolt against their Turkish oppressors, was just the kind of lonely, romantic figure of danger the British needed in World War I to offset the unrelieved, anonymous four-year horror of the Western Front. His saga became legend. Hailed by many as a masterpiece, his own monumental, turgid and mystic Seven Pillars of Wisdom became the bible of a widespread cult of Lawrence admirers, whose most romantic ideals were justified when their unpredictable hero renounced the world at the pinnacle of his fame to join the R.A.F. as lowly Aircraftman Ross.

Last week, 20 years after his death in a motorcycle crash, a new biography of Lawrence appeared in England, and set off a fury of charge and countercharge. Its respected publisher (Collins) held up publication of the book for 18 months while lawyers checked it, and friends of Lawrence were asked to rebut its accusations. Lawrence of Arabia, A Biographical Enquiry, by Novelist Richard Aldington, says without mincing words that, far from being a hero, Lawrence of Arabia was a misbegotten fraud, a perverted charlatan, a pretentious demagogue, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur, a liar and a plain fake. The effect, as one paper put it, was "as if someone charged that Nelson knew nothing about the sea." "Is this the end of a legend?" asked a sign printed in scarlet letters in the window of Foyle's, London's leading bookstore. In press, radio and TV, the nation's sharpest-penned and sharpest-tongued controversialists argued the question.

A Search for Fraud. In writing Lawrence's life, Aldington (author of a sardonic bestselling 1929 novel of World War I, Death of a Hero) claims to have started with an open mind. But in the course of his four years of research, he turned up many claims by Lawrence and his enthusiastic biographers (Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves) that did not seem to jibe with the facts. The chief of these was Lawrence's boast that he had once been offered the post of High Commissioner for Egypt. There was no record of such an offer in writing, and from the testimony of living persons who might know the facts, Aldington decided that the offer had not been made.

With this evidence of infidelity as a springboard, he began to search for further fraud. The end was a book that glares in ill-concealed suspicion at every aspect and every facet of the Lawrence legend.

Aldington goes to infinite pains, complete with family genealogies, to prove that T. E. Lawrence and his four brothers were the illegitimate sons of a baronet named Chapman. He goes deep into the family's private history to debunk tales of his hero's childhood precocity. Stirred to action by a former biographer's statement that Lawrence claimed to have read "all the books" in the Oxford Union Library, Aldington lists the total (50,000) to prove the task impossible. Even Lawrence's claim to have ridden camelback at the pace of 100 miles a day comes to earth in an avalanche of maps and routes remeasured; not content with that, the debunker goes on to cite facts indicating that Lawrence was not a camel rider anyway and always preferred to cross the desert on foot.

With Lawrence the man thus disposed of, Biographer Aldington proceeds to attack his place in history by denying 1) that Lawrence played a major part in the Arab revolt in the desert, and 2) that the revolt itself was a significant aspect of the war. "All the preliminaries which led to the rebellion," he writes, "occurred before Lawrence ever reached Cairo, [and they] would certainly have occurred if Lawrence had never existed."

I Told Them Lies. Few of the Lawrence fans, old friends and old Middle East hands who rushed to his defense last week bothered to challenge Aldington's facts one by one. All of them professed to have long known that Lawrence was illegitimate, but based their objections on the propriety of saying so while his 93-year-old mother was still alive. Most of them also conceded that Lawrence was an incorrigible ham, who loved to posture and pose in his outlandish Arab regalia and often embroidered the truth. "Finding they wouldn't believe it," Lawrence himself once wrote a friend, "I told them lies." The ire of Aldington's critics was directed far less at the existence of sordid facts concerning their hero than at the brutal and relentless way Aldington sought to reduce Lawrence's reputation to nothingness. "It is as if someone were to describe Shakespeare's atrocious table manners at the Mermaid tavern, while omitting to mention that he also wrote plays," said Historian Harold Nicolson, who admitted to his own prejudice against Lawrence. "A mere mass of faults, however competently exposed," said Lawrence's onetime superior, Sir Ronald Storrs, "adds up not to a portrait but to a post mortem--the portrait of a hero on the dissecting table."

The wisest words in the dispute were spoken by crusty old Lord Vansittart, a distant cousin but no partisan of the hero. Lawrence's part in the Arabian revolt, wrote Vansittart, "was not titanic, but it was considerable. Mr. Aldington cannot reconcile--nor did Lawrence himself--faults and gifts, purple and dust, Dichtung und Wahrheit, bravery and inaccuracy, daring and brusquerie, delicacy and cheek."

By week's end, Lawrence of Arabia, for all its crabbed dullness, had already far outsold Lawrence's own Revolt in the Desert, to prove that the legend, true or false, was still alive. Perhaps the vitriolic charges had added even more glamour, mystery and wonder to its hero, for as Lawrence himself wrote in the very first line of Seven Pillars: "Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances."

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