Tortured Hero

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: THE MAN AND THE MOTIVE (256 pp.)--Anthony Nutting--Clarkson N. Potter ($5).

No more romantic figure emerged from World War I than the shadowy desert raider in flowing white burnoose known as Lawrence of Arabia. Here was a pint-sized Oxford archaeologist who could outride the fiercest Bedouin warrior, a galloping ghost who had blown up 79 bridges along the Turkish-held Hejaz Railway (and mourned he had not made it 80), an Englishman hailed by the Arabs as El Aurens, who in 2 1/2 years had led the revolt in the desert from the Red Sea port of Jidda to the gates of Damascus. Then, with his chosen prophet, Emir Feisal, about to be crowned king of Syria, Lawrence disappeared as suddenly as he came, in what seemed a superb gesture of modesty and abdication.

Compared to the lumpen, grimy men who emerged in a state of shock from the blood-soaked trenches of the Western front, Thomas Edward Lawrence was an irresistible figure, cut to the bias of every romantic schoolboy's fantasy. His apotheosis was not long in coming. It occurred one night in September 1919, when an audience studded with Cabinet members and ambassadors jammed London's Covent Garden to hear Lowell Thomas lecture on Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia. It was a rousing occasion; the Welsh Guards played background music, and an Irish tenor rendered the Moslem call to prayer. The lecture, repeated round the world over the next four years by Commentator Thomas, was seen and heard by over a million. Lurking in the darkened rear of the auditorium on several occasions was Lawrence himself, blushing to the roots of his hair, some thought with pleasure.

Down to the Ranks. Probably no man can use a myth as a mask in this probing century. Lawrence, having finished the private edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922, tried to lose his identity. Though he had been a colonel at war's end, he enlisted in the R.A.F. as a private soldier under the assumed name of John Hume Ross. In four months the secret was out, and Lawrence was booted out of the service. The next year he was allowed to enlist in the Tank Corps as T. E. Shaw, later transferring to the R.A.F.

As Aircraftman Shaw, he spent ten years in uniform, recording the unending obscenity of barracks life in The Mint, racing motorcycles for relaxation, developing high-speed crash boats for air-sea rescue operations. In 1935 he left the service. "I would not take any job at all," he wrote Lady Astor. "There is something broken in the works, as I told you: my will, I think." Five days later, on May 13, 1935, Lawrence swerved his motorcycle to avoid two boys, fatally crashed into a ditch. Lawrence's bust was put beside that of Nelson and Wellington in the crypt of London's St. Paul's Cathedral.

Faulted Hero. But Lawrence's troubled spirit has not been allowed to rest in peace. Six years ago, Novelist Richard Aldington performed a literary autopsy on Lawrence's remains, charged that Lawrence was a downright fraud, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur whose role in the Arab revolt had been negligible. Old friends from Winston Churchill down rallied to Lawrence's defense, but the damage had been done. Lawrence's own confessions in Pillars made it clear that he had known from the beginning that the Great Powers intended to carve up the Middle East, that he was tortured by "the rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind's habit: that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race." But the destruction of one myth only created a more complex modern myth--that of the flawed, wounded hero on the order of Philoctetes, whose invincible bow was necessary for the winning of Troy, but whose wound so stank that men shrank from him in horror and disgust.

In last year's hit London play Ross, Playwright Terence Rattigan attempted to probe the nature of Lawrence's wound. The play is built around a crucial incident in Lawrence's life. Posing as a light-skinned Circassian, Lawrence walked into Deraa to scout the defenses and was seized by the Turks. By Lawrence's own account, the Turkish commander tried to assault him sexually; when he refused to comply, he was whipped, bayoneted and finally sodomized by the guards, then set free. As Rattigan sees it, the Turks had recognized Lawrence, and were aware of his homosexuality, hoped to break and disgrace him in Arab eyes.

Private Scourgings. Latest critic to have a go at unraveling the mystery of Lawrence is Anthony Nutting, whose credentials include Eton, Cambridge, and a tour as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs under Eden (Nutting resigned in protest against Eden's decision to launch the catastrophic Suez adventure). According to Nutting, a key fact is that Lawrence was illegitimate. At the age of ten, Lawrence learned that his father was not the respectable Welsh gentleman he seemed, but Sir Thomas Robert Chapman, an Irish baronet who had left his wife and four daughters to run off with the children's Scottish nanny, Sara Maden. Assuming the name of Lawrence, the two proved a faithful couple and produced five sons (Thomas was the second). But the discovery of his father's misbehavior so shocked Lawrence that he forswore sex. He turned to digging up the past as an archaeologist, becoming an expert on crusaders' castles, an Arabic linguist, and boon companion to Arabs, including handsome young Sheik Ahmed, who (Nutting notes) may be the subject of Pillars' dedicatory love poem. Currently, Nutting is acting as adviser to Hollywood Producer Sam Spiegel, now photographing a $6,000,000 epic of Lawrence of Arabia.

As for the episode at Deraa, Nutting rejects Rattigan's thesis, and believes that the Turks never suspected the identity of their captive; if they had, they would never have let him escape. The reason Deraa was a turning point in Lawrence's life, Nutting argues, was the horrifying discovery that he was at heart a masochist. For years Lawrence had indulged himself in private scourgings in the desert to toughen himself. "Pain," wrote Lawrence, "was a solvent, a cathartic, almost a decoration to be fairly worn." Lawrence confessed that under the Turkish whiplashes and bayonets "a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me." This realization converted Lawrence into the ruthless sadist who machine-gunned prisoners in cold blood.

Nutting believes that Lawrence began to see himself as a kind of latter-day Messiah. Shown an illustration for Pillars that pictured him as a godhead above the clouds looking down on the Arab revolt, Lawrence was amazed that anyone could capture so completely what at times he felt about himself during the desert campaign. But he also felt deeply that he had betrayed the Arab cause in whose name he fought. Fearful of his enormous talent for power and equally fearful of the potential consequences of such power if misdirected, Lawrence fled to the monastic security of the R.A.F. "to make me impossible for anyone to suggest for a responsible position." As he wrote his mother in later years, "There is nothing so restful as taking orders from fools."

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