T.E. Lawrence (review)

Any reviewer sent a book on T. E. Lawrence must wonder if there is anything new to say on a man who in life and death has attracted the sort of interest that these days would normally be reserved for pop and film stars. Ever since Richard Aldington's ad hominem 1955 book, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, scholars have pored over every aspect of Lawrence's life from his family background (he was illegitimate), his sex life (he seems to have had masochistic urges and paid a fellow soldier to beat him), his sexual orientation (he seems to have been homosocial or homosexual) to his psychological condition (he seems to have had bi-polar tendencies and depression, both aggravated by various personal traumas). Most of these examinations pander to those—i.e., most of us—interested in salacious detail and say as much if not more about the social mores of the time in which they were written as they do about Lawrence.

Traditional scholarship focusing on Lawrence's role in shaping history—exemplified by, for instance, Jeremy Wilson's magisterial official biography: Lawrence of Arabia: Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1992)—struggles against the personalized, polarized literature of Lawrence's admirers and detractors. Malcolm Brown, author of previous works on Lawrence, is obviously an admirer of the man, but this does not prevent him from writing a "warts and all" account. Brown shows how scholarship can deal with personal issues without making them the prime focus of a book. The result is a beautifully written, critical narrative of Lawrence. While he does not present any radical new views on his subject, Brown has done a tremendous job, with the aid of some lovely illustrations, of producing a readable and concise account based around an extensive selection of Lawrence's letters. While Brown deals with Lawrence's traumas—including possibly being raped in 1917 while on service in Arabia—his account, neatly divided into chapters that can be easily read in one sitting, brings to life a fascinating, enigmatic man who did so much in his short life. Lawrence may well have been something of a self-publicist and charlatan but his life was full of so many adventures and endeavors, all of which his sharp mind recounted with sympathy and insight.

Even a teleological rewriting of Lawrence cannot escape the fact that, from an early age, Lawrence stood out from his contemporaries in Edwardian middle-class Oxford. This is perhaps explained by his family background: his father, heir to a baronetcy, had run away from the family home in Ireland with the governess, leaving his wife and daughters behind, a enduring source of shame and worry for Lawrence's parents. As Leo Tolstoy famously recounted in Anna Karenina, while all "happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"—a possible explanation for Lawrence's peculiar drive and sense of difference that found their fulfilment in a variety of dangerous and different exploits. Brown's lively text recounts all of these: the cycling trips around France, the brilliant undergraduate dissertation on crusader castles, the archaeological digs and travels before the war in the Middle East, the war years in Arabia where he ended up as Colonel, the Fellowship at All Souls, the remarkable decision to join the Royal Air Force and Tank Corps as a ranker, and then the premature death in a motorbike crash in 1935 (a function it must be said of Lawrence's obsession with machinery and speed). A life as full as Lawrence's made the choice of any epitaph difficult; his religious mother chose "Fellow of All Souls College" alongside an extract from the Gospel of St John. At the end of Brown's book, the reader is left wondering quite what to make of Lawrence who, as one contemporary observed, spent his life backing into the limelight.