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31:3 Book Reviews depend, in part at least, on a reader's familiarity with the text of Yeats's poetry and the considerable body of secondary source material. There is, however, a remarkable unity in the diversity of these essays, and that comes from shared assumptions about the validity and the value of the texts they examine. Robert C. Petersen Middle Tennessee State University T. E. LAWRENCE: FACT AND FICTION Michael Yardley. T. E. Lawrence: A Biography. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein and Day, 1987. $22.95 James C. Simmons. Passionate Pilgrims: English Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs. New York: Monow, 1987. $19.95 Each age is known by its heroes: Achilles, the Duke of Wellington, Saladin, Lawrence of Arabia, Lindbergh, Colonel Oliver North. AU reveal human traits through time, and some retain their personal luster. Others become tarnished celebrities. With T. E. Lawrence the debate continues. Is he the real thing? Does Lawrence of Arabia deserve his niche in our hearts and imaginations? Facts can be used for many purposes. At the end of the Preface to his biography of T. E. Lawrence—the title expresses no point of view or judgment—Michael Yardley asks, "Was Lawrence a true hero, or only a media hero?" But he eludes the question, saying "For me after three years of research, the most interesting thing about Lawrence is not what he was, but how he was perceived." He has seemingly thrown up his hands in despair at finding the truth and has settled for repeating what other people have written, regardless of their knowledge or their motives. The job of the writer of a biography—especially one who tells us there are at least 40 others already written about his subject—is to try to find out who and what to believe. An older and wiser friend asked which to believe—a man's friends or enemies—replied, "The friends." Maybe Lawrence deserves what another fictional prince and uncrowned king had at the end: a friend who would "in this harsh world draw [his] breath in pain, to tell my story." Shakespeare's Hamlet had Horatio; Lawrence had Lowell Thomas, the earliest biographer, who knew Lawrence personally and had his energetic and unflagging help in presenting their view of him. Thomas needed a hero to symbolize and help insure the commercial success of his "illustrated Travelogues" of the WW I desert campaign. Lawrence in the white robes of a sheik (the prototype of Rudolph Valentino or even The Desert Song's Red Shadow) was a more exotic attraction than AUenby, that stiff British General. Lawrence complained about his notoriety while posing for photos: he had a way of "backing into the limelight." Thomas's book made both subject and author famous. Books by Lawrence's friends Liddell Hart and Robert Graves followed hard upon—with Lawrence conecting, adding, subtracting—so that all the Hart-Graves anecdotes 339 31:3 Book Reviews are basicaUy his. But, after all, they were: he had been there—and he had his reasons. Lawrence died at 46 in 1935. Twenty years later Richard Aldington wrote the most famous of the debunking biographies: he wished to disillusion his sister, who idolized Lawrence. In his biased and not entirely praiseworthy study, Aldington questioned the truth of events as Lawrence and his friends had presented them and added new "facts." Try as he might to knock Lawrence off his pedestal, Aldington failed to undermine Lawrence's heroic image, that of a small man who accomplished great deeds under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions and who, against all odds, was a fighter, a diplomat, and a writer. (Perhaps Lawrence himself took the most pride in his efforts to improve the lot of the RAF enlisted men, and to test and demonstrate the usefulness of speed boats in rescue work.) But the effigy of the saint-hero had been cracked. Other books appeared, all with some supposedly important new fact or scandal about the man Churchill called "one of the greatest beings alive." The fact that caused Lawrence the most worry during his lifetime was his illegitimacy. His father had never married his mother; she had been the governess...

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