Two on T. E. Lawrence

BOOK REVIEWS Two on T. E. Lawrence Fred D. Crawford. Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. xvii + 263 pp. $39.95 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The Complete 1922 Text. J. M. Wilson, ed. Fordingbridge : Castle Hill Press, 1997. 3 vols, xxii + 879 pp. £199 THESE TWO ADMIRABLE CONTRIBUTIONS demonstrate that the field of T. E. Lawrence studies remains as contentious and fascinating as its subject. Fred Crawford's excellent work is a revealing fulllength assessment of one of the twentieth century's most tenacious literary disagreements, while J. M. Wilson's superb edition of the 1922 text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, hitherto unavailable outside of rare books libraries , will stir renewed debate about the best version of the field's "Bible " itself. Both Crawford and Wilson have done Lawrence scholars a service, though of very different kinds. Crawford's careful, well-documented book accomplishes three things: it details, from Richard Aldington's point of view, his struggle to write his searching Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955; French edition, 1954) in the face of many difficulties; it reveals for the first time in depth (Phillip Knightley's excellent 1973 Texas Quarterly article notwithstanding) the extent of the attempt to censor and suppress Aldington's book; and it shows how Lawrence's partisans have not to this day satisfactorily resolved some of the questions that Aldington raised about Lawrence's life. Crawford claims that Aldington began the project with no apparent animus against Lawrence, but gradually became convinced that he was dealing with a poseur. As Aldington saw it, Lawrence manufactured glorious stories about himself to compensate for his illegitimacy, suffered from ambiguous sexual problems and other neuroses, made insupportable claims about the value of the Arab Revolt to General Edmund Allenby 's victory against the Turks, and surreptitiously collaborated with and deliberately misled his first biographers Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves and B. H. Liddell Hart. Although hampered by a lack of access to important research materials, and suffering from financial privation and ill health, Aldington was nonetheless able to provide a sharper, deeper, and cagier assessment of his subject than had any of his predecessors . 195 ELT 42 : 2 1999 Determined opposition to the publication of Aldington's work came primarily from Lawrence's brother Professor A. W Lawrence, who was trying to defend his family's reputation, and from Liddell Hart, who feared that Aldington's work would prove his own Lawrence biography naive and hagiographie. This "Lawrence Bureau" (Aldington's phrase), which also included Robert Graves and artist Eric Kennington among other prominent names, forced Aldington's publisher Collins into endless delays, legal consultations, and demands on the author for rewriting . When the book was finally published in somewhat bowdlerized form long after the completed manuscript had been submitted, the "Bureau" orchestrated a campaign of negative reviews and vilification. Despite these obstacles, among the most formidable that a modern writer has confronted, Aldington has had the last word. His work has created a schism in the Lawrence field that continues to this day, with biographers Phillip Knightley and Lawrence James numbered among the Lawrence skeptics, and John Mack and J. M. Wilson among Lawrence's defenders. One of the most interesting aspects of Crawford's book is his criticism of Wilson's authorized biography for partisanship and overreliance on Lawrence's own testimony, despite Wilson's attempt to use the documentary evidence whenever possible. Throughout, Crawford buttresses his argument with valuable new material from (among other repositories) the Southern Illinois University Library, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London, and the Lowell Thomas archive at Marist College. While Crawford deserves praise for having fleshed out the story of the attempted suppression of Aldington's book and for explaining this entire episode from Aldington's point of view, he does not question the motives and character of Aldington to the same extent that he does those of Lawrence 's defenders. Aldington may not have been motivated only by the desire to unmask hypocrisy, as Crawford claims, but by an envious nature that caused him to criticize not only T. E. Lawrence, but also...