Transatlantic Legend: T. E. Lawrence

BOOK REVIEWS Transatlantic Legend: T. E. Lawrence Joel C. Hodson. Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995. xiii + 195 pp. $45.00 JOEL HUDSON'S short but careful study emphasizes a sometimes -overlooked fact about Lawrence of Arabia: although he was British and never set foot in America, his celebrity status was created by an American and reinforced by Hollywood, and his work has been analyzed more often by American than by British academic scholars. Hodson attempts to understand America's contribution to the making of the "Lawrence legend" largely by analyzing the career of journalist Lowell Thomas and the development of the script of the 1962 Robert Bolt/David Lean/Sam Spiegel film Lawrence of Arabia. Partisans of both Lowell Thomas and Lawrence have made it difficult to sort out the truth of their collaboration. Lawrence told Thomas many of the stories upon which Thomas's 1919 show "With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia" was based, and he obviously liked the show, because he went to see it, incognito, several times. Yet Lawrence privately attacked Thomas as a liar and vulgar sensationalist. But Thomas was not blameless either. As Hodson shows, Thomas claimed to have seen things that he had not seen when he was with Lawrence, giving Lawrence good reason for complaint. Hudson's analysis of the LawrenceThomas relationship is deeper than that of anyone else to date (including Michael Yardley in his 1985 biography), largely because it is based on previously unpublished material now in the Lowell Thomas archive at Marist College. Moreover, Hodson is admirably objective about this dispute, finding that "Lawrence manipulated Thomas and then cast aspersions about him," while Thomas also exploited Lawrence "in order to advance his own career." This is a conclusion that will please neither Lawrence nor Thomas advocates, but it may well be accurate. Hodson is also good on the 1962 movie, showing (again on the basis of documentary evidence) how Robert Bolt, the writer, used many of the motifs developed by earlier scriptwriter Michael Wilson. In their 1992 Lawrence of Arabia: The 30th Anniversary Pictorial History, L. Robert Morris and Lawrence Raskin have explored the film in far greater detail than Hodson could in this short book, but in his discussion of Bolt's use of Wilson's motifs, Hodson definitely adds to our understanding. Hodson 's exploration of the American interest in movies about sheiks in the 1920s, following the Lowell Thomas show, is also valuable. 361 ELT 39:3 1996 Hodson compares the fame of Lawrence and that of the American war heroes General Pershing, Sergeant York, and Eddie Rickenbacker. He also shows that, like G. B. Shaw, W H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Rex Warner and many other British and American writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ernest Hemingway was intensely interested in Lawrence's career and used it in his characterization of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The reasons given by Hodson for Lawrence's enduring fame compared to, say, Charles Lindbergh's more ephemeral celebrity, have been advanced by several writers before him, and they are unexceptional: that Lawrence was better publicized by Lowell Thomas than other celebrities were by the attention that they received; that he served as a transitional figure between an earlier supposedly "more innocent" period and the modern age; that he rejected rewards, including his status as colonel, becoming a simple airman in the R.A.F.; that he appeals to Freudian and post-Freudian psychological interests; and that his myth was Transatlantic , including America as well as Britain in its inception and diffusion. Hodson also states, almost grudgingly, that "He is remembered , at least in some measure, because of his writing." Hudson's scant attention to Lawrence's genuine achievement is a problem. Hudson's study does what it sets out to do—show how America was important to the creation of the Lawrence legend—and does it well, for the most part. But the book suffers from the inherent limitation of a study focussed almost exclusively on "legend" rather than on substance —superficiality. Hodson devotes far more space to analyzing the popular (and demonstrably distorted...