BOOKS

An heroic androgyne

Jan Morris

THE GOLDEN WARRIOR: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA by Lawrence James

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £19.50, pp.432

Consider, yet again, Lawrence of Ara- bia. He was a 5'6" archaeologist, born out of wedlock, an enthusiastic liar, sexually equivocal and a practising masochist who talked, so Noel Coward thought, 'the most inconceivable balls'. He shamelessly ex- aggerated his exploits in the first world war, falsified the facts about them and recorded them in an over-written memoir which hardly anybody gets to the end of. He enlisted as a ranker in the RAF,

ostensibly to escape the great world but probably in the neurotic pursuit of self- abasement, and for many years retained a young man to whip him. He died in a motor-bike crash at a moment when his sexual proclivities were, it seems, danger- ously liable to be exposed.

Yet he was the friend and confidant of Shaw, Hardy, John Buchan, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart. He genuinely made history in the Middle East. He was a guerrilla of inspired ability and a marvel- lous leader of men. His Seven Pillars of Wisdom has never been out of print. He was seriously considered for the jobs of Governor of Cyprus, High Commissioner in Egypt and secretary to the Bank of England. It was of Lawrence that Churchill said: 'If things were going badly, how glad one Would be to see him round the corner'. He was one of the supreme romantic figures of the 20th century, permanently a legend.

No wonder the tide of books about him never seems to ebb. I forget the state of biographical play at the moment — is this still debunking time, or is it a period of rehabilitation? — but in any case Mr Lawrence James comes on to the field with the unmistakeably measured tread of the umpire. His excellent, strong and balanced biography certainly does not declare an end to the game, but it perhaps marks a sort of half-time. This is surely the defini- tive assembly of the facts: from now on it will be all assessment, interpretation and art And art is the key, this book has convinced me, to the Lawrentian riddle.

Mr James does not aspire to artistry himself. He is a schoolmaster by back- ground, and the nearest he gets to the literary is in the occasional use of unknown words — deliquescence, effluxion, scis- sion. It is as though he is determined not to be seduced by the artistic potential of his tale, but simply to present its raw materials with a calm dispassion. He is, though, profoundly aware of that potential, and the running theme of his book concerns Law- rence's awareness of it too — of his own self-creation, in fact, as a work of art. Art knows no bounds, and is beyond conscience or convention. If one recog- nises Lawrence's career as a conscious and complete act of self-portraiture, all falls into place. Mr James demonstrates that from his earliest years Lawrence saw him- self in the idioms of mediaeval chivalry, born like Arthur to change the course of destiny, and that like the old chroniclers he thought history to be an aspect of litera- ture. Malory was not too concerned about facts and figures, as he pursued the grand truths of his romance; Lawrence did not hesitate to ignore the previous arrival of the Australians, in recording his liberation of Damascus.

Seven Pillars is Lawrence's Morte d'Arthur. In this infuriating but still be- witching work he seems to have aimed at a double feat: having created his own per- sona, to convert that artifact into literature — like transmuting sculpture into music. I believe Lawrence saw Seven Pillars as a complete sublimation of the self he had brought into being: as hero, as thinker, as actor, as artist, as sexualist.

For sex is fundamental to this dual work of art, to the book as to the man. Sex

pervades it all, I think. A famous passage of Seven Pillars — one of its climactic passages indeed — describes Lawrence's rape and beating at the hands of a Turkish officer in Deraa. Mr James appears to show conclusively that it never happened, because Lawrence was nowhere near De- raa at the time, and this will probably be greeted as the most significant factual revelation of the biography. It doesn't really matter, though. For myself I never have believed in the Deraa episode — it has all the hallmarks of tawdry erotic fantasy — but sexual flagellation certainly played an obsessive part in Lawrence's sensibility, and he would have been dis- honest to himself not to have given it an emblematic place in his self-epic.

Similarly, when Lawrence claimed to have wandered through Amman disguised

as a Bedouin prostitute and propositioned

by Turkish sentries, surely he was declar- ing desires rather than events — if you

believe this episode, to my mind, you will believe almost anything. It seems to me, reading between the lines, that all his life he was treated as an androgyne, and we can hardly fail to sense his pleasure when Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, meeting him for the first time, asks if he is a boy or girl. ('Boy', blushes the putative High Commissioner).

The real fascination, indeed, of Law- rence's truly marvellous life is the combina- tion of his innate femininity with his powerful gifts as a commander and a maker of events. In this he really was like some idealised knight of the old chivalry, so gentle of temperament. so dauntless of action, and doubtless it was his magic duality of nature that enchanted so many perceptive people. An unmistakeable line of sexual attraction runs through the eulo- gies. Churchill sounds frankly in love with Lawrence ('perfectly-chiselled lips . . . flashing eyes . . . one of Nature's greatest princes'). Harold Nicolson, in later years, regrets that he is losing his Saluki grace. Allenby sounds as though he may be protesting too much when he says that Lawrence 'thinks himself a hell of a sold- ier'. Meinertzhagen, at that first meeting, thought Lawrence 'a very beautiful appari- tion'.

I am not, of course, hinting that Sir Ronald Storrs or Montague Norman held hands with Colonel Lawrence under the table. I am suggesting, though, that many of his famous contemporaries not only recognised his sexual ambiguities, but were attracted by them willy-nilly. They prob- ably also knew that he indulged them in bizarre and illegal ways. Lord Trenchard, an idol of Lawrence's as Father of the RAF, but later Chief Commissioner of Police, is supposed to have said that if Lawrence had not been killed in 1935 he would shortly have been arrested on charges of indecent behaviour. 'Look to duty, Jock', Churchill allegedly warned John Buchan at the funeral, as if to say that betrayal of the hero's sexual nature would be tantamount to treason — perhaps awk- ward for the Establishment, too.

Mr James, ever fair and steady, suggests that Lawrence deliberately left behind him a trail of equivocations, to make sure of posterity's attention. I think he simply did what came naturally to him —

I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars. Besides, one thing about Lawrence that almost nobody denies is his fundamental goodness: bloodlust may have overtaken him in war, as it overtakes many a soldier, but his life seems to have been free of malice. He made lasting friends, he charmed most people, he was remembered by fellow-officers with affection, by fellow- rankers with respect. There is something beguilingly innocent about his ambition to be his own Pygmalion, and something disarming to this day about his prismatic company, whether we experience it through journalistic exposés, or through the pages of this admirable biography.

He was born along the road from my home in Gwynedd. I often take visitors to the modest holiday villa of the Christian Mountain Centre in Tremadoc, over the street from the new housing estate, and show them the small plaque that declares it the birthplace of Lawrence of Arabia. Some of them say it is the most surprising thing they have been shown in the whole of Wales, and that's another happy legacy of T. E. Lawrence: his endless capacity to surprise us still, as we worry our way through the facts of him, puzzle about the fictions, and occasionally stand moved and wondering, for better or for worse, to find something in him of ourselves.