Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  One reason for this may have been that at school Lawrence felt himself a misfit among his peers. From his schooldays onwards he developed a sense of oddity which he never quite lost:’…the oddness must be bone deep,’ he wrote years later. ‘At Oxford I was odd … In officers’ messes, too, I’ve lived about as merrily as the last-hooked fish choking out its life in a boat-load of trippers.’4 As a youth Lawrence often saw himself as a giant trapped in a dwarf’s body, and his smallness and unimpressive appearance would colour his self-concept throughout his life. In later years ‘big’ would become his favourite accolade to those he admired, and even to works of art and literature he appreciated. Although he claimed to despise organized games simply because they had rules and results, it was actually a sense of physical inadequacy which led him to reject them. ‘Never compete in anything’ became his personal motto, so impressing his youngest brother that Arnie admitted years later to having been embarrassed when Ned asked him how he had done in a race.5 Though his brothers paid lip-service to his non-competitive whim out of deference, their physical qualities overshadowed his. Will – only sixteen months younger and often compared with him – was tall, athletic, and a paragon of classical excellence. The athletic ability which later brought Will a half-blue at St John’s College was surpassed by that of his younger brother Frank, who won the Challenge Cup for Athletics while at the High School, and was three times school gymnastics champion as well as captain of football and vice-captain of cricket. Lawrence, who would later mutter darkly about the ‘sinful misery’ of games, was affronted at this apparent break in ‘family tradition’. Actually the motto ‘never compete’ was an aspect of Lawrence’s paradoxical mask which hid a nature so extremely competitive that he could not even bear to hear someone else praised without feeling diminished. Yet so low was his self-esteem that if he was directly praised he would dismiss it as undeserved. His rejection of the norms of middle-class society was an aspect of his reverse exhibitionism, and his refusal to take part in organized sport was his most overt expression of that rejection. It is perhaps difficult to conceive now that in the late Victorian-Edwardian era sporting prowess was close to Godliness, and the qualities sport was supposed to engender – ‘true grit’, ‘fair play’, ‘good form’, ‘team spirit’ and ‘decency’ – were closely tied up with the mythology of Empire. It was seriously believed in many quarters that Britain actually owed her Empire to her sport, and that the battles which had made her great had first been won ‘on the playing-fields of Eton’. The purity campaign of the late nineteenth century had led to a shift in the concept of manliness, away from moral strength to physical strength, and away from moral integrity to sexual abstention. One authority of the time defined masculinity as ‘the duty of patriotism; the moral and physical beauty of athleticism; the salutary effects of Spartan habits and discipline; the cultivation of all that is masculine and the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English and excessively intellectual’.6

  For much of his life, Lawrence idealized masculinity because he knew that he was not conventionally masculine himself, in spite of his great physical strength. Though many have testified that he was stronger than most people of his size and weight, his appearance as a youth gave no impression of it, and his apparent sensitivity over the issue suggests that it bothered him. In a letter to his mother from France in 1906, there is a hint of defensiveness in his insistence: ‘people here say I’m much thinner than Bob, but stronger. Still Bob’s fatness is much better than muscle in their eyes, except for Mme. Chaignon, who got a shock when she saw my biceps while bathing. She thinks I’m Hercules.’7 During his march through Syria in 1909 he boasted of walking 120 miles in five days, then added: ‘Bob or Will will laugh … but not if they had to do it staggering and stumbling over these ghastly roads.’8 In the several accounts we have of Lawrence’s physical fights, he invariably seems to have come off the worse – once, at school, sustaining a broken leg. He would later tell Liddell Hart that he disapproved of hand-to-hand fighting: ‘when combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand,’ he would write, ‘I was finished.’9 The words ‘boyish’ and even ‘girlish’, which crop up with surprising frequency in descriptions of him until his last years, suggest an almost androgynous figure. As a twelve-year-old, Lawrence possessed a sensitivity rare in adolescent boys. He would delight in taking charge of baby Arnie, sometimes bathing him in an iron bath, wheeling him in his pram to the football field where his ‘manly’ classmates were engaged in ‘masculine’ sport. When the three-year-old Arnie conceived a terror of the statues in the Ashmolean Museum, Lawrence carved a face on a stone and made him smash it with a hammer to exorcize his fears. The strategy was not only effective – for Arnie later became Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, and wrote a celebrated book on classical sculpture – but it also displayed as astonishing degree of empathy. Arnie believed that this special facility Lawrence had for seeing through the eyes of others stemmed from an inner lack of confidence, and described how he would take on the characteristics of anyone he had just seen or was about to see. Paradoxically, this shape-shifting responsiveness was one of Lawrence’s great strengths, and the quality which would later set him apart from the rigid, authoritarian generals of the war as a truly great, if unconventional leader.

  Lawrence’s sensitive traits grew out of the deep imprint of his mother’s personality. Beneath his aloofness, he had a great capacity for friendship with both men and women. His most profound ties would be with other men, and according to Arnie, these friendships ‘were comparable in intensity to sexual love, for which he made them a substitute’.10 While still at school, he made friends with an older man called Leonard Green, then an undergraduate at St John’s College, and took great pride in flouting college rules to visit him in his rooms. Together they dreamed of printing fine books, and of living together in a windmill on a headland washed by the sea. Green, an aspiring poet, belonged to a secret homosexual order called the Chaeronea and to a circle of poets, artists and novelists known later as the Uranians, whose inspiration was the ‘innocence and sensuality of young boys’. A prominent member of the Chaeronea was the poet Laurence Hous-man, six of whose books were found in Lawrence’s personal library after his death, together with three homoerotic works by F. W. Rolfe, another member of the Uranians, whom Lawrence may have known personally while at school. Green was himself a Uranian poet, whose work Lawrence admired enough to tell him in 1910 that though he was unlikely to find a publisher he should not adulterate his verse by developing ‘a sense of sin or anything prurient’.11 Lawrence was to include the work of two more Uranian poets in his own anthology which appeared in the 1920s, and listed Henry Scott Tuke, a Uranian artist, as one of his three favourite painters. He may have met Tuke while a schoolboy at Oxford, and even modelled for him, for Tuke was a friend of Charles Bell, Art Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, who was an early mentor of Lawrence’s. Bell himself certainly had interests in common with the Uranians. Though they idealized homosexual love – especially that between an adult male and a young boy: often a boy of lower social class – they rarely practised it. Many were respectable churchmen, and in any case, the first decade of the twentieth century was a mean time for homosexuals. The shadow of Oscar Wilde, sent to prison for his dabblings with telegraph boys in 1895, still loomed menacingly over the Edwardian literati. Lawrence’s relationship with Leonard Green was almost certainly platonic. That he shared at least some of the sentiments of the Uranians as a youth, though, was later suggested by Arnie, who would write that he was ‘impressed often with the physical beauty and animal grace of the young, particularly the young male, in uncivilised countries’.12

  Though Lawrence despised women in their sexual role, he was able to form closer relationships with some women than most heterosexual men are capable of. He felt at home with older women of ‘the good-wife-and-mother type’,13 and Clare Sydney Smith – who fell into this category – wrote that he ‘was able to have a deep friendship for a woman – myse
lf-based on the closest ties of sympathy and understanding but containing none of the elements normally associated with love. No effort on his part was needed to do this. His presence was … hardly a physical one and he never seemed to be aware of oneself physically’14 (my italics). Mrs Smith’s husband, Sydney, must also have been aware that Lawrence presented no sexual challenge, for when someone suggested that he and Clare might be having an affair, Smith’s reaction was to throw back his head and roar with laughter.15 Lawrence’s great struggle in childhood was to extricate himself from his mother’s smothering clutches, and afterwards he remained frigid towards women, especially those who were possessive or impulsive. He could happily consort with women like Clare Sydney Smith who sent him no sexual signals and behaved ‘like a man’, but the moment he detected any sexual advance his psychical barriers would snap shut. He would talk to a woman as if she was another man, and if she refused to do the same he would run away. Women’s bodies did not attract him: ‘I take no pleasure in women,’ he would write. ‘I have never thought twice or even once of the shape of a woman, but men’s bodies, in repose or in movement – specially the former, appeal to me directly and very generally.’

  Lawrence was a rebel against convention by instinct, but his sense of history was profound. He was fond of declaring that ‘the world stopped in 1500 with the coming of printing and gunpowder’, and affected to despise the Renaissance with its reason and humanism. He became fascinated by the medieval world as a boy, and this interest quickly became a passion which eclipsed his school work. He would cycle to churches in and around Oxford, taking brass-rubbings of medieval priests and knights in armour, and by the time he was fifteen had acquired a fine collection of rubbings from all over the south-east of England, which decorated the brothers’ shared bedroom at 2 Polstead Road. Cyril ‘Scroggs’ Beeson recalled making his first rubbing under Lawrence’s direction at Wytham in October 1904: ‘… from that date onwards,’ Scroggs wrote, ‘… we made excursions by cycle to nearly every village in the three counties and to many places farther afield.’16 Lawrence pursued his interest with thoroughness, experimenting with different techniques, eliciting advice from the tradesmen who supplied the paper and ‘heelballs’ used to make the rubbings. He scoured libraries and museums for information about the knights, priests and ladies whose effigies he rubbed, and soon acquired a detailed knowledge of medieval costume and armour. He became obsessed with the devices of heraldry and collected heraldic terms: gules, blazons, flanches, maseles, octofoyles and bars sinister, rolling them richly off his tongue with the relish of a wordsmith. He would compile long scrolls of coats of arms, painting in the escutcheons and the armorial bearings in the correct colours with punctilious care. He lost himself in romantic literature: Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King gave way to authentic medieval fare such as the Finnish epic Kalevala and the thirteenth-century chanson of the Charlemagne cycle, Huon de Bordeaux. His search for brasses and relics assumed almost the proportions of a sacred quest itself, and while other youths were out watching girls at St Giles’s Fair or at the festivities of Eights Week, Lawrence could be found scouring local crypts and churches. He spared no reverence for consecrated ground, though, and honed his powers of persuasion in dealing with caretakers – once, memorably, when he and Beeson were caught emerging from the crypt of St Cross church with armfuls of human bones. Theo Chaundy, another schoolfriend, remembered his ‘sinister’ chuckle as he once happily smashed his way to a brass through some obstructing pews. It was E. M. Forster who pointed out the parallel between Lawrence’s quest for brass-rubbings and his later archaeological adventures in the East, noting that the brasses were later transformed into ancient ruins, and the truculent guardians metamorphosed into savage Bedu tribes.

  Lawrence’s interest in the medieval was essentially an attempt to escape from the circumstances of his life, and to cock a snook at the conventions of the bourgeois social landscape, behind which lay his uncertain relationship with Sarah. The feelings of inferiority and shame that relationship generated contributed to the painful shyness which was noticed by almost everyone who met him. He confessed that he was ‘abnormally shy’ … ‘ashamed of my awkwardness, of my physical envelope, and my solitary unlikeness which made me no companion, but an acquaintance, complete, angular, uncomfortable as a crystal’.17 Yet he had no real need to feel odd or solitary at school. Despite his shyness and his rejection of games he was not unpopular: his awkwardness was largely in his own mind. In fact, he did play cricket for the school at least once, entered swimming and cycling races, led paper-chases and joined enthusiastically in playground games. He did not lack in personal friendships. As a young boy he had a special friend called John Snow, and from 1903 he and Scroggs Beeson formed an inseparable partnership, becoming famous – almost notorious – for their archaeologizing and brass-rubbing expeditions. Though Lawrence was evidently the dominant partner and the initiator of their schemes, Beeson recalled the ‘enduring bond’ of their friendship with some affection. Theo Chaundy noted that Lawrence introduced many school-friends, including himself, to the mysteries of brass-rubbing, and since he managed to persuade this future mathematics don to do his algebra for him in the Vth form, Lawrence cannot have lacked charm. A friend from early childhood remembered that he had been ‘frightfully bossy’ as a six-year-old but had ordered everyone about in a very nice way.18 Bob Lawrence recalled that although he was the eldest, it was Ned who generally led the brothers in their games. Arnie described him as ‘one of the nicest people I’ve known, perhaps the kindest, certainly the most exhilarating to be with’.19 Midge Hall, who knew Lawrence both at school and at college, wrote of his schooldays that ‘any conception of a solitary, moody schoolboy shunning the company of his fellows is wide of the mark. He was far too whimsical … too interesting in his hobbies, ever to be unpopular.’20 Arnie felt that it was Lawrence’s empathy – his ability to reflect what others needed and felt – which made him extraordinarily adept at inspiring others and bringing out the best in them.

  Sarah believed that she had been a good mother, and after Lawrence’s death painted an idealized picture of family life which was echoed by her ‘lieutenant’, Bob: ‘We had a very happy childhood,’ he wrote, ‘which was never marred by a single quarrel between any of us. Our parents were constantly with us, to our great delight and profit, for they shared in our progress, made the home the place of peace it was, planned the future and our education, and were the greatest influence on our lives.’21 Certainly, Lawrence’s childhood was happy in the sense that he did not want for anything material, was successful at school, and was surrounded by friends and loyal brothers of whom he was often the undisputed chief. But under the surface his childhood did not glow with the primary colours Bob’s Pre-Raphaelite image suggests. Arnie’s description offers a darker insight: ‘There was a strong puritanism in the family,’ he wrote, ‘a spirit of sin, unnaturalness. Hush hush was great. Many subjects were taboo which to the child’s mind are not. It perplexed the children, leading to doubts and ultimately to a lack of confidence.’22 Bob’s assurance that Ned enjoyed his schooldays hardly squares with Lawrence’s own recollection of ‘the school fear hanging over one – that haphazardly suspended punishment which made my years between eight and eighteen a misery’.23 Far from being the ‘delight and profit’ she might have wished, Sarah destroyed Lawrence’s life and made certain that he would never achieve happiness or fulfilment. His need to be an individual and separate from her, loved whether strong or weak, honest or dishonest, right or wrong, was totally subordinated to the needs of her own ravenous soul. She could not help this: in her own mind she was still the terrified little girl who would never know why she had been so heinously abandoned to the whims of the dark universe. It was a wound without salve, and no one whom she loved could be allowed to leave her again – ever. Lawrence was desperate for his mother’s love, but he also needed to be regarded as a person in his own right. She loved him dearly, but as an extension of herself
, seeing any expression of individuality on his part as a threat. The kind of power she could exert over her sons was terrifying. When Arnie finally made up his mind to marry, he wrote to tell Sarah so from the apparently safe distance of Athens. On the day he had calculated she would receive the letter he awoke in a daze and found he had forgotten where he was. He staggered out into the garden and only pulled himself together with some effort. He knew that Sarah was violently opposed to his marrying, and he felt that her influence had ‘absorbed’ him even at such a distance. If this was a sample of the psychic forces ranged against Ned, it is hardly surprising that he felt the need to defend his ‘circle of integrity’. Often he hated his mother. Often he could not stand even to be in the same room, but he never once let it show. He behaved irreproachably to her, because she was his mother, and he felt he owed it to her to play the dutiful son. His Achilles’ heel in the struggle was always his own sense of guilt. He made a great show of joviality and lightheartedness in her presence and practised suppressing his emotions. He talked only about things which pleased him, so that he would appear happy even when he was not. He knew quite well that until he was free from Sarah, he would be unable to let unfold the hero within himself: his great task in life was to escape from her.