Yet, according to Janet Laurie, the daughter of a Hampshire land agent who had known the Lawrences since childhood and sometimes stayed with them in Oxford as an honorary sister, Ned–aged twenty or twenty–one–proposed to her. The question was popped without preliminaries after dinner when the rest of the family had withdrawn. Flummoxed by this off–the–cuff offer, Miss Laurie said no, a refusal that did not trouble her suitor. Soon after, she developed an attachment to his younger brother Will, which displeased Mrs Lawrence. If this incident occurred, and there is only Miss Laurie’s word for it, it appears more an instance of Lawrence’s whimsicality than of his passion.
Passion of another kind permeated Edwardian Oxford and touched Lawrence. When he was about sixteen he became friendly with Leonard Green, a homosexual and contemporary of his brother Robert at St John’s. In defiance of college rules, Lawrence was a guest at Green’s rooms, where they talked about common aesthetic interests which included fine printing. They planned to set up their own press which would print elegant editions of such suitable works as Pater’s essays. Lawrence imagined himself destined to keep alive the traditions of William Morris and, in the summer of 1909, he went so far as to buy some costly Tyrian purple dye in the Lebanon with which he and Green proposed to stain the vellum covers of their limited editions.
Green was a poet as well as aspirant printer. Early in 1910 he invited Lawrence’s comments on his verses and was encouraged by the response. Lawrence suggested that Green would not find a publisher easily, but thought that they were suitable material for the projected press. He cautioned Green not to bow to conventional morality and ‘develop a sense of sin or anything prurient’, which was prudent advice since Green, a member of the secret homosexual order of Chaeronea (founded in 1890 and including Laurence Housman in its brotherhood), also belonged to a circle of poetasters and fiction writers who would be known as Uranians. Their most notorious member was Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’) and their most distinguished FW Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’). The common inspiration of the Uranians was the innocence and sensuality of young boys. The titles of Green’s small volumes, Dream Comrades (1916) and The Youthful Lovers (1919), suggest the thinly disguised pederasty of the Uranian muse. Uranian verses were erotic and voyeuristic, for instance Corvo’s ‘The Ballade of Boys Bathing’:
White boys, muddy & tanned & bare
With lights and shadows of rose and grey
And the sea like pearls in their shining hair
The boys who bathe in St Andrew’s Bay.
Corvo’s lines were strangely reflected in two paintings acquired by Lawrence in 1922 from the artist Henry Scott Tuke. They show young soldiers bathing and one, undressing, looks uncommonly like Lawrence. Certainly Corvo would have been personally known to Lawrence. Between 1900 and 1909 he regularly stayed in rooms at Jesus when he came to Oxford to act as secretary to Dr E.G. Hardy of St John’s. Lawrence was drawn towards his writing and read Don Tarquino (1905) which he warmly praised for its ‘fleshiness’.6 It is an overripe tale of young men at the late fifteenth-century Roman court. One passage, which describes the arming of Tarquino and Cesare Borgia, may explain why Lawrence was attracted to a novel which oddly mingles antiquarianism with homoeroticism.
The Paparch’s [Pope Urban VI] son watched me glittering in the pliant steel, while I was buckling on my sword belt; and said that I was as comely in the mail falling in escallops round mine haunches as I was in silk or velvet. Thus he spoke; and, finding on the tray another mail shirt so fine that his two hands plump, juicy with heat, completely covered it, he let my pages do it to him.
As an undergraduate, Lawrence was a figure on the fringes of the Uranian circle, and when he compiled his own anthology of minor poetry in the 1920s he included two Uranian pieces by William Johnson and J.B. White. Uranian preoccupations were reflected in his own writing and there is a strong vein of homoeroticism throughout the Seven Pillars. True to the Uranian canon, Lawrence’s young Arabs turn aside from women and seek friendship and more from each other.
The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man in healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce, our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s needs in their own clean bodies–a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure.
Uranian pederasty was for the greater part confined to the imagination and expressed through words. The prosecution of Wilde had served to remind such men that, even in private and with mutual consent, homosexual acts were felonies. The Uranians were free only to give voice to their suppressed longings, and what they wrote was accepted at face value by readers who were wholly innocent of the emotions behind such works. Public morality fiercely damned any open revelation of ‘the love that dared not speak its name’. It was reported that George V, on hearing that an acquaintance was a homosexual, exclaimed, ‘I thought such men shot themselves.’
Lawrence’s interest in Uranian writing and his friendship with Green had an element of daring, shared aesthetic interests aside. There was nothing in his demeanour which indicated even latent homosexuality, or so two fellow Jesus men recalled. By taking up with Green and approving of Corvo, Lawrence was flirting with the outrageous and trespassing in a world where the slightest hint of his presence would have aroused the Puritan frenzy of his parents (there was a strong Anglo–Catholic element among the Uranians) and the indignation of the stiffer elements in his college. As it was, Mr and Mrs Lawrence were uneasy about their son’s friendship with Vyvyan Richards, whom they suspected might be a homosexual. Yet as Lawrence’s friends were swift to notice, he had a streak of devilment in him.
After he left Oxford, Lawrence admitted to having spent most of his time there reading the imaginative literature of early and high medieval France. He read quickly and boasted a facility by which he could absorb the gist of a book within half an hour. He could also steel himself to read for up to eighteen hours at a stretch. These energies were concentrated on the lyrics of the thirteenth-century Provençal trouveres (a taste he passed on to his brother Will) and contemporary French gestes, lengthy heroic poems which chronicled the adventures of legendary and semi-legendary paladins. This passion was a natural fusion of his childhood enthusiasm for Tennyson’s Arthurian verse and his later interest in the feudal world.
When immersed in these tales, Lawrence suspended all contact with the outside world. The mundane and uncongenial were excluded from his garden bolt–hole, where he would withdraw into a reverie of pure imagination. In August 1910 he told his mother of his ‘joy in getting into a strange country in a book’. The wonderment began ‘when I have shut my door and the town is in bed’ and would last throughout the night beyond an unnoticed dawn. ‘It is lovely too,’ he added, ‘after you have been wandering for hours in the forest with Percivale or Sagramors le Desirous, to open the door, and from the Cherwell to look at the sun glowering through the valley mists.’ His companion on this excursion into the dream-world was Sir Thomas Malory whose Morte d‘Arthur he read again and again when he was on active service in 1917 and 1918. Its appeal, like that of the other chivalric literature which he consumed, was to the imagination. ‘Imagination,’ he assured his mother, ‘should be put into the most precious caskets, and that is why one can only live in the future or the past, in Utopia or the wood beyond the world.’
Lawrence was addicted to a literature which had been created to illustrate the knightly virtues and to entertain a sophisticated, aristocratic audience. As he read, he heard the voices of the men and women who had lived in castles talking about love and war. Medieval political and satirical verses were ‘the only things not dry in history’, he told his brother Will in 1911 and urged him to read them in preference to modern texts.
Courtly medieval literature was full of models for human conduct. Caxton, who first printed the Morte d‘Arthur, aimed to give his fifteenth-century read
ers a code of conduct for their own lives. In the story of Arthur and his Knights, ‘Noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in those days, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punished and oft put to shame and rebuke.’ Lawrence learned from what he read. Prolonged exposure to medieval romances inevitably had a profound effect on his thoughts and behaviour.
His self–esteem was satisfied by knowing that in the legendary medieval past his own birth carried no moral stigma nor hindered advancement. In the Morte d‘Arthur, Galahad, the illegitimate son of Elaine and Lancelot, who was, it seems, bewitched at the moment of conception, is automatically given his father’s status. ‘He must be a noble man,’ announces Queen Guinevere, ‘for so is his father.’ The ‘passing fair and well-made’ Galahad is also recognised as ‘he by whom the Sangreal [Holy Grail] shall be achieved’. In another of Lawrence’s favourite romances, the early thirteenth–century French epic poem Huon de Bordeaux, one of the hero’s adversaries was ‘a young knight named Gerard, right hardy and valiant in arms, he was bastard son to the emperor [Charlemagne]’.
This tale had an incidental appeal for Lawrence since Huon and his knightly band travel to Arabia, where they suffer fatigue, hunger and thirst in the desert before defeating the ‘Emir of Babylon’ and his paynims. Victory comes from their stamina and willpower and from the help of a friendly magician prince, Auberon, who is host to Huon in his enchanted kingdom on the shores of the Red Sea and provides him with a horn with which he can summon supernatural assistance when in peril. Like all the stereotypes in such epics, Huon is skilled in arms, possesses almost superhuman powers of endurance, and never shrinks from a challenge.
In William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, which captivated Lawrence in 1912, the hero calls out, ‘I am ready; and what is the deed to win?’ In different forms, it is the war–cry of all those warrior heroes who held Lawrence’s imagination. Moreover, like Sir Galahad, many carry with them a peculiar force of destiny. They are driven into sundry adventures by impulses within themselves and their own sense of vision, although the exact nature of these powers is often beyond their understanding. Lawrence was intoxicated by these possibilities; perhaps he too had such forces within him. After the war, when asked by George Kidston, a diplomat, why he had become so closely involved in the Arab movement, Lawrence offered four reasons. ‘Intellectual curiosity’ was the fourth. He had wanted to know how it felt ‘to be the mainspring of a national movement’. There was also the element of the knightly quest: ‘Being a half-poet, I don’t value material things much. Sensation and mind seem to me greater, and the ideal, such a thing as the impulse that took us into Damascus, the only thing worth doing.’
The imaginative, like the historical chivalric world, was maledominated. Women existed as two broad stereotypes. They were either embodiments of virtue, beautiful creatures set on pedestals, their honour guarded by their knightly lovers, or else creators of mischief through their lustfulness and scheming. In the Morte d‘Arthur, Sir Bors is nearly distracted from his quest by a devil in the form of a seductive gentlewoman, and Guinevere’s illicit love for Lancelot undoes the bonds of the Round Table. The ties of male loyalty were more enduring. Huon is sustained by his loyal companions in arms, who shared his exile and fight alongside him. A certain heroic resilience came from the bonds and common purposes of men. Lawrence already understood something of this from his experiences as one of a close-knit band of brothers, as a leader in the Church Lads’ Brigade and a cadet in the OTC. Such ties could not withstand the pull of the individual will; when Arthur’s knights, moved by the vision of the Grail, swear to seek it, the King laments the loss of ‘the fairest fellowship and the truest of knighthood that ever were seen together’.
He was mesmerised by the idea of the quest. His regimen of diet, self-discipline, exercise and, from 1909 onwards, training with firearms suggests a young man making himself ready for some adventure. There was also a need for mental preparation and, in March 1912, he told his family that ‘I have for the second time assimilated Thompson’s “Mistress of Vision”.’ Lines from Francis Thompson’s poem, in which the imprisoned ‘Lady of fair weeping’ reveals her secrets, give an indication of what might be expected of Lawrence when the moment came to fulfil his aspirations:
Pierce thy heart to find the key;
With thee take
Only what none else would keep;
Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
Learn to wake when thou dost sleep
Learn to water joy with tears,
Learn from fears to vanquish fears.
To hope, for thou dar’st not despair,
Exult, for that thou dar‘st not grieve;
Plough thou the rock until it bear;
Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
Lose, that the lost thou may’st receive,
Die, for none other way can’st live.
Beyond his private world of knights, magicians and quests in distant lands was that of the Oxford History Syllabus, to which Lawrence had committed himself when he entered Jesus. Naturally he liked best the period from 918 to 1273 and had the good luck to find that the first three Crusades were one of the Special Paper choices. He approached his studies with a gusto which was not always applauded by his tutors. ‘Your matter is passable, but you write in the style of a two–penny–halfpenny newspaper’ was how R.L. Poole, a Magdalen medievalist, summed up one of Lawrence’s essays. He was not disturbed and, on leaving, remarked cockily to his tutorial partner, Warren Ault, ‘I thought that it would stir the old boy up a bit.’
But Lawrence was uneasy about the thinness of his knowledge, especially in areas of history which bored him. Finals were due in June 1910 and, as they came nearer, he thought it prudent to join forces with Prys–Jones and procure the services of a coach, Cecil Jane, who in 1907 had crammed him for his scholarship exam. ‘I should not call him a scholar by temperament and the main characteristic of his work was always that it was unusual without the effort to be unusual’ was Jane’s circumspect summary of Lawrence’s essays. What worried Jane was his pupil’s overriding wish to explain historical events through the character of those involved. Lawrence lacked the academic detachment which was considered laudable among historians; this, with his taste for satire, convinced Jane that he was not a scholar in the narrow Oxonian sense. Lawrence’s indirect retort to such criticisms was delivered in a letter to Will in which he asked, ‘Do you really expect a history don who is abstract and constitutional political to understand the mysteries of tattooing and the origin of the impi?’
While he may have been exasperated by the limitations of the Oxford historical imagination, Lawrence was grateful to Jane. When he was in Syria during 1911 he asked Will to visit Jane and do what he could to dispel his periodic moods of gloom and isolation. It was a kind gesture and well deserved since, with Jane’s help and backed by his thesis on Crusader castles, Lawrence survived the six-day ordeal of Finals and achieved a first-class degree.
Lawrence’s first, which R.L. Poole celebrated with a dinner, owed much to his research thesis on castles. It was a remarkable accomplishment for an undergraduate, since it rested on field work done by him in the Lebanon and Syria during the summer of 1909. The castles, which he systematically photographed, sketched and measured, were all but unknown to British scholars and his conclusions were novel. Hogarth had been godfather to the venture which he believed would open Lawrence’s eyes and mind to the monuments of Middle Eastern antiquity and stimulate him to further travel in the region.
Preparations were well in hand by the beginning of 1909. At Hogarth’s bidding, Lawrence had written for advice to the Victorian explorer and author, Charles Doughty. The response was tepid; travelling on foot in the hot season across a remote landscape whose inhabitants mistrusted Europeans would be hazardous. Doughty added, prophetically, that ‘Insufficient food, rest and sleep would soon tell.’ Undau
nted, Lawrence turned at Hogarth’s suggestion to a young archaeologist, Harry Pirie–Gordon, an Oxford dandy who shared his interest in Corvo. It was a sensible move, for Pirie–Gordon and the author Compton Mackenzie had as undergraduates spent their summer vacation in 1901 in another inaccessible region, Morocco. More to Lawrence’s immediate purpose, Pirie–Gordon had lately been exploring in Syria, possessed a useful map and had examined castles there. ‘Some Arabic is of course necessary,’ Doughty insisted, so Lawrence began lessons with the Reverend N. Odeh, a Syrian Protestant cleric. By July, when he disembarked at Beirut, Lawrence knew less than a hundred words, or so he told Robert Graves, but his letters home record that he could manage well enough in simple conversations.
Physical necessities for the journey were provided by Mr Lawrence, who gave his son £100. Forty pounds went immediately on a camera and a smaller sum on a Mauser automatic pistol, over three pounds weight of the latest German technology and the most efficient sidearm of its time–Churchill had carried one at the battle of Omdurman. Like the questing warrior heroes, Lawrence had to equip himself with the finest weaponry. He also needed the equivalent of magical protection, since the final stages of his journey would bring him into bandit country around Aleppo. Through the good offices of his college Principal and Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India and Chancellor of the university, the British Embassy in Constantinople procured iradehs which Lawrence picked up at the Beirut Consulate. These documents commanded all local officials to do everything within their power to assist and protect a British subject as he passed through the Sultan’s provinces. They had a talismanic quality which enabled Lawrence to enlist help from governors and policemen and even got him a cavalry escort for one dangerous leg of the journey.
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