Muscovites would have already been aware of Lawrence’s identity. His name was mentioned in 1930 during the trial of a group of British engineers from Vickers and their Russian accomplices on charges of economic sabotage. One of the accused admitted that he had been recruited by Lawrence, who had approached him in London’s Savoy Hotel. Lawrence told this man that he was acting for the British General Staff, which wanted to overthrow the Russian government by force. Since Lawrence was in India when this alleged conversation occurred, the Foreign Office was able to deny the tale. What is interesting is that the Russian government clearly believed that the use of Lawrence’s name would give credibility to its propaganda. This was a sensible assumption, given his wartime reputation and the groundswell of speculation in the British press which hinted that he was still a key figure in the British secret service.
Rumours of Lawrence the super-spy proliferated. In 1932 he was allegedly back in his old haunts, the borders of Syria and Jordan. At the same time, the Chinese government was alarmed by a German wireless report that the British government had sent Lawrence to Tibet, where he was running arms and ammunition to local resistance groups. Again the Foreign Office had to explain that Lawrence, then based at Plymouth, was an ordinary airman and suggested that the canard was probably Soviet-inspired. Official denials did nothing to stem the flood of such Lawrence stories, as one India Office official ruefully noted.
During the last few years his wraith has appeared in Kurdistan, Southern Persia, Afghanistan, and, I think, Soviet Turkestan, and in fact almost anywhere where there was trouble which could be attributed to the machiavellian designs of the Imperialistic British government. If the legend has struck deep in proportion to its branches, it seems likely to enjoy quite a respectable spell of immortality.10
It did; shortly after Lawrence’s funeral in May 1935, L’Oeuvre claimed that he was still alive and on a secret mission on the banks of the Nile in southern Sudan. Such speculation was understandable since Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was under way and, in the autumn, George Orwell picked up rumours that Lawrence was in that country and organising native forces. Orwell, who had little time for Lawrence, hoped the story might be true. It was another will-o’-thewisp like the rest of the post-war secret-service tales fabricated about Lawrence.
Alongside make-believe Lawrence mysteries, there was a genuine one which from time to time intrigued the public. It concerned the long personal narrative of the Arab campaign that Lawrence wrote between 1919 and 1925 and which he published privately in 1926. The saga of its composition, including the disappearance of one draft on Reading station, was related by Hogarth in The Times Literary Supplement of 13 December 1926. Hogarth had been consulted by Lawrence throughout the book’s preparation and he added a few details about the contents of the Seven Pillars which contained a ‘horrible description’ of Lawrence’s capture at Dera. What Lawrence called a ‘sugar and butter’ resume of the book appeared in Blackwood’s at the end of 1925 written by Edmund Candler, a former war correspondent with the army in Iraq. Candler had looked through the 1922 draft and was full of praise for ‘a war book more exciting than a novel, a code of philosophy, and a manual of irregular desert warfare’ together with ‘an immense Arabian canvas of peoples and scenes, all individual and unlike one another, and portraits and landscapes by anyone else, yet essentially true.’
This masterpiece was deliberately withheld from the public on Lawrence’s instructions. So too was The Mint, his later account of his experiences in the RAF, although it circulated in manuscript among his friends. Through copies available in the Bodleian Library, the British Museum and those loaned by subscribers to their friends, many details of the Seven Pillars filtered through to the public. The New Statesman’s review of its abridgement, Revolt in the Desert, referred to this ‘mysterious’ book which included an account of how Lawrence had been taken prisoner, flogged and left for dead. This was common knowledge by the time of Lawrence’s death when an obituary article in the Daily Sketch of 20 May 1935 stated that Lawrence had been ‘flogged by the Turks till he fainted’. Eight weeks later everyone could read the full details of the hero’s ordeal.
The Lawrence legend flourished during a period of passionate political partisanship. In Britain, both the right and the left attempted to kidnap Lawrence and secure his endorsement of their philosophies. It was a futile task, remarked Sir Herbert Read, who thought that Lawrence’s deep-rooted masochism disinclined him to total rebellion. 11 The Communist writer Christopher Caudwell detected in Lawrence a fatal weakness which prevented him from assuming a truly heroic role.
The Great War had no hero.... In the twentieth century millions of deaths and mountains of guns, tanks and ships are not enough to make a bourgeois hero. The best thing they achieved was a might-have-been, the pathetic figure of T.E. Lawrence.12
Yet Lawrence was not, Caudwell thought, a bourgeois. His RAF life was a rebellion against the bourgeois way of life, but he was not mentally tough enough to rid himself of bourgeois habits of mind. He was ‘too intellectual’ to become the Communist man of action, the leader of the masses.
Like many other intellectuals and men of letters, Caudwell followed the heroic course of action and died, aged twenty-nine, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. He, like so many of his generation both of the left and the right, was looking for a leader, a heroic figure who could combine charisma, ideology and action to save his people. Such figures interested Lawrence as well; Lenin won his admiration not for his political theories, but because of his energy and ability to get things done.
Such men were needed, or so it seemed, during the last years of Lawrence’s life which were marked by extended crises in Britain and abroad. Economic disintegration and the failure of conventional politicians and their systems to engage, let alone solve, the problems of industrial recession and mass unemployment drove many into the arms of ‘men of destiny’ with revolutionary solutions. Lawrence seemed admirably qualified to fulfil this role; he was a man of unconventional but formidable intellect, possessed a strong will, and had proved himself as a man of courage and action. This was Caudwell’s view and that of Lawrence’s friend, the novelist Henry Williamson, an ardent supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
Williamson, who shared Lawrence’s passion for speed and the air, imagined he had discovered the ideal Fascist. Lawrence appeared to belong to that new breed of supermen such as D’Annunzio, the Italian poet aviator and Mussolini supporter, who were intoxicated with speed and tested themselves to destruction to prove their superior courage. The similarities between Lawrence and the proto-heroes of Italian Fascism and German Nazism were more apparent than real. Lawrence’s self-imposed tests of courage and stamina were a legacy from his youth, which found its final expression in a reckless infatuation with fast motorbikes. On one level this behaviour represented an urge to gain domination over his own body and, remembering his obsession with the codes of medieval chivalry, it was a reminder that blind courage and a debonair disregard for death were marks of knightly prowess.
Nevertheless, Williamson believed that he could induce Lawrence to commit himself to the radical right. There were good reasons for thinking such a conversion possible, even though Lawrence revealed little outward interest in the political issues of the day. Strong men such as Churchill attracted him on a personal level, but he was unmoved by their ideologies. His own seemed a mish-mash of anarchism and nihilism. Yet in conversation with the Labour MP Ernest Thurtle, and in several passages of the Seven Pillars, Lawrence indicated his sympathies with the Nietzschean concept of the superman. He told Thurtle, ‘I think the planet is in a damnable condition, which no change of party, or social reform, will do more than palliate insignificantly. What is wanted is a new master species–birth control for us, to end the human race in fifty years–and then a clear field for a cleaner mammal. I suppose it must be a mammal.’
Such opinions may have induced Williamson to think that Lawrence mig
ht look sympathetically on others who sought a replacement of human beings by a new super-race. He hoped that Lawrence might, on retirement from the RAF, put himself at the head of an anti-war and anti-Jewish league of ex-servicemen. In a wilder flight of fancy, Williamson considered that Lawrence should go to Germany and convince Hitler that Britain did not seek a war. On the day that Lawrence suffered his fatal motorbike accident, he had just wired Williamson with an invitation to Cloud’s Hill. Shortly before, a newspaperman had asked him whether he had plans to make himself Britain’s dictator, which indicates that the thought, however absurd, had occurred to others. Still, it was highly improbable that, had he lived, Lawrence would have agreed to participate in Williamson’s hare-brained schemes or have offered his prestige to the British Fascist movement.
Nevertheless, Lawrence was conscious that his reputation gave him considerable power, even if he was uncertain how he might assert it publicly. Francis Yeats-Brown, who later joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, wrote in conclusion to a 1929 Spectator article on Lawrence, ‘He might do greater things in England if the need arose, than he did in Arabia.’ Lawrence amended this sentence to, ‘Perhaps he might do greater things in England if the need arose, than he did in Arabia.’
These ‘greater things’ continued to occupy his thoughts. Whatever their nature, they were passing through his mind shortly before his retirement from the RAF. ‘Not so long ago,’ Liddell Hart wrote to Robert Graves, ‘when I was arguing that the publicity he had been getting was his own fault, he retorted that he might need all he had and more, as an aid to his future efforts.’ It was all very mysterious, since Lawrence did not elaborate. Still, Liddell Hart noted that ‘every now and then’ Lawrence suggested ‘that he might be coming back to do something bigger than before’. In the same enigmatic vein he would compare himself to the Byzantine General, Belisarius, who had been pushed into obscurity by the jealous Emperor Justinian, but who, when crisis threatened, was recalled and achieved fresh glories. After what he called a ‘fascist conversation’, Robert Graves was perturbed by Lawrence’s views on political freedom, which he thought ‘equivocal’. Equally equivocal was Lawrence’s resolution for, on the last day of 1934, he confessed that he was looking forward to a future of ‘true leisure’. This was hardly the manifesto of a man whose heart was set on ‘greater things’.
Yet he was also under pressure from his friends Churchill and Lady Astor to engage himself in ‘greater things’. In 1935 both pleaded with Lawrence to turn his talents towards public affairs where his influence and prestige would add weight to Churchill’s campaign for speedy rearmament. Lawrence, like many of his countrymen, was disturbed by the growth of the German air force and, as an insider in the RAF, was aware of the need for Britain to keep abreast of Germany in technical research. Moreover, since Churchill was in the political wilderness and commonly branded a war-monger, Lawrence’s presence at his side would give him much needed publicity and credibility.
It is clear that several of Lawrence’s closest friends and admirers expected him to return to the centre of the public stage and that, during the last year of his life, Lawrence’s thoughts were moving fitfully in that direction. What is interesting is that figures of such widely different views as Churchill, Lady Astor, Williamson and Caudwell felt that Lawrence was a force to be reckoned with and that his name and reputation would add lustre to any cause he espoused. ‘If he roused himself to action,’ Churchill wrote in 1937, ‘who should say what crisis he could not surmount or quell? If things were going badly, how glad one would be to see him round the corner.’ This was of course the man whom Churchill knew as a friend, not the figure of popular legend.
It was inevitable that Lawrence’s exploits should attract the interest of film-makers. Their attentions worried him and he was relieved on hearing, in 1929, that plans for a film of his adventures had been dropped. They were revived in May 1934 when Sir Alexander Korda purchased the film rights of Revolt in the Desert from the book’s trustees.
Korda wanted to begin filming in 1936 and had in mind a vast desert epic in which Leslie Howard would play Lawrence, an excellent piece of casting. Lawrence was uneasy about the business and in January 1935 explained to Korda ‘the inconveniences’ which he would suffer when the film appeared. He found the Hungarian ‘quite unexpectedly sensitive’ and agreeable to proceed only when Lawrence consented. There matters rested until Lawrence’s death five months later. Almost immediately Korda began operations. Colonel Stirling, once Lawrence’s colleague and lately military adviser to King Zog of Albania, was in charge of preliminary arrangements and on 23 July approached the Foreign Office for help. In essence the film would be action with bombing raids and massed camel charges by Beduin which would be filmed on location on the border between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with Jerusalem serving for Damascus.
This created problems for, while Stirling assured the Foreign Office that the demolitions would be undertaken in the studio, there were fears that the ‘suspicious and savage Saudis’ might mistake mock battles for real ones and join in seriously. Nevertheless the Foreign Office saw the film as a chance for some good Hashemite propaganda, although sections of the script which dealt with the government’s promises to Hussain would have to be vetted.13 The outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine during the spring of 1936 ruled out any filming in Jordan which involved gatherings of tribesmen as extras. By now there were strong and insistent objections from the Turkish government about proposed scenes of Turkish atrocities.
Korda was forced to bow to pressure from the censors of the British Board of Film Control and the Foreign Office, which were both anxious not to upset Turkey. In June 1939 after extended negotiations, Korda proposed a new, completely revised script which included Lawrence’s Oxford career, the war and, for the final half of the film, an account of his time in the RAF. This, Korda insisted, was to be ‘by far the most important part of the picture’. This satisfied the censors and the Foreign Office, but the war and Korda’s departure for Hollywood terminated the project.
The new film would have entertained and uplifted audiences. Korda knew that now Britain was facing war, an idealised story of Lawrence would serve to inspire her people. ‘My associates and myself,’ he wrote, ‘are fully convinced that the making of a picture about Lawrence’s life is today very greatly in the National Interest, as nothing could have such a good propaganda effect as the example of his life.’14 Had it been made, Korda’s film with Leslie Howard in the title role would have been shown in wartime cinemas alongside others which depicted the heroes of Britain’s past such as Drake, Pitt the Younger and Nelson. No doubt it would have moved audiences, reminded them of their country’s greatness and exemplified the path of duty. It would have been the apotheosis of the Lawrence of legend.
What Korda called the ‘unique climax’ of the film was to have been Lawrence’s service in the RAF. This seemed paradoxical as Lawrence had often represented his enlistment in the ranks as a deliberate effort to discard his former public self and find anonymity. Yet he had chosen obscurity in a service which was at the centre of public attention throughout the 1920s and 1930s and which was widely associated with adventure and glamour. This was the age of the Empire Air Days, Kingsford-Smith, Lindbergh and Amy Johnson and the breaking of aerial records for speed and endurance.
Air was the new frontier, waiting to be overcome, and its conquest stirred the public imagination. Lawrence was swept along by the general enthusiasm. It was, he told Wing-Commander Sydney Smith in 1921, ‘the most important development of the future’ and he was full of excitement about the new cross-desert air routes which were being planned. Two years later at Farnborough and now a new RAF recruit, Lawrence was overwhelmed by the possibilities ahead. ‘I grew suddenly on fire with the glory which the air should be.’ Six years later and soon after he had taken part in the management of the Schneider Trophy Race at Plymouth, he still saw himself as involved in ‘the greatest adventure that awaits mankind’.
; The challenge of the air excited and fascinated contemporaries and Lawrence’s association with it, through his RAF service, added a new dimension to his public persona. It aroused the interest of intellectuals who drew comparisons between him and André Malraux and Antoine de Saint Exupéry, both men of letters who risked their lives as fliers. For Auden, Isherwood and their circle, Lawrence’s apparent fusion of thought and physical action and daring exerted a peculiar fascination. He was, wrote Auden in 1934, one of those men who ‘exemplify most completely what is best and significant in our lives, our nearest approach to a synthesis of feeling and reason, act and thought’. His life had been ‘an allegory of the transformation of the Truly Weak Man into the Truly Strong Man, an answer to the question “How shall the self-conscious man be saved ?”’ Small, neurotic and riddled with self-doubt, Lawrence had still made himself the man of action. It might be possible, Auden imagined, for men like himself to follow the same course. Certainly the external circumstances of their age demanded that weak men made themselves strong.
After Lawrence’s death, Auden and Isherwood revised their judgements and concluded that Lawrence had always been a ‘Truly Weak Man’. There was something lacking in the hero, not least a sense of purpose and high seriousness:
A Bristol Fighter which flew overhead
Swooped down as the pilot leaned out of his seat
‘It’s Lawrence of Arabia’, somebody said
And a typist tittered, ‘Isn’t he sweet!’
She would no doubt have enjoyed the Lowell Thomas show and, if it had been screened, the Korda film.
Robert Graves suspected that Lawrence had an ability to be all things to all men. This was certainly true of the legend which grew up around him during the last sixteen years of his life. To the man in the street he was a war hero who hated war, despised militarism, scoffed at old-guard generals and politicians and sought only to live quietly on his own terms. He was presented to the country’s youth as an example of steadfastness in duty and courage. For the film industry his life and exploits were the basis for an epic which would inspire and thrill audiences. Outspoken and unconventional, he was on the side of the coming generation in its struggle against its elders. As an intellectual he was a model for contemporary writers hesitant about how they should behave in a world which demanded deeds from them as well as ideas. He was in the forefront of efforts to conquer the air, and he might even have been a secret agent as cunning and resourceful as any fictional hero. Churchill could write to him in 1927 and ask him not to wait till the ‘Bolshevik Revolution entitles me to summon you to the centre of strife by an order from the Imperial Stirrup!’ At the same time a Communist could speculate whether this instinctive enemy of the bourgeois might be the revolutionary leader who would overthrow capitalism. For Williamson and a few Fascists, Lawrence was the lost leader who had to be persuaded to mount his white horse and bring salvation to his people. Anything seemed possible with a man whose legend, Noel Coward recalled, ‘was too strong to be gainsaid’.
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