Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

by Michael Korda

  The world of caravans, camels, desert, and Bedouin nomads would hold Lawrence to the Middle East for the next three years, except for brief visits home, and spare him the decision about what career to follow, until at last the outbreak of World War I thrust him into the career for which he had been training himself all his life.

  Lawrence arrived at Aleppo to find the Turkish authorities making difficulties about the resumption of work at Carchemish; nor had the moneyarrived with which to begin a new house for the archaeologists, nearer to the site. The years 1911 to 1914 were difficult ones for foreigners in Turkey—the country’s political instability combined with a series of humiliating military defeats and territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire in Libya at the hands of Italy, and in the Balkans at the hands of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, intensified the siege mentality of the Turkish government and its hostility to foreigners, and encouraged fear of the Russians and, therefore, a closer relationship with Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century Turkey had seen itself deprived of all its North African possessions, from Egypt to Morocco, and all its Balkan possessions except for a tiny enclave around Constantinople; of course, this made the Turks all the more determined to hold on to their Arabian possessions.

  Lawrence kicked his heels in Aleppo for nearly two weeks, happy to be out of Egypt, buying small antiquities for Hogarth and the Ashmolean Museum, bargaining for a long camel-hair cloak for himself (“such as Bedouin sheiks wear: Baghdad made: very warm and beautiful”), and keeping himself going by borrowing from the British consul until money arrived from the British Museum. He spent much time searching for an armorer who still made chain mail as it had been made at the time of the Crusades, for the benefit of a friend in Oxford who shared his interest in armor. He wrote home often—in one letter, he expresses satisfaction that his brother Frank is keeping up with his shooting, and urges Frank “to do a little revolver work: it is harder than a rifle to learn, and more often necessary,” a typically offhand remark that separates Lawrence from other archaeological assistants, few of whom would have felt that revolver marksmanship was a necessity. He seems to have been reading a lot—Maurice Hewlett’s Richard Yea-and-Nay, a historical novel about Richard I, for the ninth time, Lawrence claimed; and William Morris’s “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem” Sigurd the Volsung. This is a revealing choice of books. Hewlett was a prolific English writer of romantic historical fiction; he was a friend of Ezra Pound and of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and was famous and successful in his time,though he is largely forgotten now. His novel about Richard Coeur de Lion is a frankly hero-worshipping and meticulously detailed portrait of one of Lawrence’s favorite medieval kings. Morris’s hero, Sigurd, is the central figure of Norse myth and legend, the dragon slayer and hero of the Volsunga Saga, and Wagner’s inspiration for the Ring cycle. Morris transformed Sigurd into a noble Victorian hero, a kind of fantasy preux chevalier, in what one biographer of Lawrence calls “a transparently Oedipal tale."* Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he passes from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett’s novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd’s doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son’s enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology.

  Once he arrived in Jerablus, after a three-day walk over rough country, followed by a recalcitrant mule train carrying the expedition’s supplies, Lawrence was like a man back in his element. Physical discomfort, danger, and exhaustion acted on him like a tonic. He gathered a workforce; had the foundations for the expedition house dug; and argued over the ownership of the mound with a greedy local landowner who claimed it, and with a Turkish police lieutenant who ordered him to stop the digging. By the first week in March he was back in Aleppo, to pick up Woolley—there was a certain amount of excitement in the foreign community, since all Italians were being expelled from Turkey because of the war in Libya, and it was therefore possible to buy their collections of antiquities atbargain-basement prices. Then, a week later, Woolley and Lawrence went to Biridjik together, to confront the kaimakam over the order to stop the digging and the interference from the local landowner.

  Lawrence might easily have resented Woolley’s presence, since Woolley was senior to him, and a more experienced archaeologist, but fortunately Woolley behaved exactly the right way for an Englishman confronting an Asian official, and told the kaimakam that he would shoot on the spot anyone who “interrupted the digs.” He apparently spoke with enough high-handed vigor and righteous British indignation to cow the kaimakam, who had, of course, arranged the various attempts to stop the digging in the hope of extracting a bribe for himself. Woolley thereby won Lawrence’s instant and lasting respect and friendship. Those who thought Lawrence was mild saw only his short stature, his slight figure, and the boyish shock of unruly fair hair, and failed to notice the icy blue eyes and the large, firm jaw: he was quite capable of acting just like one of Kipling’s pukka sahibs when aroused, and he thoroughly approved of Woolley’s boldly threatening the Turkish police chief in the chief’s own office, as well as Woolley’s parting shot: that he was declaring war not against the Turkish government, but only against the kaimakam.

  Woolley acquired further merit in Lawrence’s eyes by admiring Lawrence’s pottery finds (and agreeing with most of Lawrence’s theories about them) and showing a preference for Syrian over Egyptian cooking. Since Woolley could not speak or understand the local dialect, he needed Lawrence to translate for him, as well as deal with the workforce—not always an easy task, since almost every adult male was armed, and every find was proclaimed with a fusillade of shots. Even the cook, “the staid Haj Wahid,” worked with a Mauser pistol stuffed into his sash and a Martini-Henry rifle by his bedroll, and at one point fired ten shots through the goat-hair roof of the tent in celebration; the holes then had to be darned.

  By the beginning of April—despite the fact that no building permit had as yet arrived from Constantinople—the stone expedition house was almost completed. Consisting of eleven rooms, “two of them very large,” the Carchemish house was to occupy a good deal of Lawrence’s time andattention over the next two years. It had an impressive courtyard with a graceful stone entrance, and although the house was built of rough-dressed stone rather than adobe, in photographs it very much resembles a largish and rather fashionable home in Santa Fe. This is particularly true of the interior, with its hanging wall rugs; white plaster walls with deep, graceful niches for books and antiquities; carved wooden doors; and beamed ceilings, which look just like the rough-hewn vigas used in New Mexico.

  By mid-April Lawrence and Woolley had settled into the new house and were waiting for the arrival (and the approval) of Hogarth. Despite a formal visit from the kaimakam, who had been ordered to apologize to them, Lawrence continued his campaign of harassing the Turkish authorities, picking the lock of the storeroom in which the “poor little [Turkish] Commissaire” kept the antiquities that had been excavated, and in general doing what he could to stoke the discontent in the local workforce against the nearby German railway builders. For the moment, all this was still on the level of undergraduate pranks, but the Middle East being what it was (and is), there would soon be an escalation to violence and the use of firearms. Even Woolley, who came to admire and love Lawrence, was aware of his “essential immaturity” about matters like this. That impression was no doubt accentuated by the fact that Lawrence looked, as Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, remarked, “about eighteen.” Another person who met Lawrence in Aleppo at that time described him as a “frail, pallid, silent youth,” though that remark contrasts with Mrs. Fontana’s descriptio
n of him as “a young man of rare power and considerable physical beauty.” Much as Lawrence spurned physical relationships with any women (or men), a number of women were strongly attracted to him over the years.

  In a long letter home at about this time, Lawrence brings up the possibility, no doubt alarming to his family, that he may go off into the desert to seek out the primitive and nomadic Soleyb, survivors of the pagan predecessors of the Arabs; spend “a spring & summer with them"; then write a book, along the lines of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, devoted to this mysterious people. Lawrence expresses his belief that his book (or books)"would be better, if I had been for a time in open country,” a very different and more demanding ambition than turning his BA thesis into an illustrated book. Lawrence may have lost interest in the elusive Soleyb on learning that they lived on raw antelope meat, though this is not the kind of consideration which would necessarily have held him back—more likely, his growing interest in archaeology and his responsibilities at Carchemish pushed this scheme into the background.

  Lawrence’s letters to his friend Leeds, back at the Ashmolean, are often rather franker than his letters home. Admittedly, in writing to Leeds Lawrence attempts to turn every event, however trying and difficult, into a funny story—one learns, for instance, that he and Woolley had prudently taken spare clothes and tinned food with them when they went to confront the kaimakam, since there was a good chance they might have been thrown into prison, and that Woolley had to brandish his pistol again, “when the police tried to hold up his donkeys.” Lawrence was running footraces with the younger and nimbler workers, and painstakingly removing a splendid Roman mosaic floor from a plowed field near the excavation site and reconstructing it as the floor of one room in the expedition house. Since this consisted of 144,000 tesserae (small vitreous tiles) “weighing over a ton,” it was no simple or easy task. In May the eagerly awaited visit of David Hogarth took place: “A breathless hush of expectation…. We’re all dressed in our best, sitting in our empty, swept, and garnished rooms, awaiting the coming of the C H I E F.”

  Hogarth’s nine-day visit to the site proved satisfactory—it is typical of Hogarth’s amazing ability to be in the right place at the right time and, more important, to know the right people, that on his way out to visit Carchemish he met in Berlin with the kaiser and obtained from his imperial majesty “his explicit promise to make all right for us with the Bagh-dadbahn people, if there is any trouble,” in Lawrence’s words. Thus the German railway engineers were persuaded to carry away much of the spoil and rubble from the excavation site to use in building the bridge over the Euphrates and in bedding the tracks, thereby saving the British Museum a good deal of money, and speeding up the dig for Woolley and Lawrence.

  Among the many things Lawrence learned from Hogarth, perhaps the most important was to go to the top unhesitatingly in any matter that interested or concerned him. Despite a reputation for shyness and a desire to remain in the background, as a young civilian in Cairo in 1914 Lawrence was apparently able to reach the formidable Field Marshal Kitchener to urge on him the importance of taking Alexandretta; he successfully bypassed many layers of military command to deal directly with General Allenby in 1917–1918; although only an acting lieutenant-colonel, he made his arguments about the Middle East directly to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; and he made his case for reforms in the RAF directly to Air Chief Marshal Trenchard in the 1920s. It must be said that Lawrence seldom used either his fame or his remarkable ability to reach some of the busiest and most powerful people in the world to his own advantage; he used both only in pursuit of causes he deemed worthwhile, or to deflect policies that he thought were ill-advised.

  Hogarth was sufficiently impressed with what had been done at Carchemish so far—and by the numerous signs that the remains of a great Hittite city would eventually be uncovered—that he recommended to the British Museum that Woolley’s pay be increased, and that Lawrence be given a salary of fifteen shillings a day for the next season’s digging. In the meantime, Lawrence was using Dahoum to help him reassemble and classify the growing collection of pottery fragments, and teaching Dahoum to act as his assistant in the darkroom. In June, Woolley stopped the dig and went home to England, leaving Lawrence on his own, to spend the summer months traveling through Syria with Dahoum as his companion.

  Lawrence’s friendship with Dahoum has been the subject of a good deal of speculation over the years, but it seems very unlikely that there was anything improper or scandalous about it—Vyvyan Richards’s comment that Lawrence was totally without sexual feelings or temptation probably holds as true for his relationship with Dahoum as it held for Richards. Whether Lawrence was totally without such feelings or savagely repressedthem for most of his life is a different question. Given his belief that his parents should never have had children, and his melancholy feeling that his father had given up great estates, a position in society, and a title for a transitory and guilty pleasure, Lawrence may well have begun early on in childhood to suppress in himself even the faintest hint of sexuality—a feat to which his unusual degree of willpower and determination would have lent themselves. The stormy relationship between Lawrence and his mother, and his refusal to be dominated by her formidable will, may have contained a complex, self-destructive reversal of the Oedipus complex: Lawrence not only refused to give in to his oedipal fantasies but suppressed all his sexual instincts completely to do so. This would be a psychological analogue of a “scorched earth” strategy, in which he constantly refused to surrender to sexual urges of any kind until his refusal became a fixed part of his personality, and the source of much of his strength.

  Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum, such as Leonard Woolley, have all emphasized that the close friendship between them was perfectly innocent; indeed had this not been the case, there would almost certainly have been a strong reaction among the local Arabs, and either Woolley or Hogarth would have felt obliged to deal with it. If Lawrence had had a physical relationship with Dahoum, it seems unlikely that he would have brought Dahoum home to Oxford to meet his family, as he would do in July 1913, or that he would also bring Sheikh Hamoudi, an unapologetic killer and not by any stretch of the imagination a tolerant soul, or that Hamoudi would have accompanied them had there been anything improper about their relationship.

  That Lawrence loved Dahoum is certainly true, and sensing in Dahoum a degree of ambition rare in most Arabs at that time and place, he did his best to provide for Dahoum’s education, and to offer him a broader view of the world. Lawrence’s definition of love was decidedly not carnal—the boundaries he was crossing with Dahoum were those of race, religion, class, and age (Lawrence was seven or eight years older than Dahoum), not sexual. Whether Lawrence had sexual feelings toward Dahoum we cannot know. Certainly, he never expressed such feelings,though perhaps if he had ever allowed them to emerge, they would have been directed at Dahoum. To nobody else in his life was he ever so close, and with nobody else was he as happy.

  In some ways, Lawrence’s concern for Dahoum was fatherly; in other ways it was that of an older brother. Certainly he saw in Dahoum the kind of natural nobility he later found among his Bedouin followers, uncorrupted in his view by European or British influence and largely untainted by Turkish overlordship, the equivalent of Rousseau’s homme naturel. That this was in some ways a romantic fantasy is certain—Dahoum was attractive, intelligent, sympathetic, and honest, and all those who met him liked him. On the other hand, he was not a Semitic version of an Arthurian hero as imagined by William Morris—but that was a fantasy Lawrence would follow right through the war to its tragic end, and even afterward, when he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence would seek throughout his adult life the company of men, and if, in that world, he found a kind of comfort, it was only during the few years he spent with Dahoum that he ever found somebody he loved who could share it.

  One does not know how the matter appeared to Dahoum—he was only four
teen when Lawrence (then age twenty-two) met him, and he would have had very little experience of Europeans; but young men mature early in the Arab world, and as a result it is sometimes Lawrence who appears younger than his protégé. Dahoum cannot have been blind to the fact that Lawrence’s friendship raised his status, as well as opening up for him a world of literacy and education that would have been unimaginable to most poor north Syrian Arab boys in the Ottoman Empire. A degree of self-interest may well have been present in Dahoum. Lawrence was his opportunity for a way out of his small village, and out of a future of herding goats or harvesting licorice root for the local agha, and he seized it eagerly; but this does not mean he did not care for Lawrence in return, and it is possible that he may have risked his life for Lawrence during the war. In one of a famous pair of photographs taken at Carchemish, Lawrence is shown wearing Dahoum’s Arab robes, laughing as he tries to put Dahoum’s headdress on correctly; the other photograph shows Dahoum in the same place and pose, wearing his own robes and headdress, looking straight into the camera, and smiling broadly. What is most significant about the photograph of Dahoum is that he holds lovingly in both hands, with undisguised pride, a nickel-plated Colt Model of 1903.32-caliber “Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistol,” not a weapon he could have afforded to own unless Lawrence gave it to him. Possession of a modern firearm was almost mandatory for any self-respecting Arab male, and Dahoum’s pleasure in holding the Colt is unmistakable. It hardly matters whether Lawrence gave Dahoum the pistol, or simply lent it to him for the photograph; either way, this was a princely gesture in a society where men did not give away or lend their firearms willingly, and Dahoum’s face is lit up with unfeigned pleasure.

  Lawrence enjoyed the years he spent working at Carchemish not just because of the constant presence of Dahoum. Lawrence and Woolley, though in many respects an odd couple, got along well; the expedition house was one of the only two homes that Lawrence would build and decorate to satisfy his own taste; and he was living among the Arabs, whom he came more and more to like and respect. In addition, he could arrange his days and nights to please himself, reading until late into the night, going without sleep or food when he felt like it, working in exhausting bursts according to whim. He was a commanding presence among the Arabs and something of a celebrity among the rare European visitors—as well as being a gadfly to the Turkish authorities and the German railway engineers without any interference, for on this subject, Woolley and Lawrence were of one mind, whatever the kaiser may have told Hogarth.