Lawrence of arabia and american culture
Download 0.8 Mb.
|
| -123-
BEAUTY AIDS, DESERT FASHIONS AND OTHER MANIFESTATIONS OF POPULAR CULTURE The commercial potential of Lawrence of Arabia in product advertising began to be exploited in the 1930s, long before a Hollywood film about him was realized. In the T. E. Lawrence collection at Oxford's Bodleian Library are examples of cigarette and trade cards with his picture issued the year of his death. The 1988 exhibit publication for the Lawrence centennial notes this early irony involving the use of Lawrence in advertising: he was a nonsmoker. Nothing, however, can compare to the advertising blitzkrieg accompanying the release of Lawrence of Arabia. It was so successful at drawing crowds into the theaters that stock in Columbia Pictures nearly doubled in value during the first week. 33 In promoting the film, Columbia Pictures spared little effort or expense. Lavish theatre lobby decorations and souvenir programs were produced. A soundtrack was made by Colpix Records for sale to the viewing public and distributed to retailers "to be played over department store public announcement systems." Similarly, a silent 8mm home video, with shorts from the film, was marketed. To encourage and educate cinema operators, Columbia offered poster displays, reprints of positive film reviews, suggestions for giveaways, and even advice and instructions on how to advertise the film. The instructions included reports on how some cinema operators had set up Bedouin tents as box offices and used oriental dancing girls or barkers in Arab garb to bring in the viewers. The Columbia Pictures merchandising and advertising pamphlet also made the suggestion that cinema operators set out miniature Bedouin tents on local restaurant tables. There were "TV Featurettes and Trailers" for advertising and a "30 Minute-Behind-the-Scenes" videotape of interviews with the actors. The latter, for television distribution, was played in twelve U.S. cities and was distributed free by Columbia. 34 Fashion was another angle Columbia Pictures and American retailers worked in promoting "Lawrence mania" in the United States. The company's merchandising pamphlet contains two 14" × 20" pages with newspaper and magazine clips from fashion shows around the country. Even though there were virtually no women in the film, the 1963 Easter fashions had a decidedly "Sheik of Araby" look with Lawrence of Arabia scarves and hats for women. Advertisements from the fashion pages of the Detroit News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette plugged the many variations on turbans inspired by the film; Lawrence "ghutra" scarfs sold for as much as $75 and arabesque hats ranged from $30 to $60. One advertisement by the Joseph -124- Home Company pictured Peter O'Toole on camelback with various tur- b baned women in the foreground. 35 Lawrence of Arabia attire was also highlighted in fashion shows in other middle American cities, such as St. Louis and Denver, and, of course, in the big fashion center of New York. The Lorraine Flocks morning television show in Washington, D.C. pushed desert chic at Garfinckel's, the city's large and now defunct department store. Vogue called the phenomenon "Desert Dazzle," and other commentators described it as "the chic of Araby" or "Chic Sheik." One could also get the "Sheik look" from Elizabeth Arden beauty products, including Lawrence of Arabia lipstick, nail polish, and "a Sheik-look Creme Rouge" which gave "sun-warmed complexion tones without dashing into the desert." There were also numerous lines of Lawrence-style beachware by such companies as Jantzen, Catalina, Maidenform, and Adolfo. An issue of McCall's Magazine devoted eight editorial pages to the "Lawrence look" at the beach in a photo spread entitled "How to Be Sheik on the Sand": "Shades of Sahara! Shades of Lawrence in Arabia! Look sizzling on the sands this summer in one of the sultry new bathing suits topped off, if you dare, with an eye-catching, desert-inspired headdress." 36 Even children's fashion was affected when Gibbs Underware Company in New York marketed "Little Lawrence's Beach 'n' Bath Burnooses." These Moroccan-style, striped terry cloth robes were, according to an advertisement in Life, "inspired by ' Lawrence of Arabia'" and were "like the real ones worn by Arabs in North Africa." Never mind that Lawrence's exploits took place in Arabia on a different continent. 37 Children's fashions led to toys and collectibles. Some of these, such as a series of hand-painted metal miniatures of Lawrence and a war strategy game based on the Arabia campaign are obviously, because of their price tag and degree of difficulty, adult "toys." The strategy game reportedly has a degree of difficulty of two on a scale of five, with five requiring a degree from the National War College. Many Lawrence collectibles do not fall within the range of popular culture. Lawrence memorabilia, including a series of Hejaz postage stamps that Lawrence produced in 1916 to give the fledgling Arab Revolt world recognition as a national movement, have become museum pieces. A copy of the 1922 Oxford edition of Seven Pillars went on sale in 1987 for $400,000, and prices for the 1926 edition at the 1988 Los Angeles Antiquarian Book Fair ranged from $17,000 to $30,000. Lawrence's writings are now the passion of wealthy rare book collectors. 38 The film and attendant advertising also revitalized the Lawrence juvenile book market. The first books, out even before the film, were Geoffrey -125- Bond's The Lawrence of Arabia Story ( 1960) and James Cadell The Young Lawrence of Arabia, published in the United States by Roy Publishers in 1961. Cadell, in the manner of Horatio Alger, tells young people how Lawrence developed into "Our Man in Arabia," chronicling his schoolboy interest in adventure and the Middle East. He demystifies for children the legendary hero by demonstrating the steady process by which Lawrence became an expert on Arabia and then a military leader. Several other biographies were published in conjunction with the film, including a popular seller in America by Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone and other adventure novels. MacLean's biography for Random House's World Landmark Series was illustrated by Gill Walker, a talented U.S. Army artist. The last of the juvenile biographies stimulated directly by the SpiegelLean film were James Dunn The Adventures of Lawrence of Arabia ( 1963) and James Barbary Lawrence and His Desert Raiders ( 1965) about the Aqaba campaign. Since the mid-1960s, there have been few children's biographies of Lawrence. The recent Gulf War rekindled interest in desert warfare and the Middle East, but it has not affected the juvenile market for Lawrence books. 39 There were other adolescent spinoffs from the film, such as comic books and a parody by MAD Magazine. An example of the comic book treatment is Dell Comics' insipid Desert War! Arab Revolt! The Unbelievable Story of Lawrence of Arabia! which ends: "Upon his return to England, Lawrence took up a scholarly life, teaching, and writing at a peaceful university." By contrast, MAD Magazine's fictitious "What Kind of O'Toole Am I? Dept." carried a no-holds-barred parody of Lawrence by Larry Siegel entitled "Flawrence of Arabia" (a takeoff on D. H. Lawrence's reference to "C. E. Florence" in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.) The 1964 parody follows the film closely, opening with a motorcyclist heading for destruction. A closeup, however, reveals that "the guys up in the projection booth" have mistakenly substituted Marlon Brando in the opening scene from The Wild One, a clever beginning recalling Sam Spiegel's original preference for the part of Lawrence. 40 Throughout the early 1960s, a "Lawrence mania" complemented "Beatle mania," most of it due to the concerted effort of Columbia Pictures to sell their product. Their advertising, however, reached beyond the promotion of merchandise related to the film to outright propaganda. Not to miss an important segment of American ticket buyers, Columbia designed a publicity pamphlet to offset the view of American Jews that Lawrence was an anti-Zionist. The pamphlet, entitled "Jewish leaders and the Jewish press -126- speak out on Lawrence of Arabia" ( 1962), carried favorable reviews of the film along with a commendation from Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, and a Lawrence acquaintance. Columbia also published A Teacher's Guide to Lawrence of Arabia replete with the "proper" questions to ask, presumably so that school children received the right version of the story according to Columbia Pictures. A generation of American school children grew up thinking Peter O'Toole was Lawrence of Arabia. 41 THE 1960s AND BEYOND Although serious scholarship on Lawrence was conducted in the United States during the late 1960s, as far as the general public was concerned, it was not a good period for the Lawrence legend. There were echoes of Lawrence in the popular television program about World War II desert warfare, "Rat Patrol," and in various episodes of "Man from U.N.C.L.E." and other spy series. The public, however, as Village Voice reviewer Andrew Sarris predicted when the Lean-Spiegel production first appeared, soon lost interest in Lawrence of Arabia. The "Lawrence mania" of 1962- 1963 seemed trivial after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, civil rights protests, and the deepening of American involvement in the Vietnam War. In England, too, Lawrence was shoved off the stage by contemporary sensations such as the Profumo Affair, the biggest sex scandal in the history of British politics. Commercial interest in Lawrence, however, continued throughout the 1960s and beyond. Despite Sarris's prediction, Lawrence of Arabia did not cease to figure into the popular culture of Britain and the United States. There have been occult works about Lawrence, such as Jane Sherwood's Post Mortem Journal ( 1964) and a highly speculative "historical novel" The Murder of Lawrence of Arabia ( 1979), based on a biography by Desmond Stewart. The novel, as the author forewarns in the preface, is "a dramatic reconstruction of the last eleven weeks in the life of T. E. Lawrence." Relying on rumors that the British Colonial Office, with collusion by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, murdered Lawrence, the author attributes Lawrence's motorcycle accident and death to government agents. Numerous allusions to Lawrence have been made in Hollywood productions subsequent to Lawrence of Arabia. Some of these have been parodies, such as a Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy comedy, Trading Places, in which Murphy, echoing Lawrence at Tafas, exclaims "No Prisoners" on the way to rig prices at the Commodities Exchange. More recently, Kevin Costner, who played a cavalry officer adopted by American Indians in Dances with -127- Wolves, was referred to by film reviewers as "Costner of America." George Lucas, in his television series based on the Indiana Jones character, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," occasionally includes Lawrence. Indy, the boy hero, explores ancient tombs in Egypt with Lawrence and in a later episode meets him at the Paris Peace Conference. They become correspondents. In its Great Performances series, the Public Broadcasting System brought David Puttnam's A Dangerous Man: Lawrence after Arabia to television. The film chronicled Lawrence's role as a behind-the-scenes power broker at the Paris Peace Conference. For better or worse, the film industry has kept the Lawrence of Arabia legend in the public eye. 42 The news media have done the same. Lawrence was often evoked for comparison during the Gulf War. Some of the allusions pertained to military strategy and modern Middle East history; others were manifestations of political popular culture. Russell Baker, in an editorial for the New York Times entitled "The Oasis Crowd," poked fun at the rush of news anchors to Baghdad to cover the war. Writing about ABC's Ted Koppel, Baker began his editorial: "He had been the first to get into Baghdad. That's why they called him Koppel of Arabia. The name had weight. Before he had been Koppel of Arabia he had been just another Ted." "Schwarzkopf of Arabia," a better analogy because the general acknowledged reading Lawrence, soon followed as did "Bush of Arabia," the latter depicted in postcards wearing Arab headdress. More recently, comparisons have included Lawrence of Moravia and various other rebel nationalist leaders in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian republics. Apparently, as long as personalities are associated with geography and rebellion, Lawrence will remain the popular analogy for the Middle East and nationalist uprisings. 43 From the 1920s onward the popular image of Lawrence of Arabia has continued to appeal to the American public. Its commercial potential has been exploited time and again in film, popular literature, advertising and fashion, as well as by the news media. A Lawrence industry developed which would seem to have made Lawrence, in Marshall Fishwick's popular culture terminology, a "fakestyle hero." According to Fishwick, the fakestyle hero is distinguished from a classical or folk hero by being a pseudo-event and the product of images contrived for commercial and/or other gain. The fakestyle hero becomes "a happening." Consequently, he or she is characterized by impermanence. In a fast-changing, many-media reporting world, events and personalities are soon shoved off the stage by competing events and personalities. 44 Lawrence's popular image originated and was propagated as "a happening"--a post-World War I pseudo-event. We should, then, according to -128- Fishwick's description of modern media heroes, be able to dismiss Lawrence as a "fakestyle" hero. But despite the artificial way Lawrence has been presented, interest in him has endured for seventy-five years. His longevity as a public figure can only be explained by a depth of appeal that transcends popular culture. -129- [This page intentionally left blank.] -130-
Chapter 8 Assaying the Legends AMERICAN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP The study of T. E. Lawrence's life and career intersects several areas of inquiry: archaeology, military and political history, biography, literary criticism, and culture studies. Consequently, Lawrence scholarship has become a multidisciplinary endeavor. It has also become a small scholarly industry, with a T. E. Lawrence Society, a journal, separately published British and American newsletters, and conferences. Hundreds of scholarly monographs and articles have been written about Lawrence. American critical interest in Lawrence has been especially notable. Philip O'Brien's still growing Lawrence bibliography, for instance, indicates that between 1919 and 1986 more than 750 articles and book reviews about Lawrence appeared in American periodicals. This number roughly equaled those in British publications for the same period. There have also been scores of unpublished American studies about Lawrence, including master theses and doctoral dissertations. Officers at the U.S. Army War College alone produced twenty-five military studies of Lawrence between 1967 and 1975. American military scholars, literary critics, biographers, psychoanalysts, and historians have all been drawn to Lawrence. As early as 1919, Lawrence began to be mentioned and even featured in American scholarly periodicals. That year Current History and Literary Digest carried articles on Lawrence as the liberator of Damascus. For the next two decades, over seventy articles appeared on Lawrence in such publications as Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, American Historical Review, Atlantic, The Dial, Foreign Affairs, New Republic, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly. Yale Review carried five -131- essays during this twenty-year period about Lawrence as a military figure, the legend of Lawrence, and his place in history. Since then, political and military interest in Lawrence has fluctuated with current events, but literary and historical scholarship on Lawrence in the United States has grown steadily. 1 American literary scholarship on Lawrence began in earnest with R. P. Blackmur's pre-World War II essay, "The Everlasting Effort," discussed in Chapter 5. Critical interest in Lawrence was further advanced in the early 1960s with Irving Howe's seminal essays "Lawrence, the Anti-Hero Hero" and "T. E. Lawrence: The Problem of Heroism." The latter was an influential contribution to the already extensive body of literature about heroism and modern culture. Howe thought Lawrence embodied the paradoxes of the modern hero, "a man with a load on his mind." He was a vulnerable idealist, a man burdened by self-consciousness and the intellectual freight he carried but caught up in a swift current of events--"the prince of our disorder." In considering Lawrence as a writer, Howe was the first of several American critics to compare him to Melville, finding in Seven Pillars of Wisdom "a model for a genre that would become all too characteristic of the age: a personal narrative through which a terrible experience is relived, burned out, perhaps transcended." For Howe, "the last of the New York Intellectuals," Seven Pillars was "as necessary for comprehending the twentieth century as Brecht's poems or Kafka's novels or Pirandello's plays." 2 Despite attention from established critics such as Howe, and Lawrence's inclusion in such works as Justine Wintle Makers of Modern Culture, Seven Pillars has rarely been included in standard English department curricula. In a review article published in the 1970s about Lawrence scholarship, Stephen Tabachnick reasoned that Lawrence had until then been shut out of university English departments because he did not fit within standard forms. Literary criticism was heavily biased toward fiction and poetry. Not until Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism ( 1957) had time to resonate did scholars know what to do with Lawrence. "By defining and precisely labelling such genres as the autobiography and the confession, Frye upgraded their status and gave timorous graduate students (and their advisers) a respectable theoretical basis for the investigation of works such as Seven Pillars which had previously defied description." 3 The appreciation for interdisciplinarity in culture studies has helped to legitimize writers like Lawrence as subjects by stretching the context of literature and promoting the exegesis of nonfiction texts. Literary scholarship on Lawrence also coincided with a liberalization of attitudes toward a -132- range of social types and subjects. But more specifically, U.S. scholarship on Lawrence has been spurred by the acquisition of substantial Lawrence collections by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The availability of materials has made Lawrence scholarship much easier for Americans. Literary reputations are often made abroad, and such is to some degree the case with Lawrence. In the 1920s and early 1930s, his war memories were first publicly available in the United States. The publicity they received in this country increased their value and bolstered Lawrence's reputation as a writer. Americans have also promoted recent literary study about Lawrence, perhaps more so than the British. Although Lawrence's contemporaries credited his literary contribution, British scholars have often failed to appreciate him as a writer. Perhaps they have found their compatriot's Strand Magazine image too distasteful, or his introspection, cynicism, ambivalence, and growing nihilism to be perverse and threatening. For instance, in A Coat of Many Colours, critic Herbert Read could not relate to Lawrence's "darkness." He wrote: "It is this core of darkness [in Seven Pillars] which . . . puts one in doubt of the essential greatness of the book." For Read, "Great books are written in moods of spiritual light and intellectual certainty," not in the depths of despair and self-doubt. That Lawrence held himself up to writers such as Turgenev, Nietzsche, and Melville (not exactly authors free of ambivalence and bathed in spiritual light) did not particularly impress Read. Other English critics, such as Lawrence biographer Robert Graves, lightly passed over his contribution as a writer. In Valentine Cunningham British Writers of the Thirties, Lawrence is referred to as a measure of despair for other authors rather than as a writer in his own right. 4 American critics, on the other hand, appear to have been more accepting of Lawrence as an artist. They are more sympathetic perhaps because of the romance tradition in American writing. Fed on Hawthorne and Melville, they have a definition of fiction broad and deep enough to view Seven Pillars as a romance or even to consider The Mint as a kind of novel, and they appreciate the romantic Rousseau-like autobiographer in Lawrence. In "Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Turns and Counter-Turns," for example, Albert Cook asks whether Seven Pillars is "a historical novel a la Henry Miller and Malraux, or a piece of history." The question he finds radically ambiguous because "in Lawrence we find the point at which history and fiction meet." The intersection, however, is far more interesting than either mode on its own. 5 -133- Beginning in 1962, with articles by Irving Howe in Hudson Review, and by Bertram Rota and Gordon Mills in Texas Quarterly, Americans have regularly assayed the topic of Lawrence as a writer. The following year, James Notopoulous wrote about the epic allusions in Seven Pillars for Yale Review, and Stanley Weintraub published Private Shaw and Public Shaw: A Dual Portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and G.B.S., chronicling the literary friendship between the two Shaws. American literary scholarship on Lawrence increased considerably in the 1970s. Stanley and Rodelle Weintraub published a book devoted solely to Lawrence as a writer in T. E. Lawrence: The Literary Impulse, and with The Wounded Spirit Jeffrey Meyers published the first book-length study of Lawrence's major literary work. During the 1970s, several other critical studies, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, two bibliographies, several dissertations, and numerous articles about Lawrence were written by Americans. Various books on Lawrence by foreign authors also had American editions. 6 The 1980s, in part because of the Lawrence centennial and the re-release of the film Lawrence of Arabia, were also a fruitful decade for literary scholarship on Lawrence. Several dissertations were written, two of which were later published. Compilations of essays by Jeffrey Meyers and Stephen Tabachnick brought together nearly twenty authors in T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend and The T. E. Lawrence Puzzle, respectively. More recently, Lawrence's literary correspondence and published criticism have been anthologized and published in the United States along with a Lawrence biography symposium. 7 THE MEANING OF THE LEGENDS Such intense interest in Lawrence by literary scholars, as well as by military, political, and cultural historians, raises the questions: Why such fascination with Lawrence? What is it about Lawrence that keeps biographers and scholars sifting through the dust sixty years after his death for the smallest scraps of information? British biographer Jeremy Wilson arrives at one list of answers to these questions. Lawrence's achievements were remarkably varied. He played important roles in the Arab Revolt and at the Paris Peace Conference, and he continued to influence British Middle East policy afterward. He made contributions to the fields of literature, archaeology, and military technology. He was also a friend to many of the leading figures of his day. 8 Lawrence was certainly accomplished, and some scholars still blame him for what's wrong in the Middle East, but the Lawrence legend is bigger than -134- a list of remarkable attainments. 9 John Mack, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning psychobiography of Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, arrives at another, more speculative explanation for the fascination with Lawrence. The professor of psychiatry captures the essence of the legend of Lawrence of Arabia. He estimates that Lawrence's importance derives more from what he came to represent and his ability to influence the lives of others than what, as an individual, he did. 10 Lawrence's accomplishments and failures--what he actually did or failed in doing--are of less importance than what he and others made of them. Myths and legends are more powerful than the individuals or events they are based on. Lawrence's role as liaison officer to the Arabs in "a sideshow of a sideshow," as he called the Arabian campaign, does not by itself warrant the extraordinary amount of attention he has received, but the effect Lawrence has had on our imagination does. Directory: fileadmin -> uni -> fakultaeten -> split lehrstuehle -> englische literatur -> Materialien -> Houswitschka -> Lawrence of Arabia fileadmin -> Comparative Politics Central Europe Mgr. Juraj Marušiak, PhD. course coordinator fileadmin -> Annex 1 to the Interim Report fileadmin -> Review of projects and contributions on statistical methods for spatial disaggregation and for integration of various kinds of geographical information and geo-referenced survey data fileadmin -> An overview of land evaluation and land use planning at fao fileadmin -> Contact information fileadmin -> Review of the literature fileadmin -> Sigchi extended Abstracts Sample Adapted to mamn25 fileadmin -> Communication and Information Sector Knowledge Societies Division Lawrence of Arabia -> T. E. Lawrence ftontispiece The bungalow at No. 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, facing page 48 Download 0.8 Mb. Share with your friends:
|