T. E. Lawrence ftontispiece The bungalow at No. 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, facing page 48
Download 1.73 Mb.
|
|
So much, en passant, for psychological "interpretations" of Lawrence based on his alleged "love of the Syrian desert" which is assumed to be as flat as the plains of Argentina. Perhaps he exaggerated when he wrote that in one day's march he "went up and down the height of Mt. Blanc," but that is certainly much closer to the truth than the boundless, empty plain idea. In Palestine he did not limit himself to castles, but walked all the way down the west shore of Lake Tiberias and some way down the Jordan Valley before turning seaward towards the great castle of Belvoir, after which he saw Nazareth on his way to Haifa. 45 He was not wholly dependent on natives, and indeed seems to have met plenty of Europeans. He spent four days with the English doctor to the Jewish Mission at Safed, and speaks of meeting Irish women and Scotch women and some Americans from Sidon; and he asked for hospitality at the American Mission School of Jebail, the ancient -63- Byblus, not far from Beirut. He has left even more detailed accounts of how he fared with the natives of Syria than with those of France. After describing the two sorts of very thin bread, used as " a dipper" for boiled wheat or "leben" (sour milk) he goes on to relate how the natives fed him. In the morning he was given hot sweetened milk with thin brittle bread, and a bowl of prickly pears which he found most refreshing. Bread and water only at mid-day, but, occasionally, figs, grapes and water-melons. There were also tomatoes and cucumbers. (How he avoided finding all these in the Midi of France where they super-abound in August is one of the many mysteries). In the evening he got bread or sour or sweetened milk. Very frugal fare, though when he stayed with priests they gave him stews and various types of meat-messes. He slept either in the house or on the roof or verandah on quilts stuffed with feathers, wool and fleas in equal proportions. Sometimes the people accepted money, sometimes not. 46 It is hardly surprising after this to learn that when Professor Barker saw him at a lecture in Oxford in October, 1909, he was thinned with hardship. The expedition brought its accidents and adventures. Lawrence, at the end of his journey, wrote to the head of his college, saying that he had counted on two attacks of malaria but had bad four. One or more of these may have been a return of the Camargue malaria, but it seems likely that he was mosquito-bitten again and infected with a worse type of malaria. 47 In September-October, 1918, during the advance across country partly traversed by Lawrence, the British army's malaria cases doubled in number and were "for the most part of a malignant type." 48 Possibly his stay with Dr. Anderson at Safed may have included treatment, though he seems to have been careless about his malaria -- not realising, perhaps. that every malarious person is a potential source of infection to others. Someday perhaps Lawrence's medical history will be reconstructed by a competent physician. Meanwhile, the layman can only point to a possibility that his repeated attacks of malaria and other infections, not to mention broken bones, may cumulatively have had some effect on him in later life, i.e., a decline of physical energy reinforcing a native indolence and psychological depression or nervous exhaustion. The "adventures" on this trip have been exaggerated, highly -64- publicised, and constantly repeated. One of these was reported by Lawrence in a letter soon after it occurred: "By the way, I took the escort abused above because I was shot at near Masyad: an ass with an old gun: I suppose he was trying it. At any rate he put in a shot at about 200 yards, which I was able to return rather successfully: for his horse promptly bolted about half a mile: I think it must have been grazed somewhere: at any rate he stopped about 800 yards away to contemplate the scenery, and wonder how on earth a person with nothing but a pistol could shoot so far: and when I put up my sights as high as they would go and plumped a bullet somewhere over his nut he made off like a steeple-chaser: such a distance was far beyond his old muzzleloader. I'm rather glad that my perseverance in carrying the Mauser * has been rewarded, it is rather a load but practically unknown out here." 49 There is nothing in that plain narrative (written to his mother) which sounds either improbable or extraordinary. Seeing that Lawrence was "in European dress and brown boots," 50 the "ass with the old gun" may have hoped to combine religious merit with profit in Bedouin style by despatching an infidel. It will be noted that all Lawrence claims here for his return shots is that one of them may have grazed the horse. But this was far too humdrum an event for circulation among his friends and admirers, and he certainly showed a picturesque imagination in some of the sensational versions which he told his friends and which were put into print in a book published for the benefit of a "Charitable Trust." Let us look first at the version he handed out to a guileless Syrian schoolmistress, with whom he had been making light of his alleged sufferings and dangers, and even joking at them. He had had "many narrow escapes from death at the hands of cruel Kurds and Turks;" or so he modestly confessed. For instance, one day in "wild mountains" he met a "huge cruel-looking Turk" who instantly shot at him but luckily missed. Whereupon Lawrence, "to frighten the man," aimed his revolver at the Turk's little finger so accurately that it was slightly wounded. "The giant stood spell-bound," as well he might, whereupon the young hero ____________________ * *This pistol must have been smuggled, for in 1909 the importation of firearms into Turkish territory was forbidden.
____________________ i.e. "I'd rather be a prig than sociable." -66- kept on, and "when the fight came he refused to shoot the robber as he might have done." They fought three rounds and Lawrence was much struck by "the sound Shakespearean way" in which they both by common consent rested between the rounds! 56 Graves and Liddell Hart include the mysterious copper watch bought in Paris, at the sight of which the villagers are said to have murmured 'Gold' 57 In Graves the Mauser becomes a Colt; in Hart, a Webley. In Graves, the Turkman cannot shoot Lawrence with his own pistol because "the safety-catch was raised;" in Hart, Lawrence "pulled out the trigger guard, so collapsing the pistol." In both the robber is frightened off by a shepherd, whose arrival stopped him as he was battering Lawrence's head with the pistol or stones. In Hart, the lost property is recovered by the Turkish police "after a lengthy argument." In Graves, more details are given. He tells us frankly that there is no truth in the story "of a desperate fight and the burning of the village," and puts forward the tale that Lawrence with his "irade" collected 110 men, whose ferry-fare across the Euphrates from Birejik he had to pay, that Lawrence, heavy with fever, slept while police and villagers wrangled, and that the robber was eventually employed under Lawrence at the Carchemish excavations. 58 The version told Pirie-Gordon says that in this contest Lawrence lost most of his clothes and all his money, had to work his passage to Marseille, where he landed with enough money to reach Oxford. 59 According to the University rules, the thesis on castles which was the outcome of all this travel and drama had to be submitted to the examiners in the Easter Vacation of 1910. If Lawrence carried out the intention expressed in his letter to Rhys he was back in Oxford by the 15th October -- and so far as is recorded escaped any fine for being a week late. He thus had between five and six months in which to write his thesis, but in a letter to a younger brother written in mid-1911 Lawrence says: "I left my special subject (the Crusades) till the last two weeks of the last term. It was mostly done while the examination was actually in progress in three all-night sittings: special subjects, if you know all but the facts are a matter of simple cram." 60 This is perhaps a little ambiguous and has led some readers to think he claimed to have written the thesis in three nights during the examination. But actually he does not say so, and possibly he wrote the thesis first and then mugged up the facts afterwards for the other papers. The result -67- in any case was successful since he secured his degree with first-class honours in Modern History, as was still possible at that date. Whatever its merits as an undergraduate thesis, the claims made for it since his death would seem to be exaggerated. It will not be expected that a non-specialist would venture to offer an opinion on a subject so technical and abstruse, and I can only record the opinions of those more competent. The Oxford "authority" of the time was Sir Charles Oman, who spent some twenty years writing a history of the Peninsular War. He also wrote (among other works) a History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, which Lawrence described as "altogether futile;" Lawrence affected to despise him as totally ineffective. He tried to pretend that Oman was a relic of the past and not worth wasting time on, since he was a charlatan, an imbecile and a smatterer. 61 It was Oman's opinion that the builders of the Crusaders' castles were influenced by the art of fortification which the Byzantine Empire had developed from Roman tradition. Lawrence took the opposite view -- the Crusaders already had the knowledge and carried it with them from the west. Oddly enough, in thus challenging the accepted view, Lawrence was carrying out Oman's own advice to pupils trying to provoke the interest of a jaded examiner: "Always, if you can, begin with some statement that rouses his attention, an error in common vogue that must be denounced, or a conclusion that must be justified, however contrary it may be to received opinion. But these theses or criticisms must at all costs have some originality . . ." 62 Accordingly, Lawrence challenged Oman's views, though not by name, at the very opening of his thesis. According to one authority this thesis was of such distinction that it was difficult to find anyone competent to judge it; 63 while Graves on the other hand tells us that "the examiners were so impressed that they celebrated the event by a special dinner at which Lawrence's tutor, Poole, was the host." 64 From Professor A. W. Lawrence we learn that "one of the judges of the thesis urged the University Press to publish it, saying however that not one of the photographs could be spared;" but unfortunately the Press decided the work would be too costly. 65 But Liddell Hart says Lawrence refused to publish the thesis because "it was only a preliminary study and not good enough to print." 66 In a letter of January, 1911, Lawrence tells a friend that his -68- camera was stolen before he was able to take any interesting photographs, but promises to send his thesis "if it re-appears in time for next term." 67 Text and photographs were eventually published 'in a limited edition in 1936, but competent scholars refused to sponsor it. More recently ( 1950) a new book on this aspect of military architecture has been published by Robin Fedden under the same title of Crusader Castles. In his bibliography Fedden says of Lawrence's book that it is "stimulating, but often inaccurate," and after mentioning Lawrence's views in his text decides that "the truth probably lies somewhere between these two extremes. The Crusaders both learnt much and brought much with them." 68 ProfessorLouis Bréhier holds firmly to the old view that the progress of fortifications dates from the crusades. "The Byzantine and Arab types of military architecture," he writes, "were the result of age-long experience of the art of war, and were imported from Syria into France and the whole of the Occident." And he enumerates technical features, including machicoulis which, he says, came from Palestine. * 69 But of course what really mattered was that Lawrence got the Honours degree. ____________________ * Since writing the above I have seen the article in the 1929 Baedeker on Islamic architecture, written by Professor K. A. C. Cresswell, one of the greatest living authorities. Speaking of the Bab en-Nasir gate at Cairo, built A.D. 1089, he says it is "defended by a pair of machicoulis, a device in fortification not found in Europe until the end of the 12th century. . . . Practically every architectural feature of these fortifications can be traced to N. Syria, and their inspiration, as fortifications, is Byzantine."
CHAPTER FIVE T HE TAKING of his degree and the consequent ending of his life as a pupil seem to have left Lawrence with nothing much to do for the remainder of 1910. There is no evidence available that he had any practical plans for a profession or for getting down to work -- which certainly seems indicated in an able-bodied young man between 21 and 22 in a numerous family represented as living in such obligatory parsimony. But, of course, we have to remember the imperfection of the printed testimony, letters having been omitted or censored; with the curious result that for this very year 1910 the editor of the Letters notes that he has "not been able" to publish Lawrence's letter on Chartres cathedral although "it is the most beautiful and emotional of his early letters." 1 The omission of his "most beautiful and emotional letter" is certainly a rather baffling piece of selection, and the reader must always remember that we are working on a noticeably incomplete record. In any event, it would be a mistake to suppose that the absence of any evidence of wanting to work meant that Lawrence was without ambition. One of the early recollections of him by someone who was not a member of the regular Lawrence Bureau speaks of his "intense ambition." 2 This is supported by a photograph of Lawrence and his brothers in 1910 reproduced in Crusader Castles, 3 showing an intent concentrated look on his face often to be seen in over-ambitious youths. And the stronger the ambition, the less likely was he to have any definite plans for gratifying it. In this uncertainty it was very natural that the young man should have thought of carrying on his studies and taking another degree. It is said that his bicycle tours of northern France in June and August and -70- a two-day trip to Rouen in November were made with the idea of writing a thesis on the medieval pottery which he had begun collecting as a schoolboy. According to David Garnett, Lawrence knew more about the collection of pots at the Ashmolean than any of the Staff. They seem to have been rather a feeble lot at Oxford in those days -no history examiner capable of marking a thesis on medieval military architecture, nobody at the Ashmolean acquainted with its pottery. The same thing must have been true of the British Museum department of Greek bronze, if we may credit the story Lawrence told of the head of Hypnos which he claimed "he had found in a rubbish heap in Italy, so precious that it travelled in his bunk while he himself slept on deck . . . twin almost to that in the British Museum; indeed he was asked to exchange them as his seemed the more perfect. But it was found after to be a reproduction . . ." Lawrence mentions possessing this head in August, 1910, at which date there is no evidence he had ever been to Italy unless he landed at Messina in 1909, which seems unlikely as the P. & O. did not stop there. Pre-1914, bronze copies of the Hypnos were regularly on sale in Museum Street, London, in Paris, and in Naples. The B.M. staff of 1910 must indeed have been incompetent if they could not distinguish at a glance between a modern copy and a genuine Greek bronze in their own keeping. 4 What E. T. Leeds (assistant-keeper of the Ashmolean from 1908) says about those days is that he remembers Lawrence coming into the Museum on "some self-appointed task" such as "re-labelling a large collection of brass-rubbings" or "discussing and assessing the date and sequence of medieval pottery." 5 There is nothing about picking up ancient Greek bronzes from Italian rubbish heaps. >This period of transition from a life of dependence to employment as assistant-archologist at Carchemish seems to form an appropriate lull for looking over his early letters. Later in life Lawrence admitted that all his letters were consciously adapted to the person he was addressing and wanted to influence. Everything he did was conscious, deliberately planned and willed, except when fate or accident tripped him up, or at least so he would have us believe. But in this conscious adaptation in letter-writing he was after all only exaggerating what everyone does more or less unconsciously; and in any case the process is not very obvious in his early letters. The trouble here is that, as with every collection of letters, the record depends on the hazard of pre- -71-
The main impression to be derived from these early letters (in which may be included those written between 1910 and 1914) is that they reveal a young man of scholarly habits (since the professors will not allow us to call him a scholar) with literary and art-craft ambitions and taste mainly of a late Pre-Raphaelite sort, tending to early Georgian. This conventional Oxford character was doubled, not by a conventional sportsman, but by an energetic cyclist and pedestrian who liked going to rather out of the way places where the fare was rough and scanty, who was reckless about his health and would endure hard usage and even being knocked about without complaint. There is nothing incompatible in the two characters, as witness the many wandering scholars or even scholar soldiers, such as e.g., Richard Burton. In addition, these early letters have the interest of showing Lawrence as a writer before the development of his too consciously rhetorical style. The young sthete is very much in evidence when he writes to his mother of his "joy" in reading at night and "I know that nothing, not even the dawn, can disturb me in my curtains .. . . And it is lovely too, after you have been wandering for hours in the forest with Percivale or Sagramors le desirous, to open the door, and from over the Cherwell to look at the sun glowering through the valley-mists." And after some fancies about books taking on some of the personality of their reader he winds up: "Imagination 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." 6 The references are to Malory, Thomas More and Morris but the tone of the passage is nearer that of Oscar Wilde's Intentions. In the next letter, written from Carentan as the former was from Andelys, he translates his emotions at the interior of a Gothic cathedral into terms of Ruskin: "Take someone with you, or go alone to Rheims, and sit down at the base of the sixth pilaster from the West on the South side of -72- the nave aisle, and look up between the fourth and fifth pillars at the third window of the clerestory on the north side of the nave." 7 Excellent! The Master himself could not have been more precise and authoritative but the writer seems to stumble into a different key as he proceeds: "Take all the direction in at a gulp, and find yourself looking at an altogether adorable mist of orange and red, such a ruby and such a gold as I have seen nowhere else in glass . . . One can imagine saints and angels and medallions and canopies, but without the smallest reason or foundation." 8 The reader half-expects the next sentence will be a call to Lawrence's friend to come and cool his hands in the twilight of Gothic things. Lawrence said of himself at a later date that he only wrote well when excited, and after the war it seemed that he was too often excited only by what was violent or horrible or disgusting. The quotations just made, which could easily be multiplied, show that before the war the exact opposite was true. Not that he failed to attempt purple patches in Seven Pillars and even in The Mint, but they are usually stilted and over-mannered compared with his frank enjoyment of horrors in his maturity or the equally frank plagiarisms of his youth. In the earliest of these letters Lawrence took pleasure in quoting Greek but soon dropped the habit, perhaps because he thought it pedantic, and even in his stilted ecstasies over Athens writes only one word in Greek characters. Italy and Italian art are not mentioned, and I think, no painter's or sculptor's name except Rossetti. He speaks with pleasure of finding a low-price series of French books, quite wellproduced too, which would enable him to read Molire, Racine, Corneille and Voltaire. 9 In another letter he says he has bought (and is carrying on his bicycle) two volumes of Montaigne, Tristan and Iseult, Jehan de Saintró, the xiiith cent. fabliaux, de Nerval and a French anthology. 10 Two of these were still in his library at his death, with his initials and the date, 1910. In 1929 Lawrence told Liddell Hart that he had "studied war since about 16 years of age, because filled with idea of freeing a people and had chosen Arabs as only suitable ones left." 11 Lady Gregory mentions in her memoirs having heard something of the sort from the Shaws, with the addition that Lawrence had at first been -73- uncertain whether he should liberate the Irish or the Arabs. 12 There is a letter which shows that he had thought about the strategic part played by the castles during the crusades, though he nowhere mentions the vital fact that the castles were built in an effort to compensate for lack of man power, nor makes the inference that they must have been built by slave labour. There is other evidence of his military interests. But, although he speaks freely in these letters of his academic, sthetic, art-and-craft and literary interests, there is absolutely no mention or implication of this politico-military ambition to "liberate the Arabs." So far as the contemporary evidence goes, his interest in the Middle East came from the needs of his thesis and then from the chance given him by Hogarth to work at Carchemish. It is perhaps worth noting that as late as August, 1910, he wrote a friend asking about the price of second-hand copies of Hogarth Wandering Scholar in the Levant, and Doughty Arabia Deserta. 13 In March, 1911, he had not yet found a copy of the Doughty for he writes: "The book will be necessary, for I must know it by more than library use, if ever I am to do something of the sort." 14 From which we may surely infer that his ambitions at the time were still literary, especially since in January of that year he wrote: 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 -> Lawrence of arabia and american culture Download 1.73 Mb. Share with your friends:
|