Self-Made Legend

By ROBERT HUGHES

A PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER

by JOHN E. MACK

561 pages. Little, Brown. $15.

Perhaps biography will never come to the end of T.E. Lawrence. He was one of those rare and many-selved creatures whose talents for action and introspection were almost balanced, and he has become a mirror to cast back the face of each inspector. Six decades have passed since his efforts to "restore to the East some self-respect, a goal, ideals" raised an Arab army against the occupying Turks in Syria, waged glamorously mobile guerrilla war in the midst of the clumsy formal movements of World War I, changed the history of the Middle East, and were sold out by English duplicity and Islamic squabbling after 1918. He has been dead 40 years. In the meantime, there have been as many Lawrences as writers: the adulated hero (Robert Graves), the narcissistic moral cynic (Richard Aldington), the Hamlet, the Lord Jim of Araby, the heroic closet queen, and so on down to the sexy, prancing psychotic portrayed by Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. In A Prince of Our Disorder, Harvard Psychiatry Professor John Mack has absorbed them all. His prose has the texture of gray felt, but it takes us closer to the core of Lawrence than any previous biography. Here, at last, is an author who can use the disciplines of psychology to open up his subject, not club him to death.

Gyring Sopwiths. A vital part of the Lawrence cult was the purity of his war. After the Somme, a new kind of battleground had been given to England: an open mass grave under a leaking sky, inhabited by shell-shocked troglodytes. The filth, stasis, boredom and despair that were the overmastering realities of trench warfare between 1914 and 1918 destroyed the chivalric picture of conflict. That picture survived in only two arenas. One was the sky, where the Royal Flying Corps, the "knights of the air" in their gyring Sopwiths, preserved the image of man-to-man conflict. The other was Arabia. On that exotic chessboard--as described by Lawrence and imagined by thousands of readers who would never go there--battle regained its heraldic quality. Despite the thirst, flies and scorching heat, "the march became rather splendid and barbaric ... the wild mass of twelve hundred bouncing camels of the bodyguard, packed as closely as they could move, the men in every variety of coloured clothes and the camels nearly as brilliant in their trappings. We filled the valley to its banks with our flashing stream." The cleanness of desert warfare was powerful enough as a myth to survive two world wars: the ghosts of Lawrence and his camels did much for the popularity of Rommel, Montgomery and their tanks.

But if Lawrence was a creature of legend, the legend was of his own making. That distinction separates him from more helpless heroes of the early 20th century, like Charles Lindbergh. He was acutely sensitive to the uses and inflections of propaganda. "We must also arrange the minds of the enemy," Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, "so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle."

Lawrence was a prophet, and his words predict the mental set of every partisan since, from the French Resistance to Orde Wingate, from Che Guevara to the P.L.O. No pitched battles or mass charges against the Turkish hardware: not even an army. "Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so we might offer nothing material to the killing."

Seventy years ago most Europeans would have sooner imagined an army of rabbits than one of Arabs; oil did not dominate politics then, and the notion of Arab unity was even more a chimera than it is today. It took a truly romantic imagination to suppose the Middle East could ever turn into a major political arena. The romantic Lawrence was not a tourist, like Burton at Mecca, but --as Dr. Mack puts it--an "enabler" who "tried desperately to exploit no one, to serve the Arabs in terms of their needs, the Allies in terms of theirs, and to fulfill at the same time a progressive and humanitarian vision of the progress of history."

Enameled Air. Lawrence's youthful imaginings drew him to this role with an almost somnambulistic directness. He would construct his leadership like a work of art, rendering himself ascetic and asexual--he lived and died, by most accounts, a virgin--Spartan in endurance but Franciscan in his tenderness toward "inferiors" and fellow soldiers. The British authorities in the Middle East had their own reasons for supporting this construction; if Lawrence had known more about the politics of Empire, he might have reached his catastrophic disillusionment much earlier. To be at war at all, the fight had to be holy. El Aurens (as the Arab sherifs called him) had passed from boyhood to manhood without an adolescence, and his first obsessions with medieval culture--the towers and Crusaders, the brass rubbings and courtly poems--formed his life. His sense of conduct had the enameled air of a chanson de geste; by turning himself into an Arthurian legend he could sublimate the horror of war. "I love the preparation, and the journey," he wrote after a raid, "and loathe the physical fighting."

He was a divided soul, at once masquerader and moralist. The virtue of Mack's biography is that Lawrence's conflicts are carefully (not to say laboriously) teased out and observed, without the jargon of psychiatry, sans the crass hostility poured on him by the likes of Aldington. An unproblematic Lawrence is no Lawrence at all. If he had not received so fanatically strict a moral upbringing and so many whippings from his parents, and then discovered to his alarm that he was a bastard anyway, he might have been saner and less anxious to transcend the flesh; but the histories of the Middle East, and of English literature, would also have been lessened.

Breaking Point. Lawrence's way of dealing with conflicts was to bring them, with full self-knowledge, into his public life: hence the theatrical color of his bravery. Only when he found out that he could not wholly command his body in extremity did this courage fail him. This, the breaking point of Lawrence's life, occurred when he was captured by the Turks at Der'a in November 1917. He was tortured and sexually assaulted by the local bey. It has never been quite clear what went on in the Der'a guardhouse (Lawrence rewrote his account of it nine times, in necessarily veiled language), but it seems that the raping and beating brought him to an unwilling orgasm. The masochistic pleasure was intolerable to him, "leaving me maimed, imperfect, only half myself. It could not have been the defilement, for no one ever held the body in less honor than I did." So the next four years, which saw the creation of the Lawrence legend by the English and American press, the writing of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the peak of Lawrence's own political dealings on behalf of the Arabs, coincided with the nadir of his own selfesteem. By 1922 the unmanned hero of Araby had burrowed into the relative anonymity of the R.A.F., renaming himself John Hume Ross. He had become the most famous of all the Great War's walking wounded.

Most accounts of Lawrence's life tend to skip over the last 13 years, on the assumption that Lawrence ceased to be himself. But as Mack shows, Lawrence in England completed the arc of his life quite well, though sadly: his metamorphosis from action's aesthete to khaki pessimist cannot be read as a slow death by self-hatred. Even its episodic squalidity--Lawrence went to pathetic lengths to arrange penitential floggings for himself, at the hands of an enlisted man named Bruce--might once have been thought holy. His sweetness in friendship increased as the old will to power sloughed off. "A decent nihilism is what I hope for, generally. I think an established land, like ours, can do with 1% monists or nihilists. That leaves room for me." The tone of voice is British samurai, but the last mystery of Lawrence's career remains. Why, after so vast an idealism, should the disillusionment have been so quiet--especially since the silence proceeded from a master of confessional literature? Dr. Mack's book takes us up to this problem, but offers no key to it; wisely, perhaps, since it is the essence of Lawrence's modernity, the deepest riddle of that Welsh sphinx.

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