Lawrence Read online

  His letter to Leeds, written three days earlier, told a very different story. He had, he wrote, been searching for Hittite seals north of Tel Bashar – a village in the Ayntab district – when a man who had been following him had jumped on him, bitten his hand, pounded him on the head with stones and robbed him. He had recovered the stolen goods, he said, by paying baksheesh, but it had cost him so much effort that he had grown sick of the district and returned to Aleppo. He asked Leeds to keep quiet about the attack for the sake of his parents, but did not mention the trip to Urfa nor the stolen camera. He made no reference to the two coachmen who were supposedly with him, nor the coach. Neither did he express to Leeds any intention of returning home immediately, but declared that he still wanted to seek Kerak and Petra, which lay in the Vilayet of Syria, far away from Aleppo. Had we only Leeds’s letter of 19 September, we would judge that he had been on an entirely different journey from the one described briefly to his mother three days later.

  However, he wrote a third letter while in Aleppo. On the 24th, two days after writing to Sarah, and five after his letter to Leeds, he wrote to Sir John Rhys, the principal of Jesus College, explaining that he would miss the first week of term. The letter is a masterpiece of English understatement and a display of stiff upper lip which would hardly have disgraced Lord Nelson. He told Rhys that he had had four attacks of malaria when he had ‘only reckoned on two’, and had been ‘robbed and rather smashed up’ only the previous week. It was a combination of these irritating circumstances, he said, which prevented him from carrying out his plans to visit Kerak and Shobek, for by the time he was fit for walking again the rainy season would have begun. Apart from this, though, he told Rhys, his trip had been ‘delightful’: he had visited three dozen castles out of the fifty on his route, and had secured for Hogarth thirty Hittite seals. He had, he said, travelled ‘on foot and alone’ all the time and had ‘lived as an Arab with the Arabs’ and had consequently gained an insight into their way of life that one who had travelled with a caravan would have missed.

  It was true that Lawrence had visited thirty-six castles (he would later tell Liddell Hart sixty), and that he had made a remarkable journey, trekking over 1,000 miles through Syria on foot in the height of summer, was undeniable. The rest of the letter to Rhys, however, was lily-gilding. He had not travelled alone all the time – at one point he had employed a guide, and for a major section of the journey he had travelled with a mounted escort. For the last part of the journey – a matter of ‘a fortnight’, according to his expense account – he had paid current Baedeker rates to hire a carriage and two men to visit Urfa, though the carriage is as conspicuously absent from his letter to Rhys as it is from his note to Leeds. This was hardly ‘living as an Arab with the Arabs’ in Doughty fashion. In fact he had worn European dress throughout, including the pith-helmet which, as he himself said later, the Arabs regarded with superstitious hatred. He had been the guest of Turkish officials and Western missionaries, had stayed in hotels – good hotels where available – and while he had certainly sojourned on occasions with local Arabs, it was as frequently as not as a paying guest. Since so much was invented, or at least ‘exaggerated’ in Lawrence’s letter to Rhys, why not the story of having been ‘smashed up’ too? Had Lawrence simply been injured in the coaching accident which he mentioned to his mother, but been too embarrassed to reveal it to Rhys? Certainly it was not true that he had been so badly smashed up that he was unable to walk, as his letter implied. A few days earlier he had told Leeds that he still intended to visit Petra. He had not been injured enough to seek medical treatment; neither, it seems, did he report the incident to the British Consulate in Aleppo. He told Rhys that the thief had been caught within forty-eight hours, and regaled Robert Graves later with an extended yarn about how he had accompanied a large party of Turkish police and volunteers to the bandit’s Kurdish village to demand restitution. Yet he seems to have been away from Aleppo for seven days in all: a diversion on foot to the Tel Bashar–Ayntab region – which was not on the direct route to Urfa – with an extra two days’ wait for the recovery of his property seems quite out of the question on the grounds of time alone. When he retraced the same journey in 1911, it took him over a month. If he made a diversion in his hired coach, where were the trusty coachmen when he was being attacked? Why does he claim in his expense-sheets to have hired them for ‘a fortnight’, which would mean that he had left Aleppo even before he had arrived there, on the 6th? Moreover, he clearly bought some of his Hittite seals in Aleppo, for he told Leeds on the 19th that he had only twenty, while by the 24th the number had increased to thirty. If the seals were available so readily in Aleppo, why go to the trouble, expense and effort of visiting Tel Bashar at all? Was the whole story invented merely to ingratiate himself with Hogarth, in whose service, he could claim, he had been ‘almost killed’? Why did he choose to write first to Leeds, rather than to his close friends Vyvyan Richards or Leonard Green, unless it was to catch the eye of Hogarth? Lawrence knew that he had not accomplished what he had set out to do: the journey had been too hard, just as Hogarth and Doughty had warned him it would be. He had been too exhausted to complete it on foot. Was the story of the robbery an imaginary expiation of the sin of failure, the first obvious instance of a pattern which would become familiar later, of public success, private failure, expiation by violence? On the other hand, if Lawrence did not visit Tel Bashar, how did he meet ‘Ahmad Effendi’ – a man who lived in a village near Tel Bashar, to whom he referred in his 1911 diary as being a friend from his earlier visit? Finally, how did he get away with lying to Hogarth, who had been at Tel Bashar only the previous year? It is a conundrum Lawrence would have delighted in bequeathing to his biographers. In the end, we are left with only a series of questions, a cycle of stories, and some tell-tale bloodstains on a map.

  6. Mr Hogarth is Going Digging

  Oxford and Carchemish 1909–11

  One day in 1910, some time after Lawrence had returned from Syria, he invited Midge Hall to accompany him on a boating trip on the Isis. He brought with him an attractive girl called Janet Laurie, and asked Hall to take her in a punt, while he tagged along fifty yards behind in his canoe. Hall was astonished by the request and afterwards he demanded what on earth his friend thought he was playing at. ‘Getting over the disappointment of letting the other man speak for the girl I adore,’ Lawrence told him. ‘I don’t know.’1 Hall concluded from this rather confused statement that Lawrence was in love with Janet and had been rejected by her. He had occasionally seen them together and had suspected that a love affair was going on. Later, he asked Janet if she knew of Lawrence’s feelings: she knew, she said, but simply couldn’t take him seriously as a suitor. Many years later, aged eighty-six, Janet claimed that in 1910 Lawrence had proposed to her, and she had turned him down.

  Lawrence had known Janet Laurie from early childhood. While living at Fawley on Southampton Water they had played together, and Janet’s father – the steward of a local estate – had frequently gone yachting with Thomas Lawrence. She had been sent to boarding-school in Oxford in 1899, and had remained close to the Lawrences, visiting them often, and even staying in the house at Polstead Road – one of the few women Sarah would allow over the threshold. She became a sort of surrogate sister to the Lawrence boys, and though she returned to Hampshire on her father’s death in 1902, she continued to visit. She saw Lawrence frequently during his undergraduate days, and sometimes joined him at home for tea on Sunday afternoons. In 1908, she and her sister had ignored college rules and called on him in his rooms at Jesus, where she had dropped her ladylike mask long enough to shy sugar cubes through the window of a neighbouring don. A lively, warm, mischievous girl with a dominant spirit, about three years older than Lawrence, she regarded him as a bright younger brother. Lawrence enjoyed poking fun at her, daring her to tomboyish acts and challenges, and ragging her if she fell short. One day in 1910, she said, she had been alone with him in the dining-room at Polstead Road when
he had suddenly leapt up and held the door shut to prevent the maid from entering. Then, without an embrace or a kiss or a preliminary of any kind, he asked her to be his wife. Janet, who had never nurtured romantic feelings for Lawrence, burst into giggles. Lawrence looked at her resignedly and just said, ‘All right.’

  This is the only evidence we have that he was ever attracted to a woman, and it seems inconsistent with much that he wrote. It is by no means impossible, of course, that he suddenly felt the species talking powerfully within him, despite everything. Yet in view of the controversy that has raged about Lawrence’s sexuality, it seems odd that Janet should have kept the story secret for so long. Several people told Lawrence’s authorized biographer Jeremy Wilson that her account was ‘exaggerated’, and another biographer, Desmond Stewart, pointed out that the story had an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to the tale of Algernon Swinburne’s rejection by ‘Boo’. Lawrence revealed much of himself in his letters, but no warm feelings for Janet have come to light.2 In 1927 he told Charlotte Shaw that his emotional relationship with his mother would prevent him from ever making a woman a mother and the cause of children,3 and while marriage and being the cause of children are not necessarily the same thing (Mrs Shaw herself was married but childless), Lawrence told Robert Graves that he had never been able to fall in love with anyone, and that as a boy he had never had anything to do with women and had thus acquired the habit of living without them. Though he wrote to Graves later confessing that the former statement had not been entirely true, and that he had once been in love, the exception turned out to be someone whom he called ‘SA’, who he said had inspired his part in the Arab Revolt, and to whom he dedicated his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is generally agreed that ‘SA’ is most likely to have been Salim Ahmad, nicknamed ‘Dahoum’, a young Arab boy Lawrence grew attached to in pre-war Syria. Lawrence’s connections with the Uranians and others are well known, though his homosexual nature does not absolutely preclude the possibility that he might have proposed to Janet Laurie. She was attracted to his more handsome brother Will, and Lawrence may have noticed this and been inspired to compete. If the proposal story is true, then it may be that Janet rejected him because she sensed his fundamental indifference to the female sex.

  Whether or not Lawrence felt attracted to Janet Laurie, he bestowed most of his attentions in early 1910 on his thesis. He spent so much time on it, indeed, that he neglected his other subjects – especially his ‘special subject’, the crusades. He left his revision until the last few weeks of term, mugging up on the facts in three all-night sittings while the exams were actually in progress. The thesis was a tremendous success, and Lawrence achieved a first class honours of such quality that his tutor, Reginald Lane Poole, held a special dinner to celebrate it. Oxford is, of course, as susceptible to personality as any other institution, and while Lawrence’s intellect was remarkable, his ability to charm and manipulate his superiors was even more egregious. His attitude to his tutors is summed up in the advice he later gave to his brother Will, who inherited some of them: ‘I warn you,’ he wrote, ‘that [Mr Jane] and Mr. Barker will be an ill-matched pair to drive. The only way to run them is to keep your own line between & utilise such of each as harmonises which is exhausting but very profitable’ (italics mine).4 On the surface, he appeared a fiery iconoclast, with what he called his ‘knight errant way of tilting at all comers’, and Edward Leeds noted ‘the fearlessness with which he attacked the views and theories of other writers’.5 Yet Lawrence’s revolt was frequently revolt into style, for he had an uncanny knack of telling those in authority what they most desired to hear. His theory that the major aspects of medieval military architecture had reached the Arabs from the crusaders, rather than vice versa, had an ideological basis which was certain to appeal to Edwardian imperialists, just as the appeal of the Hittites to men like Hogarth stemmed from the fact that they were believed to be of Indo-European stock rather than Semitic, thus proving that ‘Europeans’ played a part in creating the civilizations of the East. At twenty-one, Lawrence was in full possession of his faculties: the superb memory for facts, the razor-like and confident intuition (occasionally razor-like enough to cut himself), the ability to strike an impressive pose, to juggle fantasy and reality, to charm, seduce, amuse, convince and motivate others, to work devotedly towards a long – projected target, to exercise flexibility in the face of developments, to drive himself on against abnormal fear with unshakeable determination. Lawrence was unconventional, but cannot have appeared to Hogarth and others as anti-establishment. Hogarth himself was a reactionary autocrat who despised lily-livered bureaucracy, and he must have recognized in Lawrence a kindred spirit. Though Lawrence’s hero William Morris had dabbled in radical socialism, there is no evidence that at this stage Lawrence had abandoned his parents’ staunch conservatism. He sneered at such liberal institutions as the Old Age Pension Act, and the Suffragettes. He detested authority, especially of the rigid and uncongenial kind, but was also fascinated by it. He later wrote that liberality of body and spirit, cleanliness, vigour and good temper could only persist under conditions of common servitude.6

  Although he had been hoping to return to the East after graduation, no immediate prospect presented itself, and in October he decided to apply for a Fellowship of All Souls College. He failed to gain one of the two places on offer, and instead he registered for a B.Litt. degree in Archaeology, offering a thesis on medieval pottery. Jesus College made him a grant of £50 per year for postgraduate work, and his proposal was accepted on 1 November. The same day he sailed to France for the second time that year, to see the extensive medieval pottery collection at Rouen, where, thanks to a letter of recommendation from the eminent scholar Salomon Reinach, he found himself treated by the museum staff as ‘a kind of god’. He carried more exciting prospects than pottery with him on the ferry to Le Havre, though. Some time in October, David Hogarth had sailed for Constantinople to discuss the re-opening of the archaeological site at Carchemish, near Jarablus on the upper Euphrates. Rediscovered by George Smith in 1876, it was an ancient Hittite city mentioned in the Bible, which had subsequently been excavated by the British Museum. In 1881, work on the dig had been abandoned, but now, thirty years later, Hittites had become fashionable again. Hogarth hoped to find at Carchemish the key to ancient Hittite hieroglyphics for which the world was waiting. That September, the Sublime Porte had given the British Museum a firman to re-open the dig, but had specified that the work should begin within three months. Hogarth wanted to commence the following February, and had travelled to Turkey to seek a deferment.

  As a frequent visitor to the Ashmolean, Lawrence had discovered Hogarth’s plans, and asked Edward Leeds casually ‘if he knew of any excavations coming up in the Near East’. Leeds told him that he should have spoken sooner – a cuneiformist called R. Campbell-Thompson had already been taken on as Hogarth’s assistant for the Carchemish dig. Lawrence suggested that he might go without pay, but Leeds felt that the British Museum would not take him even on those terms. This was a blow, but Lawrence had learned to be persistent. When Hogarth returned at the end of October, he tackled him personally with a request to join the team at Carchemish. He knew that his qualifications could not match those of Campbell-Thompson, yet he trusted that Hogarth had not forgotten how, the previous year, he had been ‘rather smashed up’ by hostile tribesmen while collecting Hittite seals on his behalf. In fact, his gambit now paid off handsomely. Hogarth leapt at the idea. He told Lawrence that he would not only take him as an extra assistant, but would arrange for him to receive a ‘Demyship’ or Junior Research Fellowship from Magdalen College which would pay him £100 a year while working on the site. Lawrence could scarcely believe his good fortune. The door to the East had suddenly creaked open: the lands he had dreamed of as a youth now lay before him. At first he had told no one about the arrangement, but while at Rouen in November he could no longer contain his excitement: ‘Mr Hogarth is going digging,’ he wrote to Leeds exuberantly, ‘and
I am going out to Syria in a fortnight to make plain the valleys and level the mountains to his feet.’7 He added with facetious delight that he nurtured only one hope greater than this: that he would enjoy a quieter ferry crossing back to Newhaven than the one he had endured the previous day, when he had been tossed out of his bunk in the middle of the night, on top of another passenger. He had tried to thank the stranger for breaking his fall, he explained, to which the other had answered only, ‘Mon Dieu!’: ‘I laughed for about half an hour after I got back to bed,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t think he saw the funny side at all.’8

  Lawrence, Hogarth and Campbell-Thompson arrived at the village of Jarablus on the afternoon of 11 March 1911, frozen stiff, having forded the Sajur river and battled through a Siberian gale with a caravan of ten camels and eleven pack-horses. They had left Aleppo three days earlier, a week behind schedule, owing to bad weather, for it was the coldest winter in the Near East for forty years. As the caravan wound into the village, the Arabs came swarming out to greet them, and many hands helped the caravaneers to couch the camels and unload the horses. A house belonging to the local liquorice company had been vacated for them, and soon they were out of the biting wind, while a jostling, gabbling crowd of natives cleared out the storehouses, and brought their luggage in piece by piece.