Lawrence Read online

  Sarah’s need to control and dominate her world was blind, desperate and beyond reason. Her omnipotent, omniscient exterior actually concealed a fathomless rage of doubt and pain within. Victoria Ocampo, who knew her in old age, sensed that she was a woman seething with violent passions kept tight in the straitjacket of her unbending determination. Her childhood deprivation had left her with a chronic fear of abandonment and a massive emotional vacuum, which she could fill only by draining energy, attention and reassurance from her husband and children and anyone else who came within her reach. Bob – kind, solicitous, prudish – was the first to succumb to her insatiable demand for love and attention and never managed to escape it. He adopted her fundamentalist religious philosophy, did not marry, and remained attached to her for the rest of his life. Of all her sons, he was the only one who fulfilled her ambitions, becoming a medical missionary in China, where he was joined by Sarah herself after Thomas’s death in 1919. Ocampo, who visited Sarah in the 1950s, found her confined to her bedroom by a broken leg, with Bob, himself an elderly man, occupying the room immediately below. Whenever she banged on the floor with her stick, Bob would scurry upstairs like a servant – an arrangement, Ocampo noted with amusement, that Sarah referred to as ‘convenient’.

  As a child, Ned developed a terror of Sarah discovering his feelings: ‘If she knew, they would be damaged, violated, no longer mine,’ he later wrote.18 Unlike Bob, his disposition was prickly, and any pressure applied to him was likely to meet resistance. Even his teachers at school felt an instinctive recoil if they tried to push him in a way he did not wish to go. Given Sarah’s character, a clash of personalities was inevitable: ‘No trust ever existed between my mother and myself,’ he wrote later. ‘Each of us jealously guarded his or her own individuality, whenever we came together.’19 He and Sarah were mirror-images, attracted to each other but repelled by their sameness. He was sensitive to her wishes and anxious to please her, but intensely aware that if he lifted his emotional shield, she would get in and devour his independence, just as she had devoured Bob’s. Though he was not her favourite son, she had great expectations of him, and for her he had to be perfect: brave, noble, strong, hard-working, honest, respectful, obedient and loving – a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche. Arnie revealed that it was Ned who received the lion’s share of Sarah’s beatings, and felt that his life had been permanently injured by her. Though Bob and Will were never beaten, and Arnie required only one dose, Ned’s more dogged obstinacy occasioned frequent repetition. Beneath the Biblical justifications, there lay a simple power-struggle.20 Bob was never whipped because he offered no resistance: he and his mother were ‘at one’. Ned provoked her determination to ‘break his will’. She did not succeed. In fact, she only strengthened his resolve, as with every blow he became more and more determined never to give in. He became detached from the pain and from the body which sustained punishment, but the will he developed to such an immense degree of strength became a monster with a life of its own – a serpent which would eventually suffocate his creative power. His character – no less than his elder brother’s – was ultimately to be defined by Sarah. The two elder Lawrence boys were predisposed to react to her demands in ways that were diametrically opposite – Bob by total surrender, Ned by total resistance – and both were scarred by the experience. ‘I know Ned had a real struggle to achieve spiritual – let alone physical – freedom,’ Celandine Kennington wrote. ‘He and his mother were better friends apart. When together for more than a short time [he] was constantly forced to refight his battles for mental freedom.’21 Arnie – twelve years younger than Ned – had a similarly traumatic struggle to free himself from Sarah’s grip, but eventually succeeded by choosing a third way: he simply ‘took no notice of her’. Of the three sons who survived the war, he was the only one to marry, have a child, and lead a ‘conventional’ life.

  In his later life, Lawrence paid a man named John Bruce to flog him at intervals over a period of thirteen years, and invented a complex farrago of lies to explain why such treatment was necessary. Bruce disclosed that Lawrence experienced orgasm as a result of some of these beatings. It is possible that this behaviour might have been initiated by horrific experiences during the war. On the other hand, there are clear traces of Lawrence’s masochism in his early interest in self-punishment and self-denial. As an adolescent he would fast, go without sleep, deny himself pleasure, and continually push himself on long and arduous walks and bicycle rides. He would even dive through the ice into the frozen river Cherwell on chilling winter nights. It seems likely that any trauma Lawrence suffered in the war only intensified a capacity for masochism which had been part of him since his earliest days – a capacity which emerged through his relationship with Sarah. The intolerable conflict of attraction and repulsion he experienced could only be resolved by physical punishment. Severe beatings could not make the sexual feeling go away, but they could atone for the forbidden desire. Pain thus became a means of release. As he grew up, he developed a terror of the feelings he associated with the sexual act, and was compelled to diminish his anxiety by intentionally bringing about the situation he feared: instead of fleeing away from the threat, he fled towards it: ‘When a thing is inevitable,’ he advised Charlotte Shaw years later, ‘provoke it as instantly and as fully as possible.’22 His position was like that of the little girl who was obliged by her mother to take showers in cold water, and who, terrified by the prospect, would open the tap prior to shower-time and expose herself to the numbing water for a few moments. This act served to relieve the girl’s anxiety. She did not derive pleasure from the pain itself, but from the relief of tension it provided. All his life, Lawrence was utterly terrified of pain: ‘pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror since I was a boy,’ he later wrote.23 His brother Arnie confirmed that his fear of pain was abnormal.24 By inflicting punishment on himself – by diving into freezing water, fasting, resisting sleep, pushing himself to the limits of physical endurance – he was able to preview what he most feared, and gain a kind of mastery over it. Lawrence may even have subconsciously provoked the violent clashes with his mother, in his compulsive ‘flight forwards’.

  It was not only physically, but also psychically that Lawrence felt himself threatened. His mother would probe constantly into his innermost feelings, giving him a lifelong hatred of what he called ‘families and inquisitions’. He chose to protect himself against this psychical threat by emotional withdrawal – by assuming an aloofness which extended from his mother to almost every other person with whom he came into contact. Even when he was quite small he seemed to remain aloof from the ring of children, and had some unfathomable sense of sadness about him. His schoolmasters noticed that he was silent, self-possessed and inscrutable, and gave a hint of a latent power, just out of reach.25 As a young man he was difficult to know, unobtrusive, cheerful, even jocular in moments, but extremely reserved about himself. Ernest Altounyan would write that he was simply ‘impersonal’: ‘someone cleaving through life, propelled by an almost noiseless engine’.26 His need to protect his spiritual independence would emerge throughout his life in an obsession with images of siege warfare, of attack and defence: ‘I think I’m afraid of letting her get, ever so little, inside the circle of my integrity,’ he wrote of his mother, ‘and she is always hammering and sapping to come in… I always felt she was laying siege to me and would conquer if I left a chink unguarded.’27 This image of his self as a circle or citadel of integrity recurs repeatedly. Even as a boy, he would tell his brothers an endless tale about the defence of a tower by warlike dolls against hordes of barbarous enemies,28 and the motif appears again in the study of crusader castles in Britain, France and Syria to which he devoted much of his youth, and which led to the thesis he presented for his degree. Cyril ‘Scroggs’ Beeson, who accompanied him on some of his trips around castles in France, noted that his interest was not primarily in military history but in the hearts and minds of the designers, and the extent to
which history had tested their intentions. It was upon the military knowledge acquired from this study of castles that he would later found his theory of guerrilla war. So it was that the pattern forged in the dark recesses of his childhood struggle would one day spill out into the light as the strategy he would wield to brilliant success in the Arab Revolt.

  Nietzsche – whom Lawrence much admired – wrote that every profound spirit requires a mask: the mask Lawrence wore was one of paradox. His aloofness concealed a craving for the attention of others, for fame and distinction, which he despised and could not allow himself to show. Aloofness was a barrier he created against the outside world, a means of preventing anyone from coming too close. He was able to relax his guard only with those who were younger or socially inferior, and though, in later life, he formed relationships with the great and famous, he confessed to John Bruce – a poorly educated man from a working-class background – that most of these high and mighty folk ‘could not be trusted’. It was an aspect of his masochistic nature that he felt himself undeserving of love, and it was terror of failure which prevented him from opening himself. He found another way to attract people, using his aloofness as a tool for drawing attention by offering tantalizing glimpses and wrapping himself in an intriguing cloak of mystery. In short, as Sir Harold Nicolson coldly, but correctly, declared, ‘he discovered early that mystery was news’.29 At school and college he was regarded by his peers as a pronounced eccentric, and would intrigue others by such idiosyncrasies as riding his bicycle uphill and walking down, by sitting through prescribed dinners in hall without eating, by adopting odd diets, by going out at night and sleeping during the day, by refusing to play organized games, or by fasting on Christmas Day when everyone else was feasting. This exaggerated form of attention-seeking was the shadow side of Lawrence’s aloofness, and the social aspect of his masochism. He was like the woman from the provincial town who wanted to attend the opera in the capital wearing fine jewels and her most expensive evening dress. Ashamed of her desire for ostentation, though, she actually attended the opera in a plain dress, and as a result was the only woman in the audience not wearing evening clothes. She became the focus of attention by ‘reverse exhibitionism’ – not because of her finery but through her conspicuous lack of it. Lawrence’s tendency to cycle uphill and walk down has its parallel in the masochistic folk hero Till Eulenspiegel, who felt happy when toiling uphill and sad when coming down.

  Soon, Lawrence learned to shroud everything he did in ritual and romance, a technique he found remarkably successful and which he sharpened into the most effective blade in his armoury. He learned to manipulate others with his aura of mystery, to lay false trails, to concoct endless mazes of riddle and conundrum. He learned to intrigue those who interested him by what he called ‘whimsical perversity’ or ‘misplaced earnestness’, whetting their curiosity and then rushing off abruptly, hoping the object of his attention would pursue, ‘wish[ing] to know whom that odd creature was’.30 Few could resist Lawrence’s ‘whimsicalities’, and his jokes and buffooneries, his sudden flashes of brilliance or impish roguery gave him an almost infallible ability to charm, allure and seduce. Basil Liddell Hart, one of his most ardent admirers, summed up the quality most succinctly when he likened Lawrence to ‘a woman who wears a veil while exposing the bosom’.31 Though Liddell Hart put Lawrence’s exhibitionism down to vanity, in fact it was ‘reverse exhibitionism’: his wish was less to display his beauty and cleverness to the world than to demonstrate his ugliness, suffering and humiliation. Far from being ‘in love with himself, Lawrence would write that he despised the ‘self’ he could hear and see.32

  2. Dominus Illuminatio Measss

  Schooldays 1896–1905

  Though Oxford had been changing slowly for half a century before the Lawrences arrived in 1896, it remained a city which moved at the pace of the horse-drawn era. The man who was shortly to transform it into a centre of the motor industry, Lord Nuffield, was then plain Mr William Henry Morris – a cycle-maker with dreams, and a shop in the High – and the city remained, as Jan Morris has put it, ‘a kind of elfin workshop, full of respectable craftsmen tapping away in back-alleys … and weavers’ looms … clack[ing] in Magdalen Grove’.1 A few colleges already had their own motor cars, but the most ponderous vehicles commonly to be found in Oxford streets were the drays of Hall’s or Morrell’s Breweries. Horse-drawn trams – there were nineteen of them by 1910 – were required to keep to a sedate eight miles per hour, and their drivers were given instructions to ‘slow down for a herd of cattie, and to stop completely at the approach of a flock of sheep’. It was a dignified, unhurried Oxford – a place of gas-lit houses, of college barges, private fire-brigades, hansom cabs and coaches-and-four: a town where milkmen still carried their churns in handcarts from St Aldate’s dairy, where the University Clerks still weighed butter in the covered market opposite Jesus College, where boys wore plus-fours and winged shirt-collars, where girls rode bicycles in pinafore-dresses like Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland, and where demure young women in ankle-length skirts and straw bonnets played a round of stately tennis on the University parks.

  I travelled to Oxford to see if I could recapture something of the atmosphere in which T. E. Lawrence grew up, and to taste the vision of Britain he was to carry with him to the deserts of the East. Though the drays are gone, and the horse-drawn trams have long since been replaced by diesel-powered double-deckers, I found that much of turn-of-the century Oxford remains. I stood outside No. 2 Polstead Road – now a slightly seedy building with overflowing rubbish bins and rusty Morris Minors parked in a concrete yard – straining over the decades to hear the voices of the four eldest Lawrence boys, Bob, Ned, Will and Frank, as they set off to school each morning in that long, bright Indian summer of Old England before the Great War changed the world for ever. I walked down Woodstock Road towards the city centre, holding in my mind a vivid image of the boys riding their bicycles, in single file, in strict order of seniority, wearing the blue and white striped Breton jerseys which were almost a family uniform. There were massed may trees in bloom in the gardens, and horse chestnuts budding cream and pink, the hedgerows scented with hawthorn and alder. I passed the same massive stone villas with granite steps and ornate porticoes they would have seen, the same mansions of yellow limestone in stands of spruce and pine, and the same churches spanning a thousand years of history, from G. E. Street’s High Victorian Gothic prayer-hall of St Philip and St James in Walton Manor, to the crusty Anglo-Saxon bulwark of St Michael’s in the Cornmarket. I passed the same corner shops and terraced cottages, the same pubs with double-barrelled names like the Horse and Jockey and the Eagle and Child, the same austere Elizabethan façades of Balliol and St John’s. I turned right before the Saxon Tower and walked west along George Street, towards the Boys’ High School on the corner of New Inn Hall street. The building was still there, but it was no longer a school, neither did it face St George’s church as it had done in Lawrence’s day: the church was gone, replaced by the less elegant ABC cinema. It was an impressively solid Victorian edifice, however, with its arches and ecclesiastical window, flanked by sculpted Latin mottoes: Dominus Illuminatio Mea and Fortis East Veritas.

  Lawrence spent ten years at this school, and while a student there dreamed of freeing the Arabs from the shackles of the Ottoman Turks: ‘I fancied to sum up in my own life,’ he wrote, ‘that new Asia which inexorable time was slowly bringing upon us. The Arabs made a chivalrous appeal to my young instinct and while still at the High School in Oxford, already I thought to make them into a nation.’2 This might seem an extraordinary premonition for a schoolboy who had never set foot in the East, yet Lawrence was acquainted with the geography, history and ethnology of the Arab lands long before he arrived there. Daily study of the Bible had made the deserts and mountains of Midian, Moab, Edom, Judah and other places almost as familiar to him as the streets of Oxford, and a remarkable little volume entitled Helps to the Study of the Bible provided him with up-to
-date details. Between its modest covers he found surveys of the Holy Land, lists of topographical features connected with the Gospels, indices of biblical plants, flowers, mammals, reptiles, birds and fishes in their English, Latin, Hebrew and occasionally their Arabic names. As a youth he chose as school prizes two books on the history of Egypt, and later he obtained Henry Layard’s works on the excavation of ancient Nineveh. These were no stilted academic reports, but thrilling adventures which epitomized the Victorian view of the East as a place of mystery and exoticism, where fabulous cities lay buried under desert sands prowled by wandering Bedu tribes. In Layard, Lawrence discovered all the elements the East should possess: the bizarre, the sensuous, the alluring. It was an irresistible picture, and throughout his youth he was aware of the East as a parallel world, a dimension to which, in future, he might find the chance to escape.

  Meanwhile, though, there was the more prosaic business of school to be attended to. Lawrence looked back on his schooldays as a time of misery, yet he proved to be a remarkably quick learner, outpacing Bob, from whose lessons he had picked up reading and writing early, as many young siblings do. He had a precocious ability with language, and knew colloquial French from his time in Brittany, as well as some Latin, which the boys had been taught by a private tutor in preparation for school. He had a retentive memory and became an unusually fast reader, able, according to his own testimony, to assimilate the core of any book within half an hour. He won two prizes during the years 1896 and 1903, and in 1904 took the Vth Form prize for Divinity, despite claiming to have left the paper unfinished so that Bob, who was still in the Vth Form, might gain first place. In the same year, he was listed eightieth in the Junior Section of the Oxford Locals examinations. Yet despite his apparent success, school did not interest him, for it did not teach him the kind of thing he wanted to know: he later wrote that it had been ‘an irrelevant and time-wasting nuisance, which I hated and contemned’.3