Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (23 page)

His knowledge of medieval clothing and armor is, if anything, even more impressive, perhaps even daunting. The unfamiliar words flow by on page after page: maniple, chausable, dalamtic, stoles, alb (but no tunic, Ned observes), on a bishop’s effigy; jupon, genouillières, jambs, sollerets, on the effigy of Tiphaine du Guesclin, widow of Jean V de Beaumanoir, which exhibits a rare combination of fifteenth-century haute couture and armor—Ned meticulously counts the twenty-two round buttons on her jupon, notes that her spurs have rowels, and describes her face and hairstyle in detail. These letters seem very serious and almost self-consciously erudite, as if Ned was already practicing to write essays for his tutor, or to write his thesis, which would also be on the subject of medieval military architecture, with plans, drawings, and photographs by himself.

One letter, addressed to one of his younger brothers, Will, in reply to Will’s letter describing his rather tentative exploration of a Roman or Celtic camp and possible burial mound at home, is very much du haut en bas, full of detailed suggestions and warnings, and ends with a reminder that digging is good exercise. It is not exactly supercilious in tone, but close to it. Another, to his older brother Bob, also deals with Will’s excavations, but in a bossier way—nothing more is to be done until Ned comes home, and until Woolley, an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean, with whom Ned is already on close terms, has been consulted. Ned also notes that he has received a letter from Scroggs informing him that he has received “a first with distinction in Scripture & English” in the Oxford Local Examinations, but with no other results. A fuller letter describinghis results arrived from his mother a few days later. “The result is on the whole not as good as I had hoped,” he replied, “although I am quite satisfied with the Eng.” He does not seem to have been much disturbed.

As Jeremy Wilson notes in his authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence, Ned “had been placed in the First Class; of 4,645 candidates, only twelve had achieved a higher total.” His worst results were in algebra and geometry, and for a future translator of The Odyssey he did rather poorly in Greek and Latin, but one might guess that the examiners of schoolboys were more interested in grammar—not one of Ned’s strong points in any language—than in fluency, style, and literary knowledge.

It is usually difficult to read much into the letters home of eighteen-year-olds, but as in so many other things, T. E. Lawrence is an exception. The later T. E. Lawrence is perfectly apparent in these letters written in 1906: the urge to push himself as hard as he could physically; the astonishing accumulation of knowledge, and the mastery of every detail of any subject that interested him; the curious combination of extreme aesthetic sensibility and a fascination with the art of warfare; the fear that his mother’s will, stronger even than his own, will prevail over him unless he keeps his guard up at all times; the determination to win his father’s approval, as well as to beat him at those things Thomas cares most about; the instinctive position of leadership he takes toward his brothers, even Bob, the firstborn. All these traits would remain true of T. E. Lawrence for the rest of his life. Not only was the child (as Wordsworth put it) “father of the Man"; he was the man.

Ned’s “First” did not guarantee him entry to the Oxford college of his choice. With the aid of a private tutor (called a crammer in England), L. Cecil Jane, who was to become an admirer and friend throughout Ned’s years at Oxford, and for many years beyond, he prepared to take the examination for a scholarship at St. John’s College, his older brother Bob’s college, in December 1906, but he was unsuccessful.

A month later, in January 1907, further crammed by the indefatigable Jane, Ned tried, this time successfully, for a scholarship at Jesus College,where his birth in Wales would work to his advantage. The college’s founder, Hugh Price (or Aprice), who lived during the reign of Elizabeth I, was a Welshman, and over the centuries the college had developed strong links to Wales. Considering that Lawrence would later claim to be Irish, it is ironic to note that his birth in Wales secured him not only a place at Jesus but a scholarship of £50 a year. Ned was, of course, no more Welsh than Irish, but the fact apparently passed unnoticed at Jesus. Perhaps with this in mind, Ned went on a cycling tour of Welsh castles over the Easter vacation, and found the Welsh “rather inquisitive,” but apparently honest. Once again he tested his limit in terms of speed and endurance on a bicycle, and sent home long, detailed, but curiously impersonal letters about castle architecture.

In the autumn of 1907 Ned would “go up” to Jesus College at the age of nineteen, for three years—years which, in many ways, would be the most influential of his life. In later life he would complain—rather unfairly, one would judge—about his school days, which he described as “miserable sweated years of unwilling work,” but about Oxford he had no such feelings. He remarked in a letter to Liddell Hart, “When … I suddenly went to Oxford, the new freedom felt like Heaven.”

*
Sir Alec Douglas-home would take advantage of the change in the law to renounce his place in the peerage as the fourteenth earl of home and become prime minister the same year.

†
Although they had been revealed in a French biography of Lawrence as early as 1941.

*
in fact, William died in 1870 without issue, and Sir Benjamin would die in 1914, also without issue, at which point Thomas succeeded to the title.

*
They may have been an exception to the famous first line of tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Lawrences constituted a very happy family, but one that hardly resembled anyone else’s.

*
This is t. e. Lawrence’s estimate, but Jeremy Wilson, the author of The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence, estimates that it was, including interest from capital at his disposal, more like £1,000 per year, which would be equivalent to about $125,000 a year today.

*
This was an unlikely friendship, but t. e. Lawrence and Lady Astor got along famously. Forceful and vivacious, she bullied and protected him like a mother hen, and so far as is known she was the only woman he ever allowed to ride pillion on his motorcycle. Nancy Astor, whose birth name was Langehorne, was a native of Danville, Virginia; she was married to the enormously wealthy Viscount Astor, and was the first woman ever elected to a seat in Parliament. in later life, she was an appeaser, and the Astors’ great country house Cliveden was the social and spiritual center of those who sought peace with Germany and conciliation with hitler. She once told Winston Churchill, “if i were your wife, i’d put poison in your coffee,” to which he replied, “And if i were your husband, i’d drink it.”

*
Three doctors–Maurice Carter, MD; Avodah offit, MD; and Thomas Murray, MD– have expressed strong doubt that a broken bone in an otherwise healthy boy could possibly halt or impede growth. in any case, there is considerable controversy about t. e. Lawrence’s adult height. his American biographer Lowell Thomas puts his height at five feet five and a half inches; one of his British biographers, the poet robert Graves, puts it at five feet six inches; some people put it as low as five feet three inches; Lawrence’s medical records during his service in the rAF put it at five feet five inches. At the time the average height of an englishman of his age was five feet six inches. height was then something of a class matter–the upper classes, given a better diet, tended to be taller than the “working class,” so Lawrence was certainly short for somebody of his class, though not very much shorter than, say, the Prince of Wales (the future King edward Viii, afterward the duke of Windsor), or Winston Churchill.

CHAPTER FOUR
Oxford, 1907–1910

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town…. Proud and godly kings hath built her, long ago, With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,

With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, And the streets where the great men go.

—James Elroy Flecker, “The Dying Patriot”

I was a modest, good-humoured boy.

It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

—Sir Max Beerbohm, “Going Back to School”

I
n Britain one “goes up” to Oxford or to Cambridge; conversely, if dismissed or expelled, one is “sent down.” Lawrence, of course, did not so much “go up” as go sideways—his home in Oxford was only a few minutes from Jesus College by bicycle. For most of his fellow undergraduates, Oxford was the first great adventure of their young lives, away from home and boarding school at last, in a place where they were treated as adults, and expected to behave like adults—with a certain allowance always made, of course, for the follies of young men of the upper classes letting off steam. For Lawrence it was slightly less of anadventure—he had already run away from home and experienced life in barracks with scores of older recruits in an age when each metal cot was exactly two feet away from the next. Still, it was a huge change in status.

Oxford University was and remains a nebulous institution, more of a gas than a solid, as T. E. Lawrence would later describe the Arab Revolt, and guerrilla warfare in general. In order to join it young men (and now of course young women) apply to the colleges of their choice, take an examination, and undergo a firm and probing interview. If accepted, they will spend three academic years at their college, during which the university into which they have been matriculated will seldom touch their lives, except in the form of the “proctor” and his bowler-hatted “bulldogs,” enforcers of the university regulations while undergraduates are outside their own college in the streets of Oxford. The university’s buildings are spread through the town—among them are such architectural landmarks as the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Ashmolean Museum—but the life of the university and much of its teaching take place within the thirty-odd walled-in colleges. When asked where they “went to university” Oxonians are more likely to give the name of their old college than that of Oxford: Magdalen, Christ Church, Jesus, Balliol, etc., each college being, effectively, a world in itself. For both the undergraduates and the fellows (known as “dons"—a hangover from the days when the older colleges were still Catholic ecclesiastical institutions), their college is their home, the center of their world, as the regiment is for officers and senior NCOs in the British army. They eat there; they study there (for the most part); the undergraduates live there for the first two of their three years, as do bachelor dons; and the undergraduates’ academic career is centered on their once-a-week meeting with their tutor, often a fellow of their college, who usually sets them an essay to write, and listens to it at the next tutorial, giving his opinions afterward and setting a direction for further reading, sometimes over a glass of sherry. Much of the benefit of an Oxford education is derived from the undergraduate’s relationship with the tutor—if the personalities dovetail, if there is a bond of mutual sympathy and interest, muchcan be attained. In the absence of these things, disenchantment can quickly set in.
*

Lawrence, as so often in his life, was a special case. Unlike his classmates, he did not live at his college. They had assigned “rooms,” usually a sitting room-study and a bedroom; there were several rooms to a staircase, with “a scout"—a combination of valet, butler, and housemaid—to look after the residents. Rooms ranged from medieval discomfort to palatial grandeur, according to the students’ ability to pay, and according to an indecipherable social code in the office of the bursar, who made the assignments. In Lawrence’s day, it was quite common for undergraduates to be served breakfast, lunch, or tea in their rooms, and for those who could afford it, full dinner parties, with a special menu and wines chosen from the college’s cellar. The entrance to each set of rooms (usually two to a landing) was through a pair of doors, and when the outer one was closed (this was called “sporting one’s oak”) it was a sign that one did not wish to be disturbed. Thus the undergraduates had a degree of privacy that few of them could have enjoyed at boarding school or, for the most part, at home.

Lawrence’s principal tutor, Reginald Lane Poole, was actually at his older brother’s college, St. John’s, rather than at Jesus. Poole was not perhaps the ideal tutor for such a rara avis as Lawrence—he was keeper of the archives and lecturer of diplomacy at Oxford, the author of 151 scholarly works, a forbiddingly conventional historian who preferred solidly based research to brilliant insight, and who was described by one of Lawrence’s friends at Oxford as looking “as if he descended from a long line of maiden aunts.” In fact, Lawrence seems to have found two much more interesting and (perhaps interested) unofficial tutors: his crammer, L. C. Jane, whom he continued to visit, often at odd hours of the night; and David Hogarth, the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who, untilhis death in 1927, remained one of the most powerful influences in Lawrence’s life.

Except for one term in 1908, Lawrence continued to live at home throughout his years at Jesus, and since he seldom ate dinner “at Hall"—indeed, he seldom participated in any conventional meal, except that he had a fondness for tea (among his few self-indulgences was a sweet tooth)—his contact with his fellow undergraduates was minimal. He did not take part in team sports or frequent the Junior Common Room or join any of the undergraduate clubs and societies that are deemed to be an essential part of the Oxford experience. In short, he managed to attend Oxford on his own terms. The only exception was his service in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps. Lawrence was one of the first to volunteer, no doubt in part because as a schoolboy he had been in a similar organization, the St. Aldate’s Church Lads’ Brigade, and perhaps because he thought he might as well put to some use his brief service in the army. In addition, he was made a signaler, a position that in those days involved cycling, his passion. Besides, his enthusiasm for military matters was genuine, and not necessarily confined to reading books on strategy and tactics.

Lawrence was never friendless, despite his Cheshire cat-like invisibility at Jesus. “Scroggs” Beeson was up, though not at the same college, and Lawrence made friends with several undergraduates at Jesus, including an American Rhodes Scholar from Kansas, W. O. Ault; and Vyvyan W. Richards, a “Welsh-American,” with whom Lawrence had a more intimate friendship than with any other contemporary. Ault’s tutor was also Reginald Lane Poole, and as Ault was also studying medieval history he saw quite a lot of Lawrence, who introduced him to the art of taking brass rubbings. Lawrence seems to have been the only person at Jesus who did not treat Ault as an outsider because he was American.

Vyvyan Richards was rather more of a soul mate than Scroggs or Ault, a sensitive young man who shared Lawrence’s medieval interests and, like Lawrence, was a passionate devotee of William Morris, the Victorian aesthete and founder of a school of arts and crafts. Much of Morris’s work was in the Gothic revival mode—indeed, the curious roof design of Lawrence’s cottage in the garden at 2 Polstead Road looks very much as if it had been inspired by the cupolas of the famous “Red House” Morris had designed and built for himself and his wife Jane.
*
Lawrence and Richards shared Morris’s passionate commitment to designing and printing beautiful books, when possible by hand, with hand-set type, eschewing altogether the modern linotype and the machine press, in favor of medieval printing methods and hand-painted illumination.

They even discussed setting up a hand press of their own somewhere in the English countryside, and devoting themselves to printing limited or single-copy editions of the great books—a plan that elicited a rare degree of disapproval from Lawrence’s usually silent father. It is not altogether clear whether Thomas Lawrence disapproved of the fantasy that a hand press could be made into a paying proposition, or whether he realized immediately, unlike his son, that Richards was a homosexual and deeply attracted to Ned. On the first point Thomas was a sound judge of business schemes—he had, after all, once managed a very large estate, and was still involved in it—and on the second he was worldly enough to recognize the nature of Richards’s affection for Ned immediately, even if Ned did not. It had been only thirteen years since Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecencies,” in what had been one of the most publicized scandals of the age, and homosexuality not only was on every parent’s mind but was punishable by social disgrace and even imprisonment.

Vyvyan Richards may have summed up the nature of their friendship best when he said, much later in life, “Quite frankly, for me it was love at first sight,” and went on to regret that Lawrence “had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He never gave even the slightest sign that he understood my motives, or fathomed my desire…. I realize now that he was sexless—at least that he was unaware of sex.” This may or may not be true—perhaps Lawrence was more aware of the nature of Richards’s interest than he let on, but at the same timewas unwilling to respond to it, and since he nevertheless liked Richards, solved the problem by simply ignoring it. It may have consoled Richards to suppose that Lawrence was “sexless,” but it seems more likely that Lawrence was, from an early age, determined to suppress any sexual feelings, whether toward Richards or anyone else. It is possible, of course, that he might have been homosexual had he allowed his sexual instincts to emerge, but since he was a master of self-control, this never happened until much later in his life, and even then in a very strange form.

At the time he met Richards, Lawrence was in the process, common to most undergraduates, of testing his limits. Richards reported that his friend went swimming at night in the winter, plunging through a gap in the ice into a river (probably the Cherwell). Lawrence also went without food or sleep for protracted periods of time, and spent many hours at the Oxford University Officers’ Training Course pistol range, practicing with both the strong and the weak hand to the point of exhaustion. It is possible that Lawrence was already preparing himself for some great feat—military glory and heroism were never far from his mind—but he may also have been submitting himself to a punishing and demanding regime intended to subdue and control just those urges which Vyvyan Richards hoped to arouse in him. In those days it was believed that ejaculation of any kind weakened the body, and athletes were sternly warned against sexual relationships and masturbation. Lawrence, as one who always carried things too far, invented for himself the most punishing physical routine he could stand.

Whether or not he recognized the nature of Richards’s affection, Lawrence was held back from any sexual activity by a naturally abstemious nature, a lack of any sensible sexual education, and his extreme religious upbringing at home. In addition, Lawrence never experienced the sexual curiosity that develops between boys in boarding school, and he had had what may have been a frightening experience as a boy in a barracks full of grown men. The result, perhaps intensified by self-consciousness over his short stature, was to produce a personality that was not so much “sexless” as armored against sexual temptation, and thelonger he avoided any kind of sexual relationship, the more difficult it became for him to have one. His youngest brother, Arnold, was of the opinion that Lawrence died a virgin, and he was surely right.

It is very significant that at the same time Lawrence was gently deflecting Vyvyan Richards’s advances, while retaining Richards as a friend—and actually making plans for the two of them to share a William Morris-inspired country cottage where they would hand-print aesthetically satisfying volumes, a cottage complete with separate “shut beds” marked “Meum” and “Tuam"—Lawrence made the mistake of proposing marriage to a young woman.

Lawrence’s first sight of Janet Laurie has a certain innocent sexual ambivalence to it. In the spring of 1894, when the Lawrences moved to New Forest, the Lauries were neighbors. Apparently, Janet’s parents had wanted a son, and therefore had the little girl’s hair cut short, and dressed her in a boy’s clothes—one of those strange decisions that, at the time, often made otherwise quite ordinary English families seem bizarre to foreigners. One Sunday morning, when the Lawrences were attending church, Ned saw Janet sitting in a pew in front of him, and said to his nanny, “What a naughty little boy to keep his hat on in church.” Janet turned around, stuck her tongue out at him, and said, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.” “And a very rude little girl,” Nanny said predictably, but a friendship had been struck, and Janet soon became a frequent visitor at Langley Lodge. Although Sarah was generally dismissive of girls—"We could never be bothered with girls in our house,” she would tell the poet Robert Graves, when he came to write a biography of T. E. Lawrence after the war—she seems to have made an exception for Janet, whom Ned particularly liked, since Janet was something of a tomboy.

Over the years, Janet became a friend of all the Lawrence boys; for a time, she was at a boarding school in Oxford, and although she went home after the death of her father, she continued to pay frequent visits to 2 Polstead Road, and “sometimes stayed there.” She seems to have played the role of a sister to all the boys, and to have been accepted by their parents almost as one of the family.