Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (30 page)

Lawrence’s photograph of James Elroy Flecker.

Although the doctors were strongly against Lawrence’s return to the Middle East, that of course did not deter him. Thompson, he learned, had declined to return unless his wife could accompany him, a suggestion that horrified everyone; and Hogarth replaced him with a young archaeologist, Charles Leonard Woolley, an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Woolley would go on to a long and distinguished career; he would not only be knighted but serve as the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. Lawrence and Woolley became and remained friends—Woolley was primarily interested in the discovery of big buildings and monuments, while Lawrence worked with the men, honed his knowledge of Arabic, and took care of the pottery finds and the photography.

Lawrence defied the doctors and set out again for Jerablus at the end of November, to report on the rumor that the Germans planned to build their railway right through the mound at Carchemish. When this proved to be untrue (the railway would pass uncomfortably near it, but not through it), he journeyed on to Egypt to join Petrie’s current dig at Kafr Ammar, on the Nile south of Cairo, but not without enduring a terrifying carriage accident on Christmas Day, when the driver toppled the carriage and the horses off a bridge and into a stream. In a letter home on January 2 he comments darkly (and correctly) about conditions in the Ottoman Empire: “Great rumors of war and annexation:—not to be believed yet, but such a smash is coming out here.”

He wrote next from Cairo, giving his family his new address in Kafr Ammar in Arabic script, so they could copy it out and add it to each envelope. The actual digging disgusted him, and prompted one of his darker descriptive passages: “It is a strange sight to see the men [dragging] out amummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting—and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear off its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result…. I’m no body snatcher, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Genghis Khan.” He found the Nile sluggish, and the brown sails of the boats on it depressing to look at.

A week later Flinders Petrie
*
and his wife arrived, and it is hard not to guess that the uncongenial nature of the work preconditioned Lawrence to dislike her. “I don’t like Mrs. Petrie,” he wrote home flatly after meeting her for the first time (this was unusual for Lawrence); as for Petrie, who was hugely dignified and full of himself, Lawrence seems to have displayed his dislike of tomb robbing by “taking the mickey” out of Petrie in small ways, perhaps not his most endearing trait. Lawrence turned up for digging in football shorts and a white Magdalen College Boat Club blazer, prompting Petrie to remark that they weren’t here to play cricket. As one of Lawrence’s biographers pointed out, the joke was on Petrie, who did not realize that cricket isn’t played in football shorts (not that Lawrence played either cricket or football). Also, and perhaps more woundingly, flaunting the Magdalen blazer may have been Lawrence’s way of reminding Petrie that unlike Lawrence he “was not an Oxonian, but merely Professor of Egyptology in the petit bourgeois University of London.” Petrie, whose long white beard made him rather resemble God the Father in Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, may have been sharp enough to guess the intention of Lawrence’s choice of clothing, but the Petries nevertheless showed him a remarkable degree of kindness and courtesy during his time there, and Lawrence thawed toward them.

Over time, despite his dislike of digging up mummified bodies (and a general distaste for Egypt, both the people and the way they spoke Arabic), Lawrence came rather reluctantly to admire Petrie’s abilities. Petrie had discovered the first mention of Israel in Egyptian recorded history by deciphering the Merneptah stele, an accomplishment that won him international acclaim; and by linking the styles of pottery shards, he developed a new and more exact method of chronology for excavation sites, something from which Lawrence would benefit in his task of classifying Hittite pottery at Carchemish.

Petrie emphasized that all archaeological research “lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details,” advice from which Lawrence could surely benefit, and with which he agreed. In the end Lawrence not only learned a lot from Petrie, as Hogarth had surely intended, but came to like and respect him, despite their unpropitious first meeting. As for Petrie, he offered Lawrence £700, a not inconsiderable sum, toward the expense of two seasons investigating several sites on the Persian Gulf, which Lawrence was very tempted to accept if the resumption of the Carchemish dig fell through.

However, during Lawrence’s one-month stay in Egypt—he may be the only visitor to pass through Cairo without bothering to see the Pyramids—Hogarth had unexpectedly tapped into a wealthy source for carrying forward the Carchemish digging. By the time Lawrence arrived back there early in February, the matter of financing was settled, and the opportunity to dig for Petrie vanished for the moment. Perhaps this was just as well, for Lawrence’s commitment to a career in archaeology was never total. Lawrence was happy at Jerablus—happier than he would ever be in his life again—but he was never tempted by the academic life.

The world of caravans, camels, desert, and Bedouin nomads would hold Lawrence to the Middle East for the next three years, except for brief visits home, and spare him the decision about what career to follow, until at last the outbreak of World War I thrust him into the career for which he had been training himself all his life.

Lawrence arrived at Aleppo to find the Turkish authorities making difficulties about the resumption of work at Carchemish; nor had the moneyarrived with which to begin a new house for the archaeologists, nearer to the site. The years 1911 to 1914 were difficult ones for foreigners in Turkey—the country’s political instability combined with a series of humiliating military defeats and territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire in Libya at the hands of Italy, and in the Balkans at the hands of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, intensified the siege mentality of the Turkish government and its hostility to foreigners, and encouraged fear of the Russians and, therefore, a closer relationship with Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century Turkey had seen itself deprived of all its North African possessions, from Egypt to Morocco, and all its Balkan possessions except for a tiny enclave around Constantinople; of course, this made the Turks all the more determined to hold on to their Arabian possessions.

Lawrence kicked his heels in Aleppo for nearly two weeks, happy to be out of Egypt, buying small antiquities for Hogarth and the Ashmolean Museum, bargaining for a long camel-hair cloak for himself (“such as Bedouin sheiks wear: Baghdad made: very warm and beautiful”), and keeping himself going by borrowing from the British consul until money arrived from the British Museum. He spent much time searching for an armorer who still made chain mail as it had been made at the time of the Crusades, for the benefit of a friend in Oxford who shared his interest in armor. He wrote home often—in one letter, he expresses satisfaction that his brother Frank is keeping up with his shooting, and urges Frank “to do a little revolver work: it is harder than a rifle to learn, and more often necessary,” a typically offhand remark that separates Lawrence from other archaeological assistants, few of whom would have felt that revolver marksmanship was a necessity. He seems to have been reading a lot—Maurice Hewlett’s Richard Yea-and-Nay, a historical novel about Richard I, for the ninth time, Lawrence claimed; and William Morris’s “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem” Sigurd the Volsung. This is a revealing choice of books. Hewlett was a prolific English writer of romantic historical fiction; he was a friend of Ezra Pound and of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and was famous and successful in his time,though he is largely forgotten now. His novel about Richard Coeur de Lion is a frankly hero-worshipping and meticulously detailed portrait of one of Lawrence’s favorite medieval kings. Morris’s hero, Sigurd, is the central figure of Norse myth and legend, the dragon slayer and hero of the Volsunga Saga, and Wagner’s inspiration for the Ring cycle. Morris transformed Sigurd into a noble Victorian hero, a kind of fantasy preux chevalier, in what one biographer of Lawrence calls “a transparently Oedipal tale."
*
Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he passes from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett’s novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd’s doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son’s enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology.

Once he arrived in Jerablus, after a three-day walk over rough country, followed by a recalcitrant mule train carrying the expedition’s supplies, Lawrence was like a man back in his element. Physical discomfort, danger, and exhaustion acted on him like a tonic. He gathered a workforce; had the foundations for the expedition house dug; and argued over the ownership of the mound with a greedy local landowner who claimed it, and with a Turkish police lieutenant who ordered him to stop the digging. By the first week in March he was back in Aleppo, to pick up Woolley—there was a certain amount of excitement in the foreign community, since all Italians were being expelled from Turkey because of the war in Libya, and it was therefore possible to buy their collections of antiquities atbargain-basement prices. Then, a week later, Woolley and Lawrence went to Biridjik together, to confront the kaimakam over the order to stop the digging and the interference from the local landowner.

Lawrence might easily have resented Woolley’s presence, since Woolley was senior to him, and a more experienced archaeologist, but fortunately Woolley behaved exactly the right way for an Englishman confronting an Asian official, and told the kaimakam that he would shoot on the spot anyone who “interrupted the digs.” He apparently spoke with enough high-handed vigor and righteous British indignation to cow the kaimakam, who had, of course, arranged the various attempts to stop the digging in the hope of extracting a bribe for himself. Woolley thereby won Lawrence’s instant and lasting respect and friendship. Those who thought Lawrence was mild saw only his short stature, his slight figure, and the boyish shock of unruly fair hair, and failed to notice the icy blue eyes and the large, firm jaw: he was quite capable of acting just like one of Kipling’s pukka sahibs when aroused, and he thoroughly approved of Woolley’s boldly threatening the Turkish police chief in the chief’s own office, as well as Woolley’s parting shot: that he was declaring war not against the Turkish government, but only against the kaimakam.

Woolley acquired further merit in Lawrence’s eyes by admiring Lawrence’s pottery finds (and agreeing with most of Lawrence’s theories about them) and showing a preference for Syrian over Egyptian cooking. Since Woolley could not speak or understand the local dialect, he needed Lawrence to translate for him, as well as deal with the workforce—not always an easy task, since almost every adult male was armed, and every find was proclaimed with a fusillade of shots. Even the cook, “the staid Haj Wahid,” worked with a Mauser pistol stuffed into his sash and a Martini-Henry rifle by his bedroll, and at one point fired ten shots through the goat-hair roof of the tent in celebration; the holes then had to be darned.

By the beginning of April—despite the fact that no building permit had as yet arrived from Constantinople—the stone expedition house was almost completed. Consisting of eleven rooms, “two of them very large,” the Carchemish house was to occupy a good deal of Lawrence’s time andattention over the next two years. It had an impressive courtyard with a graceful stone entrance, and although the house was built of rough-dressed stone rather than adobe, in photographs it very much resembles a largish and rather fashionable home in Santa Fe. This is particularly true of the interior, with its hanging wall rugs; white plaster walls with deep, graceful niches for books and antiquities; carved wooden doors; and beamed ceilings, which look just like the rough-hewn vigas used in New Mexico.

By mid-April Lawrence and Woolley had settled into the new house and were waiting for the arrival (and the approval) of Hogarth. Despite a formal visit from the kaimakam, who had been ordered to apologize to them, Lawrence continued his campaign of harassing the Turkish authorities, picking the lock of the storeroom in which the “poor little [Turkish] Commissaire” kept the antiquities that had been excavated, and in general doing what he could to stoke the discontent in the local workforce against the nearby German railway builders. For the moment, all this was still on the level of undergraduate pranks, but the Middle East being what it was (and is), there would soon be an escalation to violence and the use of firearms. Even Woolley, who came to admire and love Lawrence, was aware of his “essential immaturity” about matters like this. That impression was no doubt accentuated by the fact that Lawrence looked, as Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, remarked, “about eighteen.” Another person who met Lawrence in Aleppo at that time described him as a “frail, pallid, silent youth,” though that remark contrasts with Mrs. Fontana’s description of him as “a young man of rare power and considerable physical beauty.” Much as Lawrence spurned physical relationships with any women (or men), a number of women were strongly attracted to him over the years.

In a long letter home at about this time, Lawrence brings up the possibility, no doubt alarming to his family, that he may go off into the desert to seek out the primitive and nomadic Soleyb, survivors of the pagan predecessors of the Arabs; spend “a spring & summer with them"; then write a book, along the lines of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, devoted to this mysterious people. Lawrence expresses his belief that his book (or books)"would be better, if I had been for a time in open country,” a very different and more demanding ambition than turning his BA thesis into an illustrated book. Lawrence may have lost interest in the elusive Soleyb on learning that they lived on raw antelope meat, though this is not the kind of consideration which would necessarily have held him back—more likely, his growing interest in archaeology and his responsibilities at Carchemish pushed this scheme into the background.