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One of the most stirring romantic myths of the twentieth century was destroyed in 1968 when John Bruce, in the Sunday Times, revealed "the secret life of Lawrence of Arabia," to wit, that the visionary crusader was a flagellomaniac. Since then, the life of T.E. Lawrence has been treated more as a case study of a private neurosis than a case study of a political movement's leader, or, more precisely in this instance, a convulted study of how one man's private fears and fantasies became the motivation behind public campaigns involving millions of people.
There is much to be said for burning one's diaries and private correspondence and journals shortly efore one's death. Now that I know Lawrence's secrets, or have evidence darkly hinting at them, I cannot help but find him an unsympathetic character, and almost wish his biographers had been more discreet. I find particularly distasteful his surviving letters giving instructions to Bruce on how to whip him, involving the subterfutge of describing himself as the fictitious schoolboy "Ted" who must be whipped for some minor offence, e.g.:
The desire to be whipped purely for the sake of pleasure of one thing; the desire to be whipped for the sake of an extreme form of guilt-ridden penitence of quite another. Some of Dr Sade's heroes I admire; St Teresa I find repellent. The beatings which Lawrence voluntarily submitted to at the hands of Bruce were particularly sadistic: a metal whip brutally thrashed his bare buttocks a precise number of lashes until he ejaculated. Humiliation and shame was the desire goal, a goal which ony renewed the need for more punishment, extending even to elaborate "training" rituals involving swimming in icy water and "medical electricity."
And why all this self-inflicted torture? Solely because Lawrence was once gang-raped by Arab soldiers and couldn't come to grips with the fact that he enjoyed it. The chapter describing the notorious Der'a incident was rewritten nearly a dozen times for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, letters and journals. The agonies are desdribed with the loving-yet-loathing detail of the pornographer straining after a vivid immediacy, e.g.:
He never seems to have had a straight-forward sexual contact with his first and foremost lover, Dahoum, the donkey boy at Jerablus, sometimes known as Sheikh Ahmed,the Arab/Hittite boy to whom Seven Pillars was dedicated. Lawrence met this 14-year-old in 1911 (when he was 23), and immediately idealised him as the natural man, joyuful and innocent, unspoiled by Western society. He was the noble savage "wjo wrestled beautifully," who was "beautifully built and remarkably handsome" (who even posed for a nude limestone statue which Lawrence carved and mounted atop his house) – in other words, Lawrence's own ideal self. But Lawrence lacked the good sense – either because of his puritanical upbringing or a personal quirk – to grasp his destiny by the flesh, and when Dahoum died in 1914 Lawrence lost his own soul "and now not anywhere will I find rest and peace." Lawrence took Damascus for Dahoum, but found his demon at Der'a.
At least this is my (oversimplified) version of the sad, sad story. Dr John Mack's 500-odd-page analysis is much more complex, and at times most annoyingly psychiatric. It is also pretentious and patronising, and each chapter is prefaced by a Freudian primer defining such things as "trauma" in the most puerile prose, apparently intended for the non-specialist. Perhaps his desire to clarify his terms is laudable, though an obtrustive nuisance, but I was really put off by his trite justifications of postuhumous psychiatry: "Lasrence would, I am quite certain, want others to benefit from any knowledge or insights gained from stuidying and analyzing the struiggles he could not resolve altogetheer for himself." I was neither benefited nor amused, and though the title of the book a gross impertinence.
Rictor Norton
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