The TE Lawrence of legend, he who defeated Ottoman forces during the Great War by irregular means, was the creation of many, including David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia. Inevitably, much about Lawrence was omitted from these heroic versions and when you finish Dick Benson-Gyles's penetrating study of Lawrence's psyche, The Boy in the Mask, you'll understand why.
Lawrence’s male forebears, Leicestershire merchants named Chapman, were granted lands in 1667 at Killau, Co Westmeath, by Oliver Cromwell. A baronetcy followed in 1776. Lawrence’s father was Thomas Chapman (b 1846), second son of the 4th baronet. In 1873 Thomas married Edith, Anglo-Irish and evangelical. The marriage was miserable. The couple had four daughters.
In 1882, a Miss Sarah Lawrence came to the Chapman’s Westmeath house to care for their girls. Unknown to her employers she was the illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic Scottish servant-woman, Elizabeth Jenner, and John Lawrence, a Sunderland shipwright. The four Chapman girls loved her but in 1885, much to Mrs Chapman’s dismay, she handed in her notice, claiming her mother (who was in fact dead) needed her.
Three years later, cruising down Grafton Street in a barouche, Mrs Chapman spotted Sarah on the pavement. She hired a private detective who discovered Sarah and Thomas were lovers and had a son. Mrs Chapman confronted her husband and asked him to leave their home. To avoid scandal he and Sarah fled to Britain where their second son, the future “Lawrence of Arabia”, was born in 1888. In 1896, now styled Mr and Mrs Lawrence, they settled in Oxford. They had five sons in all. Chapman never saw his Irish daughters.
Aged 10, TE, overheard a conversation between his father and a solicitor and discovered everything. His parents weren’t married; he and his brothers were illegitimate. The psychological consequences of the discovery were complicated but in summary they were: a settled aversion to family life, procreation and Ireland, all of which Lawrence blamed for this catastrophe; a lifelong infatuation with the medieval tales of writers such as William Morris and the courtly love poetry of the troubadours, both of which offered him a way to escape his circumstances; and the realisation that on account of his parents’ sins and his tainted provenance, all traditional routes were closed and therefore he’d have to make his way in the world in a non-traditional, maverick way, which, as it turned out, was exactly what he did.
One of the beliefs that has flowed from Lawrence’s derogation from family, women and procreation is that this was because he was homosexual. No, argues Dick Benson-Gyles: he was heterosexual but celibate, his romantic practice being rooted in the medieval poetry that obsessed him: “By embracing the convention of troubadour love as a kind of template for his own emotional life, Lawrence could love secretly, even from a distance, and the physical did not have to be involved. He could dream, he could long, without having to do anything about it other than experience the emotions and acknowledge them to himself. In other words, he could dispense with the bodily and live in the heart and the soul.”
In early manhood he proposed to a childhood friend, Janet Laurie. She was actually interested in his better-looking younger brother, Will, and preferred not to take the proposal seriously, a ploy with which Lawrence acquiesced. Later though, just before the Great War, he fell properly in love and this time his feelings were reciprocated although the relationship was never consummated: the woman was Farida al Akle, who taught him Arabic in what is now Lebanon, and she, Benson-Gyles argues, is "S.A.", the dedicatee of Lawrence's monumental account of his military campaigns, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In military terms Lawrence's war was a triumph, but emotionally he paid a terrible price. In November 1917, reconnoitring around Deraa, he was captured. Deraa's governor, Hajim Bey, "an ardent pederast" according to Lawrence, had his prisoner flogged and repeatedly anally raped. The injuries caused by the assault were so serious Lawrence was dispatched by Bey to hospital and from there he escaped. The experience changed him utterly; as he puts it in Seven Pillars, "in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost".
In 1926 Lawrence and Farida met for the last time in a London teahouse: the meeting was short. He disclosed in full to her the story of his parent’s elopement and his illegitimacy, (an interesting thing to do) and when they were saying goodbye she said, “Ned, you have so changed I wouldn’t have known you,” to which he said nothing. She knew what had happened to him in Deraa and this would seem to have been a part of her meaning. It had annealed him.
She returned to the Lebanon, he to his life in the RAF, which he’d joined under an assumed name. When he went to India in 1927, she stopped writing. Lawrence, solitary and tormented, struggled to manage the psychological wounds inflicted at Deraa. He blamed himself for having given permission, even encouragement to those who assaulted him, and regularly arranged to have himself flagellated, often on the anniversary of the Deraa rapes. Though interpreted by commentators as masochism this was rather, according to Benson-Gyles, “an attempt to take control of an event which had previously been out of his control”.
Another of his coping strategies was to abandon the Englishman “Lawrence of Arabia”who’d been violated at Deraa and become (his youthful Hibernophobia now eschewed), the Irishman (his postwar letters are awash with assertions of his Irishness) named, variously, Ross, Smith and Shaw. Given his trauma, nothing he did was ever enough though. He was too damaged.
This isn’t a conventional biography – for the military facts you must go elsewhere – but it has great virtues: deft story telling, lucid writing, careful close argument. The book’s greatest virtue, though, is its sympathy with its subject, and I closed it believing what I had been given was a sharper, clearer portrait of Lawrence than any I had ever previously encountered.
Carlo Gébler works for the Prison Arts Foundation in Belfast with offenders near the end of their sentences.His latest works are The Projectionist: The Story of Ernest Gébler and a collection of prison stories, The Wing Orderly's Tales
