Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence. Small -- "my little genius" Ronald Storrs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Storrs called him -- and unduly sensitive, with 'piercing gentian-blue eyes.' .... Lawrence was a potentially brilliant archaeologist, in indifferent poet, and gifted linguistic. He was also a mythomaniac and an accomplished self-publicist. With the help of a wandering newspaperman from Ohio named Thomas Lowell, who wrote dispatches from greatly exaggerated his exploits sent heroic photographs back from the front (at that time a fairly novel form of journalism), Lawrence was transformed from the son of a disgraced Irish baronet into "Lawrence of Arabia." Here was just what the increasingly dispirited British public most needed: A British hero in a remote and highly romantic theater of war, far removed from the sorry, sordid trench warfare in Europe in which too many had already died anonymous deaths -- that "comfortless bloody business," as the novelist John Buchan called it. After the war Lowell presented his version of Lawrence in Arabia's revolt against the Ottomans in the form of a lecture with photographs, which opened to a packed house at the Century Theatre in New York in 1919 and was later taken to London. It was called, predictably "The Last Crusade."

Lawrence sentimentalized the Bedouin. His vision of the "East" had been shaped by a generation of Romantics -- men like Charles Doughty, for whose 'Travels in Arabia Deserta' (1888) he wrote a preface in 1921, and Sir Richard Burton, celebrated as a libertine, fencer, explorer, diplomat, translator of the 'Kama Sutra' and the 'Thousand and One Nights,' and, in 1853, the second (the first was Ludivico di Berthema in 1503) infidel to enter the great mosque at Mecca (disguised as a Pashtun). These men had come to see the Bedouin not as the merciless brigands Napoleon's troops had encountered by as a upholders of an ancient warrior creed and an ordered, stratified society of the type that was fast disappearing in Europe itself beneath the weight of democracy and industrialization: stout English Yeoman, in other words, "translated into another idiom" ~ Page 462 / 463