The Man Who Kept Inventing Himself: The Strange, Dark, and Unresolved Life of T.E. Lawrence
- Aug 16, 2019
- 12 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
He was one of the most famous men alive in his own lifetime, and he spent most of that lifetime desperately trying to disappear. He fought a war in the desert wearing another people's robes, dedicated his masterpiece to a man he may have loved but never touched, paid soldiers to flog him in barracks, attended flagellation parties in Chelsea organised by someone who called himself Bluebeard, and died on a Dorset road at 46 under a name he'd borrowed from a playwright. Even his birth was a kind of lie. T.E. Lawrence, the man the world called Lawrence of Arabia, was never really Lawrence at all.
The legend built on top of him is one of the most durable in British history. David Lean's 1962 film planted Peter O'Toole, six foot three in flowing white robes, so firmly in the collective imagination that the real Lawrence, who was five foot five and frequently exhausted, barely gets a look in. Most people know the outline. The desert campaign. The Arab Revolt. The dynamited trains. What gets skipped over is everything that came before and after: a life so tangled with questions of identity, desire, trauma, and guilt that biographers have been arguing about the basics of it for ninety years and still haven't agreed.
This is an attempt at the fuller picture.
Born Into a Lie
Lawrence came into the world in 1888 already carrying a secret that wasn't his. His father was Sir Thomas Chapman, a wealthy Anglo-Irish baronet with an estate in County Westmeath and a wife he couldn't stand. His mother was Sarah Junner, the governess Chapman had hired for his daughters, with whom he'd fallen completely and catastrophically in love. When the affair became impossible to hide, Chapman didn't quietly arrange a settlement and a discreet separation. He walked away from his title, his land, his first family, and his name, and went to live with Sarah in a sequence of rented houses across Wales, Scotland, France, and eventually Oxford, pretending to be an ordinary married couple called Mr and Mrs Lawrence.
They weren't married. Chapman's wife refused to grant a divorce on religious grounds. The five sons Sarah bore him were illegitimate. And for years they didn't know it.
Thomas Edward, the second son, found out around the age of ten. The version that's been handed down suggests he was piecing things together rather than told outright. His parents worshipped loudly at church while living what Victorian England would have considered a life of open sin. They used a name that wasn't theirs. His mother was herself quite possibly illegitimate, the daughter of a housemaid who'd become pregnant in service. Lawrence grew up, in other words, in a household where identity was something you performed rather than something you possessed, where the family name was a fiction, where respectability was a mask worn over a reality nobody was permitted to name aloud.
His brother Arnold later said T.E. was the only one who seemed properly disturbed by it. His official biographers have noted that he spent his entire life cycling through assumed identities without ever settling on one that fit. He was not wrong to sense, at ten years old, that something fundamental had been built on sand.
The Oxford Years and the Boy in Syria
At Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence read history and developed an obsession with Crusader castles that sent him walking alone through Syria one summer, covering 1,100 miles on foot. He was slender, physically toughened by deliberate privation, and drawn to the Middle East in a way that went beyond academic interest. He learned Arabic. He spent time at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish in Ottoman Syria. And there, working at the dig, he met a young Arab water carrier named Selim Ahmed.
Ahmed had a nickname: Dahoum, which meant roughly 'the dark one'. Lawrence was 23. Dahoum was somewhere around 14 or 15, a bright, curious boy from a nearby village who Lawrence took under his wing in a way that went considerably further than mentoring. He taught Dahoum to use a camera. He allowed him to move into the dig house. He carved a nude sculpture of the boy and placed it on the roof of the building in the style of a Greco-Roman figure, which caused considerable scandal among local residents. In 1913 he brought Dahoum to England, where the two visited Oxford and met Lawrence's family.
When war broke out in 1914 Lawrence returned to England and the two were separated permanently. Dahoum died of typhus in 1918, during a famine that swept through Syria. Lawrence learned of his death only when he returned to the region later that year.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's account of the Arab Revolt, opens with a dedication poem addressed to 'S.A.', which begins: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / And wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house / That your eyes might be shining for me when we come. Most scholars now accept that S.A. was Selim Ahmed. The precise nature of what Lawrence felt for Dahoum has been argued over ever since. His authorized biographer Jeremy Wilson described the relationship as one of 'almost fatherly concern'. Others have been considerably more direct. What's beyond dispute is that Lawrence fought the Arab campaign knowing Dahoum was dead, and that he wrote the book in that knowledge.
The Desert War and the Night at Deraa
When Lawrence arrived in Arabia in 1916 as a British intelligence officer, he was 28 years old with no battlefield training. What he had was fluency in Arabic, a detailed knowledge of the terrain, a gift for understanding tribal politics, and an unusual ability to inhabit spaces between cultures. He rode with Bedouin fighters, dressed in Arab robes, and helped plan a guerrilla campaign against Ottoman supply lines that was by any measure remarkable in its results.
But the Arab Revolt also rested on a promise Lawrence knew was false. The British had already signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France, secretly dividing the Middle East between the two powers in direct contradiction of the independence they'd promised Arab leaders. Lawrence knew this. He described himself later as a 'letter of introduction' sent by a government that had already decided to ignore the people he was introducing. He fought the campaign through to Damascus anyway.
In November 1917, while reconnoitring the Syrian town of Deraa in Arab disguise, Lawrence was captured by Turkish soldiers. What happened next is one of the most disputed passages in modern military memoir. Lawrence described it in Seven Pillars with a specificity that reads more like confession than reportage. He was taken to the local Bey, who made sexual advances. When Lawrence resisted, he was beaten severely by guards and, he strongly implies, sexually assaulted.
He wrote: 'In Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.'
Whether the assault happened exactly as described is still debated. There's no independent corroboration, and one detail in the account has been challenged. But Lawrence returned to the incident obsessively in private correspondence. In a 1924 letter to Charlotte Shaw, the closest thing he had to an intimate confidante, he wrote that he had surrendered his 'bodily integrity' to the Bey. And in the published text of Seven Pillars there is a detail that biographers have circled ever since: Lawrence writes that as the beatings continued, 'a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.'
Whatever happened at Deraa, it broke something. The man who emerged from it was already marked by loss and betrayal. The trauma added a dimension that would shape the rest of his life in ways that weren't fully understood until long after his death.
The Man Who Refused to Be Famous
When the war ended, Lawrence arrived at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference wearing Arab robes and argued passionately for Arab independence. He was ignored. The Sykes-Picot carve-up proceeded roughly as planned. He tried to make his peace with it by working under Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office in 1921, helping to broker the political settlements that at least partially redeemed some of the promises made during the war. Then he walked away from all of it.
He was by this point one of the most famous men in Britain. The American journalist Lowell Thomas had been touring a lecture show called With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia to sold-out audiences. Lawrence had become the Empire's only romantic hero in a war defined by industrial slaughter. He wanted none of it.
In August 1922, with the help of Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an ordinary aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross. He failed the medical exam and had no birth certificate. He got in anyway. When journalists found him five months later, he was discharged.
He then enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps under the name T.E. Shaw, a nod to his friendship with the playwright George Bernard Shaw. He was unhappy there and petitioned repeatedly to return to the RAF, which eventually readmitted him in 1925. He served in India, in Karachi and Miramshah, before rumours began circulating that he was involved in espionage and he was sent home. He served until 1935. He spent 13 years after the war as a low-ranking enlisted man under borrowed names, turning down honours, refusing appointments, and living as sparingly as he could in a Dorset cottage called Clouds Hill.
Michael Asher, the explorer and Arabist who has written about Lawrence at length, visited Clouds Hill and described it as feeling like a church. That's about right. Lawrence had built himself a secular monastery and appointed himself its sole monk.
The Secret Life in the Barracks
While Lawrence was performing anonymity in the enlisted ranks, he was also doing something considerably harder to categorise. During his time in the Tank Corps, he developed a relationship with a fellow soldier named John Bruce. Bruce later told interviewers that Lawrence paid him a regular retainer of three pounds a week to beat him on the bare buttocks with a birch rod. The payments and the beatings continued, by various accounts, from around 1923 to 1934.
Lawrence constructed an elaborate fiction to justify the arrangement. He told Bruce that a mysterious figure he called 'the Old Man', a kind of guardian authority, had ordered the punishments as discipline for unspecified failings. There was no Old Man. Lawrence had invented him. He was constructing a scenario in which someone else had sanctioned what he could not sanction for himself.
Around the same time, while still publicly respected as a Middle East statesman, Lawrence was attending flagellation parties in Chelsea organised by a German procurer who went by the name Bluebeard. When Bluebeard threatened to sell his confessions to the press, Lawrence used government connections to suppress them.
The relationship between the Deraa assault and the later flagellation is something biographers have speculated about carefully. Lawrence himself, in Seven Pillars, described the assault as having awakened something. The flagellation payments look, to many who have studied them, less like straightforward masochism than like a compulsive re-enactment, a need to revisit and somehow metabolise what had happened to him in that guardroom in Syria in 1917.
The Question Nobody Could Quite Answer
Lawrence's sexuality has been argued over almost as long as his legend has existed. The honest answer, after nearly a century of biographers turning over every available letter and account, is that nobody knows for certain. And the uncertainty itself is revealing.
What can be said is this: there is no confirmed evidence of consensual sexual intimacy between Lawrence and any person. His friends and contemporaries, when pressed, tended to describe him as essentially asexual. Lawrence himself repeatedly denied any personal experience of sex in private letters, not as protestation but as matter-of-fact statement.
And yet. The dedication to Dahoum. The nude sculpture. The holiday in England. The homoerotic passages in Seven Pillars, 'friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace', which Lawrence wrote about Arab fighters but which sit oddly in a war memoir. A letter to Charlotte Shaw in which he observed, apparently without distress, 'I've seen lots of man-and-man loves: very lovely and fortunate some of them were.'
His official biographers have been accused, not entirely unfairly, of defending him against 'charges' of homosexuality in a way that reveals more about their discomfort than about the evidence. The most useful framing may be that Lawrence existed at a point where the categories available to him, homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, didn't map cleanly onto whatever he actually was. He had been raised in a puritanical household by a mother who dominated him and whom he alternately adored and resented. He described himself as living like a 'one-man secular monastery'. He seems to have felt love, possibly quite intensely, and to have been profoundly uncomfortable with the body.
The one relationship that looks closest to genuine emotional intimacy is with Charlotte Shaw, the wife of George Bernard Shaw, with whom Lawrence corresponded for years. Charlotte had reportedly never consummated her marriage. She and Lawrence found in each other, it seems, a shared distaste for the physical and a profound ease with the epistolary. Whether that counts as love depends on what you think love requires.
The Death That Didn't Quite Add Up
On 13 May 1935, six weeks after leaving the RAF for the last time, Lawrence was riding his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle near Clouds Hill when he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. He was thrown over the handlebars and struck the road head-first. He never regained consciousness and died six days later.
The accident prompted the neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns to campaign for mandatory motorcycle helmets, a campaign that eventually changed British law. Lawrence was not wearing one.
Several questions have never been fully resolved. Lawrence had written to a friend just days before his death about feeling 'bobbish' and making plans. But he had also, for years, described himself as a man who'd outlived his usefulness. A witness at the inquest said there may have been a black car involved in the accident that was never identified. The coroner recorded an accidental death. The rumours of something else have never entirely gone away, though they've also never been substantiated.
He was buried at Moreton in Dorset. Winston Churchill attended. The pallbearers included the actor Sir Ronald Storrs and a soldier named Pat Knowles who'd been his neighbour at Clouds Hill. His gravestone gives his name as T.E. Shaw.
Not Lawrence. Not Chapman. Shaw. A dead playwright's name on a dead man's grave.
What the Legend Leaves Out
The 1962 film made Lawrence's legend effectively permanent in the West. But in the Arab world, the legacy is considerably more complicated. Historian Sami Moubayed has noted that while early Arab writers saw Lawrence as a passionate champion of their cause, the post-1948 reassessment has been harsh: many now view him primarily as a British agent whose ultimate loyalty was always to an empire that intended to divide the region regardless of what he personally believed. A television dramatisation of his life starring Syrian actor Jihad Saad, broadcast during Ramadan, drew poor ratings. Modern Arab audiences, Moubayed observed, had little interest in a foreign romantic hero, however sympathetic, who couldn't change what happened to them.
In Wadi Rum, where Lawrence and his Bedouin allies planned their raids on the Hejaz Railway, the tourism industry has built a version of his memory that's substantially fictional. 'Lawrence's Well', one of the landmark sites, was constructed for David Lean's film rather than by Lawrence himself. Local Bedouin from the Howaytat tribe, whose ancestors rode with him, often remember Peter O'Toole more vividly than the actual man. Michael Asher, who spent time with them, reported that some thought Lawrence was primarily a demolitions expert brought in to blow things up. The romance, as he put it, is mostly a Western construct.
His military influence is more concrete. Lawrence's doctrine of lightly armed, highly mobile irregular forces striking behind enemy lines and vanishing before retaliation shaped the founding principles of the British SAS and has been cited in counter-insurgency doctrine from Malaya to Afghanistan. American commanders including General David Petraeus cited Seven Pillars of Wisdom when drafting strategy for Iraq. Whether Lawrence's methods can win a conventional war is a different question. His own campaign succeeded in destabilising Ottoman supply lines. The peace it contributed to destroyed what it had promised to build.
Lawrence once wrote, in the closest thing he ever offered to a self-assessment: 'I'm a fraud as regards the Middle East.' He said it with something that reads like relief.
That's the thing about him that the film never quite captured. He wasn't a man who couldn't live up to his legend. He was a man who understood, better than almost anyone, exactly what the legend was made of, and who found that knowledge unbearable.
Sources
1. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
2. Michael Asher, Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia (1998)
3. John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976, Pulitzer Prize winner)
4. James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18 (2006)
5. T.E. Lawrence, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence
6. David Fromkin, The Importance of T.E. Lawrence, The New Criterion, https://newcriterion.com/article/the-importance-of-te-lawrence/
7. Tim Bray, Sex and T.E. Lawrence (2009), https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/12/20/Sexuality-of-T-E-Lawrence
8. Anthony Sattin, The Young T.E. Lawrence (2014), reviewed at https://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/i-realize_now_that_he_was_sexless/
9. Air & Space Forces Magazine, Lawrence of Airpower (2012), https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0412lawrence/
10. Spartacus Educational, T.E. Lawrence, https://spartacus-educational.com/IRQlawrence.htm
11. Sami Moubayed, cited in Forward Magazine, on Arab reception of the Lawrence legacy
12. Michael H. Hallett, The Sexual Radicalisation of Lawrence of Arabia, https://www.michaelhhallett.com/sexual-radicalisation-lawrence-arabia/
