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British archeological scholar, adventurer,military strategist, and the writer of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom(1927), an ambitious work, which combines a detailed account of theArab revolt against the Turks and the author's own spiritualautobiography. T.E. Lawrence'senigmatic personality still fascinates biographers and his legendhas also inspired filmmakers. T.E. Lawrence was better known in hislifetime as 'Lawrence of Arabia' because of the dashing role he had inhelping Arabs against the Turks during World War I. At 31 Lawrence wasan international celebrity but embittered by his country's policy hechose obscurity and died at the age of 46 after a motorcycle accident. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Carnarvonshire, NorthWales, theillegitimate son of Sir Thomas Chapman, seventh Baronet of Westmeath inIreland. Since Lady Chapman refused a divorce, he had left her, and setup a new home with Sarah Junner, a womanwho had been governess in his household. Sarah was fifteen years hisjunior. Sir Thomas moved with her to a large semi-detached house innorth Oxford, where they were known as Mr and Mrs Lawrence. Outwardlythey lived normal Victorian age life, but actually with a sense ofguilt. Lawrence was the thirdson of this union. He learned the secret of his parents at the age often. Lawrence began to read books and newspapers before going to school.From his father, who lived as a gentleman of 'independent means,' helearned to love bicycling and photography. Lawrence was educated at theOxford High School. He won a Welsh scholarshipto Jesus College, Oxford, where he read modern history. In the summerof 1909, he went alone on a walking tourthrough Syria, Palestine, and parts of Turkey. By September he hadcovered some 1,100 miles. Making careful notes, Lawrence visited 36crusader castles. His thesis on"The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture – tothe End of the XIIth Century" gained him a first-class honours degreein 1910. Lawrence was awarded a post-graduate scholarship by MagdalenCollege, and appointed by the British museum to an importantarcheological dig. In 1911 Lawrence was in Syria and participated on an expedition excavating the Hittite site of Carchemish on Euphrates. First he worked under D.G. Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and then, from 1912, under Leonard Woolley. However, digging did not really inspire him: "I am not going to put all my energies into rubbish like writing history, or becoming an archeologist," he told his mother. "I would much rather write a novel even, or become a newspaper correspondent..." On his Arabic travels, Lawrence carried three books, the romances of Malory'sMorte D'Arthur, the Greek comedies of Aristophanes, and theOxford Book of English Verse. In Egypt Lawrence worked under Sir Flinders Petrie, andtook part in a survey in Palestine. In Carchemish he became a friend of the site's 14-year-old water boy, Dahoum and taught him to read and write and dedicated himThe Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Their friendship raised eyebrows, but Jeremy Wilson has argued in his authorized biography from 1990, that rumors of a physical relationship have led many astray. During these years Lawrence acquired theknowledge of the language and customs of the Arab people. After the outbreak of World War I, he was assigned to intelligence as an expert on Arab. In 1916 he joined the forces of the Arabian sheik Feisal al Husayn. InThe Seven PillarsLawrencedescribes his first meeting with Feisal: "I felt at first glance thatthis was the man I had come to Arabia to seek – the leader who wouldbring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall and pillarlike, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brownheadcloth... His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard andcolourless face were like a mask against the strange, stillwatchfulness of his body." Taking on Arab costume himself, he began towork with Feisal to launch a fullscale revolt of the tribes. In 1916 he was captured and subjected to beatings and homosexual rape by theTurkish governor of Deraa, ''an ardent paederast'' (Lawrence's own term). Though he escaped, Lawrence was shattered by the experience. "I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with – our bodily integrity," he later wrote. Lawrence's masochist tendencies became much later public when a Sunday newspaper published an interview with a former Tank Corps private who carried out ritual floggings, at Lawrence's request, from 1925 to 1934. Professor A.W. Lawrence, the youngest member of the family and his brother's literary executor, confessed in an interview in 1986 that Lawrence hated the thought of sex. "He had read any amount of medieval literature about characters – some of them saints, some of them not – who had quelled sexual longings by beatings. And that's what he did." Numerous biographers believe that the Der'a incident did not happen, it was a deception created by Lawrence who has been credited with the quote, "On the whole I prefer lies to truth, particularly where they concern me." Brave beyond compare, Lawrence soon acknowledged as an influential figure in the Arab forces. He formed an alliance with Auda abu Tayi, leader of the Howeitat tribe, known for his courage and brutality. When one of Auda's men was lost in the desert, he went to find him. With this act, Lawrence obtained the high respect of the troops. Lawrence fought in the desert landscape of Wadi Rum. Especially Lawrence's guerrilla warfare undermined successfully Germany's Ottoman ally – they blew up sections of the vital Hejaz Railway, which carried Muslim pilgrims from Syria to holy sites, and raided Turkish positions. Lawrence claimed to have personally destroyed seventy-nine bridgesduring the Arabian revolt; in fact the number was twenty-three. During the campaigns Lawrence was wounded several times – hesuffered from dozens of bullet and shrapnel wounds. He took the port ofAqaba in July of 1917, without firing a shot, and led his Arab forcesinto the desert, distracting the Turks when the British armybegan its invasion of Palestine and Syria. However, Lawrence'smilitary victories were shadowed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, whichpromised Syria to the French and undermined the idea of an Arabhomeland in Syria. These years Lawrence later described in his workThe Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A new national hero was born, when the American journalist Lowell Thomas gained success with his lectures in London on Sir Edmund Allenby's invasion of Syria and especially Lawrence's exploits with the Arabs. On his campaigns Lawrence used the reports of Gertrude Margaret Lowthia Bell, who had investigated Arab archaelogical sites; they had met when he was on a Hittite dig and became friends. Later she joined the British intelligence division in Cairo. Like Lawrence, she never married. After World War I Lawrence accompanied the Arab delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris, first as Feisal's adjutant. He was a research fellow at Oxford and served at the invitation ofWinston Churchillas a political adviser to the Middle East Department in the ColonialOffice (1921-22). H. St. John Philby, the father of the Sovietdouble agent Kim Philby, succeeded Lawrence as Chief BritishRepresentative in Trans-Jordan. The senior Philby converted later toIslam, assuming the name Hajj Abdullah. Before his death, Lawrencecontemplated a search for the lost city of Ubar, of which Philby tellsin his bookThe Empty Quarter (1933). Charles Doughty's classic account of his 1876-78 travels in Arabia,Travels in Arabia Deserta,was reissued in 1921 with an introduction by Lawrence; the book hadcaptured his imagination in 1911-12. Later he complained of Doughty's"inhuman arrogance" and his "unshakeable conviction of his ownrightness". Lawrence refused a knighthood and the Victorian Cross. At the height of his fame, Lawrence resigned disgusted from his post and enlisted the Royal Air Force under the assumed name of John Hume Ross. He took the rank of aircraftman, the lowest in the servive. However, he did not live like a recluse, as it has been claimed. On the day of his enlistment, Lawrence sent a letter to G.B. Shaw, requesting him to evaluateThe Seven Pillars of Wisdom. When his true identitywas discovered an RAF officer tipped off the press he joined the Royal Tank Corps under the name of Thomas Edward Shaw, a name he would legally adopt in 1927. Lawrence he returned in 1925 to the Air Force as Shaw,serving in England and on a desolate RAF outpost in India for ten years. In Afghanistan he worked in an engine repair depot. Supplementing his meager income, Lawrence translatedtheOdyssey for an American publisher the project took four years. The vivid prose version of Homer'sOdyssey was a bestseller. Lawrence left the service in 1935 and movedto Moreton, Dorsetshire. There he bought a little cottage named CloudsHill. "I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen fromtheir tree and until they die," Lawrence wrote in a letter. In the last 12 years of his life, Lawrence owned seven motorcycles manufactured by George Brough. They were the fastest in the U.K. On May 13, 1935, Lawrence was in an accident near his home he tried to avoid two boys on bicycles, lost the control of hismotorcycle given to him by G.B. Shaw and slammed into the ground.Moments before the fatal crash, a black car or van was seenpassing his motorcycle. Lawrence died at Bovington Camp Hospitalwithout regaining consciousness on May 19. "Many men would take thedeath-sentence without a whimper," he had said, "to escape thelife-sentence which fate carries in her other hand." Lawrence'smonument was later erected in the old Anglo-Saxon church of St. Martinat Wareham in Dorset. St. John Philby took possession of Lawrence'spersonal files covering the years 1914 through 1921. The first draft of ofThe Seven Pillars of Wisdomdisappeared in 1919 at Reading station. Lawrence carried the manuscriptin a black banker's bag, which he put under the table. The bag wasstolen.After losing the manuscript, Lawrence rewrote it without notes, but considered the result unsatisfactory. The third version was first published in a limited edition, with illustrations by Eric Kennington. A shortened, popular version, entitledRevolt in the Desert, came out in 1927. The work has beenpraised as a literary masterpiece and condemned as an example ofmonstrous self-aggrandizement. The Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny said that he carried a copy of the book. Lawrence's other books include autobiographical account of his time in the Royal Air Force,The Mint (1936). Its matter-of-fact tone has has been compared to that of Hemingway.The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (1938) was edited by David Garnett. Lawrence's cottage at Clouds Hill in Wareham is under the care of the National Trust.The T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982), composed from Lawrence's point of view, were written by the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987). Lawrence's life and his bookThe Seven Pillars of Wisdomformed the basis of David Lean's film,Lawrence of Arabia(1963),produced by Sam Spiegel. In the 1930s Alexander Korda had planned tofilm the Lawrence legend, in 1952 Harry Cohn of Columbia had revivedthe idea, and Terence Rattigan spent three years on a script to bedirected by Anthony Asquith, starring Dirk Bogarde. When Lean launchedhis project, Spiegel told him that Marlon Brando would play Lawrence.In a letter to the director Rex Ingram, who was fascinated by exoticNorth Africa, Lawrence had written already in the 1930s: "They babblesometimes to me of making a film ofRevolt in the Desert. Ihave no property in it, so that I hope they will not. Hollywood offered�6,000 or something, which the Trustees turned down. Long may they goon turning it down. I'd hate so see myself parodied on the pitifulbasis of my record of what the fellows with me did." Peter O'Toole in the title role repeated Lawrence's fatal motorcycleaccident when a towing bar from the camera car snapped and sent thetrailer-mounted cycle straight toward a ditch. Much much of the filmwas made in Jordania, at a site in the desert called Jebel Tubeiq, but the city scenes – Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem– were shot on sets in Spain, where the port of Akaba was rebuilt. Some scenes were filmed in Morocco.Lawrence of Arabiawon seven Academy Awards; Michael Jarre's music greatly contributed to its success.The score comprised three elements: the famous 'Lawrence Theme,' agroup of "Arabian" melodies, and a varioius pieces of an atmosphericnature. Jarre turned out to be not only a very good composer for spaceand sand, but perhaps even better composer for love, snow and Russian Revolution: hismusic forDoctor Zhivago won him his second Oscar. All critics were not enthusiastic about the film. Andrew Sarris wrote in theVillage Voice :"Simply another expensive mirage, dull, overlong, and coldlyimpersonal... on the whole I find it hatefully calculating andcondescending... If a beautiful girl were stripped and then flogged forher resistence, the censors would be up in arms demanding and end tothis immorality... but let a man be stripped and flogged, and we aresupposed to be impressed with the seriousness of the theme. PerhapsLawrence of Arabia is one brutal queer film too many..." The American writerJames Baldwin compares the film toRudyard Kipling's 'Gunga Din' and sees thatLawrence of Arabiaillustrates the dilemma of all the colonizing powers, but especiallythe compulsion of the English to make the world their mirror. After hishumiliation Lawrence leads his men to massacre of the Turks. Baldwinpoints out that rape was not unknown in English public schools, and thefate of an English schoolboy "at the hands of infidels who refuse to becivilized, cannot be used to justify the bloody course of Empire, orthe ruthless stratagems of power: this schoolboy is armed with theweight of a nation, and his mortification is, or should be, nothing tothe point." Selected works:
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