T. E. Lawrence and S. A. – The Puzzle Solved                        Betty McKenzie 2002

Mrs. Fontana and the Journey Across the Euphrates       

 

How did Winifred Fontana, ostensibly W. F., become S. A.?  How was she the most significant motivation driving his campaign in Arabia?  How did a “journey across the Euphrates” symbolize the campaign?

 

She was the lady (in Arabic, sayyidatun) of Aleppo, where her husband was the British Consul during Lawrence's early years as an archaeologist at Carchemish on the Euphrates.  Lawrence spent many of the happiest hours of his young life (by his own account and by hers) visiting in their home, especially their library, and talking about books and other things of the intellect with her.  What does it matter, that in order to fit the initials S.A. the title of the English lady is rendered in Arabic, and the Syrian-Arab town spelled in English?  Such a cross-hatch cypher in fact, further confounding the puzzle-solution seeker, must have tickled T.E.'s sense of humor.

 

This chapter tells the story of how she came to be the most important motive underlying Lawrence's decision to lead the guerrilla-warfare campaign in Arabia.  It tells of how the campaign and its tragic aftermath were the culmination of a journey (safaru) across the Euphrates (al-furatu).  It tells of the canoe trip alone with her on his beloved mighty river, which came to symbolize the whole abstract concept of a journey across the Euphrates -- safaru al-furatu -- S.A. -- that dominated the prime years of his life, beginning in such clean-ness, to end alas in death.

 

How did I arrive at the assurance regarding Lawrence's bright young love -- the assurance that there was indeed a woman, and the discovery that it was Winifred Fontana who was S.A.?  The impetus was foregone -- inevitable -- given the setting in which, at age l6, I first read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  The text I read was surely the strangest of all copies of this titan of English literature.  The year was l93l.  At that time the Seven Pillars had been published only in the l926 subscribers' edition -- between l00 and 200 copies, in the handsomest of special type, illustrated with Eric Kennington's magnificent color portraits of Arabia's warrior giants, and bound in gold-tooled leather covers designed individually and personally by Lawrence himself.  Issued at approximately $l50 each (30 guineas) in l926, these volumes by l93l were already valued in the thousands of dollars, and in fact were virtually unobtainable.  It was not until many years later that I had access to a copy of the subscribers' edition.

 

What I read was a typescript, but not a typescript from a Lawrence source.  My copy had been typed out painstakingly by someone who loved Lawrence, and who since he hadn't the 30 guineas, had copied the subscribers' edition in its entirety to have for his own.  That someone was Richard B-D.  (I too must have my secret initials!)  He was my own first love.  I lived in Denmark at the time -- an imaginative, perhaps somewhat neurotic young girl who had traveled much around western Europe as the child of a foreign correspondent.  In l930, on leave of absence from The Detroit News, my father accepted an assignment to the American Legation (now Embassy) in Copenhagen.  For years prior to that time my girlhood friendships had been made only to be broken, and I had had but little real sense of closeness with youth.  In Copenhagen my friends were primarily my mother's and father's friends -- my life an adult life, at least on the surface, already.  It was there that I met and fell in love with Richard, my father's friend, who had been a British pilot in the RAF (then the RFC) during the First World War.  He was nearly twice my age, and to me a true war hero, for he had lost an arm, shot down over Germany just before the war's end.

 

Though I never met Lawrence, Richard had known him slightly and had been fascinated, drawn to the magnetism of his presence, as I later came vicariously to be.  The beginning of my involvement with S.A. stems from my lover's own interest in the puzzle and speculation revolving around the mystery identity behind the initials.

 

Richard's typescript of the Seven Pillars was more than a foot thick, each of its ten "books" collated separately with brass brads inserted through holes punched across the top.  Each had a "cover" of heavy rough-finish drawing paper, on which splashes of bright inks and pastel water colors had been dripped and the paper twisted and tilted till all ran separately and together into marvelous patterns of a brilliance that set the imagination afire.  On the first book's cover, Richard had copied the design and the words embossed into the leather cover of the subscribers' edition --  "The Sword also  means Clean-ness and Death."

 

The Seven Pillars was nearly the finish of me -- too much to cope with.  Young though I was and with a lack of understanding of all the depths of his work, I nevertheless saw in this Lawrence's book a man torn and tormented in spirit -- a child of two cultures, as I was (for Europe and the United States were culturally far distant at that time) -- a man torn in a manner threateningly close to that I now had suddenly to recognize in myself.  Should Richard not have given it to me to read?  I think, rather, he chose this means to reach out to help me -- to lead me to accept and face my own self-condemning fears.  And in truth, because Richard was there beside me for protection and strength during that first overpowering exposure to Lawrence, Seven Pillars in the end became an agent for discovery of who myself might be.

 

Part of what happened in that first reading was that Lawrence became Richard and I became S.A.  That was all right, and could be dealt with.  The problem lay beyond this, in that in some higher -- infinite or universal? -- sphere of reality, I sensed that S.A. the ephemeral, the non-specific, the dead, was all of us in one.  And this was something in the realm of the unknown, hence something to fear.

 

"I have to find out who S.A. was," I told Richard.  Rejecting all he could recall of speculation to the contrary in the five years since publication of the subscribers' edition, I persisted in contending  "S.A. is a woman," pleading for belief within myself as well as from him.  Over and over I repeated my mandate:  "I have to find out who she was."

 

Out of my need came insight which would otherwise probably have been beyond the capacity of my young mind.  Besides, in Richard himself I had a strangely -- to me, mystically present source of revelation.  Richard was by desire and by avocation a student of the medieval, with much of his leisure time devoted to the search for manuscripts of the Middle Ages, in far-flung hidden places throughout northwest Germany and the Scandinavian lands.   Through him I had learned something about and marveled at many things -- things medieval of myth and allegory in several levels of meaning  -- things mysterious and relatively unknown among the others of my family's circle of friends.  I learned too that it was Lawrence's fascination with the Middle Ages that had led Richard to this dedication of his own talent and mind.

 

Given only these insights and this much knowledge as a beginning, plus a will to study driven by my fantasy-identification, there emerged the particular basis of interpretation that I came to believe was the key to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  Not that my full understanding of the story of T.E. Lawrence and S.A., as told in the following pages, was in any sense quickly, or without hard and tireless effort, brought to its conclusion.  My first significant discoveries were reached through persistent study only of the Seven Pillars itself.  But long years and many other books had to come and pass, as did the deep sense of loss that the death of our Lawrence brought to me, before all my final answers were learned.

 

Of Lawrence the legendary figure there are many who have said, "He never loved a woman."  In Lawrence's own words however, when the key is found and they are properly pieced together, there emerges the story of a woman whom Lawrence loved so deeply, but with a love which because of his dark history he came to so condemn in himself, that the rest of his life was colored by his efforts toward resolution of his sexual and very human love for her, at another, higher level -- a level approaching the concept of divine love, hence acceptable to the relentless demands of asceticism he made upon his own body and soul.

 

One of the most substantial clues lies partly in a conversation Lawrence had with the English poet Robert Graves -- his close friend whose integrity he knew he could trust -- and partly in a letter he sent to Graves shortly thereafter.  This was in the winter of l92l-22, and is reported in the book, T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer Robert Graves, published a few years after Lawrence's death.  Graves' report states that Lawrence had been for many months driving himself to mental, physical and spiritual exhaustion in the writing of the Seven Pillars.  Late in January Lawrence visited Graves, and during their talks was severely chastised by his friend on his lack of concern for his own well-being.  He "looked so bad," Graves wrote, "that I told him he must take himself in hand.  I asked why he didn't try to find some appropriate woman who would help him to a settled life; because if he went on experimenting with solitariness like this there would be a collapse.  He said that he had never been able to fall in love:  and the hysterical pursuit of him by women who, after listening to Lowell Thomas's illustrated lectures, had fallen in love with his fame had made him avoid the society of women."

 

Graves then relates that "a few days later" Lawrence wrote him the following letter:

 

What I told you last week about my likes was not altogether

true.  There was an exception who provided a disproportionate

share of the motive for the Arabian adventure, and who after

it was over dictated the enclosed as preface to the story of it.

 

I turned it out a day ago when preparing for a printer:  and I

don't know -- It's hardly a literary question of good or bad

 (nearer the address to a letter) . . .

           

The enclosure was the brief tragedy in poetry headed by the words, "To S.A.," written by Lawrence as the dedication for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

 

Commenting on the letter and its enclosure, Graves states that he did not take the word "dictated" literally as Lawrence clearly regarded the poem as his own work.  Graves also notes that the letter was "in minute handwriting . . . . .  When Lawrence was feeling low his handwriting shrank . . . . ."  Most importantly, Graves concludes:

 

"Lawrence had told me that he had never been in love with a woman, not that he had never loved anyone; and the confession that he had not been frank with me about his 'likes' mean to me, at the time, that S.A. was a woman, as it does still.  It is likely, in view of his temperament, to have been ideal love in the mediaeval poetic tradition of knightly love for some impossibly removed lady; and it is likely too that the news that came to him shortly before the capture of Damascus spelt not the death of S.A. herself, but the death of the idea she had represented.  'The marred shadow of your gift' suggests disillusion rather than physical loss. . . .  S.A. was clearly of outstanding personal importance to Lawrence during the Revolt . . . . ."

 

 

The tragic tone and content of the poem with its opening words, "I loved you"; the "low" state of mind evident in the tense handwriting; and the fact that the poem was written "a day" before the letter to Graves, indicate that in the short period between the conversation with Graves and the writing of the letter Lawrence had been in a state of extreme stress, and deeply immersed in emotional recall of all that S.A., the woman, had meant to him.  Even if one had only these few clues to go on, together with Lawrence's statement that his poem to S.A. was "nearer the address to a letter," -- i.e., the book being the "letter" addressed to her -- it would seem clear that the love he held for this woman who provided "a disproportionate share of the motive" for his Arabian campaign had not at all diminished over the intervening years.

 

My elation when I read this Robert Graves report was boundless -- the kind of thing one wants to go shouting out around the world.  This was the first indication I had that anyone other than myself thought S.A. was a woman.  Not only that, but in addition here was clear evidence that the poem was written expressly for her, that she was thus the definitive element in S.A., the "address" to the "letter" -- that she was the key motive for his part in the Arabian campaign -- and finally, that it was for her most of all that he had written his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the "letter" itself.  Validating it all especially was the knowledge that it came from a person who knew Lawrence well -- his friend and biographer, with real facts to go on -- whereas I had had only my own assessment of what I considered key passages in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, propelled into "evidence" via what I recognized as wishful-thinking compounded by my magic magnifying mind.  Moreover, Graves not only confirmed my "S.A. is a woman" belief.  Beyond that, his entire paragraph regarding the nature of Lawrence's love for her, and "the death of the idea she had represented" rather than the death of S.A. herself, echoed exactly the conclusions I had reached through my same key passages in the Seven Pillars.  More later in this chapter regarding the said "key passages" -- too long to go into in detail just now, but one of the most significant of them is the first paragraph of SPW's epilogue:

 

Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I

landed in Arabia:  but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of

my main springs of action.  The strongest motive throughout

had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to

me, I think, every hour of these two years.  Active pains and

joys might fling up, like towers, among my days:  but, refluent

as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element

of life, till near the end.  It was dead, before we reached 

Damascus.

 

The personal motive, the "hidden urge," the "persisting element of life" -- "It was dead, before we reached Damascus."  Not a person that was dead, but "it" -- the idea that person represented.  "The marred shadow of your gift" of the S.A. dedication, as Robert Graves noted, suggests disillusion rather than physical loss.

 

Based on this and my other key passages in the Seven Pillars, together with the knowledge of Lawrence's interest in things medieval and his university thesis on Crusader Castles of the Middle East, it had been my early assessment that the entire Arabian campaign was Lawrence's personal "crusade" to free the "holy land" of his beloved lady -- this twentieth century knight crusader's own true secret love.

 

From the beginning it had seemed clear to me that the lady must be closely associated with some part of the land that would be liberated from the Turks as a result of the campaign -- "I drew these tides of men into my hands/And wrote my will across the sky in stars/To earn you Freedom . . ."  These lands ranged anywhere from Palestine to large areas of Arabia.  I also felt sure that the letters S.A. were not the initials of her actual name -- no noble medieval knight would identify his lady in his tribute -- but rather were some cryptic reference that would be known only to her and him.  At first it seemed that the simplistic could be a possibility, i.e., that the "A" stood for Arabia, and the "S" for some special name he had chosen to call her.  (Note that these assumptions were made before anything had come out publicly regarding Lawrence's several conundrum-like and often conflicting statements on the subject, some of them even seeming to be deliberately misleading to mystify further the seeker of puzzle solution.)

 

As I progressed in my study of the Seven Pillars, I narrowed my concept of his lady's holy land to Northwest Syria.  I had learned from Richard that Lawrence had spent several happy years of his youth working on the British Museum's archaeological digs at Carchemish on the Euphrates (in Northwest Syria); further, that prior to and during those years he had taken off at various times into remote areas of this land, traveling almost always on foot and almost always alone, studying, photographing, writing about, and loving its ancient and medieval castles and the wilderness beauty of the land itself.  Added to this there now came a collation of a few key references in his book.  One of them was the mysterious loner trip he took into that area during the campaign, the purpose of which was never fully disclosed.  Significant too was the fact that despite the near-obsession in his drive to liberate Damascus "the pearl," that city had never been his final goal.  This is documented in the first words of the epilogue quoted above, "Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia"; and in the epilogue's final paragraph his personal concept of the progression beyond Damascus is clearly spelled out:  "Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia . . ."  In any liberation drive from Damascus to Anatolia, freedom for Northwest Syria is implicit since it blankets that route.

 

But the blockbuster piece of evidence for my choice of this particular piece of land appears at the beginning of the Seven Pillars' Chapter XCI.  This occurs at what I believe was the absolute nadir of Lawrence's heart in his crusade, following his personal disaster at Deraa and thereafter the problems of the campaign itself, culminating in the discovery that Sherif Zeid, on whom he had depended, had -- through youth and inexperience in the handling of men and money -- ruined the hope of carrying out campaign plans necessary to keep faith with General Allenby.  (Details on all this later in this chapter and in Chapter III.)  Shattered and exhausted after Zeid's defalcation, Lawrence headed back to Allenby's headquarters, "to beg Allenby to find me some smaller part elsewhere."  There too he poured out his disillusions about the Arabian campaign and about himself to D. G. Hogarth of British Intelligence, who had been much involved with the Carchemish explorations, and who is established early on in the Seven Pillars as Lawrence's "Mentor . . . father confessor and adviser" -- clearly one of the few people Lawrence knew he could fully trust.  The outpouring to Hogarth culminates in a damning sentence of judgment upon himself:

           

My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of

circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

SPW p. 502.

 

Then a strange thing happens.  On the next page, immediately following the cry of despair to Hogarth, Lawrence tells in almost matter-of-fact tones of the British Army's request that he stay with the Arabian assignment, and of his own ready agreement to go back.  At first I felt bewildered and somewhat disappointed at his apparent cool dismissal of his so recent impassioned plea to be out of it all.  But the disappointment quickly melted into exciting new understanding when I realized the implications in the reason for his sudden about-face.  He wrote now, as prelude to his acceptance of the assignment:

 

Allenby told me that the War Cabinet were leaning heavily on

him to repair the stalemate of the West.  He was to take at least

Damascus; and if possible, Aleppo, as soon as he could.  p.503

 

Based on what I had already begun to invest in Northwest Syria, it now seemed that Aleppo might be a key word.  It was certainly the most important city in the part of Syria Lawrence so loved -- Carchemish, and the back country he had explored in his youthful "on-foot" adventures -- and it seemed likely he had spent considerable time there.  In fact, a brief description of the city in an earlier chapter of the Seven Pillars (Chapter LIX) indicates a particular appeal to him:

                    

Aleppo was a great city in Syria, but not of it, nor of Anatolia,

nor of Mesopotamia.  There the races, creeds, and tongues of the

Ottoman Empire met and knew one another in a spirit of

compromise. . . Aleppo had shared in all the civilizations which

turned about it:  the result seemed to be a lack of zest in its

people's belief.  Even so, they surpassed the rest of Syria.  They

. . . made most beautiful things . . . It was typical of Aleppo that

in it, while yet Mohammedan feeling ran high, more fellowship

should rule between Christian and Mohammedan, Armenian,

Arab, Turk, Kurd and Jew, and that more friendliness, though

little license, should have been accorded to Europeans. 

Politically, the town stood aside altogether, save in Arab

quarters which, like overgrown half-nomad villages scattered

over with priceless medieval mosques, extended east and south

of the mural crown of its great citadel.

 

(More puzzle pieces began to interlock, as I wondered -- speculation only -- whether Lawrence's loner side trip might have been undertaken to assess the then current feelings of the local people in the area encompassing Carchemish and Aleppo, regarding support for and even possible participation in the Arab Revolt, should the drive continue on northwestward from Damascus.)

 

NOTE RE LONER TRIP -- I think confirmation of my views on this, on page 90 of Graves, plus considerable on just preceding pages.  P. 90 says:  You may make public if you like the fact that my reticence upon this northward raid is deliberate, and based on private reasons:  and record your opening that I have found mystification, and perhaps statements deliberately misleading or contradictory, the best way to hide the truth of what really occurred, if anything did occur.  T.E.S.  And as a postscript, The lighter you can touch on it the better I'll be served.  Sorry:  on these points I can't afford to help you. T.E.S.

 

This then was the rationale for Lawrence's uncharacteristic docile giving in to the powers that be.  No matter how strong his intent to "beg Allenby to find me some smaller part elsewhere" -- no matter how strong his determination not to return to Arabia -- all protest vanished now with Allenby's confirmation of Aleppo as among the specific goals of the campaign.  A magic word -- "Aleppo."  He agreed to go back to Arabia.  (This, incidentally, interestingly narrowed down possibilities for the initials S.A. in relation to Lawrence's lady.  Either the "S" or the "A" might now stand for his secret name for her, with the other letter being either S for Syria or A for Aleppo.)

 

One more passage in the Seven Pillars that further confirmed my choice of Northwest Syria -- in fact, the one passage that most of all seemed to carry a message of a holy land -- was a beautiful cameo in Chapter III dealing with the spiritual life of the Semites.

 

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. . . .  A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period. . . . The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers.  My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.'

 

But at last Dahoum drew me:  'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all,' and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past.   That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. . . . .'This,' they told me, 'is the best:  it has no taste.'  My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part. . . . .The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness. . . .for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.

 

Of all the great descriptive material throughout the Seven Pillars, these lines reflect best what I believe would be Lawrence's own concept of a holy land, based on what I had learned of his character and ideals through the tapestry of personal revelations that permeates his book.  Above all, there is the key of the whole passage:  the wind blowing across this land -- the breath born somewhere beyond the Euphrates.  Lawrence never wrote one word without conscious purpose.  Carchemish was on the west bank of the Euphrates.  Across the Euphrates from Carchemish, in Mesopotamia, was the land of the Garden of Eden.  Once I found this passage in my search for the answer to his lady's "holy land," I came to wonder how I had even briefly failed to see that it lay in this single mention of the mighty river, in the very beginnings of his book -- the book that was his "letter" to S.A.

 

So Northwest Syria, bounded on the east by the Euphrates, became my place, where I now turned to search for my crusading knight's beloved.  This was the point I had reached in my thinking by the time I read Robert Graves' confirmation of my belief in S.A. as a woman.  In short, I had already pinpointed that it had to be a woman closely associated with Northwest Syria, most probably with either Carchemish or Aleppo, and possibly with both.  This could have developed into a kind of crazy-making search had I not been so fortunate as to have the Graves book sent to me at just the right time by my English lover Richard who had first introduced me to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  The Graves book and a companion volume, T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer Liddell Hart, were published in l938 and reached me a few weeks after publication with a note from Richard that yet another book would follow shortly, that is The Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, published the prior year.  I was so ecstatic over the gift that I took an unpaid vacation from work in order to plunge immediately into the enthralling prospect of reading these three books.  Fulfilling all my hopes, everything began to snowball into wild excitement.

 

First there was the Lawrence-Graves interchange that convinced Graves S.A. was a woman.  Then another report, juxtaposed with that revelation but dealing with a separate exchange of information between them which didn't occur until several years later at the time Graves was working on his biography of Lawrence (Lawrence and the Arabs, published in l927).  This report provides additional confirmation of two more of my conclusions reached through study of the Seven Pillars.  Graves writes:

 

Who 'S.A.' was I do not know, and the dedication affords no help; though it suggests that S.A. was someone who would have benefited by Arab freedom and who had indeed inspired Lawrence to his leadership of the Arab Revolt.  One of his oldest friends told me, in l927, that he believed S.A. to have been a certain Sheikh Achmed, an Arab with whom Lawrence had a sort of blood-brotherhood before the War; and that Sheikh Achmed died of typhus in l9l8.  I hinted at this in the first draft of my biography:  'Shortly before he captured Damascus there came news of a death by typhus, and this is one explanation, I believe, of his coming immediately away from the scene of his triumph and of much that has happened to him since.'  But Lawrence commented in the margin:  'You have taken me too literally.  S.A. still exists:  but out of my reach, because I have changed.'

 

"Sheikh Achmed" of course refers to Dahoum, who was not a sheik but rather the young donkey-boy at the "digs" in the happy Carchemish days, and who is identified as part of S.A. in my Chapter I.  As noted there, his actual name was Salim Ahmed, and he and Lawrence did have a blood-brother friendship.  I never questioned that Dahoum was an important part of the dedication, just always contended that he was only a part.

 

Inasmuch as Robert Graves in his own mind had established S.A. as a woman in l922, and reaffirmed that he still believed this in l938, I was temporarily at a loss to explain why he sent the above-mentioned "hint" about "Sheikh Achmed" to Lawrence for comment in the "first draft of my biography" in l927.  However I shortly arrived at a logical reason.  Graves was using this forgivable ploy in the hope of ascertaining via Lawrence's own response that Sheikh Achmed was not the S.A. of Lawrence's 1922 letter to him, thus supporting in roundabout fashion Graves' belief that S.A. was a woman.  And this of course is exactly what appears to have happened.

 

The response from Lawrence that "S.A. still exists:  but out of my reach, because I have changed," also supports my own conclusions based on my assessment of those key passages in the Seven Pillars, which Graves' other statements had already seemed to uphold.  That is, that Lawrence's love for his lady was of the reverent medieval knightly nature, and that it was not her death but death of the idea she represented that "dictated" the tragic words of the dedication.  The key lines are "Death . . . took you apart:/Into his quietness" -- and ". . . the marred shadow/Of your gift" -- the gift of freedom for her holy land for which he had embarked on his crusade, "that your eyes might be shining for me/When we came."

 

(As noted earlier, a detailed report on my "key passages" in the Seven Pillars follows toward the end of this chapter, as does my assessment of the nature of the "death" based on Lawrence's personal disaster at Deraa.)

 

Note also, while "still exists" is normally used for things extant rather than people, TE used this exact same phrase years later, in letter to his mother.  Talking about Mrs. Fontana, and her sadness over the death of her son Guido, TE states that her daughter Tacita "still exists," and is studying art.  Again, leaving a clue for future searchers for the truth.  I do not recall any other time when he used this specific phrase about a person -- only these two Fontana ladies.  Not a clue for his mother to pick up, rather for someone maybe years later, for he surely anticipated the endless chain of writers of Lawrence biographies, and I believe he did feel sure that someone, someday would discover all the truth..

 

While Lawrence's comment "in the margin" to Graves does appear to deny Dahoum, it has to be assessed within the context of his many different statements on S.A., which taken in total are confusing, conflicting, and even in some cases contradictory.  It seems reasonable to assume that the varying statements refer to the various parts of the S.A. identity.  My best guess is that Lawrence was torn between wanting to guard the secrecy of his lady and possibly of certain other aspects of S.A. as long as he should live, but wanting to assure that someday after that time had run out, the answers would all be there.  At one point, reported shortly below, he even went so far as to send Graves what seems to me to be a glaringly obvious clue to her identity, tying in with the fact that Graves was the only one to whom he ever indicated the truth that she was a woman.  Did he want Graves to pick up on this?  Or was it that he felt safe sending it to Graves and only to him, being aware of Graves' odd blind spots, but feeling sure that someday after his (Lawrence's) death, his letters to Graves would all come out -- hence this was a safe way to assure that her identity would not be made public until after his death, but might or might not be someday thereafter, depending on whether some future writer might come to care about their love enough to carry the search to its conclusion.  Thus he left us with the jigsaw puzzle, certainly one of the most complex and difficult of resolution, but also undeniably one of the most fascinating, in all literary history.

 

Concurrent with my elation upon reading the two juxtaposed reports on S.A. near the beginning of Graves' book came the realization that it would have been a sensible procedure on my part to check Graves' index for S.A. references before embarking on cover-to-cover reading.  This I promptly did.  There was only one additional reference, included in some informational material sent to Graves in l927 for use in his biography of Lawrence:   "S.A., the subject of the dedication, is rather an idea than a person."

 

This appeared to support Graves' and my view that while S.A. related to the lady who provided the "one exception" to his never having fallen in love with a woman, the use of the initials in the dedication referred rather to the ideal she represented than to her physical presence.

 

I then proceeded to follow this same sensible approach with the Liddell Hart companion book, and turned to check its index for possible references to S.A.  Here I found several.  The first was in answer to a Liddell Hart query during an interview for which no date is given:  "Who is 'S.A.' of the dedication to S.P.W.?"  Lawrence replied:  "One is a person and one is a place.  [Vague]"

 

The next is a brief passage from Liddell Hart's diary, part of a long entry dated May 27, l933 telling of fascinating talks with Lawrence, beginning after dinner and continuing "till 1 a.m., first about the Arab Revolt and then about philosophy of life" and continuing all of the following morning as they "walked about the garden."  The passage, included in a paragraph of notes on Lawrence's discussion of the Seven Pillars, reads:  "The 'personal' motive mentioned first in the concluding bit was the 'S.A.' of the opening poem.  But S.A. 'croaked' in l9l8."  The concluding bit of course refers to the Epilogue.

 

The next reference is in a report on another interview with T.E., dated August l, l933.  Liddell Hart wrote:

 

Talked of his dedicatory poem in Seven Pillars to 'S.A.'  Asked

him was there any real person or only symbolical.  He said

partly geographical.  S. and A. were two different things, 'S.' a

village in Syria, or property in it, and 'A.' personal .  Post-War.

 

This identification I judged to be referring to the site at Carchemish (property in a village in Syria), and to Ahmed (Dahoum).

 

Early that same month Liddell Hart sent Lawrence the second section of the typescript of his biography, T. E. Lawrence:  in Arabia and After, for Lawrence's review and comments.  This included a paragraph dealing with "the personal motive" which Lawrence himself had earlier identified with S.A.  The paragraph read as follows:

 

His depression was the deeper because of a factor that had

nothing to do with politics.  In the haunting poem that prefaces

the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and again in the brief epilogue,

he has confessed a personal motive that, like a magnet, had

drawn him along the road to Damascus.  Death had outpaced

him on the road, and brought the dissolution of his dream.

 

Lawrence returned the typescript with his comments on August l0.  His note on the above paragraph was:  "Before we got to Damascus.  Some time before."

 

Following up on this, in one of a collection of additional queries sent to Lawrence on September 3, Liddell Hart wrote:

 

On the page that refers to your depression at Damascus and

its relation to the poem in S.P.W. you have put a cryptic note

that does not refer apparently to any phrase of mine --

'before we got to Damascus.  Some time before.'  What does

this refer to, and mean?

 

Lawrence answered as follows:  "The unhappy 'event' happened long before we got to Damascus.  I only took D. (so far as that motive was concerned) for historical reasons.

 

I spent only a short time trying to puzzle out the several meanings that might be derived from Lawrence's various comments, but decided to postpone further efforts in that direction until I received the Letters book.  Richard's note had told me that this was a massive volume covering virtually Lawrence's entire life, and I had at first anticipated finding real enlightenment on the subject of S.A.   Now, with the degree of reticence evident in Lawrence's comments to Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, I no longer expected to find total revelation, but still hoped for enough clarification that I might arrive at some satisfactory conclusions.

 

I therefore returned to my cover-to-cover reading of Graves -- and found the answer to my search.  This is what I referred to earlier as the glaringly obvious clue Lawrence sent to Robert Graves.  In June of l927 Graves had notified Lawrence that the publishers of his forthcoming biography had given him only six weeks to collect the material and write the book -- "An impossible task," it seemed -- hence he was rushing around seeing people within reach, writing to many others, and consulting all the documentary sources available.  In response Lawrence wrote up what he termed the "facts" of his life organized in seven sections, followed by a list of sources to consult for each of these periods.

 

Section 4 dealt with Carchemish.  In Lawrence's listing of the sources for this section, here are the first few lines:

 

4)  D. G. Hogarth to whom I owe every good job (except the R.A.F.)

I've ever had in my life.  Mrs. Fontana.  Wife of former British

Consul, Aleppo.  The only person who would do justice to

Carchemish, which was the jolliest place I've ever seen.  A

marvellous, unreal, pictured pageant of a life.  Do write and call on

her.  A very special person, with the gift of feeling.

 

There she was, Lawrence's and my S.A.  I had never heard of her before and of course had never seen her picture.  Nevertheless, now, I saw her face.  Holding the book in my hands, drinking in the words Lawrence had left behind, I saw her eyes shining for me/When I came.

 

-- Her "holy land" places:  both Carchemish and Aleppo, the two key choices I had long ago made.

-- Clearly a strongly felt closeness to Carchemish, the site on the Euphrates that Lawrence so loved, and here characterized as "the jolliest place I've ever seen."

-- She herself, "A very special person, with the gift of feeling" and        "The only person who would do justice to Carchemish."

-- The fact that she was married, which fit perfectly with Graves' and my views of Lawrence's "ideal love in the mediaeval poetic tradition of knightly love for some impossibly removed lady."

 

These were the clearcut facts, evident to all.  But underlying them, eclatant, in the cypher Lawrence loved and which permeates the Seven Pillars, was the message telling me that Mrs. Fontana, absolutely beyond doubt, was S.A.  It was the final sentence -- "A very special person, with the gift of feeling."  Remembering the final sentence also of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom's dedicatory poem, ending with the words "the marred shadow/Of your gift," I reread now the final sentence about Mrs. Fontana:

 

            "A very special person, with the gift of feeling."

                                                YES --

                                    "S.P.W. -- the gift"

 

Some will call this pure coincidence.  To such, I say again, Lawrence never wrote anything by coincidence.  Every word was chosen to convey the exact meaning he sought.

 

Beyond that there is another cypher-type statement, not as dazzling in its ingenuity but a clue of a different kind, pointing a direction to the searcher for an explanation of the death of S.A.:   "Carchemish . . . a marvellous, unreal, pictured pageant of a life."  Unreal -- because somewhere during the campaign along the road to Damascus, a tragic event had brought Lawrence face-to-face with reality, and rendered the "pictured pageant" life of Carchemish unreal, and smashed his dream.

I understood now with certainty what must have happened.  The first words of Lawrence's dedicatory poem to S.A., written eight years after he left Carchemish, are "I loved you."  Here, another five years later, his still enduring love for his lady called out from this brief paragraph in the letter he sent Robert Graves to help him in the writing of his biography.  As I read it, there came back to mind that other note from Lawrence to Graves during his writing of the book -- "S.A. still exists:  but out of my reach, because I have changed."  Linking that sad line and the new cypher revelations together brought an added dimension of illuminating magnitude to what I had already guessed from my key passages in the Seven Pillars. I was sure at last exactly how Lawrence had changed, and why she was out of his reach forever.

 

The whole tragic ending -- the "death," as I came to see it -- is told in detail toward the end of this chapter.  Before I wrote it all down I wanted first to learn everything I could about Mrs. Fontana.

There had of course been no mention of her in the Seven Pillars.  I now checked my two new sources, the Robert Graves and Liddell Hart  T.E. Lawrence to his Biographer books.  The only reference in the Graves index was to the foregoing great paragraph.  There was no reference at all in Liddell Hart.

 

Fortunately The Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, which I had been awaiting with such excitement, arrived shortly.  My first reaction was disappointment, finding that in this collection of 583 letters only two were to Mrs. Fontana.  However, while these showed no evidence of the depth of his feelings for her (I didn't expect them to), they did provide in roundabout fashion several points of interest.

 

The first letter, sent from his family home in Oxford and dated two and a half months after World War I broke out, opens with praise for her successful escape from the Middle East with her two children, Guido and Tacita.  (Syria was at that time a captive part of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey was nearly certain to become an active ally of Germany.)  Mrs. Fontana had written an account to D. G. Hogarth of their flight from Alexandretta enroute their home in England, via the Midlothian, a small cattle boat.  Lawrence's letter begins:  "Mr. Hogarth has been reading to me something of the epic of the Midlothian.  I must congratulate you warmly on your enterprise, and the recording talent you show in your description of it."  He expresses some regret over the fact that Turkey now seems "to have made up its mind to lie down and be at peace with the world," and adds that "I'm sorry, because I wanted to root them out of Syria, and now their blight will be more enduring than ever."  He continues, "You have no news of Carchemish, I suppose?  I want to write to Mr. Fontana," (who apparently was still in Aleppo) "and ask him to find out how things go.  But sulphur and brimstone must be the atmosphere of the Consulate just now."  Lawrence then concludes with these words:  "Woolley has made many anxious enquiries after you:  and we couldn't find out in which continent you lay."  Leonard Woolley was in charge of the Carchemish expedition, and seems here to be a thin disguise for Lawrence's own anxiety.

 

The most revealing sentence in the letter however is a message Lawrence sends to Mrs. Fontana's two children whom he refers to as "the beast and the beaste," clearly a term of affection they all shared.  He writes:  "Offer them my salaams, and explain that in England we don't come to dinner every Thursday and Friday."  It seems evident he had a close relationship with the entire Fontana family.

 

The second letter to her dated a few weeks later is sent from the War Office in Whitehall where Lawrence has now been attached to the staff.  This letter deals primarily with steps that have been taken to safeguard the site at Carchemish.  Also he expresses concern for Mr. Fontana, of whom he has had no recent news, and specifically asks, "Will you send me news of him?"  Speaking of his own present situation he writes only that he is now to be sent to British headquarters in Cairo.  He does not mention (which is clear from other letters in the same time frame) that his extensive knowledge of Syria will be valuable in collecting intelligence.  He does however indicate to Mrs. Fontana that he expects to have some access to Syria since he asks, "Are there any commissions I can do for you in Aleppo next spring?"

 

So . . . other than affectionate family relations there was no direct evidence in letters to her to support my conclusions concerning Mrs. Fontana.  Similarly, while some information of interest appears in explanatory comments by editors of the book on Lawrence's work with the Fontanas in affairs of the Consulate, there is nothing in these reports indicating the kind of relationship I envisioned.

 

I did however find a number of references, in Lawrence's letters to others, that concerned her in an indirect way and appeared to provide some support for my theories.  Especially, there was one key letter to his mother that seemed to me to be saying something that was in his heart but which he could not bring himself to tell in direct words to anyone.  (More on this shortly.)

 

Finally, outside the realm of knowledge specifically about her, what I did find was a wealth of insights into four essential forces in the make-up of Thomas Edward Lawrence, the seeker after the "ideal standard."  First, there were the formative years spent in creating the crusading knight of the "temps perdu" of chivalry, that culminated in the nature of Lawrence's love for S.A, his lady.  Second, the building in his heart of an ineradicable link between that spirit of chivalry of the Middle Ages in Europe and the "holy land" of northwest Syria.  Third, the evidence even in early youth of his love for nature, for the earth -- for the lands and waters, and the sky and clouds, and the winds and storms, of the earth itself -- that culminated in his passionate love for the land of Carchemish and the great river Euphrates that lapped its eastern shores.  And fourth, an equally deep love for books, with some of whose content he identified so strongly that he carried over the effects of them to an intense degree in his own life.  These four forces together, I felt, were essential factors underlying the power of Carchemish as "a marvellous, unreal, pictured pageant of a life," bringing into being the beauty of this story of a twentieth century knight of the Middle Ages.  Because they are an integral part of all that I learned about Lawrence and Mrs. Fontana, I am setting forth here, as part of a single story, quotations from his letters that tell of his relationship with her, together with quotations that tell of the importance of the four forces during that period of his life when he and she lived there in such close association in his holy land.  In recounting the story I'm presenting together my discoveries in both The Letters of T. E. Lawrence and The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and his Brothers, because although the latter book was not published until some years later, the time span covered in the two volumes, except for the final year of his life, is the same.

 

 

Keys to the Severn Pillars of Wisdom

 

"L" stands for his Letters.  This is the story as I found it. Adding together for purposes of clarity the many brief threads of meaning I gathered from the Seven Pillars and later over the years from others of his published writings, the following ideas emerge:

 

l --            Lawrence asserted that the Seven Pillars was written " in

            cypher" because "on no account is it possible for me to think

            of giving myself quite away."  L-366  He further said that

perhaps one reason for the book's interest lay in its "secrecy."

            L 4l7

 

2 --    Lawrence characterized the Seven Pillars as "an old-fashioned

            book." L 488  He was from early youth a devotee of things

            medieval, absorbed in the concepts of idealism, of chivalry, of

            honor, that permeate the Middle Ages, and imbued with their

            lack of materialism and their emphasis on the spiritual rather

            than the physical realm of life.  He was a student of medieval

            literature, castles, cathedrals.  Especially he loved the Crusades

            -- read and reread one particular romantic novel on the life of

            England's King Richard I, and spent several months of his youth

            alone, often ill and hungry, in the vast emptinesses of Syria,

            studying, measuring, photographing for his pioneering

            university thesis, the Crusader Castles of the Middle East.

 

This much has long been public knowledge.  The elements that are new here are these:

 

     --  first, my proposal that Lawrence chose to make use, in certain

            important passages of the Seven Pillars, of a literary form

            prevalent in medieval prose, that is, a multi-level literal/

            figurative form;

 

     --  second, that the Seven Pillars -- clearly a magnificent document

            of guerrilla warfare, of analysis of the national character of

            Arabia, and of personal philosophy and introspection -- is also a

            magnificent, and tragic, love story;

 

     --  finally, that the essential tragedy lay in a love which Lawrence

            believed to be so idealistic, so pure in essence, so clothed in the

            nobility of the knight of the Middle Ages fighting for his lady,

            that he could not accept the inevitable moment when the whole

            superstructure of this spiritual fantasy fell before the

            earthbound truth of its genesis -- the primeval passion of

            physical, sexual love.  That it could be thus and still retain its

            beauty (even if he were to acknowledge it only in concept and

            never realize it in actuality) was a premise his idealistic creed

            could not accept, given his past and its particular relevance to

            his relationship with S.A.  Herein lay the background for much

            of his savage battle to face the extent of humanity within

            himself, the man, and to reconcile this with his equally savage

            determination to tear it out.

 

His love is mentioned only twice in the Seven Pillars, at beginning and end, and then not in wholly open context.  Nonetheless, it pervades the pages of the book in its sensed, unfathomable presence.  Its intensity as the initial force behind his Arabian campaign, and the finality of its end, form the reader's first encounter with T.E. Lawrence, in the ravaged accents of the dedication:

 

Thereafter, the reader, plunged into the epic language and the now frightening, now inspirational concepts of the opening pages -- captured and impelled onward to the end -- searches vainly for some understanding of this love that Lawrence cites as the mainspring of the campaign, then seemingly inexplicable never mentions again.  Never is the search rewarded.  Only at last in the Epilogue does an indirect allusion to his love appear once more, as "the personal motive" that remained for him "the persisting element of life till near the end."

 

All at once, in some overpowering sense of communication, I felt the light of understanding break through.  The four paragraphs of the Epilogue separated.  Its four levels of motive stood together and united in the common immediate purpose of the Arabian campaign -- yet apart from each other and perhaps at far distances in their ultimate long-range goals.  In short, I felt, reflected in the Epilogue, a realm of affinity with the multi-level literal/figurative prose of the Middle Ages that Lawrence had so loved.  Might this be a clue to the general structure of the book?  Or if not the entire book, then to some key passage that would give me the knowledge I sought?  Excited at the possibility, I began to search for similar possible multi-level meanings, though most likely not so clearly set forth, in one or more other areas of the work.  Even more exciting seemed a corollary possibility.  That is, that while I still envisioned S.A. as a woman, equated beyond doubt with the "personal motive" of the Epilogue, it now seemed reasonable to consider that the initials themselves might reflect the multi-level concept, and might be related in some way to the other three motives as well.  Above all, then, I sought first a passage that might give me some symbolic multi-level key to the death of S.A.

 

I found my key almost the moment I opened the book.  There are those who will say that the speed of the discovery was accident.  But again, I had some uncanny sense of my hand, or mind, directed by more than chance.  What happened was, that I had planned to check first certain points in the Seven Pillars where Lawrence's soul-searching -- and the inevitably resultant self-condemnation -- reach the highest peaks of intensity.  Of these, the first that I chose to assess unfolds in the chapter describing the monstrous beating to which he was subjected following his capture by the Turks at Deraa.

 

Traveling on foot in the guise of an ordinary Arab, Lawrence was seized while on reconnaissance in the Deraa area.  He was taken first to the Turkish Army's headquarters for this portion of the Arabian lands held subject by the Turkish Empire; then later, that evening, was escorted under to the residence of the local Bey.  Hauled into the Bey's bedroom, Lawrence was cajoled, urged, and pressured to engage with him in homosexual love-making, and when these machinations produced only increasingly violent resistance on the part of the captive, the Bey's soldiers were called in and ordered to take Lawrence and teach him everything.  The ensuing account is of an incredibly ferocious beating, of unspeakable filth and perverted sexual play, of fire-hot lashing torture, of rending, sickening pain.  "Completely broken," in the end Lawrence was carried back "torn and bloody" and "retching and sobbing for mercy" to the bedroom of the Bey.

 

In the last sentence of this chapter of the Seven Pillars, Lawrence writes of "the burden, whose certainty the passing days confirmed:  how in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost."  SP, p447

 

This episode having been among those I regarded as most crucial in their impact on Lawrence, its point-in-time relationship to the book as a whole remained impressed upon my mind.  Searching it out, thus, as my first potential source of the symbolic death, I took a guess, flipped open the 660-page Seven Pillars -- and found myself at a point just six pages beyond the end of the Deraa chapter.  There on the page before me, standing out with the startling clarity of a bas-relief, several inches of dazzling white space beneath it, was the key -- in a phrase so typically medieval, so perfectly representing the symbol I sought, I was convinced beyond doubt that its precise, deliberate use could not be mistaken.

 

The phrase is part of the final line of the chapter that follows the account of the torture at Deraa.  The line reads:

            " . . . . . the supreme moment of the war."

 

The supreme moment was the key.  The supreme moment meant death.  For this was precisely the term used, in the universality of faith that was the Middle Ages, to describe the end of earthly life. 

I set myself to apply to the phrase, and to the paragraph which formed its context, the concept of medieval multi-level interpretation.  In this paragraph Lawrence writes:

 

. . . . . word came . . . . . that Jerusalem had fallen (to the British); and

(General) Allenby made ready to enter in the official manner which

the catholic imagination of Mark Sykes had devised.  He was good

enough, although I had done nothing for the success, to let Clayton

take me along as his staff officer for the day.  The personal Staff

tricked me out in their spare clothes till I looked like a major in the

British Army.  Dalmeny lent me red tabs, Evans his brass hat; so that

I had the gauds of my appointment in the ceremony of the Jaffa gate,

which for me was the supreme moment of the war.  SP p 453

 

It seemed that the text could be interpreted on these levels of understanding:

 

--  In the literal sense, that is in actual historical fact, the supreme moment was this vital military victory in the British occupation of Jerusalem;

 

--  In the religious sense  (always evident in the allegories of the Middle Ages) the supreme moment was the deliverance of the Holy City from the "infidel" Turk;

 

--  Finally, as noted above, there was the interpretation of crucial significance to my searchings -- which I now saw in the meaning of the "supreme moment" at the two other medieval allegorical reference levels.  These are the tropologic. or personal, individual moral or ethical sense; and the anagogic, relating to the after life of the soul -- the final meaning that transforms the symbolic object into a spiritual truth, in the striving of inner psychic forces toward the highest ideals.  In both of these levels of interpretation, to Lawrence the medievalist, the "supreme moment" must have meant death.

 

There is the further relevant point in the odd usage of the word "catholic" (in lower case) in the first sentence of the paragraph -- which in its oddness had struck me even in my first reading of the Seven Pillars, before I had begun to look for clues.  In the context of my search, its significance became apparent as a device to call sharply upon the mind's attention, to prepare for the use of the medieval religious (Catholic) symbology; and the stated reference to "the catholic imagination of Mark Sykes" becomes thus also a cypher reference to the Catholic (medieval multi-level) imagination of T.E. Lawrence, to which we are on the threshold of being introduced.

Lawrence's British uniform, then, supplied by the British officers to substitute for his white Arab robes, in some fashion signified -- in the personal sense and in the sense of his own psychic integrity -- death.  How then?  What might this uniform, as the "gauds" of his "appointment" in "the supreme moment," mean?

 

--  In the literal, historical-actual sense the meaning was of course perfectly clear -- recognition of his status as a British serving officer;

 

--  In the sense of the religious, also, it was not difficult to discern the meaning, as his own "appointment" of himself as the 20th Century Crusader from England, in the deliverance of the Holy City;

 

--  At the personal moral-ethical and spiritual after-life levels I could detect no clear picture as yet, although in one or both perhaps his "appointment" might relate to the death of whatever he had conceived himself to be.  These "whatevers" I had yet to unravel.

 

I searched now, therefore, for a multi-level significance of the white robes.  For this I had a ready source of reference, in Lawrence's recounting of how he first donned the white robes that were to become so much a part of the Lawrence legend.  This episode is on page l26 of the Seven Pillars"

 

(Prince) Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own

while in the camp . . . . .  I agreed at once . . . . .  Hejris exercised his

fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and gold-embroidered

wedding garments which had been sent to Feisal (was it a hint?) by

his great-aunt in Mecca."   SP p l26

 

"Was it a hint?" Lawrence asked, with apparent reference to Feisal.  But it seems reasonable to link the hint also to Lawrence's own whole complex of involvement in the Arabian campaign.  The white robes, the "wedding garments," then, would signify:

 

--  In the literal historical sense, the marriage of the British and Arab armies (and in Jerusalem, the robes thus were exchanged temporarily for the British uniform, because this was an all-British victory);

 

--  In the religious sense, a marriage-to-be in the dual deliverance of Jerusalem and Mecca, holy cities of the Christian and Moslem faiths (and the robes exchanged temporarily for the British uniform, to mark deliverance of the highest shrine of the Christian west);

 

--  At the personal moral-ethical level, did the white wedding garments stand for his highly idealized fantasy marriage to S.A. -- and were they exchanged for the British uniform to mark the "supreme moment," the end, the death of their love and his hopes?

 

--  And finally, and to Lawrence perhaps the most important of all, there was the spiritual after-life sense, that is, his sense of the integrity of his own self-image, his own soul.  Buried deep in the cloud of unknowing of centuries old Chrstian ("Catholic") tradition, clothed though it might be, in Lawrence, in twentieth century intellectual sophistication, did the white wedding garments signify his marriage to his own particular saviour-Christ -- the marriage of himself to his search for the "ideal standard"?  How terrible for him, then, this final death would be.

 

If these last two premises were correct, then why?  What had happened?  In Jerusalem?  Or just before?  Ah, just before . . . . .

 

The death told here, surely and tragically, came to him at Deraa.  For Deraa had been only short days before Jerusalem.  And in what Lawrence wrote about Deraa, there were words that said -- and left unsaid -- the total character of the torture he suffered.  Knowing -- yet hoping that I did not know, I went back and read again Lawrence's words near the end of the beating:

 

. . . . . he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin.  This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth . . . . .   Another slash followed.  A roaring, and my eyes went black:  while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang.   SP p 445

 

This, then, was the death that took S.A "apart into his quietness."  Lawrence's death -- the death of the core of life within him.

 

Was Lawrence, in fact, rendered impotent by the beating?  There is certainly some basis for this conclusion in view of the above lines.  (Note, too, the possibly weighted use of the phrase "trying impotently to scream," and of "the rending nerves," significant in the variant meaning of the word "nerve" in the Middle Ages to signify sexual potency.)  Robert Graves article in Saturday Review is source for this.  Possible further basis exists in statements made in later years by Lawrence (though it should be understood that each of these is open to alternative interpretation).  One such ambiguous statement, for example, occurs in the series of letters on his early experience in the Tank Corps some years after the war's end.  Referring to his crying out against what he called the "pervading animality of spirit" among the men in his hut, he writes:

 

I cried out against it, partly in self-pity because I've condemned myself to grow like them, and partly in premonition of failure, for my masochism remains and will remain, only moral.  Physically I can't do it:  indeed I get in denial the gratification they get in indulgence.  Letters, p. 4l6

 

There is however no need to know whether or not the lashing finally resulted in actual impotence.  What is certain is that the nature of the beating itself, unspeakable and sexually cruel, brought to Lawrence the sudden undeniable realization of the tremendous importance sexual love and physical ability had for him -- and the end result was an injury of a different nature but of no less order of severity.

 

To understand the degree of the injury, there must be remembered first the fact of Lawrence's illegitimacy, which though his own intellectual and logical mind accepted it without rancor, nonetheless haunted him as a symbol of the weakness of will and spirit in the face of the force of lust.

 

With this in the background, there had evolved in Lawrence, as a result of his innate character and of his early life and readings, a purity and nobility in direction of thinking, and a not fully conscious inclination toward asceticism.  By the time he reached Carchemish on the Euphrates, near Aleppo (in Syria), as a young archaeologist, this inclination together with his self-steeping in the romance and chivalry of the Middle Ages had developed in the young man an ideal of love as a sublimely passionate thing, devoid of those qualities he associated with carnal lust.  He had read and reread, and called a "marvelous book" (Betty check exact wording) Maurice Hewlett's The Life and Death of Richard Yea and Nay, on Richard I (Coeur de Lion) and his beloved lady Jehanne -- the knights fighting for their ladies.  Moreover he had steeped himself in the medieval French troubador love poems, the spirit of which had been brought to Provence by Arab lute players.  The troubadour fixed his devotion on a lady and won from her love a mystical power that he claimed would overcome every obstacle, the bond acquiring a sacred character.  All the force of this love, so I came to believe, he turned in the Carchemish-Aleppo years to dreams of one woman, to be realized in an ephemeral, never totally thought-out life spent, not in physical marriage because she was already married, but in a closeness in time and place to her presence, on a small "site" of land he would have for his own, in this bit of the world where they had met and moved and shared in gaiety and happiness.  Here, there would come to perfection between them a marriage of spiritual love, of friendship, of companionship, of feeling -- enduring, in his bright, not-quite-clear dream, forever.

Hence, in the Arabian campaign, in his white wedding garments, he became the worshipful crusading knight, fighting for his lady -- the prize of victory to be freedom from Turkish rule for this little bit of land that formed the kingdom of their love -- the gift he would lay at his lady's feet, that her "eyes might be shining for me/ When we came."

 

At Deraa, this too narrow idealistic view of himself had its first full confrontation with the tremendous well of passion that was in him; the sudden awareness of wanting her physically too, shocked into consciousness by fear of the loss he faced in what perhaps was happening to his body in the beating; his tortured suffering and final cry for mercy lest the lash of the whip across his groin take from him his "core of life" -- his physical sexual strength that he had thought tohold beneath significance in the purity of his love for her -- the strength he knew now he valued desperately, who had thought only to despise.  He faced this recognition under circumstances so tragic and degrading that he saw the degradation not in the circumstances but in himself and his love.  That she was married -- as his father had been married -- called down his final damning judgment on himself.  And in horror at what he believed he saw, he lashed out at what was in truth part of the fullness of warmth and humanity that made his special beauty, condemning himself to death in love, not to feel what he felt so deeply, in a madness to crush out all that was sexual and physical within him.  In this condemnation, whether or not he had actually been rendered impotent no longer mattered, as he relentlessly carried out the self-command to impotence that his will had decredd for his "soiled body" and "empty soul."

 

Compounding his self-revulsion were two other aspects of knowledge of himself, brought to consciousness in the course of the Deraa beating.  First, there was clear indication of masochism.  Describing a momentary lull in the flogging, before the final lash of the whip into his groin, he writes:

 

            . . . . . lying on my back on the dirty floor . . . . . I snuggled

             down, dazed, panting for breath, but vaguely comfortable

             . . . . . a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling

             through me . . . . .   SP, p. 445

 

During the ensuing days, in the process of accepting the truths of his responses to the beating, he would have recognized the not infrequent association of masochism with the half-conscious asceticism and the repression of sexual love that characterized his association with S.A.

Finally, he condemned himself for his capitulation to pain and fear as, "completely broken," he was carried "sobbing for mercy" back to the bedroom of the Bey.  Whether actual homosexual activity followed is not clear.  Both in the Seven Pillars and in his official reports, Lawrence indicated that it did not.  Those who contend that it did take place cite a letter Lawrence wrote some years later (in early l924) to his friend and confidante, Charlotte Shaw (Mrs. George Bernard Shaw).  He states:

 

About that night.  I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk

about such things.  I wanted to put in plain in the book, & wrestled

for days with my self-respect . . . . .  which wouldn't, hasn't let me. 

For fear of being hurt, or rather, to earn five minutes' respite from a

pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are

born into the world with -- our bodily integrity.  It's an unforgivable

matter, an irrecoverable position:  and it's that which has made me

forswear decent living, & the exercise of my not-contemptible wits

& talents.

 

You may call this morbid:  but think of the offence, and the intensity

of my brooding over it for three years.  It will hang about me while I

live, & afterwards if our personality survives.  Consider wandering

among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying 'Unclean, unclean!'

(source for this letter is the Knightley-Simpson book, The

Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, p. 2l4.)

 

The letter does not however make it entirely clear that homosexual activity actually took place.  True, Lawrence confesses here that he "gave away (his) bodily integrity."  But the account in the Seven Pillars also made it clear that -- in the mere fact of capitulating -- he had "given" this "away."  The only thing that is "put . . . . . plain" in the letter which is not directly mentioned in the Seven Pillars is one of the reasons for Lawrence's capitulation, that is, the "fear of being hurt" -- surely a delicate way of conveying the fear of impotence.  Considering all the knowledge of himself that that phrase represented in his own mind, this could well underlie Lawrence's statement in the letter that "decent men don't talk about such things."

 

This view is partially borne out in another letter Lawrence wrote concerning the Deraa episode, this one in August of l922 to Edward Garnett, his valued critic and friend, in answer to Garnett's report on his first reading of the as yet unpublished Seven Pillars.  The letter to Garnett reads in part:

 

           If that Deraa incident whose treatment you call severe and serene

            (the second sounds like a quaint failure to get my impressions across,

            but I know what you feel) had happened to yourself you would not

            have recorded it.  I have a face of brass perhaps, but I put it into

            print very reluctantly, last of all the pages I sent to the press.  For

            weeks I wanted to burn it in the manuscript:  because I could not tell

            the story face to face with anyone, and I think I'll feel sorry, when I

            next meet you, that you know it.  The sort of man I have always

            mixed with doesn't so give himself away.   Letters, p. 358

 

It seems clear in this letter that Lawrence feels he has in fact got his "impressions across" even though he has not "put it plain."  It is not unreasonable to think that, in that early l920's era, Lawrence would have calculated that his reasons for capitulation as reported in the Seven Pillars might come off clearly, or "plain," to a man (Garnett) where they would not to a woman (Mrs. Shaw).

 

In any event, though this matter, like the question of impotence, is thus open to alternative interpretation, the significance, again, lies not so much in whether or not Lawrence was in fact used homosexually by the Bey.  To Lawrence himself, what mattered was that his will had broken -- that he had permitted the total extent of pain and the fear of sexual injury to force him into giving in and crying for mercy, knowing what the consequences of such capitulation would be -- that, in accepting submission to such a thing, he himself had forfeited the one thing he valued most in life:  his personal integrity.  Such a "giving away" on his part, and all the truths that lay beneath it, would have been enough, in his overly sensitive mind, to brand him as "unclean, unclean."

Gathering into one massive cloud of sin-guilt-atonement all the nightmare horror of Deraa -- setting himself as his own cold, relentless, unforgiving, punishing God -- he wrote his spirutual death into the last sentence of the chapter:

 

            . . . . the passing days confirmed:  how in Deraa that night the

            citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.   SP, p.447

 

For the sake of clarity, in recounting my story up to this point,  it has seemed best to tell many aspects in their entirety as I finally put all the pieces together.  However it should be recalled that during the first years of my search I had no knowledge whatever, nor did Richard, of any specific woman in Lawrence's life who might fit the emerging pattern of an early love.  Richard had told me what he knew of Lawrence's archaeological work as a young man on the site at Carchemish, but his knowledge was only in the context of Lawrence's interest in the findings at the site -- of his absorption in the ethos of the Middle Ages and of his university thesis on the Crusader castles of the Middle East -- of his long solo journeys on foot along the Euphrates and across the lonely vastnesses of Syria -- of his love and loyalty for this land and for his Arab friends.  About the lady of Aleppo we knew nothing.

 

Further, no knowledge had reached the broad public level at that time of the fact that Lawrence's father had never been free to marry his mother.

 

Hence my initial assessment of the Deraa beating in relation to S.A. was that there had been a woman (unidentified as yet by me) whom Lawrence loved; that he had in fact been rendered impotent by the lashing of the whip; that he therefore felt he could not hold her to their love after the "core of life" had left his body; and that this, and only this, was the death that had taken S.A. "apart into his quietness."  I had no thought at that time that his lady might be a married woman.  Only after Lawrence's death, with the publication of several related books, and when all the clues he had left for Robert Graves came to light, did I at last discover this identity I had sought for so long -- the name of the lady, the fact that she was married, and that her husband too was Lawrence's friend -- that Lawrence had first met her in Aleppo as a young man of 22, and that during his years of work on the "site" at Carchemish, her home in Aleppo had become a sanctuary of harmony and peace for him.  Only many more years later, after Lawrence's illegitimacy became public knowledge, did all the tragic implications of possible self-inflicted psychological impotence -- sealing with certainty what might or might not have occurred at Deraa in the way of physical tragedy -- finally grow clear in my mind.

 

The books that provided many of the clues were T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, edited by his brother, A. W. Lawrence (l937); The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett (l938); T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer, Robert Graves, and T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer, Liddell Hart (both published in l938); The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and his Brothers. edited by his brother, M. R. Lawrence (l954); Oriental Assembly, edited by ? A. W. Lawrence, containing the suppressed introductory chapter of the Seven Pillars, as well as Lawrence's notes made on his early journeys on foot about the Middle East (l9??); and finally Lawrence's own second book, The Mint, which he was planning to publish at the time he died, of which a few copies were printed in l936, and which was finally published for general consumption in the mid l950's.  I obtained important additional information from two short essays by Robert Graves, one an article in the June l5, l963 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, the other his preface to Idries Shah's book, The Sufis, published in l964.  Indeed, Robert Graves came so close to the answer, and he had all the necessary clues,  it has often amazed me that he didn't see it all clearly.  Some lack of insight?  Probably.  I wondered at one time whether he had known the truth, and withheld it in consideration for his friend.  Now I think, however, that had he known the truth, he would have withheld it only as long as T.E. was living, but after his death -- no.  As backup for my view on this, I cite the first paragraph in the Saturday Review article, in which Graves displays a sense of being injured that no one had consulted him in making a TV program about Lawrence, since he knew so much.

 

See the text of the article by Robert Graves, published in the June l5, l963 issue of the Saturday Review, pp. l6 and l7, for Graves’ views on S.A.

 

Home Letters letter dated April 20, l9l4, from Carchemish, page 295, second paragraph, which I think is first mention of the plan to buy a "Euphrates village" . . . . ."and we suggest one called Beiluna" (not surprisingly almost the same name as the town where the Fontanas' summer place is located) (and also not surprisingly) "just over the river from Dahoum's village" (bringing both of the two people who are part of S.A. into this "village in Syria, or property therein") . . . . ."It is quite small, only three or four square miles, but very good land, and quite undeveloped.  Much of it is uncultivated since Roman times.  The flowers are now out over the plain, for today is our first sunny day after a week or so of rain . . . and the whole place looks fresh and proper."  

 

The following section provides background: Lawrence’s historical archeological pursuits prior to Carchemish.

 

In the chronicle of the creation of Lawrence the crusading knight, one of the important early records lies in a letter to his mother, written from Evreux on August 11, 1907, during one of his late-teenage-years extended bicycle tours of France.  According to his mother, "In the summer holidays of 1906-7-8 he cycled all over France, visiting the old ruined castles, photographing, drawing, and planning them."  And, "He was very strong and healthy, and could ride over a hundred miles a day on his bicycle (not a motor bicycle)."  Then "In June 1909 he went to Syria and walked about the country for three months . . . He visited all the important ruined castles of the Crusading periods; many of these were in places most difficult to get at up in the hills . . . The results of his research were summed up in the Thesis he wrote for his Finals.  He got a First Class in the Honours School of History in 1910."  The thesis, titled The Military Architecture of the Crusades, later became widely known in its published form as Crusader Castles of the Middle East.

 

In the above-mentioned August 1907 letter to his mother, he writes of his first visit to the Chateau Gaillard, the long impregnable fortress on the Seine west of Paris, built in the 12th century, with its planning and construction under the direct personal supervision of Richard I, the "Lion Heart."  Lawrence's excitement over this magnificent monument of history is clear in his letter:

 

"Father is out" (his father had joined him in Petit Andelys, the

small town on the Seine below the castle), "and so I am at last

writing to you.  I would have written before, but was so busy

taking photos, etc. at Chateau Gaillard . . .    The Chateau Gaillard

was so magnificent, and the post cards so abominable, that I

stopped there an extra day, & did nothing but photograph, from

6.0 a.m. to 7.0 p.m.   I took ten altogether,  and if all are

successful, I will have a wonderful series.  I will certainly have

to start a book.  Some of them were very difficult to take, and

the whole day was very hard.  I think Pt. Andelys would be a

good place to stop at.  The hotel is cheap and very pleasant.  The

Seine runs near the back door, & the bathing is excellent, from a

little wooded island in the centre of the river.  There are plenty

of hills in sight, & many interesting places.  Also the scenery all

along the river is exceedingly fine.  Long strings of barges

pulled by a steam-tug pass the hotel occasionally, and the whole

place is over-shadowed by the hills with the ruins of the

Chateau.  I have talked so much about this to you that you must

know it all by heart, so I had better content myself with saying

that its plan is marvellous, the execution wonderful, and the

situation perfect.  The whole construction bears the

unmistakable stamp of genius.  Richard I must have been a far

greater man than we usually consider him:  he must have been

a great strategist and a great engineer, as well as a great man-

at-arms.  I hope Mr. Jane will emphasize this in his book.  It is

time Richard has justice done to his talents.

 

Prior to these journeys "all over France" the hero-worship of the knights of medieval times had already been building for years in the young Lawrence.  His mother tells us, in her essay on her famous son in T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, that "From the time he was quite a small boy he was very interested in brass-rubbing, and went to all the churches in and around Oxford; and when he got older made long journeys on his cycle to every place in England which had famous brasses of Knights; he covered the walls of his bedroom with them, and they made a wonderful show, especially by firelight:  some of them were over life size."  His interest in times medieval extended yet further.  One of his other major activities as a boy, his mother tells us, was "putting old pottery together."  He "brought back quantities of it which he got the men engaged on digging deep foundations for houses in the city to keep for him.  He put the fragments together with plasticine, and built up many fine pots and jugs, etc., of things broken and thrown away hundreds of years before.  A number of these pots are now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  The study of old pottery took him constantly to the Ashmolean, and it was while arranging the medieval cases there with the Assistant Keeper that he first came in contact with Mr. D. G. Hogarth, who had just become Keeper."  As mentioned earlier, Hogarth was the man Lawrence called his "Mentor . . . father confessor and adviser," and was one of the most important among those figures exerting a strong influence on Lawrence's life.

 

One of Lawrence's closest boyhood friends, in this period when his investigation of the romance of the medieval began, was C.F.C. Beeson, a fellow-student at the Oxford High School.  Writing his essay in T. E. Lawrene by his Friends, Beeson states that in 1903 at the age of fourteen he began to do much in the company of Lawrence.  "During the following four years the enduring bond of our friendship was archaeological research, undertaken by Lawrence with a passionate absorption . . . It was a dominant factor in the environment of his adolescence.

 

"At the age of fifteen he was well versed in monumental brasses . . . Under his tuition my first brass was rubbed at Wytham in October 1904; and from that date onward throughout the following school years we made excursions by cycle to nearly every village in the three counties and to many places farther afield . . . There was much searching in libraries for the histories of those priests and knights and ladies . . .Heraldry displayed an alluring field . . ." and "a herald's jargon was permanently acquired, which, with many another special terminology, eventually enriched the vocabulary of the Seven Pillars.

 

"Brasses and the bypaths they opened into medieval history confirmed the gradual concentration of Lawrence's interest in the development of Gothic architecture and the design of military buildings in particular.  Towards the end of 1905 most of the accessible British examples had been exhausted; a winter's reading in the Radcliffe and Ashmolean libraries prepared the way for an investigation of the ruins and restorations of France.

 

"A bicycle tour of the country north of the Loire was planned for the summer vacation of 1906.  In August of that year I was able to join him in the exploration of parts of Brittany.  We met at St. Malo, each equipped for the venture with a small American-cloth covered basket (handiwork of our respective mothers) on the rear carrier, a waterproof cape and spare boots on the handlebars . . .The Ctes du Nord and Finisterre were covered closely in search of cathedrals and the less known fortifications . . . Lawrence's main preoccupation was with the minds of the designers of these defensive works and the extent to which history had tested their intentions.  He talked little of campaigns and military art in general."

 

Beeson joined Lawrence only briefly on his two subsequent summer trips, but writes with admiration of Lawrenc'e 1908 final venture in the studies "all around France" (T.E.s mother's terminology).  "The summer of 1908," Beeson wrote, "was devoted to the most ambitious of his itineraries, a grand tour of France that took him down to Aigues Mortes and Carcassonne -- weeks of frugal living and strenuous riding . . . The main objective was . . . the evolution of medieval military architecture."

 

Among the many wonderful experiences of the 1908 tour, three events seemed to be outstanding.  While the second and third of these concerned castles, the first was of quite a different nature, but equally important in Lawrence's growing sense of linkage to the Middle East.  This occasion was his first view of the Mediterranean Sea, and he describes its great significance for him in a letter to his mother, written from Aigues-Mortes on August 2nd:

 

From Arles I rode to Les Baux, a queer little ruined & dying

town upon a lonely "olive-sandalled" mountain.  Here I had a most

delightful surprise.  I was looking from the edge of a precipice down

the valley far over the plain, watching the green changing into brown,

& the brown into a grey line far away on the horizon, when suddenly

the sun leaped from behind a cloud, & a sort of silver shiver passed

over the grey:  then I understood, & instinctively burst out with a cry

of (the sea, the sea) that echoed down the valley, & startled an eagle

from the opposite hills:  it also startled two

French tourists who came rushing up hoping to find anothe of the

disgusting murders their papers make such a fuss about I suppose. 

They were disappointed when they heard it was "only the

Mediterranean”!

 

A couple of days later, he continues, from Aigues-Mortes:

 

I bathed today in the sea, the great sea, the greatest in the

world:  you can imagine my feelings:  the day was lovely, warm, a

light wind, & sunny:  the sea had not our long rolling breakers, but

short dancing ripples . . .

 

'And from the waves sounds like delight broke forth.'

 

The beach was hard sand as far as the eye could reach, and

sand rippled like the waves themselves:  t'was shallow, and all most

lovely, most delightful.

 

                                                              'I love all waste

                        And solitary places:  where we taste

                        The pleasure of believing all we see

                        Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:--'

 

You are all wrong, Mother dear, a mountain may be a great

thing, a grand thing, 'but if it is better to be peaceful, and quiet, and

pure, pacata posse omnia mente tueri, if that is the best state, then a

plain is the best country': the purifying influence is the paramount one

in a plain, there one can sit down quietly and think, of anything, or

nothing which Wordsworth says is the best, one feels the littleness of

things, of details, and the great and unbroken level of peacefulness of

the whole:  give me a level plain, extending as far as the eye can

reach, and there I have enough of beauty to satisfy me, and

tranquillity as well!  . . .But for my bathe -- that was a lovely time.

I  felt that at last I had reached the way to the South, and all the

glorious east; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Cicily,

Crete . . . they were all there, and all within reach . . . of me. . . . Oh I

must get down here,-- farther out again!  Really this getting to the sea

has almost overturned my mental balance . . .

 

Two points in this last paragraph seemed noteworthy.  First, when including the Middle East in the list of places to which the "greatest sea" will lead him, he already singles out Syria.  And second, in his emphasis on his love for an open plain as opposed to a mountain, there would seem to be a precognition of his later craving for the sense of freedom in the unlimited horizons of the desert lands of Arabia.

 

The second outstanding experience of the 1908 summer journey came with his first visit, a short time later, to Carcassonne.  As the Mediterranean was "the greatest," so also Carcassonne.  A letter of great enthusiasm went to "Scroggs," friendship's name for his schoolmate Beeson:  He wrote simply:

         "Carcassonne."

Then:

 

I'm not going to describe that:  'tis impossible, impious to

attempt such a thing: go and see it, expecting to find the

greatest thing of your life, and you'll find one many times

finer.  How on earth has it remained unknown with its

memories and its remains, when people flock to a St. Michel or

the Tower of London?  It is ten thousand times finer than

these, or a hundred like them, rolled into one.  I have 40 odd

photos, which do it sad injustice, but nothing could do it

anything else:  and there are no guides, no fees, no tips, no

beggars, hardly any trippers: 'tis a paradise of a place . . .

 

Another letter filled with fascinating information went to his mother, reflecting Beeson's comment that the main objective of the 1908 trip was the evolution of medieval military architecture.  The letter reads:

 

. . and so to Carcassonne.  This place is absolutely indescribable.

It is of all dates:  much Roman work:  much Visigothic, a

splendid Saracenic tower, some Carolivingian work, and

mediaeval of all sorts to the end of the 14th century:  nothing

later  except a very little modern restoration.  This makes it the

most interesting & most valuable object-lesson in military

architecture (for at all periods it was a first-class fortress) and

it happens also to be wonderfully picturesque.  An artist in

black & white could obtain most marvellous effects (there is no

colour in the building, & no creepers or plants) and there are

some fine photographs to be bought.  I have 24 post cards, and

some of those giant p.c.'s.  They should be framed when I get

back.  Also I have a superb plan, showing the different periods

of the buildings.  In fact I spent 5 francs in getting about the

place, & getting views.  When it clears today I'll go up there

again.  It is quite small, (about a mile round) but every inch has

two lines of defence, with a fine castle in the inside of all.  This,

they say, is early twelfth century, but that's all rubbish.  It is

late in the century, or else early thirteenth.  All the same there

is much of the twelfth for me; so much that I cannot satisfy

myself upon it:  in fact could only do so by carting it back to

Oxford, & fixing it on Brill hill.  From it there are glorious views

both over Cevennes & Pyrenees, but I do not intend to go over

either.

 

Of particular interest here is his notation regarding the "splendid Saracenic tower."  The conclusion is clear (and knowing Lawrence, who whenever he studied anything studied it thoroughly, this probably could have been assumed) that he was cognizant of the extent of Arabic influence on military architecture in southwestern France dating from the period of the Arabian Empire.

The third of the three outstanding experiences of the 1908 trip, in the context of the evolution of medieval military architecture, was clearly the high point of that last, "most ambitious" summer holidays study -- one of the great achievements of the entire three years' dedication to his goal.  It came at Chalusset, with the discovery of one item of knowledge he had long been seeking for his Oxford thesis-to-be.  To Beeson he wrote of Chalusset:  "a most wonderful  thing of the thirteenth century, fine castle with donjon of the twelfth century and a large beak on the front of it.  'Eureka.'  I've got it at last for the thesis:  the transition from the square keep form:  really it is too great for words."

 

He notes too that "Challuset . . . Chalus is where Rich. I. got his final wound . . . he died near Poitiers."

 

Mentions of Richard I and/or of his Chateau Gaillard spring up repeatedly in Lawrence's letters home.  Not surprising.  Just as there were many great leaders in the war of 1914-1918, so too there were many in the Crusades.  But Richard Coeur de Lion was the dazzling, brilliant personality of those most spectacular battles of medieval times, as Lawrence later came to be in the campaigns of the first intercontinental conflagration of modern times -- our Twentieth Century's "World War."

With regard to Richard I's death as reported in the above letter to Lawrence's friend Beeson, the mention of Poitiers is extremely significant.  In the year's time since the impact on Lawrence of his first contact in person with the Chateau Gaillard and the brilliance of Richard its creator, he would surely -- in view of his already powerful identification with the era of knights and chivalry -- have made a deeper study into Richard's life and personality and accomplishments.  This in turn would surely have led Lawrence to study also one of the greatest influences in Richard's life, that is, his equally accomplished and even more influential mother, the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine.  (For a nutshell summing up of Eleanor, it might be said that she was a spectacular lady. the extent of whose impact on history and culture and literature is truly phenomenal.)

 

Poitiers is one of the key points at the heart of Eleanor's fame.  All that led up to it is in itself a story that would have appealed particularly to Lawrence, already enthralled with knights and chivalry and involved in intensive study of France of the Middle Ages, which was now extending, via the Crusades, into the Middle East, particularly Syria.

 

Aquitaine was a very large area of southwestern France, with borders that varied as conquests came and went.  Poitiers was its center.  Eleanor's grandfather was Guillem, seventh Count of Poitiers and ninth Duke of Aquitaine.  Eleanor became the richest heiress in Europe, with Aquitaine in her day controlling lands from the Loire to the Pyrenees, and from the Auvergne to the Atlantic.  One of its most fascinating areas, for Lawrence, would have been Provence, land of the Troubadours who sang of the knights and their love for their unattainable ladies -- and it was there that Eleanor grew up.

 

In 1137 she married Louis VII of France, and about ten years later accompanied him when he took off on the Second Crusade.  (She took her Troubadours with her!)  A group of earlier Crusaders, after their battles were over, had elected to stay in Antioch, in Syria.  Now the Second Crusaders stopped off in Antioch, where Eleanor's uncle Raymond was the current ruler.  The interesting result is described in The People of the Secret, a well-documented book by Ernest Scott which I found particularly interesting because it told in detail of many aspects of medieval Europe which I had already determined were significant elements of Lawrence's own identification with those times.  Scott writes:

 

 “(Raymond's) court, over which he presided in great style, included Christians,

Moslems and Greeks.  Some of the original Crusader-conquerors had married

Saracen women, and the second generation was more than half Moslem in their

ways.  The exotic surroundings and the luxury in Raymond's court appealed

greatly to Eleanor, who may well have known a family tradition in such

matters from her grandfather.” --  Guillem, who according to Scott had had

Arabic contacts in Syria or Spain.

 

Eleanor decided she wanted to stay in Antioch with her uncle, but her husband Louis took her back to France by force.  As Scott points out, "This was an action which had far-reaching effects indeed, leading as it did to the transmission of certain influences like the orders of chivalry into England."  Eleanor promptly had her marriage dissolved, and married an even bigger catch -- Henry of Anjou who was not long thereafter to become Henry II, King of England.  Quoting Ernest Scott again:

 

The early years of her second marriage were spent at Angers,

which rapidly became a resort of Troubadours, and an academy

of the cult of courtly love . . .  "In 1154 Henry and Eleanor were

crowned King and Queen of England, but it quickly became

apparent that neither her second husband nor the English climate

was agreeable to Eleanor . . .  (She) withdrew to Poitiers where

she devoted her entire resources to developing the Love Court in

its final form.  Poitiers became a university of courtesy, Troubadour

poetry and chivalry, an academy of the courtly arts to which

the nobility from far and near came for instruction.  Several

future kings and queens and many future dukes and duchesses

were educated in Eleanor's campusÊand returned home to

model their own courts on hers.  Thus the courtly ideal and the

lyrical love poetry were distributed over Europe.

 

Eleanor's second husband, Henry II, was of course the father of Richard Coeur de Lion, and Richard was her favorite son.  Eleanor outlived Henry by several years, and when Richard his successor took off as a leader in the Third Crusade, she took over the government of England.  On his w ay home from his Crusade, Richard was temporarily imprisoned, and according to Scott "passed his time composing Troubadour poetry!"  And of great import in the story of T. E. Lawrence, Scott emphasizes the following information regarding the Troubadour songs:

 

Significantly, the lady was unobtainable, even at ordinary

level, for she was not a maid, but a married woman.  Strangely

enough, her husband did not seem to regard the suitor as an

enemy or even a rival.

 

In Lawrence's case, in his relationship with Mrs. Fontana, neither he nor she would ever have identified him as a "suitor," but other than that, the scene set forth by Scott presents an accurate picture of these three friends, and fellow-lovers of Carchemish -- young Lawrence and Mr. and Mrs. Fontana.  And I cite all this information on the lives of Richard and Eleanor as further validating an existing background of the knight-crusader already so deeply entrenched in Lawrence's soul, that when the lovely Mrs. Fontana came along she came only to fulfill his destiny -- to make an already perfect dream come true.

 

In Lawrence's association of the land of Carchemish with the knights of Europe's Middle Ages -- their culture of chivalry and the idealistic love of the unattainable ladies for whom they fought their battles -- the most important initial element was his intense interest in the Crusader Castles of the Middle East.  As time went on additional elements strengthened the link.  Among these would have been the influence on Syria of the considerable number of Crusaders who fell in love with the exotic surroundings in the lands they had conquered and elected to make their future lives there.  But perhaps even more significant for Lawrence was the reverse influence of the Middle East on the life of Europe in the Middle Ages.  This would include not only the returning Crusaders who brought aspects of these exotic cultures back home with them to enrich their own.  Probably more important still would be the earlier powerful influence exerted in the heart of Europe's Middle Ages by the Arabian Empire with its far more advanced level of culture.  This would have made its strongest impact of course in Spain.  But in the French Atlas Classique of Schrader & Gallouzdec, a map of the "Empire des Arabes" shows that at its peak it extended into several areas of France, encompassing both Poitiers and a substantial part of Provence, two home stamping grounds of Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Any study of the life of Richard the Lion Heart would have produced evidence of the lasting effect of Arabic influence in France, and extending to other countries of western Europe, including England where Eleanor reigned as Queen.

 

Because the Troubadours were so universally a part of the love courts of medieval France, hence they and their poetry-songs were a key element in the very wide dissemination of the culture of knighthood and chivalry, Lawrence's studies would surely have gone deeply into their history.  The resultant knowledge would have brought forth another powerful strengthening of his sense of bonding with the Arabian lands, for the extent of Arabic influence in the troubadour movement seems undeniable.

 

According to Ernest Scott, as reported in his above-mentioned book The People of the Secret, "The first historical Troubadour of the West was Guillem," Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather.  "Guillem had been a Crusader in the East" and "had obviously had Arabic . . . contacts in Syria and Spain."  "He had also fought in Andalusia where, presumably, he made contact with the Troubadour operation at its inception."

 

Scott provides certain evidence of Arabic influence on the Troubadour phenomenon, including "the discovery in Spain of bilingual Troubadour songs in Arabic and Catalan."  The Catalan dialect of Spain has a close relationship to Provencal, which was known as the "langue d'oc" (language of the west) of Southern France.  Another piece of evidence lies in the "similarity between Moorish poetry in Spain and Troubadour poetry in Provence."  Scott looks on these facts as indications that "the Provencal love poetry originated in Moorish Spain and was brought to Provence by Spaniards speaking both Arabic and the Catalan dialect."

 

He adds to this another point that seems to me to have great merit.  This is drawn from the important component of the Arabic language, the tri-consonantal word groupings.  One such group revolves around the root TRB.  "The range of words that can be built on this consonantal group," Scott writes, "includes a meeting place of friends, a master, playing the viol and the idealization of women."  All of these would clearly relate to Eleanor's Poitiers "university of courtesy, Troubadour poetry and chivalry," where people of like interest met under the tutelage of masters, to study courtly love and the idealization of women.  The Troubadour, singing his "haunting songs" brought with him his apprentice who played the viol.  Scott reports, "The word Troubadour is usually held to derive from the Provencal verb trobar,  to find or invent, but Idries Shah has shown that the derivation is from the Arabic root TRB with the agental suffix ador  added."  Scott also states that "The Orientalist, J. B. Trend, among many others, agrees that 'the words troubadour and trobar are almost certainly of Arabic origin:  from tarraba , to sing or make music.'"

 

Summing up the tremendous significance of the Troubadour phenomenon, Scott write, "Over the century and a half during which it was active, the Troubadour movement achieved a refinement of life and a standard of culture which probably went unequalled for 500 years".  Even today, in the Twentieth Century, the old traditional folk of that beautiful part of France speak with a kind of heart-breaking pride of their Provence as "the land of the Troubadours."

 

Lawrence, already so deeply interested in the lands of Arabia, would have almost certainly picked up on the Arabian-Troubadour connection.  He had already begun his studies of the Arabic language by the time of his last "most ambitious" trip around France.  Whether he was as yet familiar with the tri-consonantal word groupings I have no way of knowing, but if any mention of them had been made during his studies, then in view of his affinity in playing with initials, it seems likely he would have picked up on this as well.  (In his family circle he was called "Ned" and he usually signed his letters home that way.  In the important letter to his mother about his first view of the Mediterranean, initials took over in his enthusiasm, and he signed it "N.E.D.")

 

My Chapter on The Way of the Sufi deals, among other things, with Sufi involvement in the Troubadour movement, and its potential as additional background in the first two of the four forces I regard as so influential in forming the character of Lawrence as he was by the time he first left for Arabia.  I want now to take up, much more briefly, the other two of these forces, that is his identification with the natural world, and with the world of books.

 

Lawrence's first commentary specifically about his fascination with "nature" appears in one of his letters to his mother, during his first time away from home for any considerable period -- that is, on his 1906 first summer holiday jaunt into France.  The letter was written from Dinard where, ensconced on a cliff overlooking the sea, he was overwhelmed by its beauty, and that of the land on its shores.  From the beginning of the letter he launches into quote after quote after quote from poetry singing of this beauty -- eighteen quotes in all, presented in a kind of conversation with his mother.  I cite only the final four.  He wrote:

 

As I left

After the sunset, down the coast he heard

Strange music, and he paused, and turning there

All down the lovely coast of Lyonesse

Each with a beacon star upon his head

And with a wild sea light about his feet

He saw them, headland after headland flame

Far on into the rich heart of the west.

 

Really about five lighthouses can be seen over

 

         The rising world of waters vast and deep.

 

As I was returning I lingered about admiring

 

Till the moon

Rising in clouded majesty at length

Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light

And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

 

You really must excuse this battery of quotations, but I have got into

the habit of quoting any appropriate lines to myself, and this time I

thought I would put them on record.  The scene really was perfectly

lovely; each of these lines might have been written to suit it; as well

as many other phrases I remember, but I will be merciful and let you

off with

 

The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues

High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray.

 

He then goes on to tell his mother -- in a brief paragraph of his own often poetic prose -- his obviously deeply thought out views on what "Nature" is, and his own relationship to it:

 

The sea was of the wondrous blue sometimes met with here,

and all was perfect; there was no one else there.   This last makes

such an addition to one's enjoyment of nature and her prodigal

loveliness; all this scene was reserved for me alone:  it is a wonderful

surpassing thought on which to reflect.  I can only wish my mind was

more receptive and my emotions more deeply affected.  Nature

contains that spirit and power which we can witness but not weigh,

inwardly conceive but not comprehend, love but not limit, imagine,

but neither define nor describe.  Nature is incomprehensible, fleeting,

and yet immortal, and a love for it and its impressions are both

ineradicable.

 

As he reread that paragraph, I suspect he went over and over the one sentence:  "I can only wish my mind was more receptive and my emotions more deeply affected."  Any sincere wish on Lawrence's part brought into action, towards its fulfillment, that indominable will.  This is demonstrated again and again throughout his life.

 

In this case it appears to have had the wished for results:  Two years later, by the time he wrote that same important letter to his mother about his first view of the Mediterranean, his deep personal identification with the natural world hits the reader with striking clarity.  Alone on the beach, looking out over the limitless horizons of "the greatest sea in the world," he recalled Shelley's words:

 

            I love all waste

And solitary places: where we taste

The pleasure of believing all we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

 

Striking evidence of his love for nature comes in a letter to his mother written from Dinard on August 26, 1906, during the first of T.E.'s several bicycle trips around France.  The bulk of the letter consists of eighteen quotations on the beauties of the natural world, of which I cite a few of those that most appealed to me.  This is the first:

 

The day was fair and sunny, sea and sky

Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind

Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves.

 

Then he launches into a kind of monologue, introducing each few lines with a note from him to his mother:

 

From my reading desk

I see the waves upon the shore

Like Light dissolved in star-showers thrown.

 

Before I had left the place the sun had set and the simile

Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream,

 

was exactly fulfilled.  The mist rose heavy and thick

A death-white mist slept over sand and sea

And rolling far along the gloomy shores

The voice of days of old and days to be.

 

As I left

After the sunset, down the coast he heard

Strange music, and he paused, and turning there

All down the lovely coast of Lyonesse

Each with a beacon star upon his head

And with a wild sea light about his feet

He saw them, headland after headland flame

Far on into the rich heart of the west.

 

As I was returning, I lingered about, admiring

Till the moon

Rising in clouded majesty at length

Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light

And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

 

. . . I will be merciful and let you off with

The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues

High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray.

 

He then continues -- in his own stunning prose:

The sea was of the wondrous blue met with sometimes here,

and all was perfect; there was no one else there.  This last

makes such an addition to one's enjoyment of nature and her

prodigal loveliness; all this scene was reserved for me alone:  it

is a wonderful surpassing thought on which to reflect.  I can

only wish my mind was more receptive and my emotions more

deeply affected.  Nature contains that spirit and power which

we can witness but not weigh, inwardly conceive but not

comprehend, love but not limit, imagine, but neither define nor

describe.  Nature is incomprehensible, fleeting, and yet

immortal, and a love for it and its impressions are both

ineradicable.

 

I found the extent of both his knowledge of poetry and his caring for the natural world fairly remarkable in a young man just past his eighteenth birthday.  And the more I read of his Letters book, at first, the more impressed I was with the kind of character that was building in this young man, and then, as the years chronicled in that book rolled on, the deeper became my understanding of how that beautiful young man came to be the disillusioned soul who only twelve years later left Syria and all his dreams behind, and set out to bring his life back from death to clean-ness again -- freed from the tragedies of the past, to rise again to the good and noble man he wanted to be, beginning with the writing of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

 

I said earlier that this seemed to me to be some kind of precognition of the sense of freedom he felt in the same limitless horizons of the desert lands of Arabia.  A craving for this sense of freedom was in fact an essential pat of his own soul.  It rings out again and again all through the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. and dates back much earlier, clearly evident in the diary he kept during his 1909 three month journey, alone and on foot, in northwestern Syria/Mesopotamia, studying the Crusader Castles of the Middle East.  It comes up often, too, in his letters.  And most of all it strikes us in the story of the way he led his life.  He found it, throughout his life, in the world of nature.  He sought it, throughout his life, in the world of men.

 

I want now to jump a bit ahead of my story just temporarily in the following few paragraphs, because they present conclusive examples of the two points I want to make before seeing Lawrence off for Arabia.  The first is a nice example of year by year progression from his "wish" for more personal involvement in nature of his mind and emotions, to the boundless love for her that he found in his soul.  The second is a presentation of the important role played by books in Lawrence's life:  his personal identification with them -- an identification so powerful as to carry within it even a mystic sense of immortality.  Three of his letters to his mother are involved, the first two dealing only with nature, the third with both nature and books.

 

The original "wish" letter was written from Dinard in August of 1906.  Almost exactly a year later, in August of 1907, came his first letter from Chateau Gaillard.  This letter, cited earlier, already reveals a warm sense of identification with one aspect of nature -- the "little wooded island in the centre of the river" (the Seine) just opposite the hotel room he shared with his father.

 

The third and final letter in the series also came from Chateau Gaillard.  This is where I say I am getting a bit ahead of my story, because this letter is written only after his return from his first trip to Arabia.  His enthrallment with the Chateau bringing him back to the same spot again, he now goes into raptures about its natural world surroundings:

 

The country here is altogether lovely:  & the views more &

more necessary:  if I stayed very long I would take root.  I sat up in

the castle this morning a little after Frank went to dejeuner, & read

below the keep.  The colours in the water below me, & the sweep of

the river under the cliffs were superb . . .The view has the same effect

on people as a forest or a church:  They talk in whispers.

 

Now he turns from the glories of nature alone to envelop alike his other passionate identification, and writes of the book he has been reading there "below the keep."  It is a setting of perfection -- of remoteness, and solitude -- of nature, and a book, and one's own spirit.  Freedom -- soaring freedom of the spirit, to heights only few ever attain.

 

The book I had was Petit Jehan de Saintr,  a XV Cent. novel of

knightly manners -- very good: -- I have wanted to read it for a long

time, but the Union Copy was so badly printed that I had not the heart

for it.  Now I have found (for I f. 25) a series quite nicely typed on

fairly good paper.  So far I have only got 4 volumes, because they are

rather much to carry:  it is altogether glorious to have found good

French books at last.  I can read Moliere & Racine & Corneille &

Voltaire now: -- a whole new world.  You know, I think, the joy of

getting into a strange country in a book:  at home when I have shut

my door & the town is in bed -- and I know that nothing, not even the

dawn -- can disturb me in my curtains:  only the slow crumbling of

the coals in the fire:  they get so red and throw such splendid

glimmerings on the Hypnos & the brass-work.  And it is lovely too,

after you have been wandering for hours in the forest with Percivale

or Sagramors le desirons, to open the door, & from over the Cherwell

to look at the sun glowering through the valley-mists.  Why does one

not like things if there are other people about?  Why cannot one make

one's books live except in the night, after hours of straining?  and you

know they have to be your own books too, & you have to read them

more than once.  I think they take in something of your personality,

and your environment also -- you know a second hand book

sometimes is so much more flesh & blood than a new one, -- and it is

almost terrible to think that your ideas, yourself in your books may be

giving life to generations of readers after you are forgotten.  it is that

specially which makes one need good books:  books that will be

worthy of what you are going to put into them.  What would you think

of a great sculptor who flung away his gifts on modelling clay or

sand?  Imagination should be put into the most precious caskets, &

that is why one can only live in the future or the past, in Utopia or

the wood beyond the World.  Father won't know all this -- but if you

can get the right book at the right time you taste joys -- not only

bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and

beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following

the light of another man's thought.  And you can never be quite the

old self again.  You have forgotten a little bit:  or rather pushed it out

with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has

gone before you.

 

When I read those self-revealing words of Lawrence's, which gave me so much to think over for myself, I made a note to watch for every mention of a book in his writings from that time on.  I found two, especially, which seemed to me to be probably the two most important books in his life.  Both will be discussed at length toward the end of this chapter.  The two hardly seemed to belong to the same world.  And in fact this was true -- but in a way quite different than that which had initially occurred to me.  The first was Maurice Hewlett's The Life and Death of Richard Yea and Nay; the second, C. M. Doughty's Adam Cast Forth.  The first was an overture to the wondrous "clean-ness" that was the impetus for his Arabian campaign -- the second, a lament for its tragic "death."

 

Lawrence travels in Arabia (before the campaign)

 

And now we go with T. E. Lawrence to Arabia.

 

As Lawrence's early interest in medieval castles grew he began to focus primarily on the evolution of medieval architecture, and especially military architecture.  From its inception he saw this concept as a fascinating subject for his college thesis, and laid out his plans for research -- the three summer holiday bicycle trips around France, 1906 through 1908, to be followed by a 1909 summer holiday trip to study the castles built by the Crusaders in Syria and Palestine, this one to be carried out alone and on foot.  He had been fortunate, in his work at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, to form a close association with D. G. Hogarth -- an enduring friendship, one of the best of his life.  They had discussed together the projected 1909 journey, and at Hogarth's suggestion Lawrence wrote to C. M. Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta,  one of the outstanding books on the Arabian lands.  Doughty advised strongly against attempting a journey such as Lawrence had planned, in the following letter:

 

Dear Sir,  I have not been further North in Syria than lat. 34.  In July

and August the heat is very severe and day and night, even at the

altitude of Damascus (over 2000 feet), it is a land of squalor where a

European can find evil refreshment  Long daily marches on foot a

prudent man who knows the country would I think consider out of

the question.  The population only know their own wretched life and

look upon any European wandering in their country with at best a

veiled ill will.

 

            The distances to be traversed are very great.  You would have

nothing to draw upon but the slight margin of strength which you

bring with you from Europe.  Insufficient food, rest and sleep, would

soon begin to tell.

 

            A distinguished general told me at the time of the English

expedition against Arabia that no young soldier under 23 years old,

who went through the campaign, had not been in hospital.

 

            I should dissuade a friend from such a voyage, which is too

likely to be most wearisome, hazardous to health and even

disappointing.

 

            A mule or a horse, with its owner, should, at least in my

opinion, be hired to accompany you.

 

            Some Arabic is of course necessary.  If you should wish to ask

any further questions I shall be happy to reply so far as I can do so. 

 

Yours sincerely,               

 

CHARLES DOUGHTY

 

Undaunted, Lawrence went his way as planned.  He did not keep a formal diary on this trip as he did on his later follow-up trip, again alone and on foot, carried out after his first few months of work at Carchemish, in 1911.  However the 1909 jaunt was covered in great detail in a series of letters to his mother.

 

The main focus of the trip was of course the castles, and in the earliest letter Lawrence expresses some disappointment in these.  However, as he progressed northward, and especially after he reached Syria, all this changed.  He tells of the castle at Hosn, "which is I think the finest castle in the world:  certainly the most picturesque I have seen -- quite marvellous."  And of another at Safita -- " a Norman keep, with  ORIGINAL battlements :  the like is not in Europe:  such a find."  And in his next-to-last letter he tells ecstatically of his experience at Sahyun, where he stayed two whole days, with the Governor.  He writes:

 

Sahyun, perhaps the finest castle I have seen in Syria:  a

splendid keep, of Semi-Norman style, perfect in all respects:  towers

galore:  chapels, a bath (Arabian) & a Mosque:  gates most original: 

& a rock-moat 50 feet across in one part, 90 feet in another, varying

from 60-130 feet deep:  there is a cutting for you!  And in the centre

had been left a slender needle of rock, to carry the middle of a

drawbridge:  it was I think the most sensational thing in castle-

building I have seen:  the hugely solid keep upstanding on the edge of

the gigantic fosse.  I wish I was a real artist.  There were hundreds of

other points of interest in the buildings.

 

While he expressed seemingly in vain the wish to be "a real artist," he did in fact make a pen-and-ink sketch of the Sahyun castle for his college thesis, which was published in Crusader Castles , and which I feel should qualify as a real work of art.  It is a stunning depiction of this magnificent example of medieval military architecture -- the strength of its battlements and the beauty of its clean-cut lines towering above the cliff on which it stands.

 

Although study of the castles was the main purpose of the trip, Lawrence's letters to his mother provide a wealth of fascinating information in several other fields as well.  For one thing, the sense of personal identification with the natural world which Lawrence had consciously fostered beginning some three years earlier gives us wondrous pictures of the beauties of the countries he visited.  An example of the kind of lovely little gems he provides is the following:

 

We went downhill again through the olive groves . . . to Tell-el-Kadi a

mound about 3 miles off.  It is about 30 feet high and crater-shaped

inside and now quite deserted, but with plenty of real trees, and such

a spring!  cold as ice, (my water-melon cracked when he got in) and

splendid in scale:  it makes at once a pool about 4 feet deep and 60

feet across (and very pretty it is too) from which rush forth two wide

streams, uniting almost at once to make a river the width of the

Cherwell but infinitely faster, and about 3 feet deep.  It is glorious, a

river springing full grown from a pine grove.  It is absolutely

deserted without even an Arab tent upon it.

 

Another frequent aspect of the letters is reporting on local conditions with a kind of lighthearted sense of fun.  For example in one letter he writes, for Arnie, a tale of many kinds of wildlife in a diversity of categories and sizes:

 

Tell Arnie that pelicans are common, and ugly, and that jackals

are too numerous to trouble much about.  The Arabs call them 'ibn

Wawi, sons of owls, from the noise they please themselves in making

at night when one wants to go to sleep.  Every stone has got its lizard

on top or underneath, but scorpions and centipedes are rare, and

snakes not very common.  Of the other animals I have seen several

herds of gazelles in the hills, and a few badgers and wolves.

 

And again, describing the difficulty of the terrain in which he is studying, he gives as an example:

 

... a terrific climb up from a valley and over undulating country to

Safed, itself on a hill 2700 feet high.  In the day's march I went up

and down the height of Mt. Blanc -- and Palestine is all like that:  a

collection of small irritating hills crushed together pell-mell, and the

roads either go up and down all the time, or wind in and about the

rocks of the valleys, and never reach anywhere at all.

 

Another amusing little tidbit was his word portrait of the Kaimmakam (the governor) at Hosn -- the castle described above as "I think the finest castle in the world":

 

a most-civilised-French-speaking-disciple-of-Herbert-Spencer-

Free-Masonic-Mohammedan-Young Turk:  very comfortable.

 

Lawrence spent three days with this multi-varied personality.  Still another area of much interest in these letters was the significance of the effort he gave to learning to speak and understand Arabic.  This brought him in much closer touch with the Arab people of Syria and Palestine than would be possible for the general run of foreign visitors.  Hence he was able to write of truly hospitable contacts with them, learning as well much about their homes, their foods, and other elements of their daily lives.  He spent many nights in the homes of local people, all the way from Governors to those on the lower end of the social scale, and found them equally friendly, and generous in sharing whatever they had with him.

 

His overall statement on the subject was emphatic:  "I found the people most hospitable."  And he provided several passages of detailed information, including the following -- one of the most fun  that I found:

 

When I go into a native house the owner salutes me, and I

return it and then he says something to one of his women, and they

bring out a thick quilt, which doubled, is laid on the rush mat over the

floor as a chair:  on that I squat down, and then the host asks me four

or five times how my health is, and each time I tell him it is good. 

Then comes sometimes coffee, and after that a variety of questions,

as to whether my tripod is a revolver, and what I am, and where I

come from, and where I'm going, and why I'm on foot, and am I alone,

and every other thing conceivable:  and when I set up my tripod

(sometimes, as a great treat) there are cries of astonishment and

'Mashallah's', 'by the life of the Prophet', 'Heavens', 'Give God the

glory'  etc. etc.  Such a curiosity has never been seen and all the

village is summoned to look at it.  Then I am asked about my wife and

children, how many I have etc.  I really feel a little ashamed of my

youth out here.  The Syrian of 16 is full grown, with moustache and

beard, married, with children, and has perhaps spent two or three

years in New York, getting together enough capital to start him in

business at home.  They mostly put my age as 15, and are amazed at

my travelling on foot and alone.  Riding is the only honourable way of

going, and everyone is dreadfully afraid of thieves:  they travel very

little.  However meanwhile the women have been getting my evening

meal, served up on one of those large straw dishes . . . (the 'charger'

for John the Baptist's head is translated by this in the Arabic version)

then they pour water on my hands from a pitcher (they have spouts

like Breton cider jugs -- I'll bring one home) and if very polite, will

offer to wash my feet.  The next thing is bed, which is the same quilt

as that on which I am sitting, laid either in the house, or outside on

the roof of an outbuilding or verandah.  Another quilt on top acts as

blanket and also there are pillows.  One goes to bed soon after 9, and

gets up at sunrise (about 4:30). . . . Then on the road after bread and

leben.  Sometimes the people of the house will take money for one's

lodging, sometimes not.

 

Some idea of the host's hospitality at the higher social level is given in the passage shortly above about the Kaimmakam with whom Lawrence spent three days "very comfortable."  Another time, he stayed with a member of the nobility, reputedly "of the highest order."  Again, at Sahyun, yet another Kaimmakam hosted him for two days in "most obliging" fashion, and when Lawrence left, provided a mounted escort for him to his next destination.  Lawrence said he had a hard time keeping up with them -- "troops of light horse" he called them -- and that every half hour or so, one or another of them would once more offer Lawrence his mount, finding it amazing that he should actually want to go on foot.  They marched 13 hours a day for five days, from Sahyun to Aleppo.  

(Doughty's dire predictions of inhospitality and ill will toward Europeans were almost surely based on the unfortunately persistent high-handed attitude of the English-speaking peoples -- primarily Americans, but many English as well -- which expects, often demands, that the natives of the countries they visit speak English, with no effort on said Americans' and Britishers' part to learn the language of the host country.  This was true in the days of Lawrence's youth,  It is possibly even worse today -- and is one of the reasons Americans are so almost universally disliked in other lands.)

 

Lawrence reported in his letters that at first the Arabic was difficult, although he was able to converse well enough to get along.  Before much time elapsed, he was reporting that his Arabic was "getting fairly fluent."  Toward the end of the trip, he wrote:  "I will have such difficulty in becoming English again, here I am Arab in habits & slip in talking from English to French to Arabic unnoticing."

 

And at the end, he wrote, too:

 

This is a glorious country for wandering in, for hospitality is something more than a name:  setting aside the American and English missionaries, who take care of me in the most fatherly (or motherly) way: -- they have all so far been as good as they can be -- there are the common people each one ready to receive one for a night, & allow me to share in their meals:  and without a thought of payment from a traveller on foot.  It is so pleasant, for they have a very attractive kind of native dignity.

 

In short, he fell in love with Arabia.  He noted at one point that he had not yet seen the "open" lands -- the great desert landscapes of which he had read in one of his most admired books -- Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta  -- those lands of limitless horizons, in Shelley's words "boundless as we wish our souls to be" -- where the spirit could find true freedom.  Yes, he fell in love with Arabia, but he also had to recognize that this land where perfect freedom could reign was in truth a captive land, controlled by a foreign people.  Years later, in the Epilogue to Seven Pillars, Lawrence wrote, "Superflumina Babylonis, read as a boy, had left me longing to feel myself the node of a national movement.”  This poem inspired in him desire to be node of national movement, and here was made-to-order situation, Arabia.  Super Flumina Arabia, perhaps.

 

The “Journey across the Euphrates”

 

I now want to take up a topic which also came to Lawrence in the course of the development of the whole picture of S.A.  That is, as mentioned briefly earlier, the safaru al-furatu, the journey across the Euphrates.  The canoe trip with Mrs. Fontana to the island on the Mesopotamian side of his mighty river, which so clearly had such deep memories not only for him but for her, as reported in her beautiful essay in T.E. Lawrence by his Friends -- this canoe trip must have come early on into his mind in the identification of components of S.A., not only in fact but in its symbolic reference as well.  In that symbolic reference, it would surely have represented his journey with her into the Garden of Eden (in Mesopotamia) "across the Euphrates" from Carchemish.  And what surely must have struck him with tremendous psychological impact was the whole background of this phrase, safaru al-furatu -- because it dated from his very first, overwhelming, experience in Syria -- his journey alone, on foot, way back as a youth in 1909, even before Carchemish, to study and photograph the "Crusader Castles of the Middle East."   Yes, to the detailed diary he kept of that trip he had given a title.  Yes, it was "Diary of a Journey across the Euphrates."  And like all the many components of S.A., the safaru al-furatu had begun in such clean-ness -- and ended in death.  For in the end, not only through his own self-punishment but through actual legal procedure, Lawrence was banned forever from returning to his land of the Garden of Eden.  In this same context, learning all that is reported earlier in this chapter concerning Lawrence's views on and admiration for Doughty's great drama "Adam Cast Forth," we come to yet another S.A. reference, again encompassed also in the safaru al-furatu, that is S.A., the Story of Adam.  For just as he was banned, like Adam, from his Garden of Eden, so also Lawrence put himself through a terrible period of torment, punishing himself in precisely the same terms as God had punished Adam, as pictured so clearly in Doughty's drama -- the period in Baker Street while Lawrence was writing the final version of the Seven Pillars, pushing his mind, body, and soul to their very limits, in hunger, and thirst, and sleeplessness, and psychologically by fire, in burn-out, driving himself in atonement for guilt over such a course as would have destroyed a man without the strength of a giant in that mind and body and soul.  T. E. Lawrence was, in every way, a giant. 

 

The first sentence of the essay she wrote for him sets the tone of their enduring close friendship in its last nine words:

 

Lawrence must have been twenty-two or three when – in the spring of 1911 – he walked into the British Consulate at Aleppo – en route for Jarablus (Carchemish) – and into the lives of its inmates to stay.

 

The “inmates” were herself and her husband and their little boy and girl, Guido and Tacita.  But in a another sense, they were all inmates, longing for the freedom (“freedom-worship” she wrote) that Lawrence had struggled for and wrote his will across the sky and stars to earn you.

 

The original version of the book edited by A. W. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, includes an essay by Winifred Fontana -- a real beauty -- clearly with considerable insight regarding Lawrence, fascination with him including his appearance, and what seems to me to be definite indication of love beyond mere friendship.   Her conclusion, based on seeing him long later, asks,  "Where was all the gold?"  I believe very much this relates to his changed behavior toward her after the war, because of his changed views about his feelings toward her, all described in detail above.  For although she asks the question just regarding the appearance of his hair, I see in it a much deeper questioning, as she must have believed earlier he was in love with her -- which he was -- and by now may or may not have fully understood the loss that had occurred.  One of the key passages in her essay deals with a tremendous storm that occurred during one of the Fontanas' visits to Carchemish.  She describes it in terms of slight fear and great fascination, and recounts in admiring fashion the steps Lawrence took to reassure her and keep her and her children safe.  She also writes of the musicians Lawrence had ordered to play for them because he knew her love of music. 

 

The exact same storm is described in similar detail and magnificence, and including also the musicians, in a letter Lawrence wrote to his mother, which letter I first read in the original publication, in l938, of The Letters of T. E. Lawrence.  The letter is dated "May l8 [l9l6]," and is written "at sea, somewhere off Aden, I suppose."  He opens by saying he wants to write her "before it gets too late," which in the context of the times generally, and his situation on board a ship that "is vibrating queerly," seems to indicate that he may feel his life is in danger, and that in case he should die -- so I surmise -- he wants at least one person, his mother, to know of the importance of this whole storm scene to him.  For although phrase "before it gets too late" relates immediately to telling her "something of what I saw in Mesopotamia," the letter then also tells extensively about the storm.  The material regarding the storm opens with the sentence, "(I wonder if I ever told you about a magnificent storm we had at Carchemish one night -- Mr. Hogarth and the Fontanas were staying with us?"  He then describes storm and musicians (which he had hired, according to Mrs. Fontana's essay, because of her love of music).  Then he ends this long paragraph with the words:  "It all lasted about ten minutes, I suppose, but I think it was the most wonderful time I have had . . . . .and when it ended it ended suddenly:  there was no quiet dragging away of the storm into distance and insignificance."  (Again, in the words I have underlined, a double meaning? -- that is, there is no way that this "most wonderful time I have had"  could ever fade into distance and insignificance.)  

 

The importance of the storm sequence, equally to Lawrence and to Winifred Fontana is clear.  But what is even more significant is the later handling of these materials in subsequent editions of the two books, which comes off in fact as quite extraordinary.  First, in the revised, abridged edition of T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, published in l95?, Mrs. Fontana's essay has been deleted.  At about the same time, i.e., l95? the book, The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence, came out, this one edited by his older brother, M. R. Lawrence, but clearly with input from A. W. Lawrence including ? an introduction? Betty check exact terminology.  What at first glance might seem to be the same letter from Lawrence to his mother, since it too describes the tremendous storm and opens with the same words, that is, "(I wonder if I ever told you about a magnificent storm . . . . ." (etc.) is also carried in this book.  However, this time round, this opening sentence of the material in question is changed to read, "(I wonder if I ever told you about a magnificent storm we had at Carchemish one night -- Mr. Hogarth and the {Cowleys} were staying with us?"  Note that "the Fontanas" has here been changed to "the {Cowleys}" and the Cowleys have been put in {brackets}, which M. R. Lawrence tells us at the outset he has used to "clarify" certain passages.  A real dead giveaway regarding this switch lies in the index to this volume of The Home Letters.  In the index, under Cowley, there is no reference to the page on which this bracketed {Cowleys} appears, namely page ?325?  On the other hand, in the index under Fontana, there is a reference to this page, even though the name Fontana appears nowhere on it.  Moreover, the editor (M.R. Lawrence in consultation with A.W. Lawrence) has added in his own {brackets}, at the end of the opening sentence, the words "{letter of l April, l9l4}?" -- and in fact this letter to his mother in the l95? Home Letters is dated two whole years earlier than the one in the original l938 publication of The Letters of T. E. Lawrence -- namely, the Home Letters version is dated May 4, l9l4, whereas the original version in the Letters of T. E. L. is dated May l8 [l9l6].  More and more strange:  while the paragraphs on the storm in these two letters are almost identical except for switching the Fontanas to the Cowleys, there is no relationship from one letter to the other in the rest of the material they cover.  After much puzzling over it all, I arrived at the following possible explanation.  Perhaps, at the time of the publication of The Letters of T. E. Lawrence and of the original version of T. E. Lawrence by His Friends (the late l930's), the surviving Lawrence brothers, Arnold and M. R., had not yet reached the conclusion that Mrs. Fontana was T.E.'s one great love and almost surely therefore a part of S.A.   However, by the early l950's when the two later books came out, perhaps the brothers had in fact come to these new insights (possibly through talks with Mrs. Fontana herself? -- or possibly by putting it together through deeper perusal of T.E.'s letters and of the material made public by Robert Graves).  In view of the kinds of unworthy material which was by then (that is, the early l950's) being published about T. E. Lawrence -- by people like Richard Aldington with axes to grind against anyone who achieves greatness -- it seems reasonable and understandable and proper that they would now seek to delete any material that would link T.E. to this lady he loved, lest more adverse publicity about S.A. ensue as a result of someone piecing together the puzzle.  (Note that I do not include myself in this category, for I have nothing but the best to say of T. E. Lawrence, regarding his love for her, or indeed regarding everything else in his life, which I look upon as a life so exemplary as to approach that of a saint.)  Arnold Lawrence, in his epilogue to his editing of T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, speaks of Lawrence's intense friendships which for him took the place of sexual love.  I feel sure he must have finally come to the knowledge about Winifred Fontana, just as I, who loved his brother and after his death came to know him well, also did.

 

The text of Mrs. Fontana's essay on Lawrence from the original edition of T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, pp.65-68, in the section headed THE EAST: ANCIENT AND MODERN substantiates eloquently my assessment of their relationship during the Aleppo-Carchemish (Jerablus) years, and afterwards -- which I feel reasonably sure is the reason A.W.Lawrence deleted it from the later edition -- or indeed there is the possibility that Mrs. Fontana herself asked him to delete it at that time for similar reasons.

 

The  text concerning The Storm, is from Lawrence May l8, l9l6 letter to his mother, as printed in the late l930's Letters of T.E.Lawrence,   Note, also, the changes made by the editors in this letter when it reappeared in a later edition

 

Re THE CANOE ON THE EUPHRATES

In her essay, Winifred Fontana also talks of how Lawrence took her on a canoe trip on the Euphrates.  Again, this is also mentioned in Letters of T. E. Lawrence, on page l50 , in [bracketed] material between letters dated l2/22/l9l2 and 4/5/l9l3, informational material which is supplied by the editor of the book, David Garnett (who cites the assistance of A.W.L.)  Garnett tells of the canoe Lawrence bought while at Oxford and had sent out for use at Carchemish, arriving there "before March 6, l9l3."  Garnett/AWL add that "Mrs. Fontana and others describe his paddling it, and his going on long trips down the Euphrates. . . . ."    (This indicates to me also that at this time AWL had not thought of "hiding" Mrs. Fontana.)

 

A final word.

The Seven Pillars is Lawrence’s "child" -- this was their (his and Mrs. Fontana's) legitimate child that she and he wrought together -- such sadness of that dedication to her.

In Lawrence's last letter to Winifred Fontana, he closed thus: "Vale atque salve .. when I'm free I hope."