Long on facts, short on craft
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Jeremy Wilson has performed a great service to posterity in bringing together almost all available information on T.E.Lawrence. There is no other biography with such a comprehensive range of references. Wilson has written what he calls a 'historical biography' based almost entirely on written sources, where possible external to Lawrence's own records. His account of Lawrence's part in the Arab Revolt, for example, he claims, no longer relies on Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Wilson also believes that equal weight should be given to every part of Lawrence's life - not just to the years in which he was a mover and shaker with the Arabs. Lawrence was also important, he tells us, as a printer, an author, a translator, a mechanic and a friend of important people.
Unfortunately what Jeremy Wilson has not done is produced a good biography. Biography is not merely laying out documents from end to end and saying "There, that is what happened, see for yourself", it is a craft, a literary genre, literally the 'story of a life.' What makes biography interesting is not the dry facts, but the way such facts are seen and interpreted through the eyes of the biographer. There can be no such thing as definitive biography, any more than there can be definitive history. History, as Graham Swift wrote, is ‘that impossible thing : an attempt to give an account – with incomplete knowledge – of actions themselves taken with incomplete knowledge.’ Biography like all art, is a selection from the broad posibilities of human perspective and human perspective is itself a limited selection from reality. Wilson’s ‘promised land’ of definitive biography cannot be found in contemporary documents, because these documents were themselves produced by human beings who were no more objective or omniscient than the rest of us.
Wilson, if you like, has produced the life but lost the story - by giving each part of Lawrence's experience the same emphasis he has turned what was an exciting and dramatic tale into a monotonous, 1000-page grind. This might be acceptable if Wilson's claim to have written an 'objective' biography were justified (or indeed possible). Alas it is not. Whenever we come to the truly problematical incidents of Lawrence's part in the Arab Revolt - his alleged shooting of a Moorish servant, his alleged capture, torture and rape by the Turks, his claim to have had a 90 strong bodyguard of cut-throats, his claim to have shot a wounded companion to prevent him being captured, for example - incidents for which there is no external evidence whatsoever - what do we find? That Wilson simply turns to Seven Pillars of Wisdom and says 'Lawrence was an honest man and would not have lied'. Hardly the spirit of detached scholarship one has been led to expect by his rather haughty introduction, and indeed, a contradiction of his own claim. And not true, anyway, since it is clear that Lawrence did lie when it suited him - for example when he claimed to have crossed Sinai in a 49 hour non-stop camel ride (it was 72 hours and he slept on the way). Similarly there is no real attempt to understand why Lawrence paid a man to thrash him periodically with a birch over the last 13 years of his life. Wilson says prudishly that we must not inquire into such things, despite the fact that we now have a century of respectable studies of paraphilia from such giants as Freud and Jung. This is at least one aspect of his subject’s life that obviously does not fit into Wilson’s category of activities that ought to be accorded ‘equal weight’. Indeed one has the feeling that the supposedly ‘detached’ biographer would have preferred Lawrence’s masochism to simply disappear.
His spirit of inquiry seems to have been similarly truncated when it came to looking beyond the library shelves, to the desert battlefields where a significant part of Lawrence’s life was acted out. Wilson visited none of them, does not speak Arabic and does not know the Arabs. One would have thought that some experience in this field was essential to understanding Lawrence’s milieu. The truth, Wilson seems to be telling us, lies in the documents – it is irrelevent to consider what conditions were actually like ‘out there.’
And whether Lawrence’s activities in printing, mechanics, handicrafts and even writing are truly as significant as his years with the Arabs can easily be determined by asking whether, without Arabia, there would have been a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in the first place. ‘Lawrence of the Handicrafts’ does not have quite the same ring.
Despite the pretensions expressed in his introduction, therefore, Wilson’s approach to Lawrence is neither truly scholarly nor analytical. Few of Lawrence’s own statements are ever contested, and almost anything that might be construed as even remotely critical to him is cunningly omitted. At the same time the author has the gall to assure us continually that his perspective is ‘historical’. It is, in short, a whitewash job – an attempt to retell the ‘Lawrence legend’ without unequivocal supporting evidence and without a compensatory feel for the epic nature the tale itself. Again, all might have been well had the author not spent several pages in his introduction deriding and denigrating the works of other serious Lawrence scholars – an astonishing display of hubris which is to my knowledge unprecedented in the genre. One would have thought that at least he would have got the beam out of his own eye first.
If it is a ‘good read’ you are looking for, you will not find it in this biography, but neither will you find a refreshingly revisionist approach. It is an attempt to revive the same tired old story, an encyclopedic mass of documentary sources which fail in many cases to bring home the bacon when it counts. It is neither a quest for insights into Lawrence’s character, nor a riveting retelling of the legend. It is, quite simply, dull.
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