Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality
2009; Wiley; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5923.2009.00286.x
ISSN1540-5923
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoStrong praise and strong blame are results of half-knowledge; to know the real motive or mood of heroism is often to make it accidental or involuntary or instinctive. You cannot admire the stars, since they are only fire and mud in nature. T. E. Lawrence In the course of time, changing historical circumstances often transform an iconic figure's reputation.11 I wish to acknowledge with much gratitude the constructive criticisms and suggestions of the Johns Hopkins University History seminar; Anne Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida; Susan Marbury; Joseph Thomas; Lawrence Friedman, Harvard University; Roger Louis, University of Texas; David Hackett Fischer, Brandeis University; Abdul-Karim Refaq, College of William and Mary; Peter L. Hahn, Ohio State University; Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston University; and Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University. So it has been in the case of T. E. Lawrence. At first his astonishing exploits in Arabia and his flamboyant personality won him the laurels of a conquering hero in England and America. He came to symbolize the values of boldness, military ingenuity, and literary skill. These attributes thrilled the British public, most especially at a time of a war-weariness and a yearning for something to cheer. His death in 1935 did not dim his glamorous image, which was to suffer in the 1950s and 1960s, when claims about the futility of warfare cast doubt on the legitimacy of Lawrence's reputation. Heroism and honor, too, lost their luster. Lawrence himself, as the epigraph suggests, was skeptical about heroism when it became less of a personal virtue and more of a flawed perception by others. David Lean's classic film only partially restored his heroic stature when it appeared in 1962. Another perspective has lately emerged, which has regained him a measure of renewed respect, at least in military sectors. The transition in Iraq to a more constructive collaboration with the native forces owed something to Lawrence's experience with guerilla warfare in World War I. The changing image of the man suggests that there have been, almost from the very start of his renown, several Lawrences. Each has reflected the contemporaneous needs of Anglo-American society. Lawrence's cryptic character makes interpretation difficult. He wrote his friend Robert Graves, the poet and novelist, “I'm rather a complicated person, and that's bad for a simple biography.”22 T. E. Lawrence to Robert Graves, 28 June 1927, in Robert Graves, ed., T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Robert Graves: Information about Himself in the Form of Letters, Notes and Answers to Questions, Edited with a Critical Commentary (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 58. * * * In treating the first of the several Lawrences, we begin with the idolization that he received not only from the British and American public, but also from members of the English literary and political upper classes. American and British ideals of honor and military valor coincided at this juncture. After all, they were close allies, and Woodrow Wilson was a devout believer in America's Anglo-Saxon heritage. To both nations, Lawrence seemed the very model of a hero. Yet, there were differences from the start. The American mistrust of colonialism would ordinarily have tempered any admiration of an English representative of that form of rule. But the exotic setting of the Arabian desert, the showiness of Lawrence's resplendent Arab costume with curved gold sword, and the daring of his expeditions against the Ottomans inspired awe. An American journalist declared, “the imagination of matter-of-fact Westerners, who are suddenly spirited away on the magic carpet of memory to scenes familiar through the fairy story-books of childhood” inspired this widespread response to Lawrence's wartime career.33 Lowell Thomas, “The Greatest Romance of Real Life: The Uncrowned King of the Hejaz Desert,” The Strand Magazine 59 (January 1920): 40. During that era, Lawrence had also epitomized for the British establishment what one writer calls the role of “Imperial Hero, an agent of his time and class.”44 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), 399–400; William Chace, “T. E. Lawrence: The Uses of Heroism,” in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 156. Writers and thinkers had begun to dispute the legitimacy and relevance of the English Victorian hierarchy. The war had dismantled longstanding ideals of gentlemanly nineteenth-century warfare—as imagined if not practiced. By the 1930s, nostalgia for the old verities could not entirely overcome the way in which the blood-drenched conflict had begun to erode the rigid social order. Novelist E. M. Forster, Lawrence's close friend, noted in an obituary, this was “the last effort of the war-god before he laid down his godhead and turned chemist.” Clearly he had in mind the horrors of mustard gas and the trench life of the Great War. Forster, although a beneficiary of the existing political structure as a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, guessed that, for all his qualities of mind and heart, Lawrence would someday arouse controversy. “Now that he has gone away,” the novelist foretold, “there would also be ‘sharks’ circling in the water.” Moreover, Lawrence would be transformed into something the veteran had hated, “a boy scout's hero and the girl guide's dream.” The novelist argued that Lawrence instead “must be analyzed, estimated, claimed. A legend will probably flourish” that would distort “his true bearings.” So even his friends and admirers seemed to exhibit an undertone of perplexity beneath their adulation. That sense of doubt was perhaps related to British power's slow decline. Lawrence himself knew what might come about. He wrote a friend, “They'll rattle my bones after I'm gone.”55 E[dward] M[organ] Forster, Abinger Harvest: Essays on Books, People and Places (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 140. Lawrence is quoted by James Hawes, director of Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, in a brilliant documentary interview, Special Features, Lion Television DDE on PBS, 2003. Entertaining no doubts at all about his hero's purity, bravery, and chivalric manner, however, Lowell Thomas, the Chicago journalist, was the first to launch Lawrence into the heights of glory. In military terms, American notions of honor had not deviated from the adoration of the men in blue and gray in the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt's cowboys storming San Juan Hill. Thomas created a theatrical panorama that seized both American and English imaginations. The extravaganza he produced, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, combined Thomas's lecture on the heroes of the Middle Eastern campaign, film, music played by the Welsh Guards, pantomime, braziers with burning incense, Egyptian columns flanking the stage, and exotically attired female performers doing the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” A publicist friend arranged for Thomas to bring his theatrics to Covent Garden Royal Opera House and the spacious Royal Albert Hall, much to the delight of four million spectators, including the royal family. Thomas also carried his show to the major American cities. A huge audience attended the performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. American Christians were mesmerized by the sight of valiant crusaders storming the fortifications of the Sultan Saladin. There followed the introduction of “Lawrence, the uncrowned King of Arabia and his Arabian knights.”66 See Michael Yardley, Backing into the Limelight: A Biography of T. E. Lawrence (London: Harrap, 1989), 149–58. From the United States, Thomas took the program to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and India.77 Joel C. Hodson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 41. Thomas's book, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), which followed the tour, was a transatlantic publishing hit. One might even conjecture that he helped to create the public thirst for celebrities and their doings with his promotion of Lawrence. On both sides of the Atlantic, the soul-destroying warfare of World War I, with thousands lost in major engagements, was transformed into old-fashioned derring-do. It was something boys in search of manhood could still dream about. The stress on manly adventure dominated popular entertainment—in the fad for American cowboy adventure, the thrill and mystery of sheiks and deserts, and similar outlets for virile expression. Thomas was also deliberately using Lawrence to solidify the Anglo-American alliance. He managed to present Lawrence as the model British imperial hero, while in America he created a fighter for freedom and democracy in the Wilsonian anticolonialist mode. Like most Westerners, Thomas thought Islamic, tribal people could never achieve modern values and a sense of nationalist loyalty and freedom without the energetic guidance of the Anglo-Saxon.88 See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 1994), 167–292. Thomas exaggerated the extent of his contact with Lawrence. His stories were sensational and they seriously bent the truth. Lawrence was both gratified and repelled—chiefly the latter. In 1920 he complained, “I am painfully aware of what Mr. Lowell Thomas is doing.” His articles and lectures “are as rank as possible, and are making my life very difficult for me, as I have neither the money nor the wish to maintain my constant character as the mountebank he makes me.”99 Phillip Knightley, introduction, in Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia (1924; London: Prion Books, 2002), viii. Lawrence found himself pursued by the paparazzi of the day. He wondered if he had not become another man's possession. “Have I deserved a Lowell Thomas?” he bitterly wrote his friend Forster. To another correspondent he complained, “The Arab war was not nearly as silly as he makes out: and I was not in charge of it, or even very prominent. Only I was in fancy dress, & so made a good ‘star’ for his film.” The star image is a complicated production—part real, part fictional. It may become difficult for the luminary to figure out who he really is. So it was with Lawrence.1010 Lawrence to Ralph Isham, 22 November 1927, in David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 545. Similar statements are made by Lawrence in letters to Sir A. J. Murray, 1 October 1920, Kilgour Collection, BMS 1252, Houghton Library, Harvard University; and to Fareedah El Akle, 3 January 1921, in Malcolm Brown, ed., T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters (New York: Norton, 1989), 183; Lawrence to Forster, 17 June 1925, in ibid., 283; Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 8–14. He did not live long enough to find out. Lawrence recoiled from the heroic role others attributed to him. Dismayed by the perfidy of the Western powers at Versailles, he resigned from an influential post in the Colonial Office in 1922. He left the political world and joined the Tank Corps and later the R. A. F. as a private under assumed names. In May 1935, Lawrence died at age forty-seven in a motorcycle accident not far from his modest cottage, Clouds Hill. His recklessness in battle or on his beloved, mighty Brough Superior motorbike was almost suicidal. The crash occurred only a month after his mustering out of the R. A. F. as an almost anonymous airman. His death only enhanced his public veneration. The poet W. H. Auden mourned, “To me Lawrence's life is an allegory of the transformation of the Truly Weak Man into the Truly Strong Man.” At a memorial service, the chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford, where Lawrence had matriculated before the Great War, likened his three-year career in the Middle East and his death to the destiny of Jesus Christ. Nor was the clergyman the only Englishman to do so.1111 Auden in Arnold W. Lawrence, ed., Lawrence by His Friends (1937; New York: Doubleday, 1954 [abridged edition]), 382. See also William M. Chace, “T. E. Lawrence: The Uses of Heroism,” in Meyers, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend, 131–32, Blackmur quotation, 135. Winston Churchill offered that “his background of somber experience and reflection only seemed to set forth more brightly the charm and gaiety of his companionship, and the generous majesty of his nature.” King George V wrote to Lawrence's brother Arnold, “His name will live in history.” Reflecting an early shift in Lawrence's reputation, however, in 1940, R. P. Blackmur, a well-known literary critic at Princeton, sounded a skeptical note about Lawrence's reputation. He had been “lost but lurking, never to fulfill his promise.” In the 1940s his memory remained fresh in Great Britain, whose armed forces issued his Seven Pillars of Wisdom in paperback for military libraries. He was not cited by Allied generals fighting with massed armies. Another strategist, however, adopted Lawrence's strategies. At the start of the First Indo-China War in 1946, Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnam People's Army informed French General Raoul Salan, “My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it.” The irony should be obvious. The victor of the Vietnam War learned much from Lawrence at a time when, as often happens in the first few years after a death, his public stature was diminishing in the Western World.1212 Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1989; New York: MacMillan, 1992), xviii. Quotation from Adrian Greaves, Lawrence of Arabia: Mirage of a Desert War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007), 232; Air War College: Military Theory, Theorists, and Strategy, T. E. Lawrence http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-thry.htm#lawrence. * * * In the 1950s, King George's prediction of lasting fame was thrown into doubt: a quite different Lawrence was created. The biographer Richard Aldington set out to obliterate the heroic image. He did probe some of Lawrence's weaknesses and illuminated for the first time areas of conflict in the hero's makeup, but Aldington's approach was too polemical and reductionist for reasons growing out of his own miseries. Like Lawrence himself, the author of T. E. Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry was a Great War veteran. He had been gassed on the Western Front.1313 Fred D. Crawford, Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 6. For more on Liddell Hart, see John J. Mearscheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Unlike Lawrence, who attended Oxford, Aldington had not completed his common-school studies at University College, Teddington. The sudden failure of his father's finances prevented it. Declassed, so to speak, Aldington came to despise the English establishment. In 1919 he published Death of a Hero, a popular antiwar novel. In what an acerbic critic calls “a savage debunking of the whole concept of heroism,” the novel roundly censures the English upper crust, whose members Aldington held accountable for the disastrous war. Associated with such well-known literary figures as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Norman Douglas, and D. H. Lawrence, he wrote prolifically, producing poems, novels, and biographies throughout the 1920s and 1930s.1414 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), 182. See also Miguel González-Gerth, T. E. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and the Death of Heroes (Austin: Harry Ransom Research Center, 1994). In the 1950s Aldington fell out of favor with publishers and public alike. Poor health and low finances added to his distress. His former wife, the poet Hilda Doolittle, recalled that, after mustering out of the army in 1918, he had suffered from memory loss and the “dissociation, they called shell shock.” Depressive episodes persisted thereafter.1515 Hilda Doolittle to Conrad Aiken, 26 August 1933 (Yale), quoted in Charles Doyle, Richard Aldington, A Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 68. Aldington was emotionally exhausted when he began his Lawrence biography. His anger found a means of expression in wresting Lawrence from his pedestal. He had chosen a most visible kind of straw man to represent his disgust with the British social and political order. Had Aldington suppressed or modified his one-sided interpretation, he could have written a far more convincing biography. Yet, for all his errors of tone and substance, he did raise issues that had long lain hidden. His work cannot be ignored but must be handled with special scrutiny. Aldington's account accused Lawrence of three major offenses: an allegedly overwrought reaction to his own illegitimacy; homosexual tendencies; and a deceptiveness that masked an alarming ineptitude. Aldington even questioned Lawrence's prowess as a warrior. On the matter of illegitimacy, Aldington maintained that the English hero was affected from an early age by the family secret. His bastard status, Aldington revealed to an astounded public, explained Lawrence's “abortive career and tortuous character.”1616 Richard Aldington, T. E. Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 23. Actually, T. E. L. had learned about his illegitimacy in 1898 when he was ten years old. His mother, however, did not know that until he told her at the time of his father's death in 1919. That ancient stigma still exercised some power, though diminishing in effect during the postwar years. It is true that before changing the family name to Lawrence, his father had been Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, seventh Baronet of Westmeath, an Anglo-Irish title. Chapman abandoned his wife, Lady Edith, and their four daughters, and ran off with Sarah Junner, their Scottish governess. In private correspondence, Lawrence complained that Sarah Junner's powerful and intrusive hyper-Calvinism affected his life most deeply. She felt especially guilty in God's eyes because, without a divorce, she and Chapman had been unable to marry; Lady Edith refused any such possibility.1717 Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 14 April 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, 325. After brief sojourns in Ireland, France, Scotland, the Channel Islands, and Wales, where T. E. L. was born, the Lawrence family settled in Oxford. They did so for the educational opportunities it gave T. E. L. and his four brothers. Two of them were to die in the Great War. Countering Aldington's claims, Robert Graves stoutly denied the charge of a “bastardy complex.” Lawrence had confided to him, “My mother was shocked” that he and his brother Arnold “weren't shocked at her news and that we took it so lightly.” To a friend Lawrence wrote in 1926, “Bars sinister are rather jolly ornaments. You feel so like a flea in the legitimate prince's bed.”1818 Lawrence to Lionel Curtis, August 1926, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, 301; Robert Graves to Liddell Hart, c. March 1954, T. E. Lawrence Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Lawrence had not, however, wished the information about his illegitimacy to be made public. In fact, when Graves was preparing his biography of Lawrence, his friend wrote him, “There are certain things about my family, which must not be said. Not that I care, but other people had odd views about marriage.” Lawrence to Graves, 9 June 1927, fms Eng 1252 (368), Kilgour Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 14 April 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, 325. For her part, Sarah Junner Lawrence considered herself to be in a state of utter depravity. Victorian as she was, the old lady feared God's wrath and social disgrace. Beneath the surface of a “happy childhood,” the boys had early recognized what Arnold Lawrence, the youngest brother, called “a spirit of sin, unnaturalness. Hush hush was great. It perplexed the children, leading to doubts and ultimately to a lack of confidence.” Arnold thought his brother had been “injured by his mother.” So did Lawrence, who felt that all her sons felt “helpless” and would therefore never give anyone else the pain that she forced upon them “by her impossible demands.”1919 Arnold Lawrence to Jim Ede, 1937, quoted in Michael Asher, Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993), 30; Arnold Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 30 May 1928, British Museum Add MSS 35904, as quoted in John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (1976; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33; Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 14 April 1927, in Brown, ed., Selected Letters of T. E. Lawrence, 325. As for Aldington's claim about T. E. L.'s homosexuality, the evidence seems mixed. Without a doubt, he had an abiding affection for Sheikh Ahmed, nicknamed Dahoum, a handsome young water boy. Dahoum died of typhoid fever while behind Turkish lines in 1918. No one knows if they consummated the relationship. Lawrence's dedication to him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom clearly suggests a love for the boy that exceeded a bond of male friendship or avuncular interest.2020 Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, 51–52, 66; Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 88, 96–98, 192, 224, 310. As noted, Dahoum's real name was Sheikh Ahmed. See “To S. A.,” in T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926, 1935; New York: Random House, 1991); Anthony Nutting argues that T. E. L. was deliberately misleading and that “S. A.” is really a fantasy. Nutting, Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive (New York: C. N. Potter, 1961), 241. Ronald Florence examines the possibility that “S. A.” stood for Sarah Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jew who spied for the British but was caught and executed by the Turks. After exhaustive research, Florence concludes, however, that the rumors were wrong. See Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israel Conflict (New York: Viking, 2007), 459–62. The poem to “S. A.” reads in part: “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn your freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, / that your eyes might be shining for me. / When we came.” In Seven Pillars, he recalled finding his young Bedouin warriors “quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace.”2121 Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 30. But he found this “sexless and even pure.” Aldington pointed accusingly to guilt by association: Lawrence had gay literary friends—Siegfried Sassoon, E. M. Forster, and Noel Coward, among others. He did not approve, however, of their sexual encounters. He refused to read E. M. Forster's Maurice, his then unpublished homosexual novel. Lawrence informed the author, “I'm so funnily made up, sexually.”2222 Yet Lawrence could also be ambivalent about very active homosexuals. He wrote Graves rather condescendingly about the activities of war poet Siegfried Sassoon. T. E. Lawrence to Graves, 13 October 1929, BMS 1252, Eng, Kilgour Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. See also Lawrence to Graves, 17 December 1933, ibid; Lawrence to Forster, 8 September 1927, in Brown, ed., T E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, 147; Asher, Lawrence, 26, 233. Both Lawrence and Forster shared the strains of having formidable mothers, a similarity that drew them together. Even Robert Graves, who defended Lawrence against all critics, remarked, “A brilliant mind, noble principles, but suffering from intense erotic fancies as a result of impotence incurred by a violent shock. These erotic fancies,” he observed, could be found in his writings “and are what clouded his style.” His “lustfulness of speed” on his motorcycle, Graves conjectured, had an erotic basis. But a life-threatening foolhardiness might have been present, too, as Lawrence was often chronically depressed.2323 “T. E. loved ‘suffering’ but he would never have gone for a fraternal hike in Spain with a young policeman as E. M. Forster has just done!” Graves to Liddell Hart, 10 February 1955, Lawrence Papers, Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. When reviewing Lawrence's sexual inhibitions, Graves had in mind Lawrence's trauma when Turkish soldiers seized him at Deraa in 1917. Undoubtedly, it did affect his sexual nature. Contemporaries and historians offer different opinions on that misfortune: skepticism; outright denial that it took place; and sympathetic acceptance of his word. Lawrence presented differing accounts, understandably so. It was a matter of deep humiliation. “I went in to Dera'a in disguise to spy out the defenses, was caught, and identified by Hajem Muhyi al Din Bey the Governor. … Hajim was an ardent pederast and took a fancy to me.” The Governor “tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty.”2424 T. E. Lawrence to Deputy Chief Political Officer, Cairo, 28 June 1919, in Brown, ed., T E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, 165–66. A letter to Charlotte Shaw provides a most persuasive alternative account of what had really occurred at Deraa: Hajem Bey did rape him, with devastating emotional effects on his sexuality. Rather than treating the psychological injury sympathetically, Aldington claimed that it indicated Lawrence's pleasure in receiving and administering pain.2525 Suleiman Mousa, a much respected Arab historian, denies the whole account and claims that Hajim Bey was not homosexual. The anthropologist Raphael Patai points out, however, that both Arabs and Turks consider the act of sodomy “an assertion of one's aggressive masculine superiority while the acceptance of the role of the passive homosexual is considered extremely degrading and shameful.” The deed “casts the man or youth into a submissive, feminine role.” Suleiman Mousa, T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 116–18; Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Scribner's, 1973), 146. Others with doubts about the rape include Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Marlowe, 1994), as well as Desmond Stewart and A. N. Wilson. See A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 145; James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire: T. E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 203–06; Desmond Stewart, T. E. Lawrence: A New Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 240–44. On the other hand, John Mack, a psychiatrist as well as one of the most accomplished of Lawrence's biographers, explains how such an experience could warp any man's sense of self and self-worthiness. “It's an unforgivable matter, an irrevocable position: and it's that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents.” Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw, 26 March 1924, in Brown, ed., T. E. Lawrence: Selected Letters, 261–62; Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, 419–20. As prison psychiatric researchers conclude, the response to male rape takes many forms: denial, as mentioned, anger, guilt—repressed or admitted—repulsion, depression, a lost sexual identity, or confusion. It may also involve a degree of pleasure that almost at once triggers the other, negative emotions. On separate occasions, Lawrence exhibited each of these characteristics.2626 On Islamic and Arabic attitudes about homosexuality, see Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997). See also my paper, “The Humiliation of Male Rape: The Case of T. E. Lawrence,” presented at the Human Dignity and Humiliation Conference, Columbia University, 10 December 2007. For work on male rape, see Arthur Kaufman, “Male Rape Victims: Noninstitutionalized Assault,” American Journal of Psychiatry 137 (February 1980): 221–23; Michael Scarce, Male on Male Rape: The Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame (New York: Plenum, 1997); Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Male/Male Rape and the ‘Taint’ of Homosexuality,” Human Rights Quarterly 27:4 (2005): 1274–1306; Ann Burgess and Larry Holmstrom, “Rape Trauma Syndrome,” American Journal of Psychiat
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