Thomas’s presentation was an exercise in mass manipulation, and its effects were staggering: within weeks many who had opposed or criticized Lawrence were praising him unreservedly, realizing that they, too, were accessories in the heroic story. So powerful did the mythical image become that in the ensuing years it was almost impossible for anyone to make a balanced statement about Lawrence: all but the most iconoclastic felt that it was expected of them to pay lip-service to the official version, and to oppose it became almost tantamount to treason. Lawrence’s fame opened every door: prominent writers, artists, poets – many of those who might be thought of as capable of individual and independent views – simply accepted passively the verdict of the crowd. (There were some exceptions: neither Kipling nor Doughty joined in the popular circus.) Such is the overwhelming power of fame: not that Lawrence did not deserve to be famous, but that the fame itself became a fantastic entity quite out of proportion to the reality, bathing everything Lawrence did or touched in a gaudy, neon glow. Lawrence became a ‘hero’, that is, not a creature of flesh and blood living in the real world, but a composite character inhabiting what today we might call ‘cyberspace’ – the collective consciousness – an imaginary focus of human aspirations and desires. He became so bound up with many people’s concept of what it was to be British that any criticism of Lawrence came to be seen in some quarters as an attack on the British themselves. It was not until the 1960s – long after Lawrence’s death – that a writer named Richard Aldington had the courage to stand up and point out the absurdity of the worship of Lawrence as a secular saint – and Aldington’s ‘debunking’ was made with such ill-conceived sarcasm and vitriol that he virtually demolished his own case.
What part did Lawrence himself play in the creation of this legend? There can be no doubt that his sensitivity and his tendency to project the mundane into the mythological played a major role. Mythogeny – the creation of myth – is a two-way process. The hero-in-the-making must have a feeling for the myth he is in – the capacity to reflect what is projected upon him by others – to provide, as it were, the raw material upon which the legend can be built. Lowell Thomas revealed later that Lawrence had actually visited him at Richmond regularly and had consulted with him. Thomas wrote that he had often asked Lawrence if certain anecdotes were true, upon which Lawrence would giggle and reply: ‘History is not made up of the truth anyway, so why worry?’ 15Yet Lawrence’s masochistic nature prevented him from simply accepting the adulation of others. He was not vain: his exhibitionism was, as can be frequently observed throughout his life, not of the narcissistic kind. He felt himself to be fundamentally ‘unclean’ and needed to show this to the world also. His life thus became a ceaseless dialectic between his exultation in his success and his instinctive need for self-degradation. Thomas recognized that Lawrence loved fame, but wanted at the same time to flee from it: ‘He would protest that he wanted to be left alone by the world,’ Thomas wrote,’… but at heart he loved it all.’ 16It was Thomas himself who wrote the famous line about Lawrence having a talent for ‘backing into the limelight’, 17and George Bernard Shaw – no doubt one of the most perceptive men of his day – who called him a born actor, writing: ‘when he was in the middle of the stage, with ten limelights blazing on him, everyone pointed at him and said: “See! He is hiding. He hates publicity.”‘ 18Lawrence pre-empted all these comments, though, when he admitted that he had ‘a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known’. 19His predicament was remarkably like that of J. M. Barrie’s rascally old Etonian, Captain Hook, whose ‘vitals were tortured’ by the reflection that it was ‘bad form’ to think about having ‘good form’, and that one could only truly have ‘good form’ without knowing it. As Lyn Cowan has commented, such a trait is perfectly consistent with masochism: ‘the masochist reveals that he is a forceful actor,’ she has written. ‘He must act, and lives to act, and hates to act. So great is his inner torment that it must hide behind curtains and burst forth on to centre stage.’ 20Lawrence both helped to create and then tried to deny the myth, telling Joseph Conrad that the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ legend was all untrue: that his success had been exaggerated out of all proportion: ‘You see I know how false the praise is,’ he wrote later, ‘how little the reality compared with the legend: how much luck: how little merit.’ 21Yet He acknowledged that the legend had a life of its own, when he announced: ‘Colonel Lawrence still goes on; only I have stepped out of the way.’
At almost the moment when ‘Colonel Lawrence’ was being born, however, Lawrence discovered that he was not ‘T. E. Lawrence’ at all. In April 1919 his father died of influenza, and he flew back from the Peace Conference for the funeral to discover his true identity. Thomas had inherited the Chapman baronetcy from his uncle in 1914, although, of course, he had never used the tide. Lawrence now discovered that he was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman, who was the heir to vast estates in Ireland. His reaction to this revelation is difficult to gauge. From an early age, he had sensed that there was something strange about his parents’ relationship. It cannot have escaped his notice, for instance, that while other children had cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, he seemed to have no relatives at all. He claimed to have known that he was illegitimate before he was ten, but according to notes taken down by Charles Bell of the Ashmolean from David Hogarth, he knew only a garbled version of the story. He believed that Thomas was not his real father, but had married his mother – a servant in another man’s house – after she had acquired some or all of her sons. Lawrence maintained that he had not ‘given a straw’ about his illegitimacy: it had not affected his childhood, and it certainly had not affected his success. Arnie Lawrence, who himself had burst into raucous laughter when Ned first told him the truth, said that his brother felt no bitterness about his inheritance: ‘He cannot possibly have felt any grievance …’ Arnie wrote, ‘because the money had actually come to his father, and why should he regret Bob’s exclusion from the landed estate (but he did once remark how funny it would be if Bob had been able to become Sir Montague)?’ 22Moreover, since Lawrence frequently wrote to acquaintances informing them that his name was ‘not really’ Lawrence, he cannot have felt a great sense of shame. Lawrence’s biographers have frequently attempted to turn his story into a tale of existential guilt over his family circumstances. Apart from some play over his name, and an assertion of his ‘Irishness’ which was new, though, the revelation came too late either to mould his character or to affect his career: when he learned the truth in 1919, he was already on the way to becoming a national hero.