Nietzsche – whom Lawrence much admired – wrote that every profound spirit requires a mask: the mask Lawrence wore was one of paradox. His aloofness concealed a craving for the attention of others, for fame and distinction, which he despised and could not allow himself to show. Aloofness was a barrier he created against the outside world, a means of preventing anyone from coming too close. He was able to relax his guard only with those who were younger or socially inferior, and though, in later life, he formed relationships with the great and famous, he confessed to John Bruce – a poorly educated man from a working-class background – that most of these high and mighty folk ‘could not be trusted’. It was an aspect of his masochistic nature that he felt himself undeserving of love, and it was terror of failure which prevented him from opening himself. He found another way to attract people, using his aloofness as a tool for drawing attention by offering tantalizing glimpses and wrapping himself in an intriguing cloak of mystery. In short, as Sir Harold Nicolson coldly, but correctly, declared, ‘he discovered early that mystery was news’. 29At school and college he was regarded by his peers as a pronounced eccentric, and would intrigue others by such idiosyncrasies as riding his bicycle uphill and walking down, by sitting through prescribed dinners in hall without eating, by adopting odd diets, by going out at night and sleeping during the day, by refusing to play organized games, or by fasting on Christmas Day when everyone else was feasting. This exaggerated form of attention-seeking was the shadow side of Lawrence’s aloofness, and the social aspect of his masochism. He was like the woman from the provincial town who wanted to attend the opera in the capital wearing fine jewels and her most expensive evening dress. Ashamed of her desire for ostentation, though, she actually attended the opera in a plain dress, and as a result was the only woman in the audience not wearing evening clothes. She became the focus of attention by ‘reverse exhibitionism’ – not because of her finery but through her conspicuous lack of it. Lawrence’s tendency to cycle uphill and walk down has its parallel in the masochistic folk hero Till Eulenspiegel, who felt happy when toiling uphill and sad when coming down.
Soon, Lawrence learned to shroud everything he did in ritual and romance, a technique he found remarkably successful and which he sharpened into the most effective blade in his armoury. He learned to manipulate others with his aura of mystery, to lay false trails, to concoct endless mazes of riddle and conundrum. He learned to intrigue those who interested him by what he called ‘whimsical perversity’ or ‘misplaced earnestness’, whetting their curiosity and then rushing off abruptly, hoping the object of his attention would pursue, ‘wish[ing] to know whom that odd creature was’. 30Few could resist Lawrence’s ‘whimsicalities’, and his jokes and buffooneries, his sudden flashes of brilliance or impish roguery gave him an almost infallible ability to charm, allure and seduce. Basil Liddell Hart, one of his most ardent admirers, summed up the quality most succinctly when he likened Lawrence to ‘a woman who wears a veil while exposing the bosom’. 31Though Liddell Hart put Lawrence’s exhibitionism down to vanity, in fact it was ‘reverse exhibitionism’: his wish was less to display his beauty and cleverness to the world than to demonstrate his ugliness, suffering and humiliation. Far from being ‘in love with himself, Lawrence would write that he despised the ‘self’ he could hear and see. 32
2. Dominus Illuminatio Measss
Schooldays 1896–1905
Though Oxford had been changing slowly for half a century before the Lawrences arrived in 1896, it remained a city which moved at the pace of the horse-drawn era. The man who was shortly to transform it into a centre of the motor industry, Lord Nuffield, was then plain Mr William Henry Morris – a cycle-maker with dreams, and a shop in the High – and the city remained, as Jan Morris has put it, ‘a kind of elfin workshop, full of respectable craftsmen tapping away in back-alleys … and weavers’ looms … clack[ing] in Magdalen Grove’. 1A few colleges already had their own motor cars, but the most ponderous vehicles commonly to be found in Oxford streets were the drays of Hall’s or Morrell’s Breweries. Horse-drawn trams – there were nineteen of them by 1910 – were required to keep to a sedate eight miles per hour, and their drivers were given instructions to ‘slow down for a herd of cattie, and to stop completely at the approach of a flock of sheep’. It was a dignified, unhurried Oxford – a place of gas-lit houses, of college barges, private fire-brigades, hansom cabs and coaches-and-four: a town where milkmen still carried their churns in handcarts from St Aldate’s dairy, where the University Clerks still weighed butter in the covered market opposite Jesus College, where boys wore plus-fours and winged shirt-collars, where girls rode bicycles in pinafore-dresses like Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland, and where demure young women in ankle-length skirts and straw bonnets played a round of stately tennis on the University parks.
I travelled to Oxford to see if I could recapture something of the atmosphere in which T. E. Lawrence grew up, and to taste the vision of Britain he was to carry with him to the deserts of the East. Though the drays are gone, and the horse-drawn trams have long since been replaced by diesel-powered double-deckers, I found that much of turn-of-the century Oxford remains. I stood outside No. 2 Polstead Road – now a slightly seedy building with overflowing rubbish bins and rusty Morris Minors parked in a concrete yard – straining over the decades to hear the voices of the four eldest Lawrence boys, Bob, Ned, Will and Frank, as they set off to school each morning in that long, bright Indian summer of Old England before the Great War changed the world for ever. I walked down Woodstock Road towards the city centre, holding in my mind a vivid image of the boys riding their bicycles, in single file, in strict order of seniority, wearing the blue and white striped Breton jerseys which were almost a family uniform. There were massed may trees in bloom in the gardens, and horse chestnuts budding cream and pink, the hedgerows scented with hawthorn and alder. I passed the same massive stone villas with granite steps and ornate porticoes they would have seen, the same mansions of yellow limestone in stands of spruce and pine, and the same churches spanning a thousand years of history, from G. E. Street’s High Victorian Gothic prayer-hall of St Philip and St James in Walton Manor, to the crusty Anglo-Saxon bulwark of St Michael’s in the Cornmarket. I passed the same corner shops and terraced cottages, the same pubs with double-barrelled names like the Horse and Jockey and the Eagle and Child, the same austere Elizabethan faзades of Balliol and St John’s. I turned right before the Saxon Tower and walked west along George Street, towards the Boys’ High School on the corner of New Inn Hall street. The building was still there, but it was no longer a school, neither did it face St George’s church as it had done in Lawrence’s day: the church was gone, replaced by the less elegant ABC cinema. It was an impressively solid Victorian edifice, however, with its arches and ecclesiastical window, flanked by sculpted Latin mottoes: Dominus Illuminatio Meaand Fortis East Veritas.