T. E. Lawrence :sx The Myth and the Message .sx JOHN M. MACKENZIE .sx If fame be judged by numbers of biographies , then T. E. Lawrence is the most famous Briton of the twentieth century .sx Over thirty biographies of him have been published , and more flooded from the presses for the centenary of his birth .sx Few reputations have swung so wildly from hero-worship to notoriety ; few personalities have so successfully eluded definition .sx But through it all Lawrence continues to exercise an extraordinary hold on the imaginations of Britons in the twentieth century .sx John Buchan wrote that he " could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world " .sx He intrigued figures as diverse as George Bernard Shaw ( not to mention Charlotte Shaw ) , E. M. Forster , Winston Churchill and Robert Graves , while Michael Foot , not long before becoming leader of the Labour Party , wrote , " My guess is that The Mint will help to restore the reputation of the Seven Pillars , which in turn will restore the reputation of Lawrence .sx " Sure enough , a television documentary in 1986 , repeated in 1988 , largely re-created the atmosphere of uncritical adulation .sx What started as a Lawrence Bureau ( as Richard Aldington called the fan club ) became a Lawrence industry , whose production fed off the vast quantities of raw material left by Lawrence himself .sx Each incident of his life is likely to have several different versions ; each viewpoint , letter or report several variants ; each publication several texts .sx As more and more evidence has been uncovered , it has become hard to distinguish truth through a fog of dissimulation or solve the riddle of the recluse who fled from the fame he courted , the puritan obsessed with the sexuality he rejected , the sensitive scholar who abhorred the brutalities of war while revelling in them , the exalted intellect which sought to reduce mind and body to the level of the automaton , or the gentle soul who sought extremes of self-abasement and punishment .sx Some of these apparent dichotomies are not so unusual , but in Lawrence the chemistry was particularly complex , and the harder he tried to conceal the formulae the more traces he seems to have left .sx Yet , although he grossly inflated his own achievements and appropriated those of others , although the evidence of charlatanry is extensive , his ideas were often proved wrong , and his great Middle Eastern sandcastle lies in ruins , he refuses to go away .sx This essay is concerned not with the life , but with the myth .sx Where did it come from , why did it grown , and why has it survived ( at least in part ) when so many other myths - such as those of Livingstone , Gordon and Rhodes , apparently even more potent in their day - have now dispersed ?sx The myth needs to be explored in terms of certain key aspects of the life , the background against which it was formed , and the elite among whom it aggregated , functioned and had instrumental power .sx Above all , it is necessary to understand the media by which it was propagated :sx journalism , the newly potent cinematograph , lecturing , popular writing for adults and juveniles , school textbooks , 'serious' biography , and the publications of Lawrence himself .sx To be fully understood , the Lawrence myth needs to be set into its proper tradition , that of the nineteenth-century imperial hero .sx I HEROIC MYTHS .sx A state at the height of its power seems to require legendary figures .sx They explain and justify its rise , personify national greatness , offer examples of self-sacrificing service to a current generation , provide warnings for the future to an elite fearful of decline , and act as the instrument of pressure groups and interests in the formulation of policy .sx Once it became apparent that such figures had popular potency on a considerable scale , they could be used to whip up agitations to influence governments which were often as much reactive as active .sx By the later nineteenth century Carlyle's dictum that " No great man lives in vain .sx The history of the world is but the biography of great men " had become , in effect , the guiding principle of school texts and the countless works on heroes published for juvenile reading .sx For an adult audience , biographical 'series' - for example of leading figures of British India - had become the rage .sx Leaving aside the occasional use of ancient and medieval examples , heroic figures inhabited three main periods .sx The reign of Elizabeth I produced a clutch of heroes who illustrated the emergence , consolidation and early expansion of the Protestant state ; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced empire-builders and naval and military figures who confirmed British superiority over the French ; and , increasingly important , the Victorian era spawned contemporary heroes of exploration , missionary enterprise and empire .sx Heroism needed to pit itself against an enemy , and through these periods the enemy changes from Catholic Spain to Catholic France to 'heathen' , Hindu or Muslim inhabitants of Empire .sx Heroes not only offered historical instruction embracing an understanding of politics , military tactics , geography , religious precepts and even natural history , but acted above all as moral exemplars .sx Their moral power , image superimposing reality , was forged out of a combination of indomitable will , almost superhuman physical stamina , and religious ( or quasi-religious ) fervour in the attainment of nearly miraculous objectives .sx Martyrdom was usually the essential qualification for promotion to the top rank of heroic myths , which offered both moral touchstones and weapons to belabour governments and stimulate public expenditure .sx Martyrdom often produced the icon through which the message could be conveyed in its most direct form :sx Nelson dying on Victory ; Livingstone in the heart of Central Africa , kneeling in prayer ; Gordon at the top of the flight of stairs in the palace at Khartoum facing the forces of Dervish darkness .sx The manufacture and use of heroes quickened in the late nineteenth century :sx their appeal reflected a growing apprehension , an awareness of an empire possibly ready for its recessional , subject to growing jealousies and gathering foes , both European and non-European .sx Moreover , this was a period of endemic warfare in exotic localities , and exoticism was a necessary backdrop to heroic stature .sx Clive and Wolfe would have been unknown without it .sx Nelson's most famous victory before Trafalgar had been in the East , incorporated the resonant name of the most mysterious of rivers to the ancient as to the modern world , and crucially checked Napoleon in his oriental ambitions .sx Gough and Napier , though Peninsular veterans , were unknown before they approached heroic stature ( though of the second rank ) through the Chinese , Sikh and Sind wars of the 1840s .sx The Mutiny of 1857 produced heroes of the distinctive Victorian stamp :sx Sir Henry Havelock , Sir John Nicholson , Sir Colin Campbell , the Lawrence brothers - Christian militarists and administrators who became cult figures of the ensuing decades .sx These military figures were catapulted into heroic fame by the press , the new science of photography and engravings derived therefrom , popular writings , texts and sometimes theatrical representation .sx The Church and a whole range of national and local intellectual and cultural societies played their part in the dissemination of legend .sx There are two excellent examples of this process .sx Just before the Mutiny , in 1856 , David Livingstone arrived home from his first great African journey , his transcontinental crossing from Angola to Mozambique , to find that he was already a celebrity .sx The press , scenting a scoop , had laid the groundwork and he built upon it by publishing the best-selling Missionary Travels and lecturing indefatigably throughout the country .sx Such fame helped unlock the coffers of the Treasury for the officially authorised Zambesi expedition .sx Its failure , together with the emergence of other celebrated explorers such as Burton and Speke , helped to eclipse Livingstone for a period , but his final journey to discover the sources of the Nile , his meeting with Stanley , and his death in Central Africa re-created the myth on the grandest scale possible .sx By any conventional standards Livingstone was a failure - as a missionary , as an explorer ( certainly in terms of his own objectives ) and as a husband and father .sx Yet he was the perfect vehicle for a myth because he came to personify the Victorian fascination with Africa , abhorrence of the Arab slave trade , yearning for heroic and successful missionary endeavour , and the legitimate commerce of free trade with or without colonisation .sx But the myth was not self-generating .sx Initiated by the press , fostered by Livingstone himself , it was given a tremendous fillip by the Stanley 'scoop' of 1871 and all the publications that flowed from it .sx Even the devotion of his African servants , Susi and Chuma , in bringing the body out of Africa for burial in Westminster Abbey was not enough to ensure the final canonisation .sx The careful editing of Livingstone's Last Journals in order to slant his efforts towards the slave trade , commerce and Christianity , and away from the failed geographical objectives , the fabrication of the icon of his death and the inauguration of a wave of Livingstone publications all served to make Livingstone the patron saint of imperial endeavour in Africa in the 1880s and 1890s .sx Whenever this endeavour seemed likely to be checked , in Nyasaland in 1890 or in Uganda in 1892 for example , his name became a rallying cry .sx Charles Gordon secured fame in the Taiping revolt in China in the 1860s , then passed through a temporary eclipse before burnishing his reputation once more as a scourge of the slave trade when serving the Egyptian Knedive in the Sudan .sx Interestingly , it was the press and popular agitation which trapped Gladstone , against his better judgement , into using Gordon to evacuate the European and Egyptian inhabitants of Khartoum in the face of the developing conquest of the Mahdi .sx Gordon secured a self-imposed martyrdom by failing to evacuate himself , and his death had powerful repercussions in British politics as well as on imperial policy in North-East Africa .sx The circumstances of his death were carefully fabricated for iconographic purposes , and his reputation was assiduously used to promote the reconquest of the Sudan .sx The commitment to Kitchener's campaign of 1896-8 was made by Gladstone's successor , Lord Roseberry , though executed by the Conservative and Unionist administration of Lord Salisbury .sx In many ways Kitchener inherited the mantle of Gordon , and the immense popularity of the Nile campaign was rooted in the belief that it was waged to avenge Gordon .sx Khartoum became virtually a memorial city , while the 'River War' helped to spawn another legend , that of Winston Churchill , who was in turn to be important in the development of the Lawrence myth .sx Livingstone and Gordon were perhaps the two most potent heroic myths of the late nineteenth century , although they were underpinned by those of the Mutiny generals , Wolseley , Kitchener , Rhodes and a few missionaries .sx Both Livingstone and Gordon were flawed figures whose frailties were widely apparent and who made many enemies , but legends once created have a capacity to shout down criticism .sx Once engendered by the extraordinary capacities of the subject , the events of his life , the propaganda of the myth-making machine and public willingness to be caught up in an emotional outburst , the myth becomes self-generating , because to knock it down is to endanger the system on which it feeds .sx By becoming structurally important it impinges on the vested interests of many members of the elite ; to sustain it was often to sustain their own role .sx In the conditions of the late nineteenth century the myths came to be bound up with patriotism and its twin , xenophobia .sx It is only in the light of these two powerful forces that one can explain the connivance of radicals such as Labouchere in the efforts of Rhodes and Chamberlain to save each other after the Jameson Raid of 1895-6 , an event which , in spite of all the evidence of both duplicity and incompetence , prepared the way for another , albeit minor , legend , that of Dr Jameson .sx Major myths cannot , however , be manufactured out of men of straw .sx That is why Jameson , despite all the efforts of the Kaiser , never really qualified .sx The myth needs substance to work upon , and there can be no doubt that the subjects of heroic legends were remarkable figures .sx The very complexities of their personalities , which have left them open to the debunking process , have usually been an essential , if often concealed , part of their extraordinary characters .sx