LOOKING FOR LAWRENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 894, 21 September 1956, Page 13

LOOKING FOR LAWRENCE

THE DESERT AND THE STARS, by Flora Areeaeepel Faber and Faber, English price .VERYTHING connected with the luckless Lawrence (T. E.) seems to wind up in paradox. The unspeakable Lowell Thomas who sought to glorify Lawrence (and, incidentally, himself) succeeded only in making him a figure

of poor fun. Richard Aldington, who rode out as the bold iconoclast, not only suffered a terrible mauling, but found that hi$ book actually raised Lawrence’s stature by chipping away some of the Lowell Tomfooleries. So we have Aldington to thank for some ot the many. merits of Flora Armitage’s new biography. No biographer henceforward can tackle Lawrence with-

out facing and answering Aldington’s charges; which just goes to show that the more spiteful the advocatus diaboli the more convincing the _ canonisation. Miss Armitage deals with Lawrence as Impostor in an Epilogue — and burkes none of the charges. She _empties Mr.

Aldington as dispassionately as a housewife shells peas, and deals with Lawrence’s webs of falsehood honestly, camly and sympathetically. She presents the whole life of Lawrence in accurate perspective, not as a setting to the brief Arabian. adventure. She brings to her study a woman’s aching pity for the physical and spiritual suffering of a man at civil war with himself. She tries to "explain" Lawrence and fails, as all his biographers must fail, but gallantly. For other Lawrence biographers there will be, as there will always be men and women compelled to write of the Brontes, of the murder of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. W.H. of the Sonnets, of the Easter Island monoliths, Lawrence of the cliff-like brow and the jutty chin had a strangely Easter Island look about him, come to think of it.

G. C. A.

Wall