What the Desert Can do to a Man

PSYCHO-HISTORY, a field that has gained a reputation for raking great men over the coals, has hardly been kind to T.E. Lawrence. From several "psycho-biographies" and a Hollywood extravaganza, Lawrence emerges as the hidden sexual Frankenstein's monster of the modern age--a libidinal beast repressed by Victorian morality, then let loose and finally destroyed by post-World War I decadence. These accounts have reveled in the sordid side of the Lawrence myth, and there are certainly enough seedy details to make any Freudian's mouth water.

Richard Adlington, in his 1950 work "Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry," finds the key to Lawrence's desert escapades in narrow psychologism resembling this: Lawrence was illegitimate and dominated by a moralistic mother, and grew up a virginal bookworm lost somewhere in his studies of the Middle Ages. His rush into the Arab nationalist uprising in the 1910s was a subconscious effort to let loose his sexual-aggressive tendencies. But the consequences of this move for the innocent Lawrence were traumatic. He underwent a rude sexual awakening when a Turk captured and sodomized him at the height of the rebellion. From then on, Lawrence was lost to consuming guilt and shame and soon after the assault, Lawrence took up the habit, repeated regularly until his death, of paying a fellow soldier to whip him mercilessly as an act of stimulating penance.

YET LAWRENCE LEFT a legacy deserving a much more intricate and subtle approach than this. In his exhaustive study, A Prince of Our Disorder, Dr. John E. Mack has brought his psycho-historical skills to all that is known about Lawrence in an effort to set the record straight. Not content with simplistic Freudian digs at Lawrence, Mack has gathered every (but every) shred of evidence he could find--friends' recollections, letters, unpublished commentaries to Lawrence's books and, of course, Lawrence's massive opus which almost no one has read, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom." The project took Mack, who also serves as the head of Harvard Medical School's psychiatric division and as a practicing analyst at Cambridge Hospital, over ten years to complete. And while the sheer volume of Mack's research makes the product somewhat hard to digest, the results of his "objective" study throw considerable light on just how psycho-historical analysis should be done.

Mack plays down the importance of "trauma" in Lawrence's development, and focuses instead on his subject's creativity. This emphasis makes a great deal of sense, since Lawrence had without doubt a one-of-a-kind imagination. The study of medieval romances consumed him as an undergraduate, and even as a boy he dreamed of someday helping an oppressed people to free themselves. The Arab campaign gave Lawrence his own modern Crusade, Mack says, and the Turks became the dragon for this latter-day St. George to slay.

The motivation behind this romantic obsession, Mack argues, was Lawrence's need for redemption--a need spurred not only by his shame about being a bastard, but also by the secret life his unwed parents led in order to evade public scorn and prejudice. What better reason for identifying with a people under the yoke of imperialist domination than his own haunting memories of his mother's rigid morality? (An illegitimate child herself, she pleaded with each of her three sons to redeem her by becoming missionaries.)

AT THE SAME TIME, Mack highlights the various ways in which a political life, first in the Arab rebellion and later in a Royal Air Force career, allowed Lawrence to exercise his talent for "enabling." Lawrence, through his sharp understanding of the needs of men, managed with grace to prod and guide them into putting their wishes into action. Erik Erikson stressed this same talent for "enabling" in Mahatmha Ghandi, in a work, Ghandi's Truth, that sets the standard for insightful psycho-history. And like Erikson, Mack demonstrates how Lawrence made this talent a continual game that challenged his considerable wits and tested his subtle power to move and manipulate his environment.

Mack's respect for Lawrence's intellect, charm, and sense of play yields a portrait that is not only comprehensive but compassionate, and never smacks of facile, "shrinky" cheapness. Several admirers have called Lawrence a Hamlet for our times. Mack demonstrates how the overdose of insight and self-consciousness that kept Hamlet from ever doing anything in another epoch forced Lawrence to take action in a compulsive way.

As with any psycho-historical interpretation, though, A Prince of Our Disorder leaves one with the uneasy feeling that these neat themes may be too neat. In fact, the awesome load of testimony and historical background Mack has collected seems to almost defy generalizations. Mack has not only amassed what must amount to a warehouse full of notes--his text is followed with not less than 56 pages of footnote--he seems to have felt an obligation to use them all. (He informs us at one point that on a post-war trip through southern Europe, Lawrence stopped over in Albania to lead a glowworm-catching contest). Much of the background, in particular, would not have been missed, and in several places detracts from the force of his interpretation.

STILL, HISTORICAL PRECISION and a thorough consideration of where the evidence is coming from give Mack's work strength. In his preface, Mack says he undertook the Lawrence project with a prejudice in favor of a much more psycho-analytical explanation of his subject; but the more he discovered the more he became convinced, he writes, that Lawrence's unusual place in history was of central importance. E.M. Forster wrote about Lawrence that in an age of faith he might have become a monk, or at least a holy crusader who continued to believe in his lost cause.

Without such a faith, however, the awful attraction to violence and degradation eventually took its toll on Lawrence. He became acutely conscious of how he was "using" the Arabs to live out personal dreams and to fight his fear of death. Ultimately, Lawrence could not endure the central psycho-social fact that no matter how diligently man serves humanity, he inevitably serves himself in doing so. Lawrence, more than anyone, would feel uneasy about the psycho-historical movement; in his later life, he often prayed and pleaded to be free of his mainly self-analytical insights.

To escape this preoccupation, Lawrence became more and more addicted to the thrill of high speeds. On a May morning in 1935, he took his beloved motorcycle on a breakneck run through the English countryside. Two boys on bicycles moved into his path. He swerved, flew over the handlebars and fell fatally to the road. Could it be said that in a final ironic effort to protect other's lives, Lawrence gained release from the torment of his own?