Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

As the heat increased, Lawrence took to sleeping on the mound, overlooking the Euphrates, and getting up at sunrise to help Sheikh Hamoudi pick the men, and deal with the infinite problems of blood feuds and rivalry between those who shoveled, and thought of themselves as an elite, and those who merely carried baskets of dirt and rocks. Daily, Lawrence was learning not only colloquial Arabic, but the complexities of Arab social relationships, and the dangerous consequences of getting these wrong, or offending Arabs’ sensitivity.

On June 24, he wrote home to say that the British Museum, disappointed in the results so far, had ordered work shut down in two weeks, and that he intended to take a walking tour of about a month. He added a warning, “Anxiety is absurd.” If anything happened to him, his family would hear about it in time. Dahoum had apparently been promoted from one of the two water boys to “the donkey boy,” and Lawrence described him as “an interesting character,” who could “read a few words (the only man in the district except the liquorice-king) of Arabic, and altogether has more intelligence than the rank-and-file.” Dahoum, he mentions, had hopes of going to school in Aleppo, and Lawrence intended to keep an eye on him. Lawrence deplores the intrusion of foreign influence, particularly French and American, on the Arabs, and adds: “The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.” In a postscript he adds that he has now decided to spend the winter walking through Syria (his new pair of boots has arrived), perhaps settling in one of the villages near Jerablus for a time, possibly in the house of Dahoum’s father.

This information may not have alarmed the Lawrence family, but it should have. There was no more talk of working under Petrie in Egypt, let alone any mention of Richards and his printing press. Lawrence and Thompson were to go off and briefly examine another Hittite mound at Tell Ahmar, at Hogarth’s request, and after that Lawrence proposed to go onby himself, walking to those crusader castles he had not already seen. On top of his next letter, written on July 29, from Jerablus, his mother wrote: “This letter was written when he was almost dying from dysentery.”

Lawrence’s letter home gives no hint of this—on the contrary, he writes, “I am very well, and en route now for Aleppo,” and describes his itinerary so far. The letter is unusually short for him, however—surely a bad sign—and in fact, on the day before, he wrote in his diary, “Cannot possibly continue to tramp in this condition,” and collapsed in the house of Sheikh Hamoudi. Hamoudi looked after Lawrence as best he could—though not without a note from Lawrence absolving him of responsibility in case his guest died. This was intended to protect Hamoudi from the Turkish authorities, who would certainly have punished him if a foreigner had died in his care.

Lawrence’s mother was not wrong—he came very close to dying, and owed his life to the patient and determined care of Sheikh Hamoudi and the donkey boy Dahoum. By the first days of August Lawrence was beginning to recover, though he was still very weak, and sensibly concluded that his walking tour could not be completed, and that he would have to go home. His illness in 1911 set a pattern that would persist for the rest of Lawrence’s life—he ignored wounds, boils, abrasions, infections, broken bones, and pain; paid no attention to the precautions about food and drinking water that almost all Europeans living or traveling in the East made sure to take; suffered through repeated bouts of at least two strains of malaria; and kept going as long as he could even when dysentery brought him to the point of fainting. He lived at some point beyond mere stoicism, and behaved as if he were indestructible—one of the essential attributes of a hero.

As Lawrence slowly regained his strength, he used the time to encourage Dahoum’s “efforts to educate himself,” and wrote to his friend Fareedeh el Akle at the American mission school in Jebail for simple books on Arab history for his pupil—if possible, books untainted by western influence or thinking. In the meantime he practiced his Arabic on Dahoum; and with a curious habit of anticipating the future, whichcreeps into his letters and diaries, he wrote to Hogarth that “learning the strongly-dialectical Arabic of the villages would be good as a disguise” while traveling.

While Lawrence lay ill in Jerablus, Hogarth was busy in London, deftly guiding the British Museum toward supporting a new season of digging at Carchemish, since the Turkish government was unlikely to allow the British to start excavation on another Hittite site before this one had been fully exploited. Apparently impressed by Hogarth’s letters to the Times about Carchemish, Lawrence began what was to become a lifelong habit of writing to the editor of the Times about matters that displeased or concerned him. He broke into public print for the first time with a savagely Swiftian attack on the way the Turkish government was allowing important antiquities and archaeological sites to be torn down by developers. “Sir,” he began: “Everyone who has watched the wonderful strides that civilization is making in the hands of the Young Turks will know of their continued efforts to clear from the country all signs of the evil of the past.” Remarking on a plan to destroy the great castle of Aleppo for the benefit of “Levantine financiers,” and on plans to do the same at Urfa and Biridjik, he went on to attack the Germans who were building the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and predicted that “the [Hittite] ruins of Carchemish are to provide materials for the approaches to a new iron girder bridge over the Euphrates,” signing himself, “Yours, &c., Traveller.” The Times, always quick to publish even the tamest of letters—and this one was anything but tame—under a provocative headline, published it on August 9, below the headline “Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia,” predictably eliciting an infuriated reaction from the German consul in Aleppo. Taunting the Turks and attacking the Germans for their activities in the Ottoman Empire was to become a habit with Lawrence in the years remaining before the outbreak of war.

On August 3 Lawrence began his trip home. He arrived in Beirut on August 8, and to his great delight met the poet James Elroy Flecker and Flecker’s Greek wife, Hellй, who were to become his close friends over the next few years. Flecker was the acting British vice-consul in Beirut;he had attended Trinity College, Oxford, where he had been, or felt he was, a misfit, although he had been a contemporary, friend, and rival of the poet Rupert Brooke. John Maynard Keynes, who had met Flecker while visiting friends in Oxford, wrote about him to Lytton Strachey: “I am not enthusiastic about Flecker,—semi-foreign, with a steady languid flow and, I am told, an equally steady production of plays and poems which are just not bad.” There may be a trace of what might now be called gay bitchery in this comment, as well as a degree of genteel anti-Semitism—both Keynes and Strachey were members of a rather refined group of extremely bright, ambitious young homosexuals. Flecker labored under numerous erotic and familial difficulties, none of which he was able to reconcile or resolve: he had been educated at a school where his father was the headmaster, and as if that were not difficult enough, his father was a ferociously Low Church, evangelical Protestant who was half Jewish. Flecker’s swarthy looks made his intense Englishness seem adopted rather than natural, and he rebelled against his parents in every way, running up reckless debts, and indulging himself by writing extravagantly garish poetry and striking exaggerated aesthetic poses that alarmed them. Only by dint of a heroic, last-ditch effort was Flecker able to squeak through the examination into the consular service (a large step down from the more socially and intellectually distinguished diplomatic service). In the process, he did nothing to please either his parents or the Foreign Office by falling in love with a forceful young Greek woman, who braved the issue of his ill health—he was already suffering from tuberculosis—to marry him. More or less exiled to a subordinate post in Beirut, Flecker paid more attention to his career as a poet than to his consular duties.

In Lawrence he found not only a friend but an admirer. Lawrence was deeply impressed by Flecker’s poetry,* the best of which was written after Flecker was exposed to the color and drama of eastern life, and felt as much at home in the Fleckers’ apartment in Beirut as he would a fewyears later in that of Ronald Storrs, in Cairo. Indeed Lawrence photographed Flecker elaborately dressed in a Bedouin robe and headdress—though despite his dark complexion and an inherent love of dressing up in costume, Flecker does not look nearly as comfortable in Arab clothing as Lawrence. Flecker is also a good example of one of Lawrence’s most endearing characteristics: once he became your friend he was your friend for life, and once he admired your work he was a supporter of it forever.

It is a measure of how ill Lawrence had been that he returned to England via Marseille and went on from there by train to Oxford—this route was much quicker (and more expensive) than traveling by sea from Beirut to England. At home, he recuperated under the watchful eye of Sarah, and faced the difficulties so common to talented young men of his age. In his case it was not so much that he couldn’t decide what to do with himself as that he had too many choices and self-imposed obligations. Hogarth, he learned, had secured the funds for a second season of excavation at Carchemish; Flinders Petrie had accepted him for a stint of tomb digging in Egypt; Vyvyan Richards was still eager to proceed with the printing press scheme; Jesus College expected to hear more about Lawrence’s BLitt thesis on medieval pottery; and Lawrence himself was deeply mired in his plan to bring out his expanded BA thesis on castles and fortifications as a book, a project that was doomed for the moment by the number of his drawings and photographs that he deemed essential to the text.

Lawrence’s photograph of James Elroy Flecker.

Although the doctors were strongly against Lawrence’s return to the Middle East, that of course did not deter him. Thompson, he learned, had declined to return unless his wife could accompany him, a suggestion that horrified everyone; and Hogarth replaced him with a young archaeologist, Charles Leonard Woolley, an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Woolley would go on to a long and distinguished career; he would not only be knighted but serve as the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. Lawrence and Woolley became and remained friends—Woolley was primarily interested in the discovery of big buildings and monuments, while Lawrence worked with the men, honed his knowledge of Arabic, and took care of the pottery finds and the photography.

Lawrence defied the doctors and set out again for Jerablus at the end of November, to report on the rumor that the Germans planned to build their railway right through the mound at Carchemish. When this proved to be untrue (the railway would pass uncomfortably near it, but not through it), he journeyed on to Egypt to join Petrie’s current dig at Kafr Ammar, on the Nile south of Cairo, but not without enduring a terrifying carriage accident on Christmas Day, when the driver toppled the carriage and the horses off a bridge and into a stream. In a letter home on January 2 he comments darkly (and correctly) about conditions in the Ottoman Empire: “Great rumors of war and annexation:—not to be believed yet, but such a smash is coming out here.”

He wrote next from Cairo, giving his family his new address in Kafr Ammar in Arabic script, so they could copy it out and add it to each envelope. The actual digging disgusted him, and prompted one of his darker descriptive passages: “It is a strange sight to see the men [dragging] out amummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting—and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear off its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result…. I’m no body snatcher, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Genghis Khan.” He found the Nile sluggish, and the brown sails of the boats on it depressing to look at.

A week later Flinders Petrie* and his wife arrived, and it is hard not to guess that the uncongenial nature of the work preconditioned Lawrence to dislike her. “I don’t like Mrs. Petrie,” he wrote home flatly after meeting her for the first time (this was unusual for Lawrence); as for Petrie, who was hugely dignified and full of himself, Lawrence seems to have displayed his dislike of tomb robbing by “taking the mickey” out of Petrie in small ways, perhaps not his most endearing trait. Lawrence turned up for digging in football shorts and a white Magdalen College Boat Club blazer, prompting Petrie to remark that they weren’t here to play cricket. As one of Lawrence’s biographers pointed out, the joke was on Petrie, who did not realize that cricket isn’t played in football shorts (not that Lawrence played either cricket or football). Also, and perhaps more woundingly, flaunting the Magdalen blazer may have been Lawrence’s way of reminding Petrie that unlike Lawrence he “was not an Oxonian, but merely Professor of Egyptology in the petit bourgeois University of London.” Petrie, whose long white beard made him rather resemble God the Father in Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, may have been sharp enough to guess the intention of Lawrence’s choice of clothing, but the Petries nevertheless showed him a remarkable degree of kindness and courtesy during his time there, and Lawrence thawed toward them.

Over time, despite his dislike of digging up mummified bodies (and a general distaste for Egypt, both the people and the way they spoke Arabic), Lawrence came rather reluctantly to admire Petrie’s abilities. Petrie had discovered the first mention of Israel in Egyptian recorded history by deciphering the Merneptah stele, an accomplishment that won him international acclaim; and by linking the styles of pottery shards, he developed a new and more exact method of chronology for excavation sites, something from which Lawrence would benefit in his task of classifying Hittite pottery at Carchemish.

Petrie emphasized that all archaeological research “lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details,” advice from which Lawrence could surely benefit, and with which he agreed. In the end Lawrence not only learned a lot from Petrie, as Hogarth had surely intended, but came to like and respect him, despite their unpropitious first meeting. As for Petrie, he offered Lawrence Ј700, a not inconsiderable sum, toward the expense of two seasons investigating several sites on the Persian Gulf, which Lawrence was very tempted to accept if the resumption of the Carchemish dig fell through.

However, during Lawrence’s one-month stay in Egypt—he may be the only visitor to pass through Cairo without bothering to see the Pyramids—Hogarth had unexpectedly tapped into a wealthy source for carrying forward the Carchemish digging. By the time Lawrence arrived back there early in February, the matter of financing was settled, and the opportunity to dig for Petrie vanished for the moment. Perhaps this was just as well, for Lawrence’s commitment to a career in archaeology was never total. Lawrence was happy at Jerablus—happier than he would ever be in his life again—but he was never tempted by the academic life.

The world of caravans, camels, desert, and Bedouin nomads would hold Lawrence to the Middle East for the next three years, except for brief visits home, and spare him the decision about what career to follow, until at last the outbreak of World War I thrust him into the career for which he had been training himself all his life.

Lawrence arrived at Aleppo to find the Turkish authorities making difficulties about the resumption of work at Carchemish; nor had the moneyarrived with which to begin a new house for the archaeologists, nearer to the site. The years 1911 to 1914 were difficult ones for foreigners in Turkey—the country’s political instability combined with a series of humiliating military defeats and territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire in Libya at the hands of Italy, and in the Balkans at the hands of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, intensified the siege mentality of the Turkish government and its hostility to foreigners, and encouraged fear of the Russians and, therefore, a closer relationship with Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century Turkey had seen itself deprived of all its North African possessions, from Egypt to Morocco, and all its Balkan possessions except for a tiny enclave around Constantinople; of course, this made the Turks all the more determined to hold on to their Arabian possessions.

Lawrence kicked his heels in Aleppo for nearly two weeks, happy to be out of Egypt, buying small antiquities for Hogarth and the Ashmolean Museum, bargaining for a long camel-hair cloak for himself (“such as Bedouin sheiks wear: Baghdad made: very warm and beautiful”), and keeping himself going by borrowing from the British consul until money arrived from the British Museum. He spent much time searching for an armorer who still made chain mail as it had been made at the time of the Crusades, for the benefit of a friend in Oxford who shared his interest in armor. He wrote home often—in one letter, he expresses satisfaction that his brother Frank is keeping up with his shooting, and urges Frank “to do a little revolver work: it is harder than a rifle to learn, and more often necessary,” a typically offhand remark that separates Lawrence from other archaeological assistants, few of whom would have felt that revolver marksmanship was a necessity. He seems to have been reading a lot—Maurice Hewlett’s Richard Yea-and-Nay, a historical novel about Richard I, for the ninth time, Lawrence claimed; and William Morris’s “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem” Sigurd the Volsung. This is a revealing choice of books. Hewlett was a prolific English writer of romantic historical fiction; he was a friend of Ezra Pound and of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and was famous and successful in his time,though he is largely forgotten now. His novel about Richard Coeur de Lion is a frankly hero-worshipping and meticulously detailed portrait of one of Lawrence’s favorite medieval kings. Morris’s hero, Sigurd, is the central figure of Norse myth and legend, the dragon slayer and hero of the Volsunga Saga, and Wagner’s inspiration for the Ring cycle. Morris transformed Sigurd into a noble Victorian hero, a kind of fantasy preux chevalier, in what one biographer of Lawrence calls “a transparently Oedipal tale."* Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he passes from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett’s novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd’s doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son’s enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology.

Once he arrived in Jerablus, after a three-day walk over rough country, followed by a recalcitrant mule train carrying the expedition’s supplies, Lawrence was like a man back in his element. Physical discomfort, danger, and exhaustion acted on him like a tonic. He gathered a workforce; had the foundations for the expedition house dug; and argued over the ownership of the mound with a greedy local landowner who claimed it, and with a Turkish police lieutenant who ordered him to stop the digging. By the first week in March he was back in Aleppo, to pick up Woolley—there was a certain amount of excitement in the foreign community, since all Italians were being expelled from Turkey because of the war in Libya, and it was therefore possible to buy their collections of antiquities atbargain-basement prices. Then, a week later, Woolley and Lawrence went to Biridjik together, to confront the kaimakam over the order to stop the digging and the interference from the local landowner.

Lawrence might easily have resented Woolley’s presence, since Woolley was senior to him, and a more experienced archaeologist, but fortunately Woolley behaved exactly the right way for an Englishman confronting an Asian official, and told the kaimakam that he would shoot on the spot anyone who “interrupted the digs.” He apparently spoke with enough high-handed vigor and righteous British indignation to cow the kaimakam, who had, of course, arranged the various attempts to stop the digging in the hope of extracting a bribe for himself. Woolley thereby won Lawrence’s instant and lasting respect and friendship. Those who thought Lawrence was mild saw only his short stature, his slight figure, and the boyish shock of unruly fair hair, and failed to notice the icy blue eyes and the large, firm jaw: he was quite capable of acting just like one of Kipling’s pukka sahibs when aroused, and he thoroughly approved of Woolley’s boldly threatening the Turkish police chief in the chief’s own office, as well as Woolley’s parting shot: that he was declaring war not against the Turkish government, but only against the kaimakam.

Woolley acquired further merit in Lawrence’s eyes by admiring Lawrence’s pottery finds (and agreeing with most of Lawrence’s theories about them) and showing a preference for Syrian over Egyptian cooking. Since Woolley could not speak or understand the local dialect, he needed Lawrence to translate for him, as well as deal with the workforce—not always an easy task, since almost every adult male was armed, and every find was proclaimed with a fusillade of shots. Even the cook, “the staid Haj Wahid,” worked with a Mauser pistol stuffed into his sash and a Martini-Henry rifle by his bedroll, and at one point fired ten shots through the goat-hair roof of the tent in celebration; the holes then had to be darned.

By the beginning of April—despite the fact that no building permit had as yet arrived from Constantinople—the stone expedition house was almost completed. Consisting of eleven rooms, “two of them very large,” the Carchemish house was to occupy a good deal of Lawrence’s time andattention over the next two years. It had an impressive courtyard with a graceful stone entrance, and although the house was built of rough-dressed stone rather than adobe, in photographs it very much resembles a largish and rather fashionable home in Santa Fe. This is particularly true of the interior, with its hanging wall rugs; white plaster walls with deep, graceful niches for books and antiquities; carved wooden doors; and beamed ceilings, which look just like the rough-hewn vigas used in New Mexico.

By mid-April Lawrence and Woolley had settled into the new house and were waiting for the arrival (and the approval) of Hogarth. Despite a formal visit from the kaimakam, who had been ordered to apologize to them, Lawrence continued his campaign of harassing the Turkish authorities, picking the lock of the storeroom in which the “poor little [Turkish] Commissaire” kept the antiquities that had been excavated, and in general doing what he could to stoke the discontent in the local workforce against the nearby German railway builders. For the moment, all this was still on the level of undergraduate pranks, but the Middle East being what it was (and is), there would soon be an escalation to violence and the use of firearms. Even Woolley, who came to admire and love Lawrence, was aware of his “essential immaturity” about matters like this. That impression was no doubt accentuated by the fact that Lawrence looked, as Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, remarked, “about eighteen.” Another person who met Lawrence in Aleppo at that time described him as a “frail, pallid, silent youth,” though that remark contrasts with Mrs. Fontana’s description of him as “a young man of rare power and considerable physical beauty.” Much as Lawrence spurned physical relationships with any women (or men), a number of women were strongly attracted to him over the years.

In a long letter home at about this time, Lawrence brings up the possibility, no doubt alarming to his family, that he may go off into the desert to seek out the primitive and nomadic Soleyb, survivors of the pagan predecessors of the Arabs; spend “a spring & summer with them"; then write a book, along the lines of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, devoted to this mysterious people. Lawrence expresses his belief that his book (or books)"would be better, if I had been for a time in open country,” a very different and more demanding ambition than turning his BA thesis into an illustrated book. Lawrence may have lost interest in the elusive Soleyb on learning that they lived on raw antelope meat, though this is not the kind of consideration which would necessarily have held him back—more likely, his growing interest in archaeology and his responsibilities at Carchemish pushed this scheme into the background.

Lawrence’s letters to his friend Leeds, back at the Ashmolean, are often rather franker than his letters home. Admittedly, in writing to Leeds Lawrence attempts to turn every event, however trying and difficult, into a funny story—one learns, for instance, that he and Woolley had prudently taken spare clothes and tinned food with them when they went to confront the kaimakam, since there was a good chance they might have been thrown into prison, and that Woolley had to brandish his pistol again, “when the police tried to hold up his donkeys.” Lawrence was running footraces with the younger and nimbler workers, and painstakingly removing a splendid Roman mosaic floor from a plowed field near the excavation site and reconstructing it as the floor of one room in the expedition house. Since this consisted of 144,000 tesserae (small vitreous tiles) “weighing over a ton,” it was no simple or easy task. In May the eagerly awaited visit of David Hogarth took place: “A breathless hush of expectation…. We’re all dressed in our best, sitting in our empty, swept, and garnished rooms, awaiting the coming of the C H I E F.”

Hogarth’s nine-day visit to the site proved satisfactory—it is typical of Hogarth’s amazing ability to be in the right place at the right time and, more important, to know the right people, that on his way out to visit Carchemish he met in Berlin with the kaiser and obtained from his imperial majesty “his explicit promise to make all right for us with the Bagh-dadbahn people, if there is any trouble,” in Lawrence’s words. Thus the German railway engineers were persuaded to carry away much of the spoil and rubble from the excavation site to use in building the bridge over the Euphrates and in bedding the tracks, thereby saving the British Museum a good deal of money, and speeding up the dig for Woolley and Lawrence.

Among the many things Lawrence learned from Hogarth, perhaps the most important was to go to the top unhesitatingly in any matter that interested or concerned him. Despite a reputation for shyness and a desire to remain in the background, as a young civilian in Cairo in 1914 Lawrence was apparently able to reach the formidable Field Marshal Kitchener to urge on him the importance of taking Alexandretta; he successfully bypassed many layers of military command to deal directly with General Allenby in 1917–1918; although only an acting lieutenant-colonel, he made his arguments about the Middle East directly to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; and he made his case for reforms in the RAF directly to Air Chief Marshal Trenchard in the 1920s. It must be said that Lawrence seldom used either his fame or his remarkable ability to reach some of the busiest and most powerful people in the world to his own advantage; he used both only in pursuit of causes he deemed worthwhile, or to deflect policies that he thought were ill-advised.

Hogarth was sufficiently impressed with what had been done at Carchemish so far—and by the numerous signs that the remains of a great Hittite city would eventually be uncovered—that he recommended to the British Museum that Woolley’s pay be increased, and that Lawrence be given a salary of fifteen shillings a day for the next season’s digging. In the meantime, Lawrence was using Dahoum to help him reassemble and classify the growing collection of pottery fragments, and teaching Dahoum to act as his assistant in the darkroom. In June, Woolley stopped the dig and went home to England, leaving Lawrence on his own, to spend the summer months traveling through Syria with Dahoum as his companion.

Lawrence’s friendship with Dahoum has been the subject of a good deal of speculation over the years, but it seems very unlikely that there was anything improper or scandalous about it—Vyvyan Richards’s comment that Lawrence was totally without sexual feelings or temptation probably holds as true for his relationship with Dahoum as it held for Richards. Whether Lawrence was totally without such feelings or savagely repressedthem for most of his life is a different question. Given his belief that his parents should never have had children, and his melancholy feeling that his father had given up great estates, a position in society, and a title for a transitory and guilty pleasure, Lawrence may well have begun early on in childhood to suppress in himself even the faintest hint of sexuality—a feat to which his unusual degree of willpower and determination would have lent themselves. The stormy relationship between Lawrence and his mother, and his refusal to be dominated by her formidable will, may have contained a complex, self-destructive reversal of the Oedipus complex: Lawrence not only refused to give in to his oedipal fantasies but suppressed all his sexual instincts completely to do so. This would be a psychological analogue of a “scorched earth” strategy, in which he constantly refused to surrender to sexual urges of any kind until his refusal became a fixed part of his personality, and the source of much of his strength.