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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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It is important to note that the agreement proposes neither an Arab nor a Jewish state, but rather a state under joint Arab-Jewish control, with absolute religious freedom for all, and that no limit is set on Jewish immigration. This would have produced an incalculably different history for both Palestinians and Zionists, as opposed to the ultimately doomed attempt of the British to rule Palestine under a “mandate,” from 1920 to 1948, and to set tight limits on Jewish immigration.

Feisal was already aware that the chances of putting this agreement into practice were rapidly diminishing, since when he signed it he added,in graceful Arabic script above his signature, a handwritten “reservation,” which Lawrence translated and wrote out in English, for attachment to the agreement: “If the Arabs are established as I have asked in my manifesto of Jan. 4th* addressed to the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, I will carry out what is written in this agreement. If changes are made, I can not be answerable for failing to carry out this agreement. Feisal ibn Hussein.”

In short, the title deed to a joint Arab-Jewish Palestine was conditional on the Arabs’ getting an independent Arab state in Syria with Damascus as its capital, and including Lebanon and its ports, without which any such state would have been strangled at birth. Indeed Feisal had already remarked that Syria without Lebanon would be “of no use to him.” It was already clear to both Feisal and Lawrence that this was not likely to happen; so, as idealistic as the agreement with Weizmann may seem, it can also be read as a bold attempt to win Jewish support (and particularly AmericanJewish support) for Feisal’s claim to Syria, as well as Jewish financing for the Arab state. Lawrence was, at the time, steeped in realpolitik. He would later write to his comrade in arms Alan Dawnay that Feisal didn’t need financing from France: “ ‘He’ll say that he doesn’t want their money, because by then the Zionists will have a centre in Jerusalem, and for their concessions they will finance him (this is all in writing, and fixed, but don’t put it in the press for God’s sake).’ … Lawrence went on to say that the Zionists are not a Government, and not British, and their action does not infringe the Sykes-Picot Agreement…. ‘They will finance the whole East, I hope, Syria and Mesopotamia alike. High Jews are unwilling to put much cash into Palestine only, since that country offers nothing but a sentimental return. They want 6%.’ ”

Thus the price for unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine was to be Jewish financial assistance, and Jewish support for Feisal’s claim to Syria. Like Balfour, Lloyd George, and many other people in Britain, Lawrence hugely overestimated the influence and wealth of the Jews, in

America and elsewhere. Within less than fourteen years, most of Europe and America would turn a blind eye to the fate of the Jews. Even Weizmann, of all people, understood the Jews’ lack of power. The importance of Zionism was not symbolic; the pressure that made Jews in Poland, Russia, and eastern Europe consider seriously the prospect of resettling in a strange, distant, and hostile land and climate was a product of poverty, intense discrimination, and fear. Rich philanthropists like Lord Rothschild might make the Zionist settlements in Palestine possible, but those who undertook the long journey there were for the most part poor and desperate.

In the end, neither the Arabs nor the Zionists would have much effect on the Paris Peace Conference. In the long memorandum to Balfour, which Lawrence had drafted, Feisal ended by begging “the Great Powers … to lay aside the thought of individual profits, and their old jealousies” and to think of the Arabs “as one potential people, jealous of their language and liberty, [who] ask that no step be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.” The “Great Powers,” of course, did nothing of the sort, and instead shared the Arab lands between themselves, with frontiers rough-hewn by European bureaucrats and statesmen. The effect was, more or less, to guarantee that there would never be “one sovereign power” in the Middle East.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the largest, most ambitious, and most comprehensive attempt to remake the world in the history of mankind. It began on January 18, 1919, and continued for more than a year, during which Paris was filled with the huge staffs of more than thirty national delegations, as well as thousands of people from all over the world lobbying for every imaginable cause. The Peace Conference took on itself such matters as the international regulation of air travel (then still in its infancy) and the attempt to define fishing rights in the open seas, still a subject of fierce controversy between nations today; but its two major challenges were to remake Europe in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to deal with the former possessions of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

The Peace Conference was under siege, from the very beginning, by an incredible array of issues, some of them defying any rational solution or compromise, and by demands for justice from every possible national, racial, or linguistic group. None presented themselves with more dignity or with a better-prepared case than the Arabs, led by Feisal in his robes as an emir and a sharif, and Lawrence omnipresent beside him, either in British uniform with an Arab headdress or, on more formal occasions, in white robes, with his curved gold dagger. From the outset, the French Foreign Office made difficulties. Feisal was left off the list of official delegates until the British protested on his behalf, and even then he was allowed to represent only the Hejaz. In addition, his mail was opened and his cables were intercepted and deciphered by the British, and every possible obstacle was placed in his path by the French.

The British delegates were housed in three hotels: the Majestic and the Astoria, with the overflow relegated to the Hotel Continental, a thirty-minute walk away from the other two. Lawrence was allocated a small room there, which, in the tradition of French hotels of the day that were not in the grand luxeclass, had no bath. Having to use the one bathroom on his floor of the hotel was always a trial to Lawrence, whose only self-indulgence was taking long, very hot baths. By inference, his room had no telephone, either—Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, CBE, DSO, Lawrence’s rival as a daring intelligence officer, had the room below Lawrence’s at the Continental (with a bath), and reported that when Lawrence wished to communicate with him at night, he would thump on the floor to alert Meinertzhagen, then lower a message or a sheaf of manuscript on a string to Meinertzhagen’s window. When Meinertzhagen wished to communicate with Lawrence at night, he would thump on the ceiling—not such a problem for Meinertzhagen, since he was very tall. According to Meinertzhagen, Lawrence continued to wear the badges of a full colonel on his uniform, even though that rank had been given to him only for the duration of his trip home in 1918. When

Lawrence asked if he could take a bath in Meinertzhagen’s room late one night, there were “red weals on his ribs, standing out like tattoo marks,” presumably where the Turkish bey at Deraa had plunged and twisted a bayonet between Lawrence’s ribs.

Meinertzhagen and Lawrence had what might best be described as a wary relationship, and the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s diaries, which he revised, edited, and retyped later in life, is not necessarily to be relied on, though some of his account rings true. He referred to Lawrence affectionately as “little Lawrence,” and Lawrence described him as “a silent, masterful man, who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest,” which is what a lot of people said or thought about Lawrence. Meinertzhagen claimed to be the inventor of the famous “haversack ruse”: he had ridden close to the Turkish lines in 1917, pretended to be wounded, and galloped away, dropping his haversack, which contained Ј20, faked love letters, and a falsified map and war diaries, all intended to persuade the Turks that Allenby’s attack would be aimed at Gaza. Meinertzhagen’s role at the Peace Conference was, in some ways, analogous to Lawrence’s—though not Jewish, he was the expert on, the true believer in, and the spokesman for Zionist aspirations, as Lawrence was for the Arabs (a street in Jerusalem is now named after Meinertzhagen). He was wealthy and well connected; was a cousin of Beatrice Webb (a cofounder of the London School of Economics); had attended Harrow with Winston Churchill; and had once shot and killed the leader of a Kenyan tribal uprising while shaking his hand at a meeting to negotiate a truce.

Meinertzhagen, though his own nature was overbearing—his sheer size and his reputation for killing prisoners by smashing their heads in with his knobkerrie alarmed most people—seems to have understood and liked Lawrence very much. His analysis of Lawrence’s character is at once sympathetic and penetrating: “his mind,” he wrote, “was pure as gold. Indelicacy, indecency, any form of coarseness or vulgarity repelled him physically…. He had perfect manners if consideration for others counts and he expected good manners from others…. The war shattered his sensitive nature. He was shaken off his balance by the stresses, hardships and responsibilities of his campaign. These all went to accentuate and develop any little eccentricities of his youth.”

He and Lawrence shared a taste for schoolboy pranks. Meinertzhagen claims that they hid themselves at the top of the stairs of the Astoria Hotel, unfurled rolls of toilet paper, and dropped them down in long strips on the heads of Lloyd George, Balfour, and Lord Hardinge, who were standing in the lobby, prompting Hardinge to remark: “There is nothing funny about toilet paper.” Lawrence may have revealed to Meinertzhagen the fact that he was illegitimate, and the intimate details of his rape at the hands of the bey and the bey’s men in Deraa. Meinertzhagen would probably have been a good choice of confidant, since he was unshockable: on the subject of illegitimacy he merely told Lawrence he was “in good company for Jesus was born out of wedlock.” In late life Meinertzhagen claimed that Lawrence began to write the story of his involvement with the Arabs while he was in Paris.

Lawrence’s pace of writing was remarkable—he wrote 160,000 words in less than six months, while putting in long days at the Peace Conference, or in meetings with Feisal and the British delegation, as well as enjoying a full social schedule. In the words of Gertrude Bell—who also became part of the British delegation, to lobby for Britain’s control over what was to become Iraq—Lawrence was “the most picturesque” figure at the conference; also, he realized early on the need to win over journalists and members of the American delegation to Feisal’s cause, and dined with them constantly.

Almost everybody who was at the Peace Conference seems to have noticed Lawrence. A typical example is Professor James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University, a member of the American delegation, who wrote of Lawrence, after their first meeting: “He has been described as the most interesting Briton alive, a student of Mediaeval history at Magdalen, where he used to sleep by day and work by night and take his recreation in the deer park at four in the morning—a Shelley-like person, and yet too virile to be a poet. He is a rather short, strongly built man of not over twenty-eight years, with sandy complexion, a typical English face, bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes and a smile that responded swiftly to that on the face of his friend [Feisal]. The two men were obviously very fond of each other. I have seldom seen such mutual affection between grown men as in this instance. Lawrence would catch the full drift of Feisal’s humor and pass the joke along to us while Feisal was still exploding with his idea; but at the same time it was funny to see how Feisal spoke with the oratorical feeling of the South and Lawrence translated in the lowest and quietest of English voices, in very simple and direct phrases, with only here and there a touch of Oriental poetry breaking through.”

Lawrence made many friends in Paris, among them Lionel Curtis, some of whose ideas about turning the British Commonwealth into a multinational, multiracial federation resembled those of Lawrence; and Arnold Toynbee, the historian. Even so, it is impossible to think of the time that Lawrence spent in Paris, however productive, as happy; indeed, if Meinertzhagen is to be believed, Lawrence was frequently (and “intensely”) depressed. The ambiguity of his own role continued to disturb him—he was at the same time the most important (and most visible) part of Feisal’s small “team,” and a member of the British delegation, where Feisal was already seen as a lost cause.

Lawrence wrote home briefly on January 30, while waiting for his breakfast, to say that he was busy, and had dined only once at his own hotel since arriving in Paris (with his old friend and comrade in arms Colonel Stewart Newcombe). Certainly he saw everybody who mattered, starting with President Woodrow Wilson himself, into whose head Lawrence seems to have put the idea of a committee of inquiry into the wishes of the Syrians.* Lawrence assiduously cultivated American journalists, and gave them long interviews. With his startling good looks, his youth, his reputation as a war hero, and his exotic headdress, he got enough attention and space in American newspapers to worry both the French and the more cautious of his colleagues in the British delegation. He fancied that he had persuaded Wilson, and the American public, to take responsibility for a free, democratic Arab state in Syria, instead of a French colony, but in this he was overoptimistic. Wilson, despite his belief in democracy and the self-determination of peoples, was wary of making any promises about America’s becoming the godfather of an independent Arab state.

On February 6, Lawrence appeared in what was widely acknowledged as one of the most dramatic scenes of the Paris Peace Conference. Feisal’s and Lawrence’s appearance before the Council of Ten (the leaders of the Allied governments) to argue the case for an independent state in Syria had been widely anticipated, and was the subject of considerable backstage maneuvering by the French. Unwisely, Lawrence had been telling people the story of how Feisal had addressed an audience in Scotland in Arabic by reciting the Koran to them, and then whispered to Lawrence to make up whatever he pleased as the English translation. This may have been true, since Feisal had been bored and irritated at being sent on a Scottish tour by the British government. When word of it had reached the French, they hoped to catch him out playing a similar trick in Paris. Therefore they provided themselves with a Moroccan civil servant to see if Lawrence’s translation corresponded with what Feisal said. Fortunately, Lawrence had anticipated that the French would do something of the sort. He wrote out Feisal’s speech in Arabic for him, then translated it into English for himself. Opinions differ as to what Lawrence wore for the occasion. Lloyd George wrote that he was dressed “in flowing robes of dazzling white,” and Arnold Toynbee, the future author of the twelve-volume A Study of History,and a more reliable witness than the prime minister, recorded that Lawrence was “in Arab dress.” Lawrence himself insisted that he was in British uniform with an Arab headdress. Feisal, at any rate, wore the white and gold embroidered robes of a sharif of Mecca, with a curved gold dagger at his waist and a gold-thread agalon his headdress, impressing everybody, even the French, with his gravity, his melodic voice, and his dignified bearing. When he had finished his speech, Lawrence read it aloud in English, but several of the ten heads of government were still unable to understand what had been said. “President Wilson then made a suggestion. ‘Colonel Lawrence,’ he said, ‘could you put the Amir Feisal’s statement into French now for us?’ “ Lawrence then started again and read the whole speech aloud in flawless French. “When he came to the end of this unprepared piece of translation, the Ten clapped. Lawrence’s spell had made the Ten forget, for a moment, who they were and what they were supposed to be doing. They had started the session as conscious arbiters of the destinies of mankind; they were ending it as the captive audience of a minor supplicant’s interpreter.”

The “minor supplicant’s interpreter” had effectively upstaged “the minor supplicant” in the eyes of most of the delegates, but Feisal did not seem to mind. Photographs taken at the Peace Conference show him looking sad, like a man who already suspects that he is presenting a lost cause, whereas Lawrence, always standing tactfully a pace behind him, has his usual faint, cynical smile. Behind both of them, an unusual figure even at the Peace Conference, stands Feisal’s tall, broad-shouldered black Sudanese slave and bodyguard in full Arab robes and cloak.

Despite Lawrence’s “amazing” feat, Feisal’s statement fell on deaf ears. The Italians, the Serbs, the Belgians, and the rest of the smaller Allied countries had no great interest in Syria—it was effectively a contest between Britain and France, with the United States as a neutral referee. Any hope of a united autonomous Arab state from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was dead, since the British had occupied Mesopotamia and clearly intended to stay there; and to obtain increased British support Feisal voluntarily conceded Palestine, which the British were also occupying. He—or Lawrence, as his speechwriter—included numerous references to self-determination, in an effort to please Wilson. During the prolonged questions that followed, Feisal more than held his own against Clemenceau, pointing out, with superb tact, both how grateful he was for French military support and how minimal it had been; and when Clemenceau noted that French interest in Syria went back to the Crusades, he gently asked the French prime minister: who had won the Crusades?

A spokesmen in favor of French rule in Syria went on at such length that at one point Clemenceau angrily asked his foreign minister, Pichon, “What did you get that fellow here for anyway?” Wilson signified his own impatience with the proceedings by getting up and walking around the room. “Poor Lawrence wandered among Versailles’ well-cut hedges, casting hateful glances at Arthur Balfour’s aristocratic features and baggy clothes,” commented an exiled czarist nobleman. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation, remarked on “the lines of resentment hardening around his boyish lips … an undergraduate with a chin.”

A hint that Lawrence’s patience and good nature were fraying can be found in the interview he gave to Lincoln Steffens, the famous American muckraking journalist and progressive. By the time he saw Steffens, Lawrence may have had enough of American journalists, although Steffens was the kind of man Lawrence normally admired. Still, Lawrence was not without a certain streak of skepticism and snobbery on the subject of Americans, as well as a high degree of impatience with the professed moral superiority of Woodrow Wilson, especially in view of the Americans’ reluctance to take on any commitments in the Middle East. Steffens, who called the interview “the queerest I have ever had in all my interviewing life,” met with Lawrence in the latter’s hotel room, and found the young colonel at his most difficult, argumentative, and ironic—very much a regression to the image of the languid poseur he had sometimes cultivated as an Oxford undergraduate. It didn’t help, perhaps, that Steffens wanted to talk about the Armenians, whereas Lawrence wanted to present Feisal’s case for Syria. Lawrence was far from disliking Armenians—the wealthy Altounyan family in Aleppo had been friends of his during his days at Carchemish—but he probably regarded the Armenians as a lost cause, since the Turks had murdered 1.5 million of them in 1915 without provoking the United States into breaking off diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire.* In any case, Steffens’s somewhat holier-than-thou attitude brought out the worst in Lawrence, who suggested, deadpan, that the Armenians deserved to be killed off, and that the United States, with its particular combination of idealism and commerce and its experience at destroying the American Indians, was the best power to take on the task of completing what the Turks had begun. Steffens does not seem to have fully understood that Lawrence was pulling his leg, but what emerges from the interview more strongly than anything else is Lawrence’s irritation with America’s naive good intentions, particularly when they were coupled with its total unwillingness to take on the hard part of rebuilding a new world. Lawrence also played a curious cat-and-mouse game: Steffens was forced to put Lawrence’s ideas into words, so that Lawrence could later deny having said them.

The United States was offered the mandate for Armenia at the Peace Conference and needless to say turned it down, condemning thousands more Armenians to death. Wilson also turned down all suggestions for an American mandate over Palestine, though Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was rushed in to mediate a disagreement between Feisal and Weizmann over the number of Jews who could be admitted into Palestine every year. Lawrence not only was present but drafted Feisal’s letter, which solved the dispute. Throughout March and much of April Feisal and Lawrence met with the French, the British, and the Americans, attempting to create a compromise for Syria that would be acceptable to the Arabs and the French. In the end the best they could do was to accept President Wilson’s suggestion of “an inter-Allied commission of inquiry,” if only as a delaying tactic. Lawrence wrote Feisal’s letter to Clemenceau accepting the commission, and it conveys unmistakably Lawrence’s gift for deadpan irony, as well as his bitterness, which Clemenceau can hardly have failed to notice.

The Spanish flu pandemic, which would kill between 100 million and 150 million people worldwide, raged from 1918 to 1920, and reached its peak in 1919. It was as if by some malignant stroke of irony the war had ended with a final, and even greater, human disaster. It killed Lawrence’s ebullient friend Sir Mark Sykes in Paris in February (prompting Lloyd

George to remark rather ungraciously, “He was responsible for the agreement which is causing us all the trouble with the French…. Picot … got the better of him”), and on April 7 it killed Lawrence’s father. A telegram from Oxford warned him that Thomas Lawrence was suffering from influenza and pneumonia, and Lawrence set off immediately for England to see him, but arrived too late. He returned to Paris, and did not tell anyone, not even Feisal, that his father had died, until a week later, when he requested permission to go home and see his mother. Feisal admired Lawrence’s “control of personal feelings,” and that assessment is fair enough, but Lawrence had long since made control of his personal feelings something of a fetish. He would certainly have deeply mourned the unexpected death of his father, and perhaps even more, dreaded being exposed once again to the emotional demands of his mother. Thomas Lawrence had tried, whenever he could, in his patient, gentle way, to diminish, control, or redirect those demands, but now he was no longer there to protect Ned from the full force of his mother’s attempts to intrude into his life. He must have felt overwhelmed by his father’s death, by his failure to secure Syria for the Arabs, and by the demands of his book, which forced him to relive the experiences of two years of war. He persuaded Feisal to return to Syria, rather than stay on in Paris watching his position erode, a decision Gertrude Bell endorsed. Lawrence himself decided to return to Egypt to retrieve the notes he had left behind in the Arab Bureau’s files, and now needed.

Taking advantage of the fact that the Royal Air Force (upgraded from the Royal Flying Corps into a new and independent service in 1918) was about to send fifty big Handley-Page bombers to Egypt—the first sign that Britain was going to back up its occupation of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and what is now Jordan—Lawrence sought permission to fly out with one of the first squadrons. He left Paris on May 18 for what was intended to be a week’s leave. Airplanes and the air force had always interested him, and he must have relished the opportunity of a long flight in the RAF’s biggest bomber. He must also have welcomed the chance of getting away from Paris, where the French press had been running a series of hostile articles about him, accusing him of turning Feisal’s head with notions of a united, independent Arab state; of being willing to do “a disservice” to his own country for his “sacred mission"; and of becoming “a second Gordon"*—all this carefully orchestrated by the French government.

On March 9, 1919, almost a year after his visit to Aqaba, Lowell Thomas opened his lecture—illustrated with motion pictures and tinted slides—in the Century Theater in New York. He played to packed houses. The lecture was originally titled With Allenby in Palestine, Including the Capture of Jerusalem and the Liberation of Holy Arabia,but it would shortly be changed to With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia,once Thomas realized that what the audience wanted most was Lawrence. The demand for tickets was so great that the lectures had to be moved to Madison Square Garden. Thomas promoted them with artful newspaper articles, and an advertising campaign that included giant photographs of Lawrence, in his robes and headdress, in the windows of the major department stores on Fifth Avenue, as well as a vivid full-color poster showing Lawrence charging on horseback, robes flowing, surrounded by “his” Arabs, curved sabers drawn and gleaming, against a background of the desert.

Lowell Thomas was a born publicist, huckster, and promoter, as well as one of the most successful lecturers in American history, with a phenomenal gift of gab and a naturally intimate relationship with his audience, however large, which equaled that of Mark Twain at the height of his career. Funny, folksy, and inspirational by turns, Thomas could keep people on the edge of their seats with suspense, bring tears to their eyes with sentiment, and make them hold their breath with drama. On the subject of Lawrence he not only did himself proud but had Harry Chase’s photographs and films to back him up. It is hard for us to understand the impact of his show (which changed, and was more ambitiously staged,with every performance), but at its center was something people had never seen before: a real-life drama captured on film, in which the central figure was not an actor, but a real hero: T. E. Lawrence. Thomas enthusiastically proclaimed him “Lawrence of Arabia … a young man whose name will go down in history beside those of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clive, Charles Gordon, and all the other famous heroes of Great Britain’s glorious past.” Even today, reading the typescript of Thomas’s lecture, which accompanied the film and slides, is an extraordinary and thrilling experience, so sweeping were his eloquence and his enthusiasm for his subject.

While Lawrence watched Feisal’s hopes begin to fade at the Paris Peace Conference, across the Atlantic he was about to become famous on a scale beyond anything he, or anyone else, could have imagined. With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabiawould be seen by more than 2 million people in the United States, and by even more in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, when Thomas eventually took his lecture and “picture show” on a world tour.* The London theatrical impresario Percy Burton saw the show in New York and was so overcome that he immediately offered to bring it to London; and after spirited bargaining Thomas, who insisted on opening it at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where no film had ever been played before, agreed to postpone his tour of American cities in favor of Great Britain. By then, it was already clear that the show was going to be a phenomenal success. In the end it would make Lowell Thomas a millionaire (he made a profit of $1.5 million on the show, the equivalent of at least $16 million in today’s money), and set him on the first steps of the path that took the former cub reporter from Cripple Creek, Colorado, to a motion picture, radio, and television career that would last for more than sixty years. It also transformed T. E. Lawrence permanently into “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Lowell Thomas’s show is hard to recapture accurately, since it was continually being changed. He modified it for different audiences; in Great Britain he frequently referred to Lawrence as “the prince of Mecca” (a nonexistent title conferred on him by Thomas) and “the uncrowned king of Arabia"; in the United States he described Lawrence more democratically as “the George Washington of Arabia"; in Australia he took special care to praise the role of the Australian Light Horse in the capture of Damascus. Thomas himself was not just a bold and talented producer but also a gifted narrator, with a sonorous delivery, relieved by the occasional joke, that would make him a star—indeed an institution—for the rest of his life. The show included not only the film that Chase had shot of Lawrence and the Arab army at Aqaba, as well as hand-tinted slides of Lawrence, but eventually exotically dressed young women dancing in front of a backdrop of color slides of the Pyramids to “eastern” music, braziers in which incense burned, and, for the London performance, the sixty-piece band of the Welsh Guards, as well as the “Moonlight on the Nile” scenery borrowed from Sir Thomas Beecham’s production of Handel’s opera Joseph and His Brethren.