Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Tomlin
Sorry to disappoint, but not a clue.  |
One thing that David Lean brings
so well to the motion picture was that in the movie, as in real life, “Lawrence” was not just a real *warrior* but a real *thinker*. This is the kind of character development I personally believe is seldom seen in most popular movies of today.
Here is a copy and paste from an author who is arguably one of the most reputable T.E. Lawrence historians. The historian’s name and the actual website from which I snatched this (a couple years back) escapes me for now as I just kept some of his insights on my word processor for when I received queries from people working on the Blu-ray title that took a personal interest in the main character and wanted some background. Here is an excerpt........................
“T. E. Lawrence became famous after the First World War because of the remarkable role he had played while serving as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. When the war ended, an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, toured Britain and the Empire giving an outstandingly successful slide-show about Lawrence’s achievements. The romantic story of Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia and Allenby's in the Holy Land appealed strongly to a British public sated with horrific accounts of trench warfare on the Western Front. From this beginning grew the legend of 'Lawrence of Arabia'.
Thereafter, the facts of Lawrence's war-adventures were often obscured by myth. Even today, his reputation is a favourite target for popular controversialists. Nevertheless, when the secret British archives of the Middle East campaigns were finally released in the 1960s and '70s, they showed that Lawrence's service with the Arabs had been no less remarkable than the legend.
Lawrence himself had little wish to be remembered as a war hero: he could hardly bear to think about his wartime role. His enduring ambition was to be a writer. He once confessed his hope that, "in the distant future, if the distant future deigns to consider my insignificance, I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than a man of action.”
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Rob, specifically in regards to my question to you, this is what the historian has stated and I quote……………………….
“No-one who knew him well suggested that he was homosexual. Very few of his friends were homosexual. When the accusation was made publicly by Richard Aldington, twenty years after Lawrence's death, not one of his friends or contemporaries in the ranks - the people who knew him well - supported it. As far as I know only two people made this suggestion (in private correspondence) during his lifetime. Neither of them was more than a slight acquaintance, and both had very strong personal reasons to wish to discredit him. They made no secret of their general enmity.
There is independent evidence that in Oxford as a young man Lawrence was attracted to at least one girl, Janet Laurie. In 1910, soon after graduating from university, he left England to join an archaeological excavation in a remote part of Syria where there were no European women. As he spent most of his time there until the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, he had almost no opportunity to mix with the kind of girl that an Englishman of his generation might have thought suitable. Nevertheless, he seems to have had very cordial relationships with English and American women he met in the Middle East and with his Arabic teacher Fareedeh el Akle.
At the beginning of World War One Lawrence was almost certainly sexually inexperienced, as were the great majority of young officers in the British army. The sexual morality of the period was very different from morality today.
Despite many attempts by controversial biographers to claim otherwise, there are no sound reasons to disbelieve his statements in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom and elsewhere that during the war, at Deraa in November 1917, he was subjected to flogging and violent male rape. Thereafter he seems to have had a profound horror of sexuality and physical contact with other human beings.
The experience at Deraa left very deep psychological scars which are evident throughout his later writings. In the mid -1920s he developed a flagellation disorder. We have little reliable information about this, but it appears that on a relatively small number of occasions (eleven or so) during the following decade he arranged secretly to have himself beaten in a ritual related to the events at Deraa. He also appears also to have suffered during these years from less extreme forms of masochistic disorder.
A number of controversial biographers, notably Richard Aldington, Desmond Stewart (himself openly homosexual), Lawrence James, and Michael Asher, have written biographies of Lawrence in which they claimed that he was gay. Neither of Lawrence's major scholarly biographers, myself and John E. Mack (a Harvard professor of psychiatry) reached that conclusion. In the T. E. Lawrence Studies website there is very detailed analysis of the case made by Michael Asher (itself largely derived from the books by James and Stewart).
Whatever Lawrence's personal difficulties in this area, he was not homophobic. His personal philosophy, throughout his adult life, was that people should be allowed to lead their own lives. In this and many other matters he was not judgmental. This tolerance has been misinterpreted. Thus, the fact that he does not condemn homosexual practices by others in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom has been cited as a basis for assuming that he favoured such practices himself.”
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