From earliest childhood, Ned Lawrence knew that his family
was different, in some unspoken way, from other families, and
that he was not at all like his four brothers. Such tough
beginnings can either inhibit a personality or stimulate its
[5] growth. As is well explained in “The Young T.E. Lawrence”, a
quirky but rigorous biographical study by Anthony Sattin, a
British travel-writer, the man best known as Lawrence of Arabia
fell firmly in the second category.
Other books about Lawrence, and a famous film, present
[10] him as a hero of the first world war who rallied the Arabs to rise
against the Ottoman empire, guided them to great victories and
lobbied for the Arab cause, with disappointing results, in post –
war negotiations. Mr. Sattin, whose book came out in Britain
last October and is only now being published in America, looks
[15] instead at Lawrence´s life before that: growing up and studying
in Oxford, then excelling as an archaeologist in Syria and
Palestine.
As a middle-class boy growing up in Oxford at the turn of
the 20th century, young Lawrence was secretive as well as
[20] inquisitive, skeptical of received truths, easily bored by mentors
but passionate about medieval history. Piecing together clues
was something he learned early. He knew there was something
odd about his parents´ relationship but could not divine what;
only later did he learn that, scandalously for those times, they
[25] had never married. His father was an Anglo-Irish baronet who
had left his legal wife for Lawrence´s mother, a governess.
His letters from teenage cycling trips round France
contained lots of information about castles, but only
intermittent signs of real feelings. The same might be said of
[30] the letters he wrote from the Levant. As a result, posterity
is still guessing about what was probably the most important
relationship in Lawrence´s life: an Arab youth, Dahoum, who
was just 13 or 14 when they met. If Lawrence ever gave a full
account of his friendship with Dahoum, it may have been in the
[35] memoirs he burned in august 1914.
Mr. Sattin avoids adding to the speculation about the exact
nature of this friendship, but he is defensive about it. “There
was more than paternal care; there was love,” he writes. Like
their subject matter, biographers have to be diggers and
[40] restorers, sifting a mass of evidence and gluing the bits
together. But these bits never quite constitute a whole,
comprehensible human being; much about Lawrence remains
an enigma because he wanted it that way.
(from Books and Arts in THE ECONOMIST, February 14th – 20th 2015)
According to paragraph 2,
