Foreign News: Autopsy of a Hero

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"His name will live in history," wrote King George V at the death of Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Soon afterward, in a biographical sketch, Winston Churchill added: "That is true; it will live in English letters; it will live in the traditions of the Royal Air Force; it will live in the annals of war and in the legends of Arabia."

Lawrence, the pint-sized, introverted Oxford scholar who rose from an obscure post in the Civil Service to lead the desert Arabs in revolt against their Turkish oppressors, was just the kind of lonely, romantic figure of danger the British needed in World War I to offset the unrelieved, anonymous four-year horror of the Western Front. His saga became legend. Hailed by many as a masterpiece, his own monumental, turgid and mystic Seven Pillars of Wisdom became the bible of a widespread cult of Lawrence admirers, whose most romantic ideals were justified when their unpredictable hero renounced the world at the pinnacle of his fame to join the R.A.F. as lowly Aircraftman Ross.

Last week, 20 years after his death in a motorcycle crash, a new biography of Lawrence appeared in England, and set off a fury of charge and countercharge. Its respected publisher (Collins) held up publication of the book for 18 months while lawyers checked it, and friends of Lawrence were asked to rebut its accusations. Lawrence of Arabia, A Biographical Enquiry, by Novelist Richard Aldington, says without mincing words that, far from being a hero, Lawrence of Arabia was a misbegotten fraud, a perverted charlatan, a pretentious demagogue, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur, a liar and a plain fake. The effect, as one paper put it, was "as if someone charged that Nelson knew nothing about the sea." "Is this the end of a legend?" asked a sign printed in scarlet letters in the window of Foyle's, London's leading bookstore. In press, radio and TV, the nation's sharpest-penned and sharpest-tongued controversialists argued the question.

A Search for Fraud. In writing Lawrence's life, Aldington (author of a sardonic bestselling 1929 novel of World War I, Death of a Hero) claims to have started with an open mind. But in the course of his four years of research, he turned up many claims by Lawrence and his enthusiastic biographers (Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves) that did not seem to jibe with the facts. The chief of these was Lawrence's boast that he had once been offered the post of High Commissioner for Egypt. There was no record of such an offer in writing, and from the testimony of living persons who might know the facts, Aldington decided that the offer had not been made.

With this evidence of infidelity as a springboard, he began to search for further fraud. The end was a book that glares in ill-concealed suspicion at every aspect and every facet of the Lawrence legend.