Books: The Hero Our Century Deserved

T.E. LAWRENCE: THE SELECTED LETTERS

Edited by Malcolm Brown; Norton; 568 pages; $27.50

With hindsight, it is easy to see why a slim, self-effacing Englishman named Thomas Edward Lawrence became one of this century's most ballyhooed celebrities. Out of the appalling carnage of World War I -- the mud-caked anonymity of the trenches, the hail of mechanized death that spewed from machine guns and fell from airplanes -- there emerged a lone Romantic, framed heroically against the clean desert sands of Arabia. U.S. journalist Lowell Thomas was the first to recognize that Lawrence's wartime work -- organizing disparate Arab tribes into armed revolt against the occupying Turks, allies of Germany -- had pop-myth possibilities. Thomas' publicity essentially created the figure known as Lawrence of Arabia, but others contributed to the saga. Robert Graves wrote a life of Lawrence that appeared in 1927, when its subject was only 39. Lawrence told his own story in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was published shortly after his death from a motorcycle accident in 1935.

Since then, the Lawrence legend has thrived through a steady stream of biographies and memoirs. His life sparked one of the greatest epic films ever made: David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), recently rereleased in the original, uncut version its director intended. Moviegoers can once again admire Peter O'Toole in the title role and assume that they have seen Lawrence whole. They have not, through no fault of the actor or anyone else involved in that exemplary movie. On the evidence of The Selected Letters, which includes 470 examples, roughly two-thirds published for the first time, Lawrence was a host of different people subsumed under a name that was constantly subject to change.

After the war and the deluge of his fame, Lawrence stunned friends by changing his identity and going underground. As John Hume Ross, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force. When his cover was blown by a London newspaper ('UNCROWNED KING' AS PRIVATE SOLDIER), Lawrence was forced out of the R.A.F. and subsequently enrolled in the army as T.E. Shaw. In a letter written soon after this move, he noted his divided state of mind and suggested that "perhaps there's a solution to be found in multiple personality."

Just so. In a single letter, Lawrence could ring all the changes between boasting and self-abnegation. To a confidante who had read an early version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence noted, "The story I have to tell is one of the most splendid ever given a man for writing." He also downplayed his own participation in that story, adding, "I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself."