Top Grumpy’s Top Hate

Robert Irwin

• Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale by Fred Crawford
  Southern Illinois, 265 pp, £31.95, July 1998, ISBN 0 8093 2166 1
• Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia by Michael Asher
  Viking, 419 pp, £20.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 670 87029 3

The heroes of my schoolboy reading back in the Fifties were mostly men of action, like Tarzan, Berry and Biggles (though I did read Worrals books too). These were nonchalantly modest, clean-limbed fellows ready for a scrap, if there was a chance of delivering a knockout punch to the half-shaven chin of Evil. I was reassured to discover that such fictitious protagonists had their real-lite counterparts and to read of the true exploits of the pilot Douglas Bader, the spy-master Colonel Oreste Pinto and, of course, Lawrence of Arabia. Although I was reluctant to lose my heroes, I was not very much older before I gathered that there was something not quite right about T.E. Lawrence. Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, which came out in 1955, denounced its subject as a bastard (literally), a liar, a charlatan and a pervert. It also disparaged the importance and the achievements of the Arab revolt, mocked Lawrence’s literary style and queried his knowledge of medieval French poetry. Reading Aldington’s book is a bit like standing under a waterfall of venom.