shakh your bootie

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=4967572

If only the government had listened to him - no Israel problem, no Ba'ath regime, no Kurdistan problem.....

No wonder he walked away in disgust.

Grace O Malley

No one interested in Lawrence?

Yes but he knew he was betraying the arabs, he walked away in disgust and full of guilt

shakh your bootie

LOL - I only posted the thread to satisfy Monsieur Le Dean.....

Poor old Lawrence ended up pleasing nobody - I believe that he argued strongly to create borders along the lines of tribal & trading patterns, which he certainly would have known more about than anyone else apart from, perhaps, Gertrude Bell (now there was one hell of an Englishwoman). He fell from grace with Churchill, who by then I believe was running the Foreign & Colonial Office and then tried to enlist in the RAF under a false name. They rumbled him, threw him out, so off he goes to Afghanistan and enlists under another false name, writes a novel & translates Homer's Odyssey....

What a guy - lived his life to the max.

Grace O Malley

How did he die?

The Dean

Legend has it that he died in a motorbike crash but apparently there's some doubt about that.

SYB probably knows.

shakh your bootie

I wasn't aware there was any controversy about the motor cycle crash - he swerved to avoid two kids on bicycles and ended up wrapping his bike around a tree, close to his home at Cloud Cottage, just out of Wareham, Dorset. It was in my manor in a different lifetime...

Grace O Malley

Yes i think there was, many beleive he killed himself?

shakh your bootie

Well, he'd suffered a nervous breakdown at this stage, was living under a false name and was in an abusive relationship with another ex-serviceman called John Bruce who used to flagellate him to the music of Beethoven and threaten to reveal his "true" identity... It's plausible that it may have been suicide; he was certainly living recklessly.

Eva

The chapter about flagellation in Seven Pillars of Wisdom made for very uncomfortable reading...not the subject matter but the suspicion I read with- to me it seemed fictional .....don't need the pipsquewk answers..it was quasi fictional ta very much- almost like he was fantasing the events with positive anticipation.
Translating the Odyssey at that time put him up against the best....Burns, Gould & Robinson came after.Did he aspire to Odyessean like labours??? or Herculean strengths? Was he just a romanticist or social misfit or without the love of a good and equal man?
Going to Jesus College,did he become a Jesuit and submit to flagellation therefore looking for thorn in the flesh to drive him? Does one submit or be condemned to flagellation?
Why did Wilfred Theisiger dismiss him?
Why did David lean give Peter O'Toole the lead??
Answers on a postcard please....

Eva

Aaaaw- like Nirvana?
Never.

Muqawim

There's an interesting piece in National Geographic on 'Lawrence of Arabia' -- Vol. 195, No. 1, January 1999... loads of pictures and some very interesting maps and info...

Btw, in that article they say that when he was captured by the Turks, he was "flogged and raped".

Eva

Yes, T.E tells us that in P of W.....read it, the whole circumstance of him -beaten half to death and raped by a Turkish Officer then escaping from a very small and locked room,running off thru' myriad of turkish troops to safety......read it.Interested to hear what you think.

shakh your bootie

I think most critics agree that the Seven Pillars is only semi-autobiographical; it does decend into tall tales of derring-do, and his thinking is Orientalist in that he romanticises the Arabs as "Noble Savages":

'Really this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words: one is really the baron in the feudal system.'

You can deconstruct his sexual penchants to the nth degree - childhood beatings from his mother, the fact that he was the bastard son of his knighted father & the governess, the Jesuit schooling; but the fact remains that despite having more flaws than a SZR apartment block the guy performed some extraordinary acts, and in his thinking aspired to an evolved personal morality.

The Dean

but the fact remains that despite having more flaws than a SZR apartment block the guy performed some extraordinary acts, and in his thinking aspired to an evolved personal morality.

Perhaps the first truly great quote in the history of The Bored.

SYB - I salute you.

jvr20

Interesting this topic came up just now... I've found myself wanting to learn more about the C20 history of this region... I wikipedia'd TEL before i came out here and I saw the O'Toole film ages ago. all i can remember is the scene in open desert where he's waiting for Faisal and Omar Sharif appears slowly on a horse out of nowhere. Brilliant cinema. Would re-watcihng the film be a good place to start? I've put Thiesiger on my amazon wish list for chrimbo too