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Review commentary by Jeremy Wilson on Lawrence,
the Uncrowned King of Arabia by Michael Asher
(London, Viking, 1998)
Chapter I | Page
10 | next page
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Chapter 2: Dominus Illuminatio Mea
Schooldays, 1896-1905 (pp 21-31,10 pages)
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page/para/line
22/1/21 |
This
chapter, which takes Lawrence through his school years from the ages of
8 to 17 (1896-1905), is titled "Dominus Illuminatio Mea",
which is in fact the motto of Oxford University, not of the Oxford High
School. Asher appears to have been confused by the fact that the motto
is carved on the old Oxford High School building. However, its presence
there is a mark of the school's traditional links with the university.
As a chapter title, it would have been more appropriate to the following
chapter than this one.
The first page-an-a-half is an evocation of Oxford in
Lawrence's day. I applaud any attempt by a biographer to get back to the
atmosphere of the period. On this particular topic a paper published in the Journal of
the T. E. Lawrence Society goes considerably further (see Dr Malcolm
Graham, 'The Oxford of T. E. Lawrence', JTELS VII:1, pp. 7-15).
For the record, however, I suspect that there are some minor errors of
detail. Asher's walk from the Lawrence boys' home to their school seems
to have been supplemented by information from guidebooks, and such sources can
mislead. The reference to "the austere Elizabethan façades
of Balliol and St. John's" is curious. The St. Giles façade of St.
John's is, I believe, Tudor, but it is not Elizabethan. The façades of Balliol
are much later. In fact, the only Elizabethan buildings I recall at
Balliol were some cottages in the rear quad which were demolished to
make way for a new building in the 1960s. It might formerly have been
possible to see part of them from St. Giles through the back gate, if
that happened to be open; but they were gone long before the walk Asher
describes. |
| 22/2/3 |
Here
is an obviously nonsensical misquote which suggests that Asher, despite
his degree in English, is no textual critic: "I fancied to sum up
in my life that new Asia which inexorable time was slowly bringing upon
us." For "sum", read "run". How did that get
past Viking's copy editor unchallenged? Maybe he or she was baffled by
Asher's source-reference: "SPW, Oxford Text, 1926". The Oxford
text was printed in 1922, not 1926. Since it runs to more than 330,000
words, a chapter or folio number would have been helpful! As a detail,
the quote as printed finishes incorrectly with a full point inside the
quote-mark (because the end of the passage quoted is not the end of a
sentence).
The date error for the
Oxford text occurs throughout Asher's references; yet completion of the
Oxford text marked a turning-point in Lawrence's post-war life. This
astonishing mistake suggests that Asher paid very little attention to
the post-war period - a suggestion supported by the minimal space he
gives to it in what purports to be a "major new biography".
This in turn raises another
serious issue: in the pre-war chapters, Asher draws a number of
contentious conclusions about Lawrence's personality. Because these
conclusions are necessarily based on very little first-hand contemporary
evidence, they involve a huge dose of speculation. By
contrast, Lawrence wrote thousands of letters after 1922, many of which
bear directly on his personality. Given Asher's determination to reach
psychological conclusions very early in the book, it would have been
reasonable for him him to test these conclusions by checking whether or
not they still looked reasonable in relation to the weight of evidence
from the post-war period. His failure to do so makes the
"interpretation" in the early chapters somewhat suspect.
In my view, the
person that Asher paints in these early chapters is, in important
respects, definitely not T. E. Lawrence. Who is it? I suspect that it is
Michael Asher. Read the last page of his Introduction (page 3) |
| 24/1/5-8 |
Here
Asher mentions Lawrence's height for the first time: "his smallness
and unimpressive appearance would colour his self-concept throughout his
life." A fair comment, if oddly expressed. Next
page |
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