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Review commentary by Jeremy Wilson on Lawrence,
the Uncrowned King of Arabia by Michael Asher (London, Viking, 1998)
previous page | Page
21 | Chapter 3
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Chapter 2: Dominus Illuminatio Mea
Schooldays, 1896-1905 (10 pages)
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| 30/1/15 |
"the
school fear hanging over one - that haphazardly suspended punishment
which made my years between eight and eighteen a misery." The
reference for this (reference 23) is completely wrong. It points to a
letter to Charlotte Shaw printed in Malcolm Brown's Letters page
305, in which there is a passage about Lawrence's schooldays; but it is
not this one. In reality the "quote" appears to be a corrupt
transcription from The Mint part 2 chapter 19, penultimate para:
"there is the school-fear over me, that working against hazardously
suspended penalty which made my life from eight to eighteen miserable,
and Oxford, after it, so noble a freedom." |
| 30/1/17 |
"Far
from being the 'delight and profit' she might have wished, Sarah
destroyed Lawrence's life and made certain that he would never achieve
happiness or fulfilment." I don't in the least agree with this
statement, which seems to me to be simplistic psycho-babble. The highly
speculative sentences that follow are hardly better, e.g. "in her
own mind she [Sarah Lawrence] was still the terrified little girl who
would never know why she had been so heinously abandoned to the whims of
the dark universe." This is complete fiction. |
| 30/1/end
of page. |
The
unstated source for Asher's story about Sarah Lawrence and A. W.
Lawrence's marriage is John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder,
Boston, Little, Brown, 1976, p. 474 note 50 (the story is accurately
quoted/summarised here). A.W. Lawrence's sense of confusion, assuming
that it was not pure coincidence, would have resulted from his
anticipation of her reaction, rather than thought-transmission between
England and Greece. |
| 31/1/11 |
"his
great task in life was to escape from her." Surely a greatly
over-simplified conclusion? |
| 31/2 |
Neither
the exact date, nor the duration, nor the precise cause of Lawrence's boyhood
enlistment are known. It is reasonable to point to the various factors
that might have played a part, but hardly in quite so certain a manner
as Asher: "Sarah disapproved [of Lawrence's wish to switch from
mathematics to history], sensing instinctively a move away from her. The
matter became contentious". This sentence too is fiction. Next
page. |
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