Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (86 page)

Long after Lawrence’s death, Bruce claimed to have been introduced to him early in 1922, in circumstances that seem curious and unlikely even today. According to Bruce, Lawrence was still working at the Colonial Office and was looking for somebody to do “odd jobs” for him. Bruce claimed to have briefly met Lawrence at “the Mayfair flat” of “a Mr. Murray,” presumably an acquaintance of Lawrence’s. The son of a bankrupt milk distributor in Aberdeen, Bruce was there to be interviewed by Murray “for a position which was to become vacant presently,” having been recommended for the job by his family doctor in Scotland, a friend of Murray.

In Bruce’s account of this supposed “job interview,” there is a louche sexual undertone. If Murray was interviewing Bruce for a job, one wonders why “Colonel Lawrence” (as he still was) would be watching from the sidelines. Bruce was no fool. “Lawrence did nothing without a purpose,” he was to write later, “and using people was his masterpiece.” Unkind as this judgment may sound, there is undeniably a certain amount of truth to it, at least so far as Lawrence’s dealings with Bruce are concerned. Not everybody fell under Lawrence’s spell. For example, Harold Nicolson—diplomat, author, and husband of Vita Sackville-West—wrote of Lawrence unflatteringly: “His disloyalty reminded one of the boy who would suck up to the headmaster and then sneak to him about what went on in the school. Even when he became a colonel, he was not the sort of colonel whom one would gladly leave in the office when confidential papers were lying on the desk. So sensitive a man, it seemed to me, ought to have possessed a finer sense of mercy: when, in his gentle voice, he told tales of a massacre, his lips assumed an ugly curl.” Much as Bruce was to fall and remain under Lawrence’s spell, there is no denying that Lawrence was manipulative and deceptive in dealing with him over the years.

Forty-five years later, when Bruce sold his eighty-five-page typewritten account of their relationship to the
Sunday Times,
he described this meeting with Lawrence in detail; but like a great many other things in his story, this description is unverified, and much of it is improbable. He described how Lawrence put him through a series of tests, and, apparently satisfied, eventually revealed that he wanted Bruce to whip him from time to time, and would pay him what amounted to a retainer to do so.

The one certain truth in Bruce’s account is that he took on the role of being Lawrence’s chief administer of corporal punishment, but it is more likely that this did not begin until after Lawrence’s enlistment at Bovington, and that Lawrence first met Bruce there, as a fellow recruit in Hut 12. Even Lawrence’s youngest brother, Arnold, who was Lawrence’s literary executor, became sadly and reluctantly convinced that Bruce was telling the truth about this.

Bruce’s attempt to place Lawrence in the underground world of male sadomasochism in London, however, must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Admittedly, Lawrence had an interest in flagellation long before his treatment at the hands of the Turks at Deraa. He and his friend the poet James Elroy Flecker, an unapologetic masochist, had talked about the pleasures of being whipped when they were together in Lebanon
before
the war. Richard Meinertzhagen claimed that Lawrence behaved provocatively toward him in Paris, infuriating him to the point where he put “little Lawrence” over his knee and smacked his bottom. Lawrence, he reported, “made no attempt to resist and told me later that he could easily understand a woman submitting to rape once a strong man hugged her.” Meinertzhagen, however was something less than a reliable witness, since he revised and retyped his diary entries years after the event. Arnold Lawrence compared his brother to a medieval penitent who sought punishment for his sins, real or imagined, and this was certainly an element in Lawrence’s need to be whipped. Still, it is hard to draw the line between penance and pleasure, even for Lawrence.

Lawrence’s desire to be whipped is not by itself a very shocking or very unusual feature of upper-class English life ninety years ago—indeed corporal punishment is something of a staple of English humor. This is not to say that sadomasochism in various forms is not equally prevalent in most national cultures—for instance, one thinks of Germany, Austria (Dr. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian), and France (birthplace of the Marquis de Sade himself)—but in England, the connection between whipping and sexual arousal has always been at once a source of snickering humor and an activity which is only barely repressed or hidden. At a time when prostitutes still advertised with a card thumbtacked to their front door, the number of those who offered “Lessons in discipline” never failed to provoke comments from foreign tourists. It would be idle to speculate on the reasons for this, except to note that among those of the upper middle class and the upper class who attended English boarding schools, whipping on the bare buttocks, whether inflicted by masters or by older boys, was not only common but usual—it was considered salutary and character-building—and it sometimes led to a certain confusion between pain and pleasure in later life.

Lawrence’s mother, a believer in the old adage “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” boasted of slapping young Ned on his bare buttocks, and appears to have singled him out for this punishment, since he was by far the most rebellious of her boys. Knowing what we do of Sarah Lawrence’s nature, it seems doubtful that a beating inflicted by her would have been gentle. One imagines that she meant it to hurt, and that she believed the Lord would expect her to put her whole strength into each blow; she was not the woman to do things by half, particularly when it came to punishing wickedness or disobedience. It may be that early in Lawrence’s life there was therefore a certain mingling of pleasure with fear and pain—and that however hard he tried to suppress any erotic arousal, he was not capable of eliminating it altogether. The connection between erotic arousal and his mother would certainly explain in part his lifelong flight from her desire for his love. As for the connection between his involuntary erotic arousal when being brutally beaten and sodomized by the Turks, that is not only obvious in Lawrence’s own account, but also quite sufficient to explain his extreme dislike of being touched, as well as his lifelong determination to avoid any kind of sexual intimacy.

At this point in his life Lawrence apparently required infrequent sessions of severe pain inflicted by another man. What is more interesting than Lawrence’s need for punishment, however, is the bizarre lengths to which he went in order to persuade Bruce that somebody else was
ordering
the punishment. It is useless to speculate on the degree to which the whippings may have produced erotic arousal or even ejaculation—i.e., pleasure as opposed to punishment—and neither Lawrence nor Bruce is alive to tell us. But it is quite clear that some measure of both was involved, and that Bruce was picked partly because Lawrence guessed he was reliable, and partly because, like Sarah Lawrence, he would not resort to half measures. Even in a photograph of the young John Bruce, there is something in the eyes and the broad, inflexible mouth that suggests he would consider it his duty to make every blow hurt as much a possible.

The degree of artifice, dissimulation, imagination, and careful planning over time, which Lawrence brought to bear on the task of recruiting Bruce to his purposes, is nothing short of astonishing, and suggests just why Lawrence was regarded as a genius at intelligence and clandestine warfare. In this case, the cover story was as bizarre as the end purpose. Lawrence knew exactly how to manipulate Bruce: money alone would never be his primary motive; Bruce needed to believe in the morality of what he was doing; he needed to believe that he was enforcing punishment ordered by an older authority figure, and inflicting it on somebody who deserved it.

In Bruce’s account, Lawrence hatched a story that contained just enough truth to sound plausible. He had borrowed from friends and from “a merchant bank” money that he could not repay, and had gone to a wealthy uncle, the “Old Man,” who had inherited money that ought to have gone to Lawrence’s father. The Old Man “called him a bastard not fit to live among decent people,” who had “turned his back on God, lost an excellent position at the Colonial Office, become financially involved ‘with the damned Jews,’ insulted a Bishop and insulted King George at Buckingham Palace.” That Lawrence was “a bastard” was true, and many people did wrongly believe that he had insulted the king by refusing to accept his decorations. The story about the bishop involved an altercation between the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem and Lawrence over Jewish immigration, which had led Lawrence to declare indignantly that the bishop was not fit “to black Weizmann’s boots.” In short, Lawrence trolled through his life to find and adapt to his purpose stories that might persuade an elderly relative to punish him. More important, they were stories about acts that Bruce might believe were both reprehensible and true.

Lawrence claimed that his “uncle” was intent on saving the family honor—one of the “threats” Lawrence invented was that if he didn’t do exactly as the Old Man demanded, down to the smallest detail, “a meeting of the family would have to be called to see what was to be done with him.” This was well calculated to appeal to Bruce, who had a strong sense of family and who respected his milkman father in Aberdeen. The character that Lawrence apparently created for the Old Man is interesting. So far as one can judge, it resembled no male relative Lawrence knew, certainly not his father, whom Lawrence remembers as having stopped once when Ned was a child to upbraid a carter for whipping a horse. In reading Bruce’s account of what Lawrence had to say about his “uncle,” it seems more than likely that Lawrence built up his character from that of his mother, and merely switched genders, since Bruce was more likely to accept a male authority figure. The old Man’s strict moral judgment, his unforgiving sense of right and wrong, his absolute conviction that he knew what was best for Lawrence, and his belief in the value of punishment, pain, and discipline are exactly the qualities that Lawrence found so difficult to accept in his mother. The criticism of his own conduct that Lawrence imputes to the Old Man is exactly what his mother would have said, and the old Man’s power to influence and interfere with Lawrence’s life is what kept him away from home as much as possible.

The intensity with which Lawrence won Bruce’s compliance and his determination that Bruce must agree to do whatever the Old Man told him to do are both impressive and frightening. Lawrence was creating a detailed and plausible fictional world, and assigning Bruce a role in a psychodrama, which would continue off and on until the end of Lawrence’s life. Bruce later professed to have been shocked when Lawrence mentioned that the Old Man might call on him to inflict “corporal punishment,” but this was surely face-saving on Bruce’s part nearly half a century after the fact. It seems much more likely that Bruce guessed what Lawrence wanted from the beginning.

The first of the whippings Bruce claimed to have given Lawrence took place in Clouds Hill, the tiny brick cottage whose roof would soon be replaced. (Lawrence paid for the new roof by selling the gold dagger
*
he had bought in Mecca.) Lawrence was still elaborating on the fantasy that was intended to give him control over Bruce. The Old Man, he told Bruce, was disappointed because Lawrence had missed church parades, and had dispatched a bircht
†
with which Lawrence was to be whipped. This time Lawrence backed up the request with “an unsigned, typed letter which he said was from The Old Man,” instructing Bruce that he was not only to carry out the whipping, but “to report in writing … [and] to describe Lawrence’s demeanour and behaviour under punishment.” Bruce, the letter promised, would be paid for the whipping. These whippings (and the payments) would be continued at infrequent intervals over the next twelve years, and step by step the letters from the Old Man grew in terms of the complexity of his demands, his requests for accurate reports of Lawrence’s reaction, and the loving details of the instruments of punishment to be used. Each of these letters was of course written with great care by Lawrence himself, prescribing down to the last detail the punishments that were to be inflicted on him. When the Old Man requested a reply from Bruce, Bruce handed his letter to Lawrence, for forwarding.

Lawrence, after his beating at Deraa, had been able to remember every detail of the “Circassian riding whip” which was used on him: “tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver, with a knob inlaid in a black design) down to a hard point much finer than a pencil.” In the letters Bruce claimed to have received from the Old Man, Lawrence was just as precise, even fussy, in describing the details of what he wanted, how it was to be done, and what it was to be done with. It is, in fact, an amazing work of fantasy, backed up with carefully forged letters that were designed to convince Bruce, and succeeded. The letters may have been overkill—there is no evidence that Bruce needed anything like this much persuasion—but their tone is very revealing. It is that of “Colonel Lawrence,” direct, explicit, a person of the officer class who expects obedience from a social inferior. Nowhere is it clearer that “Colonel Lawrence” was still alive and well, than in these bizarre letters. “Private Meek,” as Bernard Shaw would call him in
Too True to Be Good,
treated Bruce with kid gloves—for Bruce was a difficult and demanding character. But the former lieutenant-colonel gave Bruce the commands, which, except for their subject matter, read like those a wealthy landowner might send to a farm manager. The letters Lawrence wrote as the Old Man are works of genius—with Dickensian skill, he managed to create, layer by layer, detail by detail, a crusty, demanding, difficult character whom one might almost expect to see in the next seat in a first-class railway compartment on the way “up” to London—neatly suited; his bowler hat, gloves, and umbrella beside him; with a regimental tie, a white mustache, and a monocle; reading the
Times
with furious concentration—a figure straight out of an Osbert Lancaster cartoon.