TE Lawrence: Action man

In the 70 years since his death at the age of 46, the figure of Lawrence of Arabia has been enshrined in countless books, plays and film scripts, so much so that it has become increasingly difficult to separate the man from the legend. As Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence's authorised biographer, once wrote, there are essentially "two quite distinct Lawrences in existence". Attempts to tell them apart have invariably resulted in storms of controversy and dissent.

The circumstances of Lawrence's death are well known. On the morning of 13 May 1935, he left his Dorset cottage, climbed onto his motorcycle and drove to the local post office to dispatch a parcel and send a telegram. A short time afterwards, a neighbour listening to the motorcycle making its return journey suddenly heard the engine race - and then stop. Lawrence had come upon two errand boys riding their bikes in a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them, he had clipped the wheel of one of the bikes and had been thrown onto the road, sustaining serious head injuries.

The death of TE Lawrence six days later in a military hospital at nearby Bovington was proclaimed worldwide as the tragic end to a brilliant career. He was, according to one newspaper, "the greatest mystery figure of modern times": as Lawrence of Arabia, "the uncrowned King of the Desert", he had become famous for his exploits in the Arab Revolt during the First World War, but had subsequently sought anonymity, joining the ranks of the Royal Air Force in order to hide from the public gaze.

The mourners at Lawrence's funeral in Dorset, including General Wavell, Winston Churchill and Siegfried Sassoon, attested to his extraordinary appeal across the military, political and artistic spectrums. For St Martin's church in Wareham, a few miles across the heath from Lawrence's cottage at Clouds Hill, the artist Eric Kennington, one of the illustrators of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's account of his war service (selling out in its first trade edition, just 10 weeks after the author's death), carved an effigy of the dead man. Completed in 1939, it shows Lawrence in the robes he had worn to win the trust and intimacy of the Arabs. It also portrays him in the recumbent attitude of a medieval crusader, and places an example of Hittite sculpture at his feet, the former as testimony to his love of the chivalric romances of the middle ages, the latter, to his work as an archaeologist during his twenties, in northern Syria before the war.

In the immediate aftermath of Lawrence's fatal accident, unsubstantiated rumours attached themselves to the circumstances of his death, and hinted at the confusion of fact and fiction that was to come. One witness, giving evidence at the inquest, stated that he had seen a black car travelling in the opposite direction to Lawrence moments before the crash, though its driver, if the car ever existed, never came forward. Inevitably, there were suggestions too, that Lawrence, who had been depressed by incessant press intrusion following the end of his RAF career, had committed suicide. Most romantic were stories that he hadn't died, but had been spirited away to an Arthurian retreat from which he would one day return to defend an imperiled Britain. George Orwell picked up one such tale in the autumn of 1935, that Lawrence was in Ethiopia organising native forces against Mussolini's invasion (conspiracy theorists, however, should note that, according to Peter Metcalfe, a collector of Lawrentiana, photographs of Lawrence's corpse do exist).

The ill-fated Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle on which Lawrence was killed, tailor-made for him in 1932, which he nicknamed "Boanerges" (son of thunder), is one of more than 300 artefacts in an exhibition, Lawrence of Arabia, Life and Legend, which opens at the Imperial War Museum this week. The fact that this is the second major London exhibition devoted to Lawrence in just 16 years is clear evidence of his continuing interest, though Penny Ritchie Calder at the museum stresses that the chief objective has been to devise "a three-dimensional biography that doesn't draw any conclusions, creating a space that's sympathetic to Lawrence's different personas". As if to emphasise this, some of the different identities assumed by Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia, Aircraftman John Hume Ross, his name in his first years in the RAF, and TE Shaw, the surname he took by deed poll in 1927 - are emblazoned on the exhibition's walls.

Lawrence left behind a rich literary and visual legacy, which Malcolm Brown, a veteran Lawrentian, describes as "a cultural cornucopia". The display is rich in photographs, many of them taken by Lawrence himself. From 1907-09, as an Oxford undergraduate, he spent several summers in search of the then little known castles of medieval France, and of Lebanon and Syria, photographing them as he went. Later, using his small Kodak with 120 negative film, he took some of the most dramatic images of the entire war, including one action shot of the attack on Akaba in July 1917, which highlights the element of surprise that defined Lawrence's policy of attack against the Turkish enemy. In a less recognised role, Lawrence is represented as a patron of the arts. He sat to a succession of portrait painters and photographers, including Augustus John and William Rothenstein (who commented that he "seemed to like being painted"), and commissioned 20 portraits of the Arab leaders of the Revolt, and 20 of the British participants in the campaign, for the subscribers' edition of Seven Pillars.

One of the most resonant physical objects in the exhibition - literally - is a station bell, captured as a trophy from the Hejaz Railway, focus of the Arab uprising's guerrilla warfare in raids designed to divert Ottoman manpower and resources from opposition to the British advance in Palestine. And for those who have never seen them in situ, many of the contents of Lawrence's hideaway at Clouds Hill are on display, thanks to the generosity of the National Trust. In 1923 Lawrence had discovered the derelict cottage, which offered a refuge in which he could write and entertain friends. Six years later, after his return from India, where he'd been stationed with the RAF, he began a series of improvements, adding a water supply and installing a bath, though his lifestyle there remained fairly ascetic. Visitors to the exhibition will find Lawrence's Columbia "Grafonola" gramophone, the sleeping bags embroidered "Meum" and "Tuum", his typewriter, and the glass domed food cover used, in the absence of a kitchen, for storing food.

Malcolm Brown has written a book to accompany the exhibition and says that his mission has been "to drive a sensible middle road" through the thickets of Lawrence biography, portraying "this exceptional human being" as neither saint nor charlatan. "I take my line from a remark made by Aubrey Herbert, surveying his fellow members of the intelligence cadre brought together in Cairo in 1914: 'Then there's Lawrence, an odd gnome, half cad - with a touch of genius'. AW Lawrence [Lawrence's youngest brother and the keeper of the flame for more than half a century] thought that was just right."

It's difficult now to appreciate the extent of the shock delivered in 1955 by the publication of Richard Aldington's "biographical enquiry" into Lawrence, which argued that he was a consummate deceiver who had fabricated his own legend; nor the ferocity of the backlash visited upon the author by members of Lawrence's circle. What has become clearer with time is that Aldington's debunking was part of an inevitable process of revisionism that finally removed Lawrence's reputation from the hagiography that had threatened to overwhelm it in the years following his death.

The new exhibition underscores a number of changes in our view of Lawrence. One of the most significant is the response to the question of whether he exaggerated his contribution to the Arab Revolt, given that his account of it in Seven Pillars is intended to be a contribution to epic literature rather than to sober history. Lawrence himself had anticipated the time when historians would be able "to cross-check my yarns", and wrote that he expected them "to find small errors, and to agree generally with the main current of my narrative". When the official papers were released in the late Sixties, this is precisely what occurred. Biographers will continue to treat some of Lawrence's claims with scepticism, and be irritated by what Robert Graves called the "vein of unseriousness" with which he sometimes invests them. The broader picture, however, is confirmed as remarkably accurate. But for Lawrence's strategic vision and genius, the Revolt, consisting of regular and irregular Arab forces, would never have coalesced into a concerted effort.

Lawrence once admitted that "if the distant future deigns to consider my insignificance, I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than a man of action". Posterity is again inclined to support his verdict. Lawrence's claim to literary greatness rests not only on Seven Pillars and The Mint, his "bawdy" account of training in the RAF - the first sometimes described as Lawrence's answer to Moby Dick, the second as resembling One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - but also on his 6,000 or so surviving letters, which combine individual style with an openness about human failings that is blunt and sometimes shocking.

The vulnerability of Lawrence, guilt-ridden after the war at his failure to persuade the British government to bestow full self-determination on an Arab nation, then perplexed and hunted as he attempted to throw off the weight of fame and attention, makes him an enormously appealing, as well as enigmatic, character for the 21st- century. "To have news value", he said, "is to have a tin can tied to one's tail." The search for an identity dominated his life, and it was a search made all the more understandable by the fact that he was illegitimate (his mother was a governess who ran off with the master of the household, "like Jane Eyre and Rochester", as Malcolm Brown says). "Lawrence" wasn't his real name at all, merely one assumed by his parents to give their union respectability.

His sexual identity remains a riddle. When, in 1968, it emerged that Lawrence had paid to be regularly flogged in a complex regime of self-chastisement, his brother Arnold argued that this was Lawrence' attempt to suppress rather than stimulate his sexuality in the manner of the ascetics of the medieval church. (Arnold Lawrence, who I met shortly before his death in 1991, was not someone to cross. I found him terrifying, though I've been assured by others who knew him well, that his bark was worse than his bite, and that, unlike his famous brother, he had a very definite eye for the ladies). But speculation about the truth of events at Deraa in 1917, where Lawrence claimed to have been a victim of homosexual rape, and the strongly homoerotic content of his account of the episode in Seven Pillars, leaves open to question the exact nature of Lawrence's sexual masochism.

Without doubt, the single factor that brought Lawrence to a new prominence was David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. It didn't seem to matter that the Oscar-winning production took enormous liberties with history (Liddell Hart, one of Lawrence's staunchest defenders described it as a "fascinating and striking work of fiction"), nor that Peter O'Toole in the title role was significantly taller than the original, who'd stood just five foot five inches ("if you'd been any prettier", Noel Coward told O'Toole, "you'd have been Florence of Arabia"). What it achieved, through more than three-and-a-half gruelling hours of sun and sand, was a masterpiece of the cinematographer's art that established TE Lawrence, once and for all, as an archetypal modern, flawed, hero. The exhibition displays bits of memorabilia from the film, though, disappointingly, not one of O'Toole's flowing white garments. (My stepmother used to come to breakfast in one of the robes worn in Lawrence of Arabia by O'Toole, which she'd converted into a dressing gown. She'd borrowed it from a Hollywood costume department for a fancy dress party, but had never returned it. I would have persuaded her to lend it for the exhibition were I not almost certain that it will by now have been dyed dusky pink).

Lawrence himself had never doubted that his exploits had dramatic potential, though he loathed all notion of being "celluloided". His legend had largely been the creation of Lowell Thomas, "a born vulgarian", responsible for refashioning Lawrence as a hero for a war devoid of traditional heroism. In books and lectures, iconic images and spectacle (his sellout show, all smoke and mirrors, at Covent Garden and the Albert Hall in 1919-20), Thomas waxed lyrical about "the most romantic career of modern times", making Lawrence sound like a Valentino in the desert. Lawrence, at first, went along with the image making. He saw its propaganda value at the peace tables in Paris where he was trying to drum up support for the Arab delegation. But it also appealed to his natural vanity.

It was Lowell Thomas who coined the unforgettable description of Lawrence as "backing into the limelight". There was a streak of exhibitionism in his temperament, recognised by his namesake DH Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover, where the character of CE Florence, a sufferer from "the conceit of self-abasement", is all too obviously based on Lawrence (in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, Lawrence is the object of similar satire, "Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince ... he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas he was mistaken.") And Lawrence was mistaken, too, if he believed that the floodlights of publicity, once switched on, could ever be dimmed to a less searching light. In his lifetime, he was portrayed on stage as "Meek" in a play by his friend Bernard Shaw. After his death, a series of film, television, and stage projects (including Terence Rattigan's Ross), were performed or mooted, with a variety of actors playing Lawrence, among them Leslie Howard, Dirk Bogarde, Alec Guinness, John Mills, Albert Finney and Ralph Fiennes.

One of the most rewarding exhibits at the Imperial War Museum is the document "Twenty-Seven Articles", written by Lawrence in 1917 as guidance for British officers working with the Arabs for the first time. Reading it one is scarcely surprised that, since the Iraq War, the demand for Seven Pillars of Wisdom among the British and American military has risen to unprecedented levels. Nor that the Pentagon has been promoting "words of wisdom by Lawrence of Arabia" from these articles, which have an all too painful relevance to the current situation. "War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup", runs one excerpt. "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them" is another. These, and other words like them, make Lawrence of Arabia very much a man for our times. m

Lawrence of Arabia, Man and Legend: Imperial War Museum, London SE1 ((020 7416 5320), Friday to 17 April. A book of the same title by Malcolm Brown (Thames & Hudson £25) accompanies the show