But, propped on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet – while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly –
With half-dropped eyelid still,
Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill –
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’
Summer 1913
Lawrence was in no hurry to go back to Oxford, so when Woolley left for England on 14 June 1913 he stayed at Jerablus. He had recently had a rare open disagreement with his mother, who had made a comment about their working on the sabbath, taking Fridays off instead. He had responded by asking, ‘Would it be quite considerate to make two hundred workmen miss their day [of rest] for the sake of the two of us? Especially as they are not sophisticated enough to have heard of Julian and Gregorian calendars, or the “first day of the week” theory.’ His letters were less frequent after that, and when the excavations closed for the summer, he stayed, revelling in ‘the resultant feeling . . . of a most perfect peace: it is midday, everyone is asleep, and the only noise near me is the ticking of a watch on our great table’.
This peace was soon disturbed by the arrival of a stray English consul, en route to Diarbekir, one hundred miles to the east, who needed to be entertained. He wanted exercise, so he dived off the railway bridge into the river, to the consternation of Herr Contzen, the senior German engineer, who thought he was trying to commit suicide. Lawrence showed his visitor around the digs and gave him some shooting practice. When he left, a week after Woolley had gone, Lawrence wrote, ‘I’ll come to Oxford.’ By then he knew there was a chance that his parents might be away at the coast and, if that was the case, he suggested they leave a key at the insurance office in town. He added as a postscript, ‘Hope to bring 2 Arabs with me this summer.’
Much has been written about Lawrence’s sexual preferences, as it has about his relationship with Dahoum. Even more has been speculated. Dahoum was fourteen years old when they first met, in January 1911, perhaps even thirteen, as his exact birth date is not known. Something about this donkey-boy, bringing water and supplies to the digs, had caught Lawrence’s attention and retained it. Their relationship had changed significantly after that first Carchemish season as a result of Dahoum nursing Lawrence through dysentery in the summer of 1911. Dahoum had then accompanied him on the first leg of the journey to Aleppo. Afterwards, Lawrence had looked for ways of repaying the kindness and attention, as well as encouraging the spark he saw in him. He began by promoting him among the workforce – Dahoum became Lawrence’s assistant and learned how to use the cameras and to make squeezes of the inscriptions they uncovered. By the summer of 1913, Dahoum, now sixteen, was one of the senior members of the team, although he did not yet have the same status as Hamoudi, the Hoja or overseer.
More important than these practical steps was the help Lawrence provided for Dahoum to improve himself. He had asked Miss Fareedeh at the American School for Arabic history and geography books – nothing ‘foreign’. ‘I have no wish to do more for the boy than give him a chance to help himself,’ although he had already done much more than this, taking him to Aleppo, to Alexandretta, on a British warship up the Syrian coast, and giving him access to the British Consulate and to the houses of the Altounyans and other wealthy people in Aleppo, not normally open to a village boy, however bright. Why was he doing this? In part, because he recognised the boy’s romantic spirit. It was Dahoum who had impressed Lawrence the previous summer at Qasr Ibn Wardani, the ruined desert fort where the rooms smelled of roses, all except one, where there was nothing but pure, clear desert air. ‘Among us,’ Lawrence reported Dahoum as saying, ‘we call this room the sweetest of all.’
By his own admission, Lawrence was unable to think plainly. Everything had another level, a parallel meaning. So while the story of Ibn Wardani tells of a love of beauty, he also saw that Dahoum was ‘half-consciously sounding the ideal of the Arab creed, for generations stripping itself of all furniture in the working out of a gospel of simplicity’. There was a gospel of austerity here and one that Lawrence, in spite of his compulsive purchasing of Hittite antikas and Persian rugs, found seductive. He was interested to see how far this noble young savage might go, to see what he would do, given opportunities. Jeremy Wilson, the authorised Lawrence biographer, describes an ‘almost fatherly concern’ for the youth. But there was more than paternal care; there was love. Ten years later, when Lawrence referred to his friendship with Dahoum, he talked of it as one in which there was such intimacy and mutual understanding that they had said all that two people could say to each other. This freed them to work or rest together for hours without speaking. Lawrence experienced that sense of calm and trust with very few people in his life. It was not obvious that one of them would be the donkeyboy from Jerablus.
In this summer of 1913, the two of them spent most days and evenings together, working at the digs, swimming in the Euphrates, cleaning and drawing, photographing and cataloguing the finds in the courtyard or large sitting room of the expedition house, even while Lawrence was busy writing of his adventures in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the book he was to burn in Oxford. Woolley was happy with this relationship and had made no objection to Lawrence trusting him sufficiently to let him buy antikas in villages – Dahoum was usually offered a lower price, even though Lawrence had refined his haggling technique.
It is impossible to know what Dahoum thought of these changes to his life. He was obviously flattered that the khawaja was taking an interest in him, while the extra money and new status helped set him apart in the village. A range of possibilities was opening through his growing ability to read and write Arabic. But only occasionally can we hear Dahoum’s voice with any clarity. One moment was at Ibn Wardani, but the most persuasive was his answer to Miss Fareedeh’s question, in the summer of 1912, of why he loved Lawrence. He did so, he had replied, because Lawrence was brother, friend and leader, because he could do things better than them, because he was courageous, playful, humorous and, perhaps more important to them, because they knew he cared for them.
*
This, Lawrence wrote to Hogarth, ‘will shock you’. In the event, many more than Hogarth were shocked to see two Arabs, their heads covered in keffiyehs, wearing striped, flowing robes over baggy white trousers and embroidered tunics, walking along the High in Oxford or cycling down the Woodstock Road. Lawrence had kept his promise and brought Dahoum and Hamoudi home.
He had spent less than a fortnight there in the past year and a half, and was not planning on staying long this time – ten days in all, and in that time he had work to do. He also needed to look after Dahoum and Hamoudi because they spoke almost no English. The visitors stayed in the bungalow at Polstead Road, Lawrence in the main house, but they spent the days together, several of them at the Ashmolean, where they saw Hogarth, Woolley and Leeds. On 12 August, at the Ashmolean, they also met the painter Francis Dodd; Charles Bell, Assistant Keeper at the museum, had arranged for Dodd to sketch their portraits. As Bell was now on holiday, Lawrence wrote him a description of the meeting:
Dodd turned up smiling in the morning, and got to work like a steam engine:– black and white, with little faint lines of colour running up and down in it. No. 1 was finished by midday, and was splendid: Dahoum sitting down, with his most-interested-possible expression . . . he thought it great sport – said he never knew he was so good-looking – and I think he was about right. He had dropped his sulkiness for a patch.
No. 2 was almost a failure. Dodd gave it up half-finished.
No. 3, standing, was glorious. My brother came to the door with some people, and Dahoum just at the critical moment looked round a little bit annoyed, to see what the dickens the matter was. Dodd got him on the instant and promptly stopped work.
Dodd gave the first one to Dahoum, and the third one to Bell.
Hamoudi is not mentioned here, perhaps because he was with Woolley that day. (After 1918, Hamoudi became Woolley’s foreman and worked at Ur in the 1920s.) But the lack of a portrait of Hamoudi would explain the strange story he told after Lawrence’s death when he remembered that ‘many wished to photograph us [Hamoudi and Dahoum] as we sat with him [Lawrence] in our customary clothes. And after they took a picture they would come and speak to him and always he said, “No, No.” One day I asked him why he was always saying “No, No,” and he laughed and said, “I will tell you. These people wish to give you money. But for me you would now be rich.” ’
‘Do you call yourself my friend,’ Hamoudi shouted, ‘and say thus calmly that you kept me from riches?’ It was a rare moment of cultural division between them. It also shows that the Syrians understood the wealth and privilege of their young friend.
Hamoudi remembered that Lawrence had laughed at his anger, and the more he laughed, the angrier Hamoudi became. Then Lawrence said, ‘Yes, you might have been rich, richer than any in Jerablus. And I – what should I have been? I should have been the showman of two monkeys.’
‘And suddenly,’ Hamoudi admitted, ‘all my anger died down within me.’
Leeds, who also met them at the museum, described Dahoum ‘dressed in picturesque, clean robes, striped in red, black and white’. He thought him ‘too spruce and fine for any menial task’, and yet when some crates needed moving, he lifted something that would have needed three museum porters to carry. Before they left, Leeds asked them what they would most like to take home with them. They chose two things. One was a water tap, so they would have hot water whenever they wanted, instead of having to heat it in a kettle as they did at home. The other was more revealing of what Leeds called their ‘childlike simplicity of incomprehension’, for they asked for one of the ‘Keep off the grass’ signs they had seen on a stake in the University Parks. ‘Evidently these hoops possessed magic properties as guards against trespass and might be turned to good account.’
Back in Jerablus, Lawrence wrote that Dahoum and Hamoudi ‘entertain large houses nightly with tales of snakes as long as houses, underground railways, elephants, flying-machines, and cold in July’. Later still he noted that ‘they are too intelligent to be ridiculous about it. They describe it as a garden, empty of villages, with the people crowded into frequent towns. The towns wonderfully peaceful and populous, the houses very high: the tube railways are to them a source of stumbling.’ More important than this was the realisation of their place in the world, for ‘they tell the villagers that Syria is a small poor country, very likely to be coveted by us tree-lovers . . . and that the Arabs are too few to count in world-politics. All of this is very proper.’
What Lawrence’s parents felt about their house guests is not known; his brothers enjoyed the company of the Syrians. What was clear to the Lawrences, however, was that their second son had grown away from them. Neither the garden bungalow, an academic posting nor even his printing-press plan would be enough to bring him back because – and this he knew and they must have guessed – he had found somewhere that suited him (for the moment, at least) and it was in Syria, not England. That, and the fact that he had Dahoum and Hamoudi to look after, explains why, although Woolley was not intending to return to Syria until the end of September, Lawrence was back in Aleppo on 24 August with plenty of gossip to share.
Writing from Baron’s Hotel, he marvelled at having passed from England to the Mediterranean and then by boat to Alexandretta via Egypt without once having had his bag checked by customs. This had particular resonance when he reported that Baron von Oppenheim, now referred to merely as ‘the German excavator’ – he had dropped the ‘little Jew-German-millionaire’ epithet, but still called him ‘an ass’ – had had a cart of antiquities seized by the authorities near Aleppo. ‘We know not what will become of him,’ Lawrence wrote, barely disguising his pleasure at their rival’s discomfort, adding, ‘we are very fortunate to have had no check so far in any of our forwarding departments’. Other news included the buying of Hittite seals in Aleppo, the German engineers having built some sheds on the archaeological site (Haj Wahid had taken them over), the weather was hot, the river low, it was Ramadan and the Turkish army were again requisitioning mules. After the excitement of the digging season and the intensity of his brief visit home, suddenly he was at a loss, ‘back in the House of Bondage’, as he confessed to Leeds in Oxford, which was where his brother Will found him.
Will Lawrence had graduated from Oxford that summer and secured a teaching job in Delhi. Instead of going straight to India via the Suez Canal, he had decided to pass through the Middle East and to visit this brother. He arrived just a fortnight after Ned had reached Aleppo. Of the five Lawrence brothers, Will and Ned were closest in temperament, age and interests – Will had a love of the classics, studied history at St John’s College, Oxford, liked to swim and wrote extremely well. Unlike his elder brother, Will had retained the religious belief their parents had encouraged. One of his Oxford tutors remembered that he ‘combined, above any other man that I ever knew, a great love of beauty and a deep religious sense’. He also thought Will was ‘perhaps the gentlest, but also one of the strongest; perhaps the most winning’ of the young Lawrences.
Will’s route took him from Beirut – ‘very beautiful, a splendid bay’ – to Damascus, which he thought was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. ‘I have just come in from seeing moonlight and afterglow and it’s simply glorious. Minarets and white roofs . . .’ Seduced by the scent of peach, the mix of nations, the industry in the souks, when he reached Ned in Aleppo he described him as ‘very well and a great lord in this place’. There is a sense of joy in his description of seeing his brother in Syria, of awe also, because Ned, just a year older, ‘is known by everyone, and their enthusiasm over him is quite amusing’. Amusing and impressive, particularly when they happened to meet Busrawi Agha, the great Kurd leader who was visiting his son in hospital, and who invited Will to visit his tents across the Euphrates.
‘This Carchemish comes as a surprise,’ Will wrote when they left the train at Jerablus. ‘The station shows no mound in sight and no river . . . a walk of ten minutes or so over rocky slopes brought us without really any climbing into the Kalaat of Jerablus which is thus low on one side. It is a very wide circle full of old stones and trial pits of the digs dotted about it . . . The Mound is thus impressive only from the riverbank. Then very much so.’ But more impressive than the place, and the things they had excavated in it, was the life his brother was living. The day after Will arrived, Dr Altounyan, who had shown them around Aleppo, came to stay with his son (now practising at the Middlesex Hospital, London) and daughter. Among the other people staying at the mission house during these days was Edgar Bonham Carter, Legal Secretary to the government of Sudan, Charles Cochrane-Baillie, a man with sleepy eyes and a fine, pointed
moustache who, as Lord Lamington, had served as Governor of Queensland, Australia, and of Bombay. There was also an American missionary, Dr Usher, and with him an English officer, Lieutenant Hubert Young – ‘an interesting fellow,’ Will reported home, ‘speaking Arabic and Persian very well.’
Young and Usher were travelling together to Van and had made a detour to visit the Carchemish excavations. ‘Neither Usher nor I knew that archaeologists do not dig in the summer,’ Young later wrote, ‘and we thought it would be fun to combine a visit to the “digs” with a peep at the railway-bridge . . . At Carchemish we found that Hogarth and Woolley were away and the “digs” closed down for the summer, but we were shown over them by a quiet little man of the name of Lawrence, who was for some reason living there alone.’ The quiet little man served them coffee, and grapes on a bed of ‘snow’ (ice) and then gave such a compelling explanation of the site that the two travellers missed their train. The following day, when Lawrence suggested they stay longer – presumably to relieve his boredom – Usher had other obligations, but Young gladly accepted.
‘I have seldom enjoyed a week more than that week at Carchemish,’ he remembered.
We spent the days in clambering over the mound, bathing in the Euphrates, carving figures out of the soft limestone, and above all talking. Lawrence was by then twenty-five, though he looked about sixteen, but in many respects he was years older. By his mere personality he had converted the excavation into a miniature British consulate. His rough native workmen would have done anything for him. Slight and fair and clean-shaven, he was the last person whom one would have imagined capable of wandering about in native dress and passing unobserved among the swarthy and bearded inhabitants, but he had mastered the local dialect and was apparently accepted without question wherever he went as a youth from Jerablus.
Lawrence was less enthusiastic about having so many visitors at Carchemish and admitted, after the Altounyans had left, that he disliked having the house so full. ‘Still,’ he conceded, ‘Will enjoyed them, and the one who is left, one Young, a Lieut. in an Indian Regiment, is a decent sort of person.’
When it was time to visit Busrawi in his tents across the Euphrates, Lawrence was suffering from fever, so stayed at Jerablus: Young and Will Lawrence crossed the river with Dahoum and Hamoudi. ‘He sent his sons and some retainers for us, with horses,’ Will reported. ‘Then we had a ride of about 6 hours through steppes, perfectly barren stony country rolling up and down with only a very occasional well surrounded always by great herds of large black goats in charge of boys with guns.’ Busrawi’s status was reflected in the number of his followers, in the fighters he could put in the field and in the size of his tent. Both Young and Lawrence remarked that his tent, which they reached after dark, had forty poles. Open sided in one part, with family quarters screened off in another, it was large enough to hold the hundred people who gathered for the feast. ‘They laid down a long mat thirty feet or so upon the carpets in front of our mat, placed bread all along the edges of it, and then more than 40 dishes. The old Agha sat between us and gave the signal to start by taking a piece of meat in his hand and putting it in my spoon. Then everyone fell to with eagerness, saying nothing but eating at a great pace simply shovelling the stuff into their mouths. Servants moved behind with mugs of water.’ Will enjoyed the food at the time, but suffered for it the whole way to Delhi. After the food there was coffee, cigarettes and entertainment. ‘All the while we had been eating,’ Will recalled, ‘a man had been beating a drum, and another blowing on a pipe, which sounded at times like the reel pipes, but had no bag. After dinner there was a lot of this music, and some dancing, just of men, who capered about waving handkerchiefs and singing, not very exciting.’
There was a horseback game that sounds similar to polo, and a visit from Khalil, the son of Ibrahim Pasha, the late Kurdish leader. They slept in Busrawi’s grand tent. Early the next morning, still by moonlight, they rode back to the river with the Agha and a dozen horsemen. Busrawi continued with them to Jerablus, where he and Will caught the Aleppo train. Lawrence, who had recovered from his fever, saw them off. ‘When I last saw him as the train left the station,’ Will wrote to reassure their mother, who had obviously made a comment about life in Jerablus being uncivilised, ‘he was wearing white flannels, socks and red slippers, with a white Magdalen blazer, and was talking to the governor of Biredjik in lordly fashion.’ Two months later, from Delhi, Will told his mother, ‘You must think of him as a great power in the land for good: the Kurds apply to him continually, as arbitrator in tribal differences, and he has contrived to keep his village, the Hoja’s people, sober, while the Germans have made drunken men a common sight in the [railway] bridge builders’ cottages.’ Some months later still, Will wrote a verse for his brother, worth repeating for the sentiment as much as for the poetry:
I’ve talked with counsellors and lords
Whose words were as no blunted swords,
Watched two Emperors and five Kings
And three who had men’s worshippings,
Ridden with horsemen of the East
And sat with scholars at their feast,
Known some the masters of their hours,
Some to whom years were as pressed flowers:
Still as I go this thought endures
No place is too great to be made yours.
‘I never quite fathomed why Lawrence was still at Carchemish when the “digs” were closed down,’ Lieutenant Young wrote, ‘but I gathered that it was partly from choice and partly from economy. He used to spend his time wandering about in Arab dress, sometimes for days at a time, storing his phenomenal memory with scraps of local knowledge which came in very useful later on. When he was not doing this he was trying to puzzle out the Hittite inscriptions or target-shooting with a long Mauser pistol. I amused myself by competing with him at both these games.’ Some of Lawrence’s biographers have pointed out that this time – ‘the best life I ever lived’ – when he was being treated as a lord, or, as he himself put it, living like a king, was similar in nature (if not in details) to the life his father had enjoyed before he left his wife for Sarah Lawrence. If the theory that Lawrence had overheard a conversation between his father and someone concerned with the financial or legal settlement is true, then he will have known something of his father’s privileged, drink-soaked life. And he will have imagined more. It seems hard to find any other credible explanation for his response, on hearing of his father’s intention of going to Ireland around the time that Will was in Carchemish: ‘Don’t go . . . even to play golf. I think the whole place repulsive historically: they should not like English people, and we certainly cannot like them.’
Young mentioned that they spent time that week carving sculptures from the soft limestone, which Lawrence described as ‘gargoyles for the better adornment of the house. He [Young] managed in limestone an ideal head of a woman; I did a squatting demon of the Notre-Dame style, also in limestone, and we have now built them into the walls and roof, and the house is become remarkable in N. Syria. The local people come up in crowds to look at them.’ If Leonard Woolley is to be believed, the local people came to do more than look at the sculptures. Writing after Lawrence’s death, Woolley described how Lawrence had had ‘Dahoum to live with him and got him to pose as model for a queer crouching figure which he carved in the soft local limestone’. There is an insinuation in this, that Lawrence was having a sexual relationship with the youth. Woolley then spelled it out: ‘To make an image was bad enough in this way, but to portray a naked figure was proof to them of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence was widely spread and firmly believed.’ It has been even more widely spread since Woolley wrote those lines and there continues to be a widespread belief that Lawrence was homosexual, either in practice or in thwarted desire.
Homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, even in private and between consenting adults, so Woolley’s suggestion of ‘evil of another sort’ would have had a greater impact in the 1930s than now. He must have realised the power of what he was writing for, having cast his aspersion, he then hastened to add that it was unfounded. If he believed that the rumour was unfounded, then of all the things he might have written about the man he had worked with for so many years, why say this? Perhaps he remembered the moment the two of them were in a Kurdish village, when Lawrence was approached by a group of girls drawing water at a well. ‘One bold hussy pulled open his shirt to see if his skin was white all over; and soon, with shrieks of laughter, they were all about him determined to see more, until he escaped almost stripped. He could not take it as a joke.’ Perhaps, for Woolley, Lawrence was not ‘one for the ladies’, although other people who knew him well had other ideas. Winifred Fontana remembered that ‘Lawrence spared himself no pains for this woman’s comfort and happiness – nor for that of other women who stayed there.’
Lawrence said he never had a sexual relationship and most people who knew him found that credible. In 1927, he wrote to his friend the (homosexual) novelist E. M. Forster, ‘I’m so funnily made up, sexually,’ and later that same year went further. Having read Forster’s ghost story, ‘Dr Woolacott’, in which a man dies after a gay sexual encounter, Lawrence wrote that ‘The Turks, as you probably know (or have guessed, through the reticences of the Seven Pillars) did it to me, by force . . . I couldn’t ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me.’ The following year, with Robert Graves, the poet and at that point his biographer, he had a discussion ‘about fucking’: ‘As I wrote (with some courage, I think: few people admit the damaging ignorance) I haven’t ever: and don’t much want to.’ The most important testimony, at this young, Carchemish stage of his life, comes from Lawrence’s Oxford friend and fellow print-enthusiast Vyvyan Richards, who would have been stunned to know that there was anything sexual in Lawrence’s relationship with Dahoum, as he had hoped for such intimacy himself. ‘He had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind,’ Richards wrote, after confessing his love for his friend. ‘He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He neither gave the slightest sign that he understood my motives or fathomed my desire. In return for all I offered him – with admittedly ulterior motives – he gave me the purest affection, love and respect that I have ever received from anyone . . . a love and respect that was spiritual in quality. I realise now that he was sexless – at least that he was unaware of sex.’ Even Woolley eventually mitigated his salacious remarks, insisting that Lawrence ‘was in no sense a pervert; in fact, he had a remarkably clean mind. He was tolerant, thanks to his classical reading, and Greek homosexuality interested him, but in a detached way, and the interest was not morbid but perfectly serious.’
Jeremy Wilson in Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography points out that Woolley was ‘factually misleading’ and ‘libellously inaccurate’ even for suggesting that Lawrence and Dahoum were alone in the house, that Lawrence carved the naked figure when they were alone and, by inference from village disapproval, that they were lovers. There were many guests at the Carchemish that month and, even when the last of them had gone, Haj Wahid still lived in the house with his wife and children. More significant, Hubert Young was there when he made the carving, and was creating his own sculpture when Lawrence carved the gargoyle. Wilson points to jealousy on the part of Woolley. By the time he wrote the suggestion, Woolley was Sir Leonard Woolley, his name connected to Ur, the great Sumerian city he excavated so successfully between 1922 and 1934. At the time of Lawrence’s death, however, he had not acquired a reputation or a following that could compare to his junior assistant, and he will have known that during the Carchemish excavations Lawrence, Hogarth and Kenyon found him ‘a source of mirth and [that he] lent himself to delightful descriptions [by Lawrence]. These caused great enjoyment to the Ashmolean.’ In other words, Lawrence had mocked his boss behind his back and the others had found it funny. Woolley, when he read some of these comments soon after the end of the Great War, had other views.
All that lay in the not so distant future. They were very different characters, but they kept hidden any objections they might have had about each other and had developed an easy and successful working partnership. One thing Woolley expressed later but which struck him at this time was Lawrence’s apparent lack of concern for others’ opinion of him. ‘He knew quite well what the Arabs said about himself and Dahoum,’ but ‘so far from resenting it was amused, and I think he courted misunderstanding rather than tried to avoid it’. Lawrence had long nurtured an ability to sow confusion; it was one of the ways he had learned to protect himself from his mother’s prying. After the war, it became an essential tool in his fight to preserve something of himself from journalists and others wanting to get at the man behind the legend.
Excerpted from "The Young T.E. Lawrence" by Anthony Sattin. Published by W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. Copyright 2014 by Anthony Sattin. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Shares