6. Mr Hogarth is Going Digging

Oxford and Carchemish 1909–11

One day in 1910, some time after Lawrence had returned from Syria, he invited Midge Hall to accompany him on a boating trip on the Isis. He brought with him an attractive girl called Janet Laurie, and asked Hall to take her in a punt, while he tagged along fifty yards behind in his canoe. Hall was astonished by the request and afterwards he demanded what on earth his friend thought he was playing at. ‘Getting over the disappointment of letting the other man speak for the girl I adore,’ Lawrence told him. ‘I don’t know.’¹ Hall concluded from this rather confused statement that Lawrence was in love with Janet and had been rejected by her. He had occasionally seen them together and had suspected that a love affair was going on. Later, he asked Janet if she knew of Lawrence’s feelings: she knew, she said, but simply couldn’t take him seriously as a suitor. Many years later, aged eighty-six, Janet claimed that in 1910 Lawrence had proposed to her, and she had turned him down.

Lawrence had known Janet Laurie from early childhood. While living at Fawley on Southampton Water they had played together, and Janet’s father – the steward of a local estate – had frequently gone yachting with Thomas Lawrence. She had been sent to boarding-school in Oxford in 1899, and had remained close to the Lawrences, visiting them often, and even staying in the house at Polstead Road – one of the few women Sarah would allow over the threshold. She became a sort of surrogate sister to the Lawrence boys, and though she returned to Hampshire on her father’s death in 1902, she continued to visit. She saw Lawrence frequently during his undergraduate days, and sometimes joined him at home for tea on Sunday afternoons. In 1908, she and her sister had ignored college rules and called on him in his rooms at Jesus, where she had dropped her ladylike mask long enough to shy sugar cubes through the window of a neighbouring don. A lively, warm, mischievous girl with a dominant spirit, about three years older than Lawrence, she regarded him as a bright younger brother. Lawrence enjoyed poking fun at her, daring her to tomboyish acts and challenges, and ragging her if she fell short. One day in 1910, she said, she had been alone with him in the dining-room at Polstead Road when he had suddenly leapt up and held the door shut to prevent the maid from entering. Then, without an embrace or a kiss or a preliminary of any kind, he asked her to be his wife. Janet, who had never nurtured romantic feelings for Lawrence, burst into giggles. Lawrence looked at her resignedly and just said, ‘All right.’

This is the only evidence we have that he was ever attracted to a woman, and it seems inconsistent with much that he wrote. It is by no means impossible, of course, that he suddenly felt the species talking powerfully within him, despite everything. Yet in view of the controversy that has raged about Lawrence’s sexuality, it seems odd that Janet should have kept the story secret for so long. Several people told Lawrence’s authorized biographer Jeremy Wilson that her account was ‘exaggerated’, and another biographer, Desmond Stewart, pointed out that the story had an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to the tale of Algernon Swinburne’s rejection by ‘Boo’. Lawrence revealed much of himself in his letters, but no warm feelings for Janet have come to light.² In 1927 he told Charlotte Shaw that his emotional relationship with his mother would prevent him from ever making a woman a mother and the cause of children,³ and while marriage and being the cause of children are not necessarily the same thing (Mrs Shaw herself was married but childless), Lawrence told Robert Graves that he had never been able to fall in love with anyone, and that as a boy he had never had anything to do with women and had thus acquired the habit of living without them. Though he wrote to Graves later confessing that the former statement had not been entirely true, and that he had once been in love, the exception turned out to be someone whom he called ‘SA’, who he said had inspired his part in the Arab Revolt, and to whom he dedicated his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is generally agreed that ‘SA’ is most likely to have been Salim Ahmad, nicknamed ‘Dahoum’, a young Arab boy Lawrence grew attached to in pre-war Syria. Lawrence’s connections with the Uranians and others are well known, though his homosexual nature does not absolutely preclude the possibility that he might have proposed to Janet Laurie. She was attracted to his more handsome brother Will, and Lawrence may have noticed this and been inspired to compete. If the proposal story is true, then it may be that Janet rejected him because she sensed his fundamental indifference to the female sex.

Whether or not Lawrence felt attracted to Janet Laurie, he bestowed most of his attentions in early 1910 on his thesis. He spent so much time on it, indeed, that he neglected his other subjects – especially his ‘special subject’, the crusades. He left his revision until the last few weeks of term, mugging up on the facts in three all-night sittings while the exams were actually in progress. The thesis was a tremendous success, and Lawrence achieved a first class honours of such quality that his tutor, Reginald Lane Poole, held a special dinner to celebrate it. Oxford is, of course, as susceptible to personality as any other institution, and while Lawrence’s intellect was remarkable, his ability to charm and manipulate his superiors was even more egregious. His attitude to his tutors is summed up in the advice he later gave to his brother Will, who inherited some of them: ‘I warn you,’ he wrote, ‘that [Mr Jane] and Mr. Barker will be an ill-matched pair to drive. The only way to run them is to keep your own line between & utilise such of each as harmonises which is exhausting but very profitable’ (italics mine).⁴ On the surface, he appeared a fiery iconoclast, with what he called his ‘knight errant way of tilting at all comers’, and Edward Leeds noted ‘the fearlessness with which he attacked the views and theories of other writers’.⁵ Yet Lawrence’s revolt was frequently revolt into style, for he had an uncanny knack of telling those in authority what they most desired to hear. His theory that the major aspects of medieval military architecture had reached the Arabs from the crusaders, rather than vice versa, had an ideological basis which was certain to appeal to Edwardian imperialists, just as the appeal of the Hittites to men like Hogarth stemmed from the fact that they were believed to be of Indo-European stock rather than Semitic, thus proving that ‘Europeans’ played a part in creating the civilizations of the East. At twenty-one, Lawrence was in full possession of his faculties: the superb memory for facts, the razor-like and confident intuition (occasionally razor-like enough to cut himself), the ability to strike an impressive pose, to juggle fantasy and reality, to charm, seduce, amuse, convince and motivate others, to work devotedly towards a long – projected target, to exercise flexibility in the face of developments, to drive himself on against abnormal fear with unshakeable determination. Lawrence was unconventional, but cannot have appeared to Hogarth and others as anti-establishment. Hogarth himself was a reactionary autocrat who despised lily-livered bureaucracy, and he must have recognized in Lawrence a kindred spirit. Though Lawrence’s hero William Morris had dabbled in radical socialism, there is no evidence that at this stage Lawrence had abandoned his parents’ staunch conservatism. He sneered at such liberal institutions as the Old Age Pension Act, and the Suffragettes. He detested authority, especially of the rigid and uncongenial kind, but was also fascinated by it. He later wrote that liberality of body and spirit, cleanliness, vigour and good temper could only persist under conditions of common servitude.⁶