Lawrence, standing on a bollard, with B. H. Liddell Hart.

Still, there was no sign of gloom on Lawrence’s part, as the inevitable date of his retirement from the RAF in 1935 approached. He was spending (overspending, in fact) on the rebuilding and modernization of Clouds Hill, in anticipation of living there full-time, and seeking translation jobs from publishers to provide a modest income for himself. He would have been gratified by the reviews of Liddell Hart’s biography of him had they not reawakened people’s interest, and had he not spoken so frankly to Hart about his parentage. He had said that “Lawrence” was a name as false as “Ross” and “Shaw,” with the inevitable result that the newspapers sought to find out his real name, and came close to uncovering the secret of his illegitimate birth—about which he no longer cared, but which would have embarrassed his mother and his two surviving brothers.

The king, in a strange moment of insight, had once called Lawrence the happiest man in the kingdom, and perhaps it was true—he was doing what he wanted to do; he had exhausted his ambitions; he had no ties to anyone or anything. His mother and his brother Bob were back in China; his youngest brother, Arnold, was married and hard at work on a career as an archaeologist. Robert Graves, who knew Lawrence as well as anyone, claimed by way of defending his right to call himself Irish, “the rhetoric of freedom, the rhetoric of chastity, the rhetoric of honour, the power to excite sudden deep affections, loyalty to the long-buried past, high aims qualified by too mocking a sense of humour, serenity clouded by petulance, and broken by occasional black despairs, playboy charm and theatricality, imagination that overruns itself and tires, extreme generosity, serpent cunning, lion courage, diabolical intuition, and the curse of self-doubt which becomes enmity to self and sometimes renouncement of all that is most loved and esteemed.” Whether these are Irish traits or not—and Lawrence’s claim to be Irish was not a strong one—perhaps nobody ever summed him up better, except that Graves left out Lawrence’s curious mixture of vanity and modesty.

By the end of 1934, Lawrence was again facing the potential of huge publicity. The British Fascists were attempting to claim him as their own, despite the fact that he had turned down an invitation to one of their meetings with a jocular note suggesting that his only interest in them would be if they put an end to the popular press, and that he would dance on the grave of the Daily Express, Daily Chronicle,and Daily Herald.Since he signed his note, “Yours not very seriously, T. E. Shaw,” it can be assumed that he had no interest in becoming a Fascist leader, a fact which was confirmed by no less an authority than the prospective British Fьhrer and head of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Lawrence was not about to exchange RAF blue for a black shirt, and he had no enthusiasm for Mussolini either.

Lawrence was now working in Bridlington, Yorkshire, on the North Sea, looking after the winter overhaul of the RAF launches and living in the Ozone Hotel. His enlistment in the RAF would at last come to an end in March 1935, but so long as he was still serving, he was determined to give the RAF value for its money. He worried about how he would support himself at Clouds Hill after he left the air force, and whether he would be able to afford his motorcycle. He described his predicament to Lady Astor: “In March 1935 the RAF takes away from me the right to serve it longer, and I relapse into a self-supporting life. My Cottage, 35/—a week, 24 hours a day. I am so tired that it feels like heaven drawing near.” Job offers came in, including one as secretary to the Bank of England, though this was unlikely: it is hard to imagine him in a respectable City position, wearing striped trousers, a black coat, and a hat to work every day, neatly furled umbrella in hand. The truth was that he didn’t really want a job or a position; he simply wanted to make enough money to live his own way. Despite his years of service in the army and the RAF his personality remained basically that of a bohemian and an artist.

He worried about the possibility that Revolt in the Desertmight be made into a film; this had concerned him since 1928, when the trustees (of which he was not one) sold an option on the film rights. Lawrence was concerned not only about the publicity and the question of who would play him, but about the possibility of a ham-handed attempt to build a “sex interest” into the story, by creating a role for a female star. By now the rights had passed into the hands of Alexander Korda,* the Hungarian-born producer who had made Britain’s first internationally successful film, The Private Life of Henry VIII,in 1933. This was the first British film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and its star, Charles Laughton, became the first British actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Lawrence rightly feared that Korda was much more likely to actually make the picture than the previous owners of the rights. He went down to London to have it out with Korda, but found to his surprise that the film producer listened to him patiently and sympathetically, and appeared to agree. “I lunched with Alexander Korda, the film king,” Lawrence reported to Charlotte Shaw: “He was quite unexpectedly sensitive, for a king: seemed to understand at once the inconveniences his proposed film would set in my path … and ended the discussion by agreeing that it should not be attempted without my consent.He will not announce its abandonment, because while he has it on his list other producers will avoid thought of it. But it will not be done. You can imagine how this gladdens me.”

Korda would later speak with great fondness of Lawrence, and described him as “the nicest man I ever failed to do business with.” What he had actually agreed to—a fine, but significant, point—was that the film would not be made without Lawrence’s consent until after his death.Far from wanting to include a “sex interest,” Korda had planned to base the script very closely on Revolt in the Desertand to have Leslie Howard play Lawrence. He wanted to have his brother Zoltan, who was about to make Sanders of the River(with Paul Robeson), direct the desert sequences; and to have his brother Vincent do the art direction. Korda liked Lawrence from the start (finding him “trиs sympathique”), and he also realized that making a film against Lawrence’s wishes would bring down on him a host of protests from just the kind of Englishmen whose respect and friendship he wanted. In any case, Korda regarded the ownership of the film rights of important books as a kind of savings account. He was buying the goodwill of the authors—everybody likes to receive an unexpected check, hence Korda’s purchase of the screen rights to Winston Churchill’s two-volume biography of Marlborough. Also, if he was patient, sooner or later somebody else might eventually want to make a film of even the most improbable book, and he could then sell the rights at a profit. It was a form of saving for his old age, for a man who preferred gambling to saving. In any case, the more options he took on books, the more friends he made. Lawrence understood this intuitively; he wrote to Robert Graves, “Korda is like an oil-company which has drilled often and found two or three gushers, and has prudently invested some of its proceeds in buying options over more sites. Some he may develop and others not.”

Lawrence enjoyed Bridlington, despite its melancholy ambience of an unfashionable summer resort in midwinter, and was comfortable at the Ozone Hotel, where he had a tower room looking out over the harbor wall to the sea. Officers seldom put in an appearance—one who did recalled him wearing a blue pullover, a scarf, an old sports jacket, and a pair of gray flannels. Lawrence ordered the few NCOs around with consummate tact, while they responded by calling him “Mr. Shaw,” as did his formidable landlady. The equipment officer at RAF Catfoss, Flight Lieutenant R. G. Sims, had known Lawrence in Iraq, and Lawrence became a close friend of Sims and his wife, once more crossing what would have been for anyone else the rigid class barrier that separates other ranks from officers in the British armed forces. The Simses took Lawrence to concerts in Hull, and he became a frequent dinner guest in their cottage. Reggie Sims, as so many other people had, occasionally spotted the undiminished presence of Colonel Lawrence in AC1 Shaw, as on the day he came into a room where Lawrence was absorbed in studying a blueprint. For a moment Lawrence ignored his presence, then his head rose, and “his eyes blazed forth for a moment or two in what Sims took to be scorn or hate. Then there was a sudden half-smile of recognition. ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Sir.’ A. C. Shaw murmured apologetically, ‘but for a moment I took you for a reporter.’ ”