Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: a cautionary tale

Abstract

If you plan to portray a national icon in less than heroic terms, you had better be prepared for a fight, as Richard Aldington learned even before the publication of his 1955 biography, of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. Fred D. Crawford provides the first examination of all major parties and points of view embroiled in the controversy generated by Aldington's biography of T. E. Lawrence. In two years of research, Aldington made major discoveries, including the extent to which had cooperated with Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves, and B. H. Liddell Hart in the creation of the Lawrence legend. For this and other reasons, Aldington concluded that was a charlatan, a poseur, and a fraud. Upon learning of Aldington's antagonism to a year before Aldington's book appeared, a powerful group including B. H. Liddell Hart, Robert Graves, A. W. Lawrence, and other partisans worked behind the scenes to suppress and denigrate Aldington's biography. These attempts, Crawford notes, reveal a great deal about how private interests can determine what the public is allowed to read.