A picture hangs on the wall over my word processor as I write this. It is a picture of Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence, from the movie Lawrence of Arabia. He’s on camelback, leading his battle-maddened bedouin in their final dash to Damascus. He’s at the height of his glory as a desert god, and just about to crumble into madness. The picture serves for daily inspiration; it also acknowledges a shaping influence in my life. By my best reckoning, over the years I have seen Lawrence of Arabia about 20 times. Soon I’ll go see it again, as it has been rereleased in a pristine new print with almost 30 minutes of edited footage restored. The critics are talking about how, seen fresh after many years, Lawrence is after all a major work, a great movie. This is no news to me. For me, Lawrence of Arabia is more than a movie. It is a way of life.
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The epics that I already liked so much–the movies about Rome and Hercules and the Bible–had clued me that the Mediterranean was the natural home of spectacle and mystery. But they were one step removed from reality–too fantastic, too distant in time, or too low-budget for me to trust completely. But I could believe in every square inch of Lawrence. In a way that other movies had not, Lawrence combined the old “cast of thousands” lavishness with the illusion of historic and cultural authenticity. This was mostly in the detail–saddlebags and goatskins; compasses, globes, binoculars, and pistols, bedouin robes and British uniforms; antique trains and armored cars; scrubby desert plants and rippled, windblown sand. Everything in Lawrence looked both awesome and authentic. Everything was more detailed, more nuanced, richer than it needed to be–and as a result was more completely convincing. I came away believing that history–and by extension, individual lives, maybe even my own–could really become epic from time to time. This was exciting news.
But even more intriguing, Lawrence purported to show how you got there–how this leap was made by a real (and, in the beginning, not terribly impressive) person, in real history; and at what price. This was of great interest to me. Thomas Edward Lawrence was an odd, lonely young man, the illegitimate product of an affair between an Anglo-Irish baronet and the family housemaid. Lawrence grew up enthralled with the mystical medievalism of William Morris and the other fin de siecle British aesthetes (throughout his guerrilla campaigns in Arabia, he kept an edition of Le Morte d’Arthur in his saddlebags). At Oxford, he was recruited and groomed as an intelligence agent for a sort of secret foreign office, made up of Arabists and liberal imperialists who wanted to organize the Arabian peninsula into Britain’s first independent nonwhite dominion, like a Canada or Australia of the Middle East.
Lawrence of Arabia is pure high enthrallment from the first moment to the last. Lean created a world down to its smallest sensuosities–the creaking of saddles, the snuffling of camels, the glare of desert light, the dust on faces, the sound of a single gunshot clean and startling in the vast emptiness of the desert, the creaking of tent poles in the night wind. That completeness enabled me, while sitting there in the dark, to surrender entirely to that world. I got thirsty as the bedouin troops crossed the An Nafud Desert. I felt Lawrence’s ecstasy in first seeing those fantastic endless breakers of sand. Each incident unfolded with an exalted hallucinatory realism, like N.C. Wyeth on film: Lawrence and his bedouin guide making camp in the desert sunset; an already traumatized Lawrence leading the camel carrying the bedouin boy as they approach a deserted British depot in swirling white dust on the Suez Canal; the bedouin camp under the moon, the epitome of strangeness and foreignness; Lawrence emerging from the desert furnace with a man he has rescued, as his one loyal bedouin servant rides joyous circles around him. And best of all, the first appearance of Ali (Omar Sharif)–out of the flickering cobalt distance, a small trail of beige dust ever so slowly materializing into a soundless black rider apparently floating over the sand.
How I wanted to be like him. How I ransacked the libraries for books about him. How I ravaged my mother’s linen closet looking for old bed sheets I could cut into kaffiyeh and burnooses. I returned to those books and to the movie obsessively. My secret inspiration through the 60s was Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence made me a hippie–Lawrence’s flamboyant antiauthoritarianism shaped me at least as much as Mick Jagger’s, and my psychedelic adventures were a natural outgrowth of those epic yearnings first stirred by the film. When I went to Britain after college, my first pilgrimage outside of London was to Cloud’s Hill, Lawrence’s cottage, and to his grave in the Dorset countryside. I wanted it all to have happened just the way it did in the movie; I delighted in the similarities I found between the history books and the movie (O’Toole was a startling ringer for the young Lawrence), and tried to ignore the discrepancies.
