Ruffled Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia

Ever since reading *Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I've nursed a fascination with T.E. Lawrence. Something about him resonates with me. He was adventurous, philosophical and thirsted for knowledge, yet he was an introvert, had intimacy issues, was prone to sanctimony and struggled to find belonging in a world where he seemed an alien on his own planet.

Lawrence

What Lawrence is most famous for is as a leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The effort was instrumental in bringing down the Ottoman Empire. It was a struggle chock full of colorful characters, intrigue, epic desert treks, and all the death, drama and horror of war. It ultimately ended in a colossal betrayal.

The British had promised the Arabs, if they rose up against the Ottomans, that they would have independence and the lands from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula would be theirs exclusively. But the British secretly signed the *Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French and basically divvied up the Middle East between themselves.

Map signed as part of Sykes-Picot Agreement

It was a pivotal but not well known set of events. If the British had honored their promise to the Arabs, subsequent Middle Eastern history would have been very different and likely much improved over what we have now. After the war, Lawrence and others worked hard to get the British Government to scrap Sykes-Picot and fulfill their promise to the Arabs but with little success. For a really engaging account of this period, see Scott Anderson's *Lawrence in Arabia.

After the war Lawrence worked on his memoirs which eventually became Seven Pillars. He was a hero and the book was a success but over time his reputation flagged. Many considered him loose with the truth and a fabricator of various events in his book. Contributing to this reputation was a man named *Richard Meinertzhagen who also served in the Middle East and was something of a purveyor of dirty tricks for the British Army. 

Lawrence and Meinertzhagen met on a number of occasions and shared a room together at the Paris peace conference. Lawrence didn't have a high opinion of him and wrote as much in Pillars:

Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri.

Meinertzhagen

Meinertzhagen apparently didn't like the characterization and dissed Lawrence in his own memoirs, insinuating Lawrence was flighty, unreliable and homosexual. Meinertzhagen came to be known as a war hero and went on to become famous in the field of ornithology. He collected and cataloged birds from all over Asia and Africa and became a figure of scientific respectability. His seeming unassailable integrity lent credence to the notion of Lawrence as an unreliable narrator.

Nevertheless, when I read Pillars, Lawrence won me over with passages like the following which show his intimate knowledge of the Arab people. He was an archaeologist before the war and spent much time in Syria learning the Arab language, even the different dialects, and their customs.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness to this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables.

Compassion and insight combined with humor and irreverence toward establishment thinking made Lawrence a man after my own heart. Something made me want to trust Lawrence, though I bowed to the consensus view that he was unreliable. I viewed Pillars as more of a work of literature than history.

Then one day I was reading an edition of *The Best American Science and Nature Writing and came across an article written by John Seabrook called "Ruffled Feathers" that appeared in the New Yorker in 2006. It was about *Pamela Rasmussen, an ornithologist who in the 1990s did the major legwork for *Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. Traditionally ornithologists shot bird specimens, collected their skins and stuffed them for museum collections and further study. Meinertzhagen had been one of the grand champions, collecting more than 25,000 birds, so his work figured prominently in Rasmussen's research.

But something was wrong with the specimens. The data didn't always match up and she saw evidence of tampering. Further research revealed the birds had been stolen from museums around the world and Meinertzhagen had doctored the mountings to make them look like his own work. Bird after bird that he had supposedly collected turned out to be stolen. Much of his work is now considered fraudulent. The full extent isn't known.

Around the same time Rasmussen was doing her detective work, Lawrence scholars discovered that Meinertzhagen's World War I diaries were faked. He actually wrote them in the 1950s. In them were passages disparaging Lawrence. One entry states, "I believe I was the only one of [Lawrence's] friends to whom he confided he was a complete fraud." The real fraud, it turns out, was Meinertzhagen.

Some suspect he may have murdered his wife who died in a shooting accident. Meinertzhagen was the only other person there. The police didn't investigate or file charges.

Whatever the case, Meinertzhagen's chicanery is, I think, a measure or redemption for Lawrence's reputation. But he's not entirely off the hook. Certain dates and events in Pillars don't add up with other accounts. He almost certainly told Arab leaders during the war about the Sykes-Picot Agreement but doesn't acknowledge it in Pillars. How could he? It would have been admitting to treason.

I believe Lawrence was honest, to a fault even, and was trying to get at reality as best he could in a vast maze of competing loyalties and interests. His Arabian adventure was a huge undertaking, representing essentially lifetimes of experience compressed into a few years. Not even a brain as capable as his could hold it all together and somehow capture it completely with words. He had to try to point toward the truth using an inadequate medium -- language. If the writing in Pillars sometimes has the quality of a Zen koan, then you just have to trust it. I do.