But the campaign in the desert was always a sideshow. The carnage had taken place on the Western Front, a whole generation had been wiped out in the trenches; by contrast, fighting in the "uncluttered desert" was light fare. The Great War begot no heroes. Lawrence was as close to a hero as Britain could get.
Lean had made the desert itself not merely setting and background; he gave it a life and a power all its own. But as Alec Guinness-superbly playing Prince Feisal-reminded the "desert loving Englishman," Arabs did not love the desert; they longed for gardens and trees and greenery.
The desert couldn't have cast a spell over Cairenes and Beirutis. Modernity was their lodestar in the early 1960s. Feisal was an agile politician with courtly manners, but this was hardly the culture that appealed to the Arabs at the time. The Hashemites had been brought up to court politics in the late Ottoman age. They didn't know how to harangue a crowd; they were in need of British guns and money, and the exquisite subtlety of Feisal haggling with General Allenby over what could be gotten from the powerful commander held no appeal to the Arabs. Feisal was a realist, and realism was not in vogue in a highly nationalistic era. Evicted by the French from the throne in Damascus that he truly wanted, he was willing to bide his time, and to settle for what he could get: the throne in Iraq, a country he had never set foot in before.
What glory the Hashemites had once possessed had receded. Modern mass-based nationalism was unkind to their brand of politics. The exquisite manners of Feisal-and Lean must have savored the man and his charm-were out of place in an Araby set to boil over by radical politics. But, then again, Feisal was what British diplomacy had needed at the time-a touch of class and refinement in a world that had seen the tearing asunder of European life.
For Feisal's manners, there was the coarse desert raider, Auda Abu Tayyi, played by Anthony Quinn. Auda is a braggart, a bandit chieftain, who enters the worldly city of Damascus and then heads back to his familiar world in the desert. Auda is a charming rogue: he is a warrior for hire, in quest of gold and honor. His proclamation, made to the approval of his tribesmen, "I am a river to my people," is one of the film's more memorable moments.
Auda is a thief, but he steals for his people, and he steals for his pleasure. His loyalty is to his tribe, the Hiweitat. He has no patience for nationalism and its exalted claims. He sees no Arabs in that world, only warring tribes. Young Arabs of the 1960s, and beyond, are embarrassed by Auda. But they ignore him at their peril. He and his type were authentic embodiments of a genuine sense of belonging.
The one character who catches the ambiguity of a world torn between desert and town, horrified by the tribalism of it all, pained by the duplicity and paternalism of the British, is Sharif Ali, a role that gave Omar Sharif his big break in the movies. For David Lean, this was a blessed choice. Omar Sharif was Egyptian, not yet thirty years of age when Lean found him. He was an Egyptian of a particular breed, born to Lebanese ancestry. His first name was Michael. But he changed it because he wanted a career in Egyptian film.
He had been educated at an elite prep school in Alexandria. (His classmates were the future King Hussein of Jordan and the Palestinian author Edward Said.) He was true to the role he played, a modern Arab in quest for something larger than Cairo. He was the same age as Peter O'Toole; they hit it off, and Omar Sharif introduced him to the gambling casinos of Lebanon and Morocco. There is worldliness in Sharif Ali: he knows his people can not win. And yet despite the worldliness, he shoots dead a man from another tribe who dared break the desert code by drawing water from a well that did not belong to him. He is nothing, he said, about the man he slew, the well is everything.
Ever since the legend of Lawrence took hold-the authors never tire of the man-there has been debunkers aplenty. He was a fantasist, some argued, his Seven Pillars a work of embellished fiction. His Arabic was poor, others claimed, he could not pass himself off as an Arab. He was too short, room was made for him in active service only when Turkey joined the Central Powers and he was sent to Egypt and attached to a military intelligence section. There were Arabs, in particular, who ridiculed his appearance in traditional Arab attire in the streets of Beirut and Cairo, and in the chancelleries of London and Paris.
No one could say with certainty if he loved or loathed the Arabs. It is easy to say that he was drawn to their "nobility," which in this context meant the backward classes and tribes. Doubtless, Arabia held real attractions for him. He was of illegitimate birth, and Arabia made it possible for him to become "El-Orens," the man of legend and fame.
The best book by far about Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder, by the psychiatrist John Mack, makes a decent and honored place for him in the Arab Revolt. He didn't make that revolt, but he was an enabler of it. He conceived a notion of reconciling Britain's needs with the desires of his Arab allies: he thought that the Arab lands could be made into a "brown dominion" of the British Empire. But this was fantasy. No such scheme could be implemented in a world awakening to the call of nationalism.
There was always self-awareness in Lawrence. He was loyal to "Britain and other things." In Seven Pillars he wrote of that great clash of loyalties at the heart of his work with the Arabs:
A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, barter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.
He had tried to live in the dress of the Arabs, and to "imitate their mental foundation." There was his English self, and there was the Arab affectation. "Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments."
British rule came late into the Arab domains-this was not India where the Raj cohabitated with the world it had conquered. (Lawrence himself didn't think much of what England had brought forth in India; the experiment had lasted too long and was issuing in failure, he wrote in a letter to his mother, in 1925.) Britain was exhausted and broke and couldn't give much of itself to the Arabs at the receiving end of its power. It cut corners; it used air power to subdue the rebellions; it spoke of constitutional principles as it bought off tribal chieftains not so unlike Auda Abu Tayyi.
Lawrence was part of this compromise, the fantasist and amateur student of Crusader castles turned guerilla leader, and destroyer of railroad trains. He knew the bargain he made with the men of empire who sent him to Arabia, and with the Arabs who took him in as they distrusted him all the same.
