Word: aldington
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...Aldington goes to infinite pains, complete with family genealogies, to prove that T. E. Lawrence and his four brothers were the illegitimate sons of a baronet named Chapman. He goes deep into the family's private history to debunk tales of his hero's childhood precocity. Stirred to action by a former biographer's statement that Lawrence claimed to have read "all the books" in the Oxford Union Library, Aldington lists the total (50,000) to prove the task impossible. Even Lawrence's claim to have ridden camelback at the pace of 100 miles...
...Lawrence appeared in England, and set off a fury of charge and countercharge. Its respected publisher (Collins) held up publication of the book for 18 months while lawyers checked it, and friends of Lawrence were asked to rebut its accusations. Lawrence of Arabia, A Biographical Enquiry, by Novelist Richard Aldington, says without mincing words that, far from being a hero, Lawrence of Arabia was a misbegotten fraud, a perverted charlatan, a pretentious demagogue, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur, a liar and a plain fake. The effect, as one paper put it, was "as if someone charged that Nelson knew...
...Search for Fraud. In writing Lawrence's life, Aldington (author of a sardonic bestselling 1929 novel of World War I, Death of a Hero) claims to have started with an open mind. But in the course of his four years of research, he turned up many claims by Lawrence and his enthusiastic biographers (Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves) that did not seem to jibe with the facts. The chief of these was Lawrence's boast that he had once been offered the post of High Commissioner for Egypt. There was no record of such an offer in writing...
With Lawrence the man thus disposed of, Biographer Aldington proceeds to attack his place in history by denying 1) that Lawrence played a major part in the Arab revolt in the desert, and 2) that the revolt itself was a significant aspect of the war. "All the preliminaries which led to the rebellion," he writes, "occurred before Lawrence ever reached Cairo, [and they] would certainly have occurred if Lawrence had never existed...
...Told Them Lies. Few of the Lawrence fans, old friends and old Middle East hands who rushed to his defense last week bothered to challenge Aldington's facts one by one. All of them professed to have long known that Lawrence was illegitimate, but based their objections on the propriety of saying so while his 93-year-old mother was still alive. Most of them also conceded that Lawrence was an incorrigible ham, who loved to posture and pose in his outlandish Arab regalia and often embroidered the truth. "Finding they wouldn't believe it," Lawrence himself once...