I am perhaps a quarter of the way through Asher's biography of T. E. Lawrence, and am finding the his admittedly admiring and admittedly idiosyncratic picture of the man behind the myth a fascinating one. What emerges is a man broken by Victorian class, gender and psychosexual expectations. Asher is an open fan of Lawrence and his accomplishments who has spent the better part of his adult retracing Lawrence's exploits, in some ways even reliving them--e.g. cross the Sahara on camelback.

Lawrence's father it turns out was an Anglo-Irish nobleman who ran off with the family governess, leaving a wife (who refused to give him a divorce) and kids in Ireland. His mother was an illegitimate daughter of a destitute father, orphaned at a young age, and left to make her own way in the world. The two of them resettled with an assumed name at first in Wales, and then in Oxford, where Ned Lawrence, a second son, grew up.

Lawrence's mother was apparently something of a force to be reckoned with, and Ned spent most of his life constantly attempting to separate himself from her influence. Wracked by pangs of gender dysphoria, Lawrence developed a taste for wildly eccentric self-inflicted acts of depredation and pain that he took care to demonstrate exhibitionistically to a select audience. For example bathing in an ice covered river, eating only erratically.

A lot of this in Asher's analysis was a reaction to a sense of failed masculinity. He was smallish and refused to compete in sports of the day, particularly team sports, at school or at Oxford, which were practically required. He set himself apart, never had obvious (and admitted) homoerotic leanings, but apparently never acted on them in any "conventional" way. He did hire a manual laborer to flog him regularly (about which he invented the most ingenious of stories), from which he apparently, on occasion, achieved sexual release. Otherwise it appears as though he had no romantic relationships with men or women, though he had several enthusiastic friendships, usually either with matronly asexual women or younger men who were marked social inferiors.

Lawrence began actively making his own myth from an early age. For example, in order to get into the good graces of a well-connected curator who had asked him to collect some Hittite cylinders on one of his early trips to the Middle East, Lawrence apparently (though it is difficult to be sure, since his life is surrounded by such a matrix of half-truths) fabricated a story of being robbed and nearly beaten to death. He delivered the cylinders to his would-be patron without mentioning this, but then told the stories piece meal around Oxford in such a way that they were sure to get back to the courted don. Amazingly, it worked. Lawrence was able to draw on this pseudo debt to get an appointment as a paid assistant on an Anatolian archeological dig, in spite of the fact that the dig did not require another assistant and at the time Lawrence did not yet have the linguistic skills to be truly useful!

Many of Lawrence's exploits seem to have this sort of element about them. And yet his very ability to move as a de-classed individual through a society utterly dominated by class concerns, and his remarkable abilities at assimilation in foreign cultures--that is, to become fairly quickly accepted in them to a certain extent--was predicated on what he felt was his own inner emptiness, at home no where in the world.

A pretty good overview of Lawrence's life. The author intrudes, and makes the book suffer, with his own travels in the Middle East. ( )

This is a large and invovled biography of T E Lawrence, written by an author who starts out as an admirer, and remains so to the end, though to a much lesser degree.
Though there is a lot of information about the battles in the desert, i found this book most interesting when the author explores Lawrence's psyche and personality, and attempts (not always successfully or believably) at the truth behind the myth. He tests a lot of the claims about the great man, and mainly finds them wanting. This book is especially strong when it admits that it comes to no definate conclusion - rather, the author presents the facts as he sees them and lets the reader decide.

This book is probably one of the better Lawrence biographies out there at the moment (though i would not say nearly the best) as it delves into the contradictions of the man and the myuth, and isn't afraid to 'pull punches' and not make excuses for the more troubling aspects of Lawrence's personality.

I finished this book wondering why such a genius felt compelled to fabricate so much about his life, but also seeing him as more ' three-dimensional' than the common myth. ( )

I really enjoyed this study of the famous, almost mythic warrior. I became fascinated after seeing Lean's movie. I've only read one Lawrence bio, so I can't say whether it's the best out there. ( )