When this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography first appeared in 1976, it rescued T. E. Lawrence from the mythologizing that had seemed to be his fate. In it, Harvard professor of psychiatry Dr. John Mack humanely and objectively explores the relationship between Lawrence's inner life and his historically significant actions. Extensive interviews, far-flung correspondence, access to War Office dispatches and unpublished letters provide the basis for Mack's sensitive investigation of the psychiatric dimensions of Lawrence's personality. In addition, Mack examines the pertinent history, politics, and sociology of the time in order to weigh the real forces with which Lawrence contended and which impinged upon him.

PREFACE TO THE 1998 EDITION

Looking back over more than two decades since publication of the first edition of A Prince of Our Disorder, I find myself asking what now seems most significant about the life of T. E. Lawrence.
     The answer appears curiously clear to me and has to do with Lawrence's place among our evolving definitions of political responsibility. In my view he was ahead of his time in this respect, and his odd martyrdom can be seen as a contemporary version of what is likely to befall a person who takes exaggerated individual moral responsibility in a turbulent political arena.
     Ethnonational conflict is the dominant context in which peoples in the Middle East, and now throughout the world, seek to define and express their political and personal identities, most often at the expense of other peoples who define themselves in terms of the same piece of land. Lawrence saw clearly the terrible menace of such conflict, especially when potentiated by religious emotion. “To man rational,” he wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935), the epic story of his participation in the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, “wars of nationality were as much a cheat as religious wars, and nothing was worth fighting for: nor could fighting, the act of fighting, hold any meed of intrinsic virtue.” Lawrence's experiences in the war led to a kind of reverent pacifism. “Life,” this passage continues, “was so deliberately private that no circumstances could justify one man in laying violent hands upon another's” (p. 548).
     Lawrence was far ahead of his time in appreciating the central importance of self-knowledge, of awareness of deeper personal motives on the part of a person who would be an agent of change in a large political drama. Of his motivation in the Arab Revolt, Lawrence wrote, “The self-immolated victim took for his own the rare gift of sacrifice; and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich as this choosing voluntarily another's evil to protect the self. There was a hidden selfishness in it as in all perfections” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p. 550).
     T. E. Lawrence lived out the transnational vision that is expressed in the second of the quotes I chose as epigraphs at the beginning of this book, a passage whose grandeur verges on the grandiose in the extreme assignment of self-responsibility. But it is precisely for this reason, this too heavy assumption of the burdens of consciousness ranging from the personal to the global, that T. E. Lawrence remains, in Irving Howe' felicitous phrase, “a prince of our disorder.”
                                   —John E. Mack, M.D.

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Pulitzer Prize Awarded to John Mack For Biography of 'Lawrence of Arabia': Mack Retraces 12 Years of Research for T.E. Lawrence Biography

Harvard University Gazette
April 22, 1977, Vol. LXXII, No. 28

"Dr. Mack?"

"Yes."

"This is the Harvard News Office calling. May we send a photographer and writer to you in about half an hour?"

"Sure, but why?"

"Don't you know?"

"Don't I know what?"

"You've just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize."

Dr. John E. Mack, Professor and head of the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, and Director of Education at the Cambridge-Somerville Mental Health Center, had worked for 12 years on his biography, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence. His research had led him-on a camel-to the fabled Gulf of Aqaba; aboard the British rails to Oxford and its Bodleian Library; and through the winding, cobbled lanes of Delvin, County Westmeath in Ireland and to Tremadoc in Wales, where Lawrence of Arabia was born.

For Dr. Mack, a practicing psychoanalyst, this was his first biography, although lie is the author of a classic psychiatric text, Nightmares and Human Conflict, and is the editor of Borderline States in Psychiatry. The 47-year-old New York City-born physician, lives in Chestnut Hill with his wife, Sally, a psychiatric social worker, and their three sons, Danny, Kenny, and Tony.

Amid the happy hubbub of telephones ringing ("The New York Times is on hold," "Bob Coles just called to say, 'TRIPLE CONGRATULATIONS'" "The Associated Press wants to know when you were born.. .") , Dr. Mack was interviewed by the Gazette.

Q. As a psychoanalyst, what was Lawrence's special appeal to you? How were you "hooked?"

A. I became hooked by Lawrence because he was extraordinary for a public figure, a military commander, in the degree to. which he was involved with exploring his own inner life. Lawrence, himself asked what was propelling him, what was the meaning of what he was doing, what was his own purpose in getting involved with the Arab revolt, how did it relate to his own personal de velopment. He was interested in the rela-tionship of his adult actions to his youth-ful readings of chivalric romances: how they related to his concerns with the Crusade, his ideas of heroism, redemp-tion, renunciation, self-sacrifice. He ex-plored all of this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and in his correspondence. He also had a great gift for psychological insight.

Q. How did you react to his extraordinary self-exploration?

A. I felt that here was something that could overcome the familiar accusation that the writer is imposing psychological interpretations on a person who is dead and about whom there is no data. I felt this accusation would no longer be valid if the information on Lawrence were used critically but thoroughly. Also, Lawrence was sufficiently our contemporary that I was able to conduct extensive interviews with people who had known him very well.

Q. How did you get in touch with these people, most of whom were in England or the Middle East?

A. Initially, I wrote to Lawrence's older brother who had been a medical missionary. I approached him as one physician to another, who had felt very much affected by his brother's life and suffering and struggles, and was interested in talking with him. I also met Lawrence's younger brother, an archaeologist who was his literary executor, who was extremely helpful to me in gaining access to embargoed papers at the Bodleian Library and worked with me conscientiously over the next decade to enable this book to exist.

Q. Were there any problems with Lawrence's brother when it came to your writing about some of t he more intimate of his personal problems-for example, his apparent need for being whipped?

A. Yes. There were, some rough moments for him when the flagellation episode—which he had known about—came up. He became troubled when the details of it were put into one long chapter. He was troubled about the possible effects that chapter might have. But he never swayed in his support and I have enormous gratitude to him and to his wife for their steadfastness.

Q. In the hundreds of interviews you conducted for the book—from Lowell Thomas to Basil Liddell Hart to Howeitat tribesmen in Jordan—how do you think your psychoanalytic background affected your handling of the material?

A. I think that understanding of motivation, of the bringing to bear of the conflicts in one's life and to one's public actions can be appreciated by such a study. I feel there is a need to know more about the psychological development, strengths, vulnerabilities, of leaders,

Q. Is there a single theme in the book that you feel particularly benefited from your psychoanalytic training?

A. Yes. The whole question of heroism and Lawrence's need to be heroic. Lawrence's mother and father never married. He was the second of five illegitimate sons who was raised in a very strict home. His parents were members of an evangelical sect of the English Church and Lawrence was early impressed by this God-fearing, Bible-reading environment.

But he was also aware of a degree of conflict between this very strict obedience to God and the Bible and the fact that his parents were living in sin. Like many children, he fantasized that his father had once been part of a heroic race of aristocratic giants, and he was encouraged in such fantasies by a mother who felt that she, too, had fallen from a state of grace. She sought to redeem, through her chil-dren, her own fall. One son did indeed become a medical missionary, another provided Christian teachings in India, and T.E., though not consciously, seemed to need to redeem his family's fall from grace.

Lawrence sought, through his public actions, to restore the heroic image that he grew up holding in his mind. I'm not saying that he deliberately set out to do this, but I do believe that this was a force behind his public actions. He studied Arabic, became an expert in military history , and he adapted this information to leading a glorious campaign.

Q. So you think that your psychiatric training predisposed you to make these connections between Lawrence's childhood fantasies and his adult public life?

A. I think psychiatric training and experience in working with psychological histories is helpful in terms of the necessity for interweaving the themes that occur in Lawrence's life: the childhood fantasies about the heroic past from which he is descended, the desire to redeem a fallen family state, the desire to liberate a people and thereby recapture the chivalric ideals, in which he had become steeped from adolescence. Psychiatric training does not help you in learning history—that you have to do on your own—but it does help you in interviewing.

Q. How does being a psychiatrist make the kind of interviewing you were able to do different from the kind of interviewing that, say, a journalist might do?

A. That's a very difficult. question. By being a psychiatrist I may have been particularly sensitive to his personal relationships. You can tune in to the quality of the attachment between a particular person and Lawrence, in terms of what it was that was meaningful to the person about his or her relationship with Lawrence. It was often then possible to enlist his former friends as collaborators in the project.

Q. Did you encounter any suspicion toward you because of your being a psychiatrist?

A. Yes, but the funny part of it is that despite people's suspicion, they nevertheless would end up pouring out a great deal of information saying, "Well, since you're a psychiatrist, you'd certainly be interested in this. . . ."

Q. What are some biographies that you've liked?

A. Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoi Justin Kaplan's biography of Mark Twain, Alexander and Juliet George on Woodrow Wilson. Erik Erikson's work is, of course, crucial to this whole field, and I owe him a great debt.

CONTENTS

Preface, 1998
Introduction

Family Background and Childhood
Chapmans and Lawrences
Childhood and Adolescence
Lawrence and His Family: The Burden of Illegitimacy

Youth
Introduction
Literary Influences
Crusader Castles
Lawrence at Jesus College, 1907-1910
The First Trip to the Middle East, 1909
Lawrence at Carchemish
The Epic Dream and the Fact of War

The War Years, 1914-1918
Introduction
The Background of the Arab Revolt
Two Years in Cairo, 1914-1916
The Course of the Arab Revolt
The Capture of Damascus
The Achievements of "Aurens"
The Question of Motivation
Lawrence the Enabler
The Conflict of Responsibility
The Heroic Legend and the Hero
The Shattering of the Dream

The Political Years, 1918-1922
Introduction
Arab Self-determination and Arab Unity
Leaving Damascus Behind
At the Paris Peace Conference
Return to England: London and All Souls
Lawrence and Churchill: The Political Settlements in the Middle East

The Years in the Ranks, 1922-1935
The Service Years: An Overview
Ross: The First RAF Enlistment
The Years in the Tanks
Cranwell
India
Mount Batten
“Boats, Boats, Boats”
Retirement and Death

Further Dimensions
Intimacy, Sexuality and Penance
Lawrence Assayed
Appendix: Twenty-Seven Articles
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index

Trade Paperback Edition
from Harvard University Press
5 x 7 3/4 inches, 27 halftones
608 pages