Hero’s Gold

Michael Korda Explores Lawrence of Arabia

by Vanni Cappelli and photographs by Jennifer May, November 24, 2010

The Hudson River Valley shines crisply on a late October day as Michael Korda arrives at Mount Carmel Square in Poughkeepsie to discuss his new biography, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (HarperCollins, 2010). As he crosses this place, named for a biblical triumph over false prophets that occurred not far from the scene of his subject’s revelatory desert odyssey, Korda appears animated and eager to offer his own truths—and above all, those of T. E. Lawrence.

Inside Café Bocca, the distinguished publisher, memoirist, biographer, historian, and Dutchess County resident contents himself with a light panino and a glass of water. He vaults straightaway into the labyrinth of his adventurer-soldier-scholar-writer-hero’s life, unspooling his own golden thread in a cultivated British accent. His manner is commanding yet congenial, signifying both mastery and a passion to communicate the alien yet vital experience of the adventurous life.

“Lawrence was a hero in the original classical sense,” Korda affirms, “without necessarily any respect or concern for society. Like Achilles, he went to war because he wanted to project himself as a model of excellence. He could easily have accepted a relatively restrained role in the Arab Revolt, but the ambition to be a warrior took over. Lawrence was never able to do anything by halves; he had an innate ambition to succeed, and never doubted that he could find in himself the ability to take on the most extraordinary challenges, and live up to his own conception of what a heroic figure was.”

Korda feels that this venerable ideal of heroism has been “in a sense cheapened” by the contemporary extension of it to anyone who puts on a uniform or is, quite unwillingly, the victim of a terrorist attack. “It has acquired a passive rather than an active quality,” he laments. “Lawrence was not a bumbler in need of transformation, as he has been depicted, but a latent talent waiting to be actualized. He trained for the role from an early age, intellectually and physically, and the outbreak of World War I gave him his opportunity. Yet he was aided by his extraordinary immunity to fear—courage came quite naturally to him. He was one of those people for whom excitement acts like a drug—an adrenaline rush—and as a result could produce a commanding presence before his men under conditions of extreme danger. Lawrence was a man of singular social ability, possessed of an enormous combination of vanity and sense of self-worth.”

Hero begins in medias res, with 28-year-old Lt. Lawrence journeying to Arabia in October 1916 as a British army liaison to the revolt raised by the Hashemite ruler Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons against the Ottoman Turk overlords of the region, who were allied with Germany. After skillfully delineating the military facts of his rapid rise to daring and innovative guerilla leader of camel-riding Bedouin fighters, culminating in the stunning desert trek to capture the port of Aqaba in July 1917, there is a time shift to Lawrence’s earlier life in England and the Near East. Throughout the book, Korda adheres to this method of portraying the public hero before delving into the inner psychodrama that drove the man. Yet he confesses that this exploration is never easy—or, for such a mythic figure, even definitively conclusive.