Editing T. E. Lawrence (section)

==Aldington controversy==
In 1955 [[Richard Aldington]] published ''Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry'', a sustained attack on Lawrence's character, writing, accomplishments, and truthfulness. Aldington alleged that Lawrence lied and exaggerated continuously ("''Seven Pillars of Wisdom'' is rather a work of quasi-fiction than history",{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=13}} "It was seldom that he reported any fact or episode involving himself without embellishing them and indeed in some cases entirely inventing them."),{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=27}} that he promoted a misguided policy in the Middle East, that his strategy of containing but not capturing Medina was incorrect, and that ''Seven Pillars of Wisdom'' was a bad book with few redeeming features.{{sfn|Orlans|2002|p=2}}

Aldington argued that the French colonial administration of Syria (resisted by Lawrence) had benefited that country{{sfn|Aldington|1955|pp=266–267}} and that Arabia's peoples were "far enough advanced for some government though not for complete self-government."{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=253}} He was also a Francophile, railing against Lawrence's "Francophobia, a hatred and an envy so irrational, so irresponsible and so unscrupulous that it is fair to say his attitude towards Syria was determined more by hatred of France than by devotion to the 'Arabs' – a convenient propaganda word which grouped many disharmonious and even mutually hostile tribes and peoples."{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=134}}

Aldington wrote that Lawrence embellished many stories and invented others, and in particular that his claims involving numbers were usually inflated – for example claims of having read 50,000&nbsp;books in the Oxford Union library,{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=47}} of having blown up 79&nbsp;bridges,{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=181}} of having had a price of £50,000 on his head,{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=221}} and of having suffered 60&nbsp;or more injuries.{{sfn|Aldington|1955|p=227, 376}}

Prior to the publication of Aldington's book, its contents became known in London's literary community. A group Aldington and some subsequent authors referred to as "The Lawrence Bureau",{{sfn|Aldington|1955|pp=25–26}} led by [[B. H. Liddell Hart]],{{sfn|Crawford|1998|p=66}} tried energetically, starting in 1954, to have the book suppressed.<ref>{{cite news |title=T.E. Lawrence issue rallies his friends |date=February 15, 1954 |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/02/15/84610820.html?pageNumber=21 |access-date=21 July 2020}}</ref> When that effort failed, Hart prepared and distributed hundreds of copies of ''Aldington's 'Lawrence': His Charges – and Treatment of the Evidence'', a 7-page single-spaced document.{{sfn|Crawford|1998|p=119}} This worked: Aldington's book received many extremely negative and even abusive reviews, with strong evidence that some reviewers had read Liddell's rebuttal but not Aldington's book.{{sfn|Crawford|1998|pp=xii, 120}}

Notwithstanding the furore caused by Aldington's assault on the Lawrence legend, many of Aldington's specific claims against Lawrence have been accepted by subsequent biographers. In ''Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale'', Fred D. Crawford writes "Much that shocked in 1955 is now standard knowledge – that TEL was illegitimate, that this profoundly troubled him, that he frequently resented his mother's dominance, that such reminiscences as ''T.E. Lawrence by His Friends'' are not reliable, that TEL's leg-pulling and other adolescent traits could be offensive, that TEL took liberties with the truth in his official reports and ''Seven Pillars'', that the significance of his exploits during the Arab Revolt was more political than military, that he contributed to his own myth, that when he vetted the books by Graves and Liddell Hart he let remain much that he knew was untrue, and that his feelings about publicity were ambiguous."{{sfn|Crawford|1998|p=174}}

This has not prevented most post-Aldington biographers (including Fred D. Crawford, who studied Aldington's claims intensely){{sfn|Crawford|1998|pp=ix–xi}} from expressing strong admiration for Lawrence's military, political, and writing achievements.{{sfn|Wilson|1989|pp=8–9}}{{sfn|Mack|1976|p=459}} Despite the generally deprecatory tenor of his "biographical inquiry", Aldington himself was not without words of praise for Lawrence; in outlining his goal of "clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge", he says that his doing so is "not to deny that Lawrence was a man of peculiar abilities", and calls him an "extraordinary man".<ref>Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Aldington, Pelican Biographies, 1971, pp. 25-29</ref>