[epow]

When I read "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," I was mildly repulsed by some of Lawrence's observations

I have read that Lawrence was sodomized by his guards while he was a prisoner of the Moslem Turks during WWI. Some of his friends in England believed the psychological damage caused by that experience eventually led him to despise himself, and was at least part of the reason for his self-destructive behaviour after the war.

I read this in a British magazine article quite a few years ago, and I don't know how true it is. But some of his actions later in his life do seem to suggest a suicidal urge.

[patriciaruth]

A bit of trivia about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The first draft was stolen along with his briefcase in a Parisian train station, and Lawrence had to rewrite the whole book as there was no other copy.
The line in the movie Lawrence of Arabia is possibly more the essense of the result of the torture he endured (when he refused to be compliant with the Turkish officer's homosexual advances, they didn't know who he was) than the actual form the torture took. "I would have told them everything. I tried to."
Lawrence came to understand he was not some perfect child of destiny but a mortal man and subject to nonheroic acts, too. It may have been this realization that took him down from the inflated idea of himself that gave his life meaning, despite his illegitimate birth. Then add the British perfidy that undermined all the idealistic advances he'd made with the Arabs and I think that is what made him cynical and fatalistic in his last years.