A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence
by John E. Mack
Summary
John E. Mack's biography follows T. E. Lawrence from his 1888 birth in Tremadog, Wales, the illegitimate son of an Anglo Irish baronet and his children's former governess, who lived together as a couple under the assumed name Lawrence, through a boyhood spent moving among several English towns before the family settled in Oxford. It follows Lawrence's early passion for medieval history into archaeological work at Carchemish in Syria beginning in 1910, where he trained under D. G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley excavating a Hittite site, and into the First World War, when his knowledge of the region carried him into British military intelligence in Cairo and, from late 1916, into his role as liaison to Prince Faisal during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule.
Mack, a psychiatrist by training, gives close attention to the psychological dimension of Lawrence's wartime experience, above all the November 1917 episode at Deraa, when Lawrence, reconnoitering in disguise, was captured, beaten, and, by his own account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, sexually assaulted by Ottoman forces, an episode Mack treats as a genuine trauma with lasting consequences rather than as the literary invention some contemporaries suspected it of being. The book follows Lawrence's central role in the capture of Aqaba in 1917 and the Arab advance toward Damascus, and the collapse of his hopes for Arab independence when French forces defeated Faisal's government in 1920, a defeat Mack presents as a wound to Lawrence's own sense of purpose nearly as deep as Deraa had been to his body. It follows him afterward into the deliberate self erasure of his postwar years, enlisting in the Royal Air Force under a false name in 1922, then under another after his first identity was exposed, seeking in the ranks an ordinary anonymity his own wartime fame had made impossible to have honestly. It closes with his death in a motorcycle accident near his cottage in Dorset in May 1935, six days after swerving to avoid two boys on bicycles, at forty six, an ending Mack treats as consistent with a man who had spent his last fifteen years trying, without succeeding, to disappear.
Mack spent much of his career on how a person's own view of the world shapes their relationships, and builds the biography around the idea that Lawrence's own shifting sense of his place in the world, rather than any single trauma, is what a serious life of him has to explain.
Historical Context & Significance
Little, Brown published A Prince of Our Disorder in 1976, and it won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist rather than a historian by training, brought an explicitly psychoanalytic approach to a subject who had already been the focus of decades of often adulatory popular writing, including the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, and his book helped establish a more clinically grounded, less mythologized reading of Lawrence's psychology that later biographers have continued to engage with.
Mack's own later career took an unexpected turn when he became a controversial researcher into reported alien abduction experiences, work that drew serious criticism from within psychiatry, but A Prince of Our Disorder itself remained respected among Lawrence scholars, credited with treating its subject's most disputed and most sensitive experience, the assault at Deraa, with more analytical seriousness than most biographers before Mack had been willing to bring to it.