Carchemish: Woolley and Lawrence
Posted by JA, an American subscriber
My interest in Lawrence derives from his pre-war background in archaeology, and particularly in his relationship with C. Leonard Woolley. As an archaeologist, I was familiar with Woolley’s work long before I learned that Lawrence served as his assistant for three seasons (1912-1914) at Carchemish, the ancient capitol of the Hittites on the Euphrates in Syria.
Mack, in his biography of Lawrence, asserts that the two “were not personally close, and although they served together in Cairo during the war seem not to have corresponded thereafter.” I put the question to those who have had the great fortune of exploring Lawrence’s correspondence at the Bodleian: Is Mack’s implication of a near-total absence of correspondence correct? I’d be curious to know what letters between them may exist in unpublished collections. I’ve found no letters between the two men in Lawrence’s published correspondence, and in the biographies, only one clear reference: in 1921 Lawrence provided Woolley with slides taken at Carchemish, according to Woolley’s biographer, H.V.F. Winstone.
Personally close or not, Woolley and Lawrence made a fabulous team at Carchemish. The story of their collaboration there is one of great adventure. Woolley tells the tale well in two popularized accounts Dead Towns and Living Men (1920) and Spadework in Archaeology (1953). (He perhaps tells it too well — Lawrence would grumble that Woolley had made a “circus” out of memories TEL cherished).
Although eight years younger than Woolley and a far less experienced excavator, Lawrence closed the gap with his sheer exuberance, his skill as a photographer and draftsman, his knowledge of Arabic and local cultures, his fearlessness under pressure, and most importantly his amazing ability to manage a rough-and-tumble workforce of up to 200 gun-toting Arabs and Kurds.
Perhaps I shouldn’t question Mack — I’m not, after all, a psychologist. But I am an archaeologist. I know from experience that an archaeological dig, especially one in a remote area, fosters a unique kind of “closeness” among team members. The participants, through working and living together elbow to elbow for weeks and months, become all too familiar with one another’s strengths and weaknesses. A dig owes its success not only to the individual capabilities of team members, but also to each’s ability to live with their fellows’ faults.
The work at Carchemish was a success. There is little evidence of animosity between them: only the kind of work-a-day quibbles one would expect. Lawrence in letters home poked mild fun at Woolley. Among Woolley’s pet peeves, recorded in his contribution to TEL By His Friends, were Lawrence’s occasional lapses in notetaking. Jeremy Wilson points out (in his biography of Lawrence) that Woolley’s essay contains an undercurrent of antipathy toward Lawrence that sounds for the all the world to me like the surfacing of long-festering field camp grudges.
After the war, Woolley wrote to Kenyon at the British Museum, rejecting Lawrence’s request to return with him to Carchemish. Quite politely, he let it be known that Lawrence’s well-known views re the French in Syria would create political complications for the dig. Winstone also suggests (on tenuous evidence) that Woolley was offended by TEL’s role in the surrender at Kut. These postwar events aside, it seems to me that Woolley, through close association with TEL at Carchemish, probably reached the conclusion that his young assistant lacked the single-mindedness of purpose to become a serious scholar. Even at Carchemish, the two men were already following separate paths to different destinies. The war increased the distance between them, and for whatever reason, neither appears to have ever attempted to close the gap.
Incidentally, Woolley’s war-time adventures, although hardly the makings for a David Lean film, were not altogether unexciting. Assigned to coastline surveillance and contraband interception in the eastern Mediterranean, he seems to have pictured himself as something of a brigand, cruising around in a commandeered yacht. Taken prisoner after the yacht was sunk by a mine, Woolley spent the duration of the war in Turkish POW camps, honing his lecturing skills to “captive” audiences.
- -
Further comment by JA:
Thomas, TEL, and “vulgar” books
Lowell Thomas was not the only author to raise Lawrence’s hackles.
Compare: TEL to Charlotte Shaw: “So glad you felt the vulgarity of Lowell Thomas’ book. It’s horrible: reeks of it… and no criticism I’ve seen yet refers to it.”
With: TEL to Robert Graves, 6/28/27
“…very untruthful, which is not a deadly sin: but a very vulgar book, too. Carchemish was a miracle, and he turns it into a play” (quoted in Jeremy Wilson’s biography of TEL, p. 130).
This was Lawrence’s reaction to Dead Towns and Living Men, by C. Leonard Woolley, published in 1920 (Oxford University Press). Obviously, TEL did not reserve the word “vulgar” for Americans, because Woolley was a British archaeologist — son of an Anglican minister, Oxford-educated. By 1927, Woolley was quite famous for his discoveries at Ur in southern Mesopotamia. In 1920, when he published Dead Towns, he was a rising star in archaeological circles. From 1912-1914, he worked (with TEL as an assistant) excavating the site of Carchemish, on the Euphrates River, very near the present Turkey/Syria border. Written for a popular audience, Dead Towns is a lively account of Woolley’s adventures as an archaeologist, with over half the book set in northern Syria, recounting adventures many of which he shared with Lawrence.
When Woolley published Dead Towns, Lawrence was in the midst of writing Seven Pillars. When Jeremy Wilson wrote (to this list, 2/10/98) about Lawrence’s reaction to Thomas’ With Lawrence in Arabia, he could just as easily have been describing Lawrence’s probable reaction to Dead Towns
“… it is scarcely surprising that Lawrence, who was at the time sweating blood over his ‘literary’ account of the Arab Revolt, should find With Lawrence in Arabia appallingly vulgar. In the original sense of the word (still used in French) Thomas’s book is just that: a popularisation.”
Woolley’s book was every bit a popularization of his adventures with TEL at Carchemish. Some parts, indeed, read like fairly bad pulp fiction. For example, writing of what transpired when the provincial government in Biridjik (Turkey) seized the documents authorizing his dig at Carchemish, Woolley wrote:
“Leveling a revolver at the Cadi [judge], I said, “You will not leave the room alive…unless I get those papers. The judge dropped back into his seat like a rabbit… Lawrence,” I said, “bolt into the next room and hold up the Kammaikam [governor]: I bet the old brute’s got the papers himself.”
Lawrence darted through the door: the public and the assessors and the Clerk of the Court jammed in the doorway for an instant and then melted away…. I lowered my weapon… The judge looked intensely relieved…. Lawrence reappeared. “I’ve got the papers,” he announced, “the blighter had them all in his own desk!”
Passages like this one, with all their pistol-waving, jingoistic bluster, must have grated on Lawrence. For one thing, Lawrence was (or had been, or would be) struggling with the powerful scene in which he places a pistol to the head of a friend to end his suffering. To have his pre-war friend and colleague Woolley now dashing off tales about pulling revolvers on this or that recalcitrant Ottoman must have hurt and offended him.
Lawrence felt himself the victim of Thomas’ book, but In the case of Dead Towns, however, the victim was not Lawrence himself but rather his memories of Carchemish. As his letter to Graves implies, TEL regarded Carchemish as a golden age, the happiest time in his life. Therein lay Woolley’s transgression.
TEL and Woolley enjoyed a long and apparently happy collaboration at Carchemish. Considering the length of time they worked together, and their differences, they got along quite well. But their collaboration only lasted as long as their tenure together in northern Syria. They did not remain life long friends. Like Thomas and TEL, TEL and Woolley had entirely different concepts of life; their lives took entirely different directions. They shared a grand and glorious experience at Carchemish, but the experience meant something entirely different to both men. In later years, they “used” the experience in completely different ways. For Woolley, Carchemish was a source of whopping good stories (and he reaped scientific acclaim for the work as well); for Lawrence, it was his Camelot, a dream-time shattered forever by war.
Those of you interested in the Thomas-Lawrence relationship (especially re: friendship, loyalty) might find some interesting parallels in the Woolley-Lawrence relationship. I’m not familiar enough with the former to try drawing those parallels myself.
- -
Comment by St. John Armitage:
JA’s posting raises interesting points, not least contemporary use of “vulgar” a word used less to-day than in the first half of the century now that the vulgar is accepted as normal. It is quite likely that Lawrence applied it to Woolley’s book because he felt Woolley’s account vulgarised day-to-day events at the expense of their archaeological work; in applying it to Lowell Thomas, he was suggesting an uncultured person rather than a rude one. After all, Graves wrote that Lawrence could look “even vulgar”.
I find no parallel between the professional association – and early friendship – of Lawrence and Woolley with the Thomas-Lawrence relationship in which each seems to have used the other to a different degree for his own ends. As for the former, while their work together at Carchemish barely covered eleven months of the three and a half years’ span of the dig, it seems to have been fairly reported by Lawrence at the time and uncontradicted by Woolley over twenty years later. It suggests an element of personal friendship which is less-marked – if not absent from – the Thomas-Lawrence relationship.
JA might have read too much into Jeremy Wilson’s references to Woolley and Lawrence. In doing so his interpretation of Woolley’s “transgression” inflates the latter’s account, in Dead Towns and Living Men, of his confrontation with the Turkish governor as much as Woolley appears to inflate the situation described by Lawrence in his letters to Leeds:
“Passages like this one, with all their pistol-waving, jingoistic bluster, must have grated on Lawrence. . . . To have his pre-war friend and colleague Woolley now dashing off tales about pulling revolvers on this or that recalcitrant Ottoman must have hurt and offended him.”
Why? Lawrence himself had written:
“O Leeds we are here and enjoying ourselves vastly. Woolley is a most excellent person. You should have seen him . . . regretting to the governor . . .that he was forced to shoot all soldiers who tried to interrupt our work . . . You should have seen Woolley . . . charged down on them [the police], drawing his revolver . . . he pulled his pistol and shot at it [a pigeon] . . . until it died of disgust . . .”
and to his mother:
“pleasant experience . . . breaking down the door of the government antika store . . .”
JA’s views of Woolley’s book fails to observe the balance displayed in the curate’s reply to the bishop about his bad breakfast egg “Oh no My Lord! it is good in parts”. So with Dead Towns; while Woolley does not match Hogarth’s The Wandering Scholar for powers of description of his travels, where is there a more evocative description of Carchemish than Woolley’s? Set against Campbell Thompson’s account and Lawrence’s letters, Woolley’s description of events would be better termed dramatisation than bad pulp fiction.
- -
Posted by AWM, an American subscriber
I still think JA has a good point or two about the Woolley/Lawrence relationship.
St. John Armitage says JA may have read too much into Jeremy Wilson’s account of the Woolley/Lawrence relationship. Yet, by reading Jeremy Wilson’s account, it would be difficult not to conclude that there was some friction between Woolley and Lawrence.
Wilson devotes eight paragraphs describing the negative parts of Woolley’s essay about Lawrence in TEL by His Friends, and explaining possible reasons for Woolley’s attitudes. Wilson writes, “Woolley gave an account of the carvings which is incorrect, and salacious in its insinuation.” Also, “Woolley’s essay…has a slightly hostile ring throughout…”
There are more comments in this vein. Wilson ends the section on Woolley and Lawrence with one paragraph (only!) about how the two did indeed get along just fine. Perhaps he does have plenty of evidence to prove that point but chose not to include it in his book. But with one paragraph claiming “they were friends,” after eight paragraphs of “Woolley made horrible insinuations about Lawrence,” one can’t help but read into the references that the Lawrence /Woolley relationship was strained.
Also, I still think JA is right when he wrote that Woolley’s Carchemish passages must have grated on Lawrence. Mr. Armitage quotes to the contrary from Lawrence’s Carchemish letters. But the “Lawrence of Carchemish” who wrote those boyish, playful letters was a very different person to the post-war Lawrence of 1920, when Woolley wrote his book. Woolley’s dramatization seemed more like a melodramatization to me, and I don’t think it would have appealed to Lawrence’s sober state of mind (or his subtle sense of humor).
And surely Lawrence must have been a little suspicious that Woolley chose to write his book so soon after Lowell Thomas’ success with his show?
- -
Comment by Jeremy Wilson:
I stand by what I wrote. I don’t think that Woolley’s later achievements as a field archaeologist should unduly colour consideration of his relationship with Lawrence. There were clearly tensions between the two, not all of which I saw reason to speculate upon in the biography. This said, they made a good partnership and would, I am sure, have carried on at Carchemish together for more seasons, had that been possible.
–
Comment by St. John Armitage:
I agree with AM that by reading Jeremy Wilson’s account it would be difficult not to conclude that there was some friction between Woolley and Lawrence. Indeed, that conclusion alone proves my point. I was not questioning Jeremy Wilson’s criticism but drawing attention to JA’s somewhat one-sided approach to the Lawrence-Woolley relationship.
But AM has gone further than JA in citing the quantity of Jeremy Wilson’s interpretation of Woolley’s contribution to TEL by his Friends as evidence disproving the quality of a single paragraph. The latter summarises – emphasises even – the personal relationship at Carchemish between Lawrence and Woolley within which any ill-feeling was contained. By merely focusing on his criticism of the Woolley essay, she appears to ignore Woolley’s own evidence e.g.:
“gladly fell in with his suggestion that I should keep Lawrence”. [and nowhere did Woolley voice regret at that decision}
"he did it in his own way"
"if I groused at all he would grin"
"the charge was quite unfounded " [rumours about the Dahoum - Lawrence relatioship]
“I had not the insight to see then the genius that was in him . . . unusually gifted and remarkably lovable”
So, as Jeremy Wilson concluded, “they worked alongside one another very happily . . . there is no note of personal hostility “.
Lawrence letters to Leeds and the latter’s comments are important to any study of the Lawrence-Woolley relationship. The two men complemented each other and their companionship is attested by the visitors’ observations which, as well as their own words, provide most evidence of their relationship albeit AM questions that evidence because Wilson “chose not to include” it in his “single paragraph”. However, the main cause of dissent between them, over distribution of the Carchemish artefacts, was as the latter says later “smoothed over by Hogarth”. Views expressed in (much) later years when there was no longer contact between them (especially those of Woolley which only became public after Lawrence’s death) only qualify, do not constitute, a relationship.
Woolley’s argument against Lawrence returning to Carchemish after the war has been presented by some as a desire not to have him along. But, against that has to be set the facts that Woolley had asked if Lawrence would be returning to his first love and, secondly but perhaps more importantly, he clearly saw that the extent of Lawrence’s involvement in Arabian afffairs as an adversary of the French put his return to Carchemish out of the question. By the time Woolley had moved on to Ur, it was clear that Lawrence had put archaeology behind him. However, while there is no evidence that Lawrence ever put his mentor, Hogarth, or Woolley, his field director and colleague, to the test of helping him return to that profession, after the former’s death he wrote to Charlotte Shaw “but I always thought that if I ever went back to living I’d be able to link up with him again.”
One fact that is clear is that the first reference to differences between the two (apart from the Carchemish artefacts) arises in Lawrence to Graves about Woolley’s book. But less than a third of the latter’s narrative includes references to Lawrence (all of which are Lawrence of Carchemish not Arabia) and there is no record of Lawrence taking exception to it until 1927. I see his criticism then as more of a caution to Graves against drawing on Woolley as a primary source for his biography. Later in the same year, prompted by Hogarth’s death, he expressed his concern at the idea that Woolley might succeed the latter as Keeper of the the Ashmolean. I do not think that concern stemmed either from the book or their time at Carchemish, but from tales of the Ur dig which might have had undue influence on Lawrence – but that requires deeper research on Woolley and that dig.
I am rather astonished by AM’s depreciation of the clarity and content of Lawrence’s Carchemish letters as “boyish, playful”, even more so by her implication that the post-war Lawrence would have shed his pre-war views of (or sense of humour about) his life and his companions there which is not borne out by his post-war letters.
AM’s final premise is unsound – if not false. I can find no contemporary references linking the Lawrence of Dead Towns and Living Men with Thomas’s Lawrence of Arabia, nor grounds for thinking that Thomas’s show prompted Woolley to write his book. Although it was not published until 1920, Woolley completed that collection of essays while a prisoner of war. He was fully occupied in Syria from mid-1919 until mid-1920 so would have escaped the force of the Thomas publicity, of which he could hardly have been aware before September 1919. It is highly unlikely that negotiations with the OUP and subsequent requirements all followed the Thomas promotion. The suggestion that Lawrence “must have been suspicious” of Woolley’s motives is equally flawed not least because his 1927 references to the book mention neither suspicion or motives. But the suggestion also ignores the fact that, in addition to his political duties, Woolley was engaged in resuming his archaeological career and publication of a popular book was a natural step along that road most likely put in hand before he left England (as, for different reason, was the account of his prisoner of war experiences).
–
Comment by JA, USA:
What’s missing in our discussion of the Woolley-Lawrence relationship is more of Woolley’s side of the story. Woolley’s correspondence, to my knowledge, has never been published. His “home letters” from Carchemish would be very enlightening – do such letters exist? Also, Woolley revised and expanded Dead Towns and Living Men twice after its first publication in 1920: once in 1931, again in 1951(or 2). I’ve only access to the 1950s edition: a comparison of the three, not to mention an examination of manuscripts and drafts with Woolley’s editing — would probably provide some clues about Woolley’s side of the matter. But do such materials exist?