Ahh, no Lawrence icon! No Bowie icon!
Apr. 28th, 2023 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1I need to get on my roommate about those ... or do the work myself for once XD
I'm very bleary-eyed this morning because I only got three hours of sleep last night. The day before, I stayed up late to finish reading Titan: Taking Wing, and when I searched for book #2 (The Red King), I couldn't find it! Turns out when I bought the series, I got two copies of Book #5 and skipped #2 by accident.
Disappointing! But easy fix, just gotta wait for the book to come in. The next day I wrote a little Riker/Picard oneshot, a sort of response fic to Gail Christison's The Daedalus Factor -- which I conceptualized as the first of a 30-day fic challenge, this time for Star Trek slash pairings (since last time I did it, it was 30 Days of Imzadi). I got together a good list of writing prompts and then I selected 40 or so jazz standards to use as titles, which that alone shows that although I call it "Star Trek slash" I'm really thinking "Riker slash" XD
Then that night, the subject of Lawrence's torture/rape at Deraa came up in one of my servers -- really it started with WWI, with trenches, and then segued -- and I got my copy of the unabridged Seven Pillars down to send photos of the torture scene from Lawrence's POV. That reminded me that I never posted Chapter 10 of The Old Man, my post-war Lawrence fic.
So... I did that. Here's the thing about The Old Man. I wrote it in NaNoWriMo for 2021 (I think! maybe 2020) and busted out 60K. I took a long break, and when I returned to the document, I discovered it was actually much shorter than I remembered. And not as polished. I didn't bother to do a word count, but when I posted Chapter 10 last night, I realized I'd hit my last completed chapter already, and it was only 21,000 words!! How could I estimate so wrong? Back in NaNoWriMo, was I counting my outline too? But my outline is extremely short -- shorter than I remember -- and it doesn't even stretch to Lawrence's time in the Tank Corps, which I DISTINCTLY remember outlining! In fact, I remember outlining in detail, a paragraph for every chapter, all the way to the end.
Suddenly a lightbulb clicked. In 2021 I was experimenting with different word processors and drives. I logged into one of them, and there it was, right at the top: The Old Man, 100+ pages vs. the 50 pages I'd been working from!! OOOUGH!! I checked it out and it's so much more robust. Every chapter is at least a little longer. And, like, the old version was ten chapters that end with Lawrence's enlistment in the RAF, but the new version is like, 14 chapters that end with Lawrence's enlistment, and a lot more afterward, plus the full outline! So not only is each individual chapter more robust, but there are entire EXTRA chapters that aren't in the draft I've been posting to AO3.
This was very exciting (also briefly depressing, because I had just reread the outline and was really looking forward to writing the next scenes ... only to discover that past!me beat me to it).
So, what is The Old Man?
If you're not familiar with T.E. Lawrence, he was a British officer who led the Arab Revolt during WWI, where he was raped and tortured by Turkish soldiers in Deraa, became disillusioned when he learned that France and England never intended for Arabia to be "free", and in time wrote the beautiful memoir "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which became the Peter O'Toole/Omar Sharif film "Lawrence of Arabia."
There are a tons of nonfiction books about Lawrence out there, and a few fictional renditions as well -- "Ross", by Terence Rattigan, covers the time after WWI when a trauma-riddled Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name and was quickly discovered and kicked out. Lawrence's memoir "The Mint" also covers this period. There's a poetry collection I've read, and the same writer who did the Holmes/Watson WWI thrillers wrote a fictionalized Lawrence thriller covering his pre-war years as an archaeologist. But I've never seen a (fictional) book that covers his post-war relationship with John Bruce.
Who's John Bruce?
John Bruce was a teenage "bodyguard" who enlisted in the Tank Corps with Lawrence in the 20s. I'm going off memory here, so forgive me if I get some details wrong, but to my knowledge, Bruce was frankly unheard-of -- not even a footnote in Lawrence's life -- until 1969 when he spilled the beans to Australian journalist Philip Knightley. Bruce claimed that he and Lawrence had engaged in numerous reconstructions of Lawrence's torture/rape at Deraa -- that he had frequently whipped Lawrence, sometimes to the point of sexual satisfaction, and then had written detailed reports for someone called "the old man". Bruce seemed to genuinely believe that Lawrence had an older relative, someone he was in debt to, who ordered Lawrence to go through these humiliating rituals and demanded after-action reports from Bruce.
There was no external corroboration of Bruce's claims. IIRC Knightley had a hard time even proving Bruce and Lawrence knew each other. And Bruce was up-front/unapologetic about the fact that he'd stayed silent for decades and was only coming forward now, after Lawrence's death and after the movie, to get money.
So I believe this revelation was largely ignored until 1976 when John Mack published his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence, "A Prince of Our Disorder". Mack had discovered letters from "the old man" which matched Lawrence's handwriting and had been in Lawrence's cottage at the time of his death. He also spoke to Lawrence's surviving brother A.W., who matched Lawrence's reserved personality and idolized his brother, but confirmed that the allegations were true, and that he had known of it while Lawrence was alive.
All of this was very interesting to me, ESPECIALLY because it encapsulates quite nicely the controversy surrounding Lawrence's rape. There are camps of historians and enthusiasts who believe Lawrence was simply a very kinky, somewhat depraved gay man who made the whole thing up as part of an erotic fantasy. For them, Lawrence's post-war years and his interactions with Bruce are evidence of this. For the other camp, Lawrence was an asexual traumatized veteran with a masochistic streak, and his post-war years and interactions with Bruce are simply evidence of how deeply the trauma impacted him.
I'm in the latter camp -- to me, Lawrence's post-war behavior reads as fairly typical PTSD, hitting that intersection of war veteran and (male) rape victim. He rather clearly DID have a kink for masochism, which is a complicating factor that really intrigues me as a writer. I wanted to write a fictionalized version of events: his first meeting with John Bruce, his enlistment first into the RAF and later into the Tank Corps, his slow introduction of the fictitious "old man", the whippings, the self-destructive behavior, nightmares, homelessness, etc. The biggest fictionalization here is Bruce's personality. In reality, Bruce seems like a remarkably obtuse and not particularly likable young man; since he's not very present in the historical record I felt okay remodeling him into someone more sympathetic -- and more empathetic/protective of Lawrence.
Anyway!
I stayed up late reviewing/working on this story and editing the published version on AO3. Then I closed my laptop and ATTEMPTED to go to bed. But instead I picked up "Bowie on Bowie", a collection of ~30 interviews with David Bowie from the start of his career to the end, and I wound up reading that for another two hours! I didn't go to bed until 4 a.m. so I got about 2-3 hours of sleep before work this morning.
My roommate was awake too and he interrupted occasionally to tell me cool Civil War stories he read about at work, or to play Cobra Kai fanvids which were EXCELLENT and I will make a separate post to talk about them!
I'm very bleary-eyed this morning because I only got three hours of sleep last night. The day before, I stayed up late to finish reading Titan: Taking Wing, and when I searched for book #2 (The Red King), I couldn't find it! Turns out when I bought the series, I got two copies of Book #5 and skipped #2 by accident.
Disappointing! But easy fix, just gotta wait for the book to come in. The next day I wrote a little Riker/Picard oneshot, a sort of response fic to Gail Christison's The Daedalus Factor -- which I conceptualized as the first of a 30-day fic challenge, this time for Star Trek slash pairings (since last time I did it, it was 30 Days of Imzadi). I got together a good list of writing prompts and then I selected 40 or so jazz standards to use as titles, which that alone shows that although I call it "Star Trek slash" I'm really thinking "Riker slash" XD
Then that night, the subject of Lawrence's torture/rape at Deraa came up in one of my servers -- really it started with WWI, with trenches, and then segued -- and I got my copy of the unabridged Seven Pillars down to send photos of the torture scene from Lawrence's POV. That reminded me that I never posted Chapter 10 of The Old Man, my post-war Lawrence fic.
So... I did that. Here's the thing about The Old Man. I wrote it in NaNoWriMo for 2021 (I think! maybe 2020) and busted out 60K. I took a long break, and when I returned to the document, I discovered it was actually much shorter than I remembered. And not as polished. I didn't bother to do a word count, but when I posted Chapter 10 last night, I realized I'd hit my last completed chapter already, and it was only 21,000 words!! How could I estimate so wrong? Back in NaNoWriMo, was I counting my outline too? But my outline is extremely short -- shorter than I remember -- and it doesn't even stretch to Lawrence's time in the Tank Corps, which I DISTINCTLY remember outlining! In fact, I remember outlining in detail, a paragraph for every chapter, all the way to the end.
Suddenly a lightbulb clicked. In 2021 I was experimenting with different word processors and drives. I logged into one of them, and there it was, right at the top: The Old Man, 100+ pages vs. the 50 pages I'd been working from!! OOOUGH!! I checked it out and it's so much more robust. Every chapter is at least a little longer. And, like, the old version was ten chapters that end with Lawrence's enlistment in the RAF, but the new version is like, 14 chapters that end with Lawrence's enlistment, and a lot more afterward, plus the full outline! So not only is each individual chapter more robust, but there are entire EXTRA chapters that aren't in the draft I've been posting to AO3.
This was very exciting (also briefly depressing, because I had just reread the outline and was really looking forward to writing the next scenes ... only to discover that past!me beat me to it).
So, what is The Old Man?
If you're not familiar with T.E. Lawrence, he was a British officer who led the Arab Revolt during WWI, where he was raped and tortured by Turkish soldiers in Deraa, became disillusioned when he learned that France and England never intended for Arabia to be "free", and in time wrote the beautiful memoir "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which became the Peter O'Toole/Omar Sharif film "Lawrence of Arabia."
There are a tons of nonfiction books about Lawrence out there, and a few fictional renditions as well -- "Ross", by Terence Rattigan, covers the time after WWI when a trauma-riddled Lawrence enlisted in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name and was quickly discovered and kicked out. Lawrence's memoir "The Mint" also covers this period. There's a poetry collection I've read, and the same writer who did the Holmes/Watson WWI thrillers wrote a fictionalized Lawrence thriller covering his pre-war years as an archaeologist. But I've never seen a (fictional) book that covers his post-war relationship with John Bruce.
Who's John Bruce?
John Bruce was a teenage "bodyguard" who enlisted in the Tank Corps with Lawrence in the 20s. I'm going off memory here, so forgive me if I get some details wrong, but to my knowledge, Bruce was frankly unheard-of -- not even a footnote in Lawrence's life -- until 1969 when he spilled the beans to Australian journalist Philip Knightley. Bruce claimed that he and Lawrence had engaged in numerous reconstructions of Lawrence's torture/rape at Deraa -- that he had frequently whipped Lawrence, sometimes to the point of sexual satisfaction, and then had written detailed reports for someone called "the old man". Bruce seemed to genuinely believe that Lawrence had an older relative, someone he was in debt to, who ordered Lawrence to go through these humiliating rituals and demanded after-action reports from Bruce.
There was no external corroboration of Bruce's claims. IIRC Knightley had a hard time even proving Bruce and Lawrence knew each other. And Bruce was up-front/unapologetic about the fact that he'd stayed silent for decades and was only coming forward now, after Lawrence's death and after the movie, to get money.
So I believe this revelation was largely ignored until 1976 when John Mack published his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence, "A Prince of Our Disorder". Mack had discovered letters from "the old man" which matched Lawrence's handwriting and had been in Lawrence's cottage at the time of his death. He also spoke to Lawrence's surviving brother A.W., who matched Lawrence's reserved personality and idolized his brother, but confirmed that the allegations were true, and that he had known of it while Lawrence was alive.
All of this was very interesting to me, ESPECIALLY because it encapsulates quite nicely the controversy surrounding Lawrence's rape. There are camps of historians and enthusiasts who believe Lawrence was simply a very kinky, somewhat depraved gay man who made the whole thing up as part of an erotic fantasy. For them, Lawrence's post-war years and his interactions with Bruce are evidence of this. For the other camp, Lawrence was an asexual traumatized veteran with a masochistic streak, and his post-war years and interactions with Bruce are simply evidence of how deeply the trauma impacted him.
I'm in the latter camp -- to me, Lawrence's post-war behavior reads as fairly typical PTSD, hitting that intersection of war veteran and (male) rape victim. He rather clearly DID have a kink for masochism, which is a complicating factor that really intrigues me as a writer. I wanted to write a fictionalized version of events: his first meeting with John Bruce, his enlistment first into the RAF and later into the Tank Corps, his slow introduction of the fictitious "old man", the whippings, the self-destructive behavior, nightmares, homelessness, etc. The biggest fictionalization here is Bruce's personality. In reality, Bruce seems like a remarkably obtuse and not particularly likable young man; since he's not very present in the historical record I felt okay remodeling him into someone more sympathetic -- and more empathetic/protective of Lawrence.
Anyway!
I stayed up late reviewing/working on this story and editing the published version on AO3. Then I closed my laptop and ATTEMPTED to go to bed. But instead I picked up "Bowie on Bowie", a collection of ~30 interviews with David Bowie from the start of his career to the end, and I wound up reading that for another two hours! I didn't go to bed until 4 a.m. so I got about 2-3 hours of sleep before work this morning.
My roommate was awake too and he interrupted occasionally to tell me cool Civil War stories he read about at work, or to play Cobra Kai fanvids which were EXCELLENT and I will make a separate post to talk about them!
