Meinertzhagen's Diary Ruse: False Entries on T.E. Lawrence

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 1996 by M.D. Allen

One such contemporary was Richard Meinertzhagen, an intelligence officer in East Africa and the Middle East during the Great War, a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, a committed Zionist, and an amateur ornithologist. Meinertzhagen appears briefly but vividly in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), Lawrence's highly wrought, literarily ambitious account of the Arab Revolt against the Turks and his own part in it. Meinertzhagen, we are told, was

. . . an idealist of the deepest [kind], and so possessed of his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. . . . [He] took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri (qtd. Lockman, p. 2.)

Meinertzhagen's great contribution to the war in Palestine, Lawrence reports, was the ingenious planing of misleading documents amongst the enemy. Lockman justly points out that the Seven Pillars description is of a "master of deceit," and that it is "not a pretty portrait" (p. 3). At the end of his admirable little book, Lockman also points out how acute is Lawrence's insight into his colleague, for the disappointed, or resentful, Meinertzhagen did "harness evil" to his perception of "the chariot of good" by fabricating in the late 1950s a series of diary entries, allegedly contemporary with the incidents they relate, about the far more famous Lawrence, then under attack in the wake of Richard Aldington's venomous Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955).

Leading Lawrence scholars, notably John E. Mack and Jeremy Wilson, have long publicly doubted the reliability of Meinertzhagen's Middle East Diary, 1917-1956 (1959). The latter, indeed, declined to use it as a source for his authorized biography. Lockman's achievement is to present so overwhelming a case, detailed and insightful, based on a thorough knowledge of printed sources and buttressed by original research, that the Lawrence entries in Diary can never be used again, except to illustrate the pathology of forgery.

Meinertzhagen's Diary Ruse consists of five chapters, the longest and the most important being that in which Lockman examines, sentence by sentence, what he calls "The Rafa Entry" (Chapter 2). Allegedly written on 10 December, 1917 in Rafa, Palestine, this page-and-a-half account of a meeting with Lawrence that never happened is usefully printed in toto as an Appendix. Anybody interested in Lawrence will have come across it at least half a dozen times. (Lockman's book is also incidentally a criticism of "the faulty scholarship of those who have extensively quoted from" Meinertzhagen ["Preface," n.p.].) It is, therefore, with a mixture of intellectual pleasure and seemly humility ("Why didn't I see that?") that one proceeds through Lockman's careful demolition. He begins by showing how unlikely it is that Lawrence and Meinertzhagen could have been together in Rafa on that night, and goes on to criticize word choice, style, and verb tenses incompatible with contemporaneous recording ("The sudden change in temporal perspective here, with the past tense verbs 'regarded' and 'resented,' is unnatural, and apparently reveals Meinertzhagen lapsing into his actual 1950s vantage point" [p. 20].) He makes a convincing case for the influence of Aldington on at least four phrases in this one short passage. Lockman's thoroughness in research is impressive. We have all seen the photographs of British officers entering a liberated Jerusalem, but our author supports one of his points by reference to "Enlarged prints contained in the Liddell Hart Papers at King's College, London, and viewed with a magnifying glass . . ." (p. 78, n. 15). Later he quotes from the publicity flyer issued to advertise the 1908 opening of the Paris hotel where Meinertzhagen would stay during the 1919 Peace Conference.

Other chapters deal more briefly with the eleven remaining Lawrence entries, leading to the inescapable conclusion that all were written during "one dark week in the late 1950s" (p. 65).

Lockman had established all this without reference to the actual texts of the diaries. When he was eventually able to examine these, kept in Rhodes House Library, Oxford, he saw the conclusion of his detective work confirmed at a glance. The Rafa entry, for example, was typed on a different sort of paper from the entries preceding and following it, with different typewriter ribbon ink, and there are even oddities in the sequence of page numbers.

Lockman recommends that no further full-scale biographies of Lawrence be undertaken until various nebulous issues in his life "have been more or less firmly settled" (p. 73). This is indeed a counsel of perfection, unlikely to be heeded by writers who think they have something to say. But the Meinertzhagen diary question has now been settled very firmly indeed, and for that J.N. Lockman deserves our thanks.

M.D. Allen is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Center, Fox Valley.