Born August 16: T.E. Lawrence, Wolfgang Tillmans

The conventional story about the private life of the dashing T.E. Lawrence is that he was a lifelong celibate who could not bear to be touched. Yet undisputedly, his greatest love was for Selim Ahmed, called Dahoum (“little dark one”) and the S.A. to whom Seven Pillars of Wisdom [Kindle] is dedicated. In 1911, when Lawrence was at Carchemish doing archeology work, Dahoum was a self-supporting youth of fourteen working as a waterboy. Lawrence taught him English and math, he taught Lawrence Arabic. They traveled together. Lawrence hired him as his assistant. When Dahoum was sixteen and Lawrence twenty-five, they moved in together. Lawrence carved a limestone gargoyle in the Notre Dame style using Dahoum’s full-body likeness, naked. It was all a bit much for the Brits in charge of the archeological dig, but the Arabs working on the site were merely “tolerantly scandalized.” That summer Dahoum traveled to England with Lawrence as he spoke at a series of public lectures to highlight the dire plight of the Arabs. The following summer, 1914, Lawrence made Dahoum custodian at the Carchemish site and departed for Britain in order to join the war effort. Upon his return in 1918 he learned Dahoum had recently contracted typhus and died. Lawrence lived seventeen more years, never as happy or as at home in the world as he had been in Carchemish before the war, and died of injuries from a motorcycle accident when he was forty-six.
      Early biographers indignantly “defend” Lawrence against the “charges” of homosexuality, while more current historians assume their relationship was also a sexual one. Two poems Lawrence wrote about Dahoum may help to decide your opinion. The first is very public, Lawrence’s dedication to S.A. in his most famous book, and the second is private, from his diary about Dahoum sometime after his death.

                To S. A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness...

     A Photograph from Carchemish

I gaze at you now, my darling, my brother
the pistol asleep in your young groin,
your lips pulled back in a mighty grin.
My little Hittite, after you there can be no other.

In your dark eyes, my darling, my brother,
The world was created from the waters of Chaos;
now black waves of tears
crash upon the beaches of my sleep
and drown my dreams forever.

Last week Doubleday published Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East [Kindle] by Scott Anderson, the war and adventure writer who is brother to The New Yorker's war and adventure writer Jon Lee Anderson.

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it with: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Taschen has a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his images. Last fall they added Wolfgang Tillmans. Neue Welt.