"Nothing Is Written": How Lawrence of Arabia Saved My Irish Soul, Part III
“The Irish don’t know what they want in life, but they’ll fight to the death to get it.” Anonymous
Only as I passed my 40th year, following a pilgrimage to my ancestral Irish village, did I begin to grasp that elements of the myth of T.E. Lawrence lay deeply buried in my own inter-generational unconscious. Over many years of psychological and archival digging – Lawrence himself started his career as an archaeologist -- I would slowly disinter and piece together the fragments of my own “intimate epic” that came to fruition with my 2010 memoir, What Disturbs Our Blood.
Cracking my family silence, I discovered that my grandfather, Dr. Gerry FitzGerald, was, like Lawrence, born of Irish Protestant blood. A World War I medical officer commanding a British Fifth Army mobile pathology lab on the Western Front, he went on to achieve stunning international success in public health in the 1920s and ‘30s. The visionary founder of the Connaught Laboratories, his innovative methods controlled the gruesome disease of diphtheria and made insulin cheaply available to the masses. A dynamo who travelled the world for the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations, he brought his paragon of preventive medicine, years ahead of its time, to the international community, saving untold millions of lives. Incredibly, this magnificent story was withheld from me as my own father, also a doctor, never spoke of his father.
Like Lawrence, my young grandfather seized an Aqaba-like opportunity to create a unique, self-sustaining public service laboratory and academy, a precursor of Canada’s universal health care system, that distributed vaccines free to the poor. Like the British generals who in 1917 armed the 29 year old Lawrence with money and guns, in 1914 a Toronto philanthropist armed my 31 year old grandfather with money, land, and labs in an extraordinary act of faith that would pay off on a global scale. Both men were Victorian-born Idealists and pragmatists who denied their own innate feminine sensitivity in the service of a delusional invulnerability. Both were brilliant speed demons forever outracing themselves, Icarus figures reaching sky high and then crashing to earth. Initially sustained by the clouds of their own mystiques, they remained blind to the dark, self-destructive side of their altruistic drivenness – classical Greek hubris meets “the poor devil caught in the whirlwind.”
At the peak of his success, my grandfather cracked up and was committed to a private American asylum. Tortured by a mysterious guilt, he wrote in his letters home that he had “committed the unpardonable sin, and the penalty is death.” Once an eminent figure, he wanted to withdraw anonymously into a monastery, his own version of Cloud’s Hill, in an act of penance. No good deed goes unpunished. [1]
His suicide in 1940 at age 57 was covered up; only by a stroke of luck did I eventually find, in 1995, the last person alive who knew the truth: Gerry had severed his femoral artery with a dinner knife while under suicide watch. Now I understood why I felt such an eerie shiver whenever I re-watched the massacre scene of the crazed Lawrence staring at his bloody knife, a scene that felt part dream, part coded Rosetta Stone. Up until 1995, I didn’t know what I always knew. Later I realized that Lawrence’s last, reckless ride on his motorcycle was his own brand of suicide. He exploded; my grandfather imploded.
Aping the warped model of the British aristocracy, my own emotionally starved “do not touch, do not feel” Toronto childhood followed lockstep in the path of my father and grandfather, as if time were standing still. In 1962, the year I first saw the film, I was caned by my grade 7 “master”, an arrogant, blond Brit and former Grenadier Guard, for my “general attitude.” He raised purple welts on my ass, and I took the lesson to heart, swallowing my tears and my shame. I vowed not to give him the satisfaction that he had gotten under my skin, which of course he had.
Another stunted Brit, an alcoholic bachelor (and eventual suicide) who routinely beat the boys in the boarding house, hammered our pubescent nervous systems with the rules of grammar, punctuation, syntax and spelling, daily psychological floggings that I bore like a Spartan and eventually manifested in a case of gut-stabbing Crohn’s Disease. Such early, formative (or deformative) influences run deep: I have never been able to entirely shake off the “King’s English” perfectionism in my writing style, despite an ongoing love of the Irish subversions of James Joyce et al.
The welcome arrival of the late 1960s counterculture, in synch with my own adolescence, saved my Canadian bacon. When the movie If… appeared in 1969, my body tingled in tune with the schoolboy insurrectionists raining machine gun fire down on their Establishment tormentors. Months later, my father tried to kill himself by injecting morphine, saved by my sister at the last minute. But the details were kept from me: repress, suppress, dissociate, deny.
I switched sides. I went native. I stopped identifying with British heroes and devoured the legend of the incendiary IRA leader Michael Collins, a contemporary of Lawrence who pioneered guerrilla warfare and proved instrumental in liberating southern Ireland from centuries of British rule. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. I wondered what made these rebels tick, beyond their love of time bombs. As I edged into manhood, I was intuiting that the men in my family were themselves walking time bombs; was I next in line?
Movies remained my primary form of therapy until, after a succession of failed romances, I started seeing an actual therapist (critically, a non-medical, lay therapist). [2] He loved books, films and story-telling as much as me. In my third session, I brought in a dream of a doctor in a white lab coat cutting open my face with a scalpel, releasing a Niagara-like torrent of water, which I interpreted as a symbol of generations of backed-up grief. Yes, Virginia, there is an unconscious mind.
With my happy discovery of the hidden power of dreams came a belated maturity and a subtler appreciation of my favourite films. The last line of David Lean’s The Bridge Over the River Kwai, first seen as an eight year old, took on a deeper personal resonance: “Madness! Madness!” So would another Lean/Bolt collaboration, Dr. Zhivago, another well-cast role for Omar Sharif as a sensitive doctor swept up in a bloody revolution. Speaking of Strelnikoff, the rabid Bolshevik, the hedonistic cynic Komarovsky tells Lara: “He is high-minded. He is pure. He is the kind of man the world pretends to look up to and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women.” Hmmm -- sounded vaguely familiar.
As an undergraduate, I had taken a mind-blowing film course that inspired me to start horsing around with a Super 8 camera, shooting satirical vignettes with my brother and a friend. But I failed to follow my bliss and go to film school: the road not taken. As a young, reluctant journalist, I wore a t-shirt that read: “What I really want to do is direct.” Was I a word guy or an image guy? I couldn’t imagine being both.
If we are lucky, we are loved for who we are, not for what we do. But what do you do when you don’t know who you are yet? A conscientious under-achiever, my dream life and my movie life gradually “woke” me up before the word became trendy. In men like Lawrence and my grandfather, I saw my own Clark Kent/Superman split self. I contemplated the paradoxes and costs of masculine achievement, adulation and obscurity, the drama of the compulsive performer, unloved as a child, perpetually falling short of impossible ideals. Unable to digest and integrate their good deeds, they self-inflate to compensate for an inner hollowness, cut off from the earthbound female principle. “Fame is a mask,” wrote John Updike, “that eats your face.” The hell bent, Trumpist drive to be a “winner” at all costs disguises a terror of inescapable feelings of pain and loss; strength is confused with cruelty.
As a privileged boomer, I was spared material deprivation. I was spared the traumas of war that gripped my father’s and grandfather’s generations. I’ve never needed to kill a person with a pistol, myself or anyone else. Living in relative peace, I found time to explore my inner life and find out who I was. I had time to challenge my powerful childhood conditioning and re-think our ancient, entrenched definitions of male heroism and its suicidal undercurrents. The current unravelling of the western sexist/racist patriarchy, like a nervous breakdown, need not mean anarchy and nihilism but breakthrough and rebirth. Paradoxically, only by first finding out who we are as individuals do we find out where we belong.
As a member of a lucky generation, I hope I am lucky enough to live long enough to witness the lost ideals of my ‘60s youth realize their noblest elements. That it is possible for leaders to be strong, brave and kind while “minding that it hurts.” That our personal histories deeply inform our politics. That we tend to act out destructively unless we struggle to remember our histories. That the manic rescuer needs to realize he wants to be rescued. That it is impossible to love or be loved without feeling vulnerable. And if nothing is written, something can be filmed.
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[1] Two Degrees of Separation: As far as I know, T. E. Lawrence and my grandfather never met, but they might have, as they both knew John Buchan, the Governor-General of Canada. Buchan toured the Connaught Laboratories in November 1938, a scene I reconstructed in What Disturbs Our Blood:
“A thin, wiry Scot of sharp, birdlike features and titanic ambition, John Buchan, the first Lord Tweedsmuir, is the Oxford-educated, 63 year old son of a Calvinist minister and a household name, literary lion, statesman, sportsman, pamphleteer for the League of Nations, speech writer of the king, and confidant of powerful politicians and intellectuals. The progenitor of the cloak-and-dagger spy thriller, Buchan has authored over 100 books, notably The Thirty Nine Steps, made into a film three years earlier by Alfred Hitchcock. Tense and dour, prodigiously self-controlled, the Scotsman speaks in quiet, feminine voice and rarely smiles; a distinctive scar creases his brow, the races of a carriage wheel that fractured his skull at age five, lending him a sinister appearance not unlike one of his treacherous fictional characters.
Buchan’s struggles with his depressions mirror those of my grandfather. He champions the imperial values of hardiness and grit, nerve and pluck, even as he denies his own painful bouts of depression and gastritis. “It’s a great life,” he opines, “if you don’t weaken.” In his books, Buchan obsesses about men unhappy with their worldly success, tortured by the primal conflict between the calls of selfless duty and personal pleasure; it is no accident that he closely identified with his close friend, T.E. Lawrence, the celebrated, Irish-born poet-warrior of the Arabian campaign, recently killed in a motorcycle crash.”
As Buchan’s black limo pulled away, my grandfather, tortured by migraines, insomnia and a bleeding ulcer, fled to his office and surrendered to a nervous breakdown. Months later, he bled out from a self-inflicted knife wound while under suicide watch. If that doesn’t make a grandson a writer, nothing will.
[2] In 1979, not long before entering therapy, I dragged my drugged-to-the-gills father to see Apocalypse Now. In the final scenes, intercut with a ritual slaughter of a water buffalo — animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture — Colonel Kurtz is cut down by his machete-wielding assassin, whispering “The horror! The horror!” with his last breaths. At the time I did not realize the last lines of the dying Kurtz, yet another sensitive poet-warrior driven out of his mind (uttered by Marlon Brando, the would-be player of Lawrence), spoke directly to my father’s own heart of darkness, for it was not until 1995, after my father’s death, that I discovered that my father’s father, an altruistic doctor tortured by guilt, killed himself by severing his femoral artery with a dinner knife, giving himself up to a ritual sacrifice. Perhaps, in my youthful unconsciousness, I was groping in the dark for a father-son catharsis by celluloid; alas, for my father at least, art therapy it wasn’t.