Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003, was the greatest British explorer of his generation. He rode camels or walked across deserts and scrub land from Northern Kenya to Western Pakistan. Iraq and Afghan-istan were more home to him than his native England ever was, and the emptier the terrain the more his heart ached for it. Closest to his soul were Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and he encapsulated their allure in his classic travel account Arabian Sands (1959).
What is it about deserts and the British or, to be more precise, many British men from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries? In the famous David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Thomas Edward Lawrence is made to answer that deserts are "clean," and his answer is classed as very significant by his American interlocutor. Undoubtedly both the answer and the significance were real for Thesiger as well.
He was a man of extreme austerity. The harder a journey was -- extreme shortages of food and water, hostility of terrain and weather -- the more he enjoyed it. He was a ferocious boxer (at school at Eton he once broke an opponent's jaw) and a manic killer of wild animals -- lions, pigs, deer, anything that was foolish enough to come within range of his rifle. He hated the modern world and its comforts. Planes, trains and especially cars, he believed, were robbing remote peoples of their nobility, and the austere beauty of their way of life.
Yet Thesiger was an aesthete of a kind, and the human beauty he found in the desert wastes, and by which he admitted being "disturbed," was always adolescent and male. He was quite open about this, photographing a long line of noble-looking young men, appointing them as guides, giving them presents of rifles and ammunition, and later in life, in Northern Kenya, employing them as houseboys and even sharing a bed with one of them.This has led commentators to pin-point a maso-chistic homosexuality as Thesiger's fundamental character trait. There is an important ante-cedent. Thesiger has often been called a "modern Lawrence of Arabia," but Lawrence has been shown to have had an addiction to flagellation and, when serving anony-mously in the UK's Royal Air Force, to have paid a young Scottish fellow-serviceman to cane him "to orgasm" over a period of several years, sometimes with witnesses. Was Thesiger like this as well? Was a desire to be punished at the root of his seeking out phenom-enal deprivation in the remotest, driest, hottest corners of the globe from the Hindu Kush to the Sudan?
This new biography, while providing most of the factual information you could wish for, doesn't answer such questions. Its author was a close friend of Thesiger's from 1964 onwards, if anyone could be described as close to such a man. They worked on books of Thesiger's photos together, for instance, and this is an approved, official biography. Alexander Maitland is not the kind of person to betray confidences -- always assuming that there were any.
But it seems to me that Thesiger belonged to an era when this parti-cular syndrome -- savage school beatings, an intense love of adolescent men, total non-interest in women, extreme self-discipline -- was rather common, at least in England. Society had got itself into a certain mind-set in which physical homosexuality was both unmentionable and not to be thought of. Alfred Edward Housman, the poet of A Shropshire Lad, was made in the same mold. When he fell in love with a fellow student, Moses Jackson, and Jackson got married and went off to India, Housman resorted to a life of fiendishly metic-ulous, and frequently acrimonious, textual criticism of Latin authors. He too left a collection of flagellation pornography to Cambridge University Library on his death. But it seems probable that both these men would have considered actual sex with the young men they so adored to be a defilement and something they perhaps couldn't even imagine. Manly comradeship, not sex, was their ideal.
The syndrome wasn't confined to Britain. In the US, Walt Whitman, perhaps the 19th century's greatest English-language poet, constantly eulogized handsome youths in his massive Leaves of Grass. But when the English art-critic John Addington Symonds, almost the era's only outspoken advocate of what we now call gay rights, wrote to Whitman asking him to come out and declare his queer sexuality, Whitman wrote back in horrified terms, rejecting any suggestion of such a repellent
interest. The great novelist Henry James, too, fell in love with young man after young man, but almost certainly never touched any of them. He may have been impotent
following damage to a testicle in youth, but even so it's hard to imagine the outcome having been any different if that hadn't been the case.
It seems to me highly probable that Wilfred Thesiger died a virgin at the age of 93, albeit crucified by the customs of his day, and despite the frequency of homosexual activity in many of the lands he traveled through (though there was a horror of it in others). He burnt his heart into submission on the baking sands, and marched triumphant and inviolate into such oases as presented themselves, contenting himself there with a bed of stones, a sleeping-bag and the companionship of his rifle.
Not that there weren't other signs of a deeply-rooted obsession. Circum-cisions were one of his specialties. "Circumcised a boy before breakfast," he recorded in his diary. In fact he circumcised thousands -- even more, according to Maitland, than he admitted to in his books. But here again his expertise was highly valued. Arab men, for whom the operation was mandatory, clamored for Thesiger's services. He used clean implements and Western antiseptics, whereas they often used a dirty razor-blade and a piece of string. If we are to see a sexual motivation here, then we have to take into account a huge number of desperately grateful participants.
Thesiger's literary influence on, and appearance in, 20th century travel writing was extensive. In 1977 he accompanied Gavin Young on the part of his trip round Indonesia that he undertook in a small boat. Young had read Norman Sherry's Conrad's Eastern World, which traced the actual events behind Conrad's Asian stories, and decided to follow in the great novelist's footsteps. The journey is described in Young's In Search of Conrad (1991). But you inevitably sense that Indonesia was altogether too lush for the great Arabist's more astringent tastes.
Thesiger also makes a famous appearance in Eric Newby's hilarious A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Newby and his companion encounter him in a remote valley in Nuristan where he watches them blow up their inflatable mattresses. "God, you must be a couple of pansies," he is cited as probably (but very interestingly) thinking.
One of Thesiger's early enthusiasms was the marshes of southern Iraq, close to the city of Basra where the UK's occupying troops are currently based. He described the life there in his 1964 book The Marsh Arabs. But when he offered to show the place to fellow writer Gavin Maxwell, another lover of desolate places whose enthusiasm quickly became the marsh's otters, Maxwell penned a sequence of books that far out-sold Thesiger's account. A Reed Shaken by the Wind (1957) contained Maxwell's own experiences in the marshes. But it was his story of life with his two Iraqi otters on the coast of north-western Scotland, Ring of Bright Water (1960) and its sequel The Rocks Remain, that entered the best-seller lists.
Incidentally, Gavin Young also visited the Iraqi marshes with Thesiger, recording his impressions in Return to the Marshes (1977). For the rest, Thesiger took an instant dislike to novelist Evelyn Waugh who he met at the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in 1930, even though Waugh very surprisingly wanted to go with him on a dangerous trek among Western-hating tribal peoples. He expressed disdain for Jan Morris who relished intercontinental flights and modern cities and, understandably, considered the search for psychoanalytic motives in Lawrence reprehensible. And he found Mozart and Beethoven "a meaningless jumble of noises," preferring military marches, tribal music and the stamping of naked feet.
In an influential essay, Ian Buruma argued that Thesiger might be admirable in himself, but his values were dangerously close to those espoused by fascists. But this is unsurprising. Thesiger traveled in areas where old heroic codes still prevailed, as in the epics of Homer. Individual combat, collective living, unrestrained feasting where possible and songs praising heroic deeds even in defeat -- these are this culture's defining characteristics. In his book Into the Heart of Borneo (1984) Redmond O'Hanlon remarks that the cultures he was traveling through were the equiv-alent to those of Europe in the Iron Age, and indeed the book turns out to be one of the best guides there is to the ethos of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry of the Dark Ages. European 1930s fascism proved that such archaic value-systems cannot survive being transferred into the modern world.
As for literary influences on Thesiger, first must come Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) by the archaizing Victorian prose-artist Charles Doughty. This was a book considered as virtually sacred by all British Arabists. Second are the adventure stories of John Buchan -- he re-named a favorite Kenyan boy "Laputa" after the Zulu leader in Prester John. Thesiger knew Buchan, and if he is to be viewed as a species of retarded adolescent, as so many British men of his generation and type can be, then Buchan's imperial adventure stories, plus those of Rider Haggard, can easily be seen as youthful influences that effectively never left him.
This biography is touched by Thesiger's own virtues of detachment, meticulousness and decorum. But it can be taken as read that it won't be the last word we hear on this strange, yet also strangely typical, figure from a fast-disappearing era.
Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer will be published tomorrow.
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