The Books: Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, by Janet Wallach

I guess I’ve finished with ye olde memoirs/journals/letters shelf. I have many more self-appointed “genres” to get through. Next up? Biography. I have already done biographies of U.S. Founding Fathers, which I keep in their own section, as well as my extensive Entertainment biography section. I wouldn’t feel comfortable having all of those books together, with Alexander Hamilton next to Howard Hawks – no, that would be totally wrong, I’d never be able to find anything, I need to separate them out. The “Biography” section then can be said to comprise “everything else” after we get through the U.S. Founding Father types and entertainers.

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

First biography on this shelf is Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, by Janet Wallach

“The smooth hard ground makes a beautiful floor to my tent. Shall I tell you my chief impression – the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here nothing.” – Gertrude Bell on sleeping her first night in the desert in Syria

I bought this book because I was cast as Gertrude Bell in an experimental play/multimedia event (not even sure what else to call it) that was being done in a huge awesome warehouse space in DUMBO (one of the cooler-than-cool neighborhoods in Brooklyn). DUMBO is an acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”. I could go on and on about DUMBO which probably has gotten much more obnoxious than when I was hanging out there, because it was sort of an undiscovered goldmine of art lofts and warehouses, totally industrial – you could barely buy a cup of coffee when you were there. No delis, no restaurants. Just cobblestone streets, the giant Manhattan Bridge Overpass towering above the buildings like a looming dinosaur, and huge warehouses filled with empty space and artists. I was in the Gertrude Bell project in 2003, if I’m recalling correctly. We had just invaded Iraq, which was ironic timing, to say the least, considering the topic of the play. The director was this fantastic young Iranian woman, whom I still remember fondly. I believe she eventually moved to Paris. Or maybe Germany. She loved the theatre scene in Germany. Everyone else in the play except for me (it was a small cast – me and three others) was Iranian. If you know me, then you know that I was in my glory! Surrounded by Iranian actors? Please. We talked about Kiarostami, we talked about the film scene in Iran, I grilled them about the actors they knew back home, what they thought of such-and-such. It was awesome, they were all so much fun. Let me work with these people forever. Gertrude Bell was one of the people who helped negotiate the borders of what is now modern-day Iraq (a blessing and a curse, Ms. Bell, you have wrought much havoc!), helping to put in place the King (King Faisal) for the short-lived constitutional monarchy. An older actor, who had been a television star in Iran before the Revolution, played Faisal. He wore bifocals, and khakis and sneakers, and had an easy-going humorous energy. He was also a hell of an actor. I had to speak in Arabic in the play, and I went to my local deli, run by Egyptians, and put them on tape saying my lines in Arabic. These guys were hilarious. “Could you say these lines into my tape recorder in Arabic, please?” In between making coffee for the morning rush, the two guys (they were brothers), took turns reading my lines, and giving me tips on how to make it sound right. They were so helpful. I would repeat what they said in Arabic, and first they would burst into laughter at how ridiculous I sounded, but then they would give me tips. “When you say the ‘H’, it has to sound like you are about to spit,” said one of the guys as he put together an egg sandwich for a customer. The actor playing Faisal would always struggle not to crack up when I would launch into my horrible Arabic sections in the play. Even when he kept a straight face (because it was a very solemn moment in the play), I could see his eyes were filled with hilarity. But they were all very kind about it.

The performance was done in a vast industrial space and behind me, as I declaimed my monologues in Arabic, a huge screen dropped down with scenes from Lawrence of Arabia projected behind me. I was facing out, wearing my little pith helmet and blousy skirt and trousers and such, and never could see what the full effect looked like, although I knew horses were galloping across the desert, and camels were struggling up hills behind me, as I made my speeches. It was a very interesting project, I had a lot of fun doing it.

The other woman in the play was an actress as well as a marine biologist, and she had great stories about her childhood in revolutionary Iran. Her parents had emigrated to the States when she was a baby, and when 1979 came along, they actually flew back. “The planes leaving Iran were full, the planes going TO Iran were empty – except for my family, who was returning,” she told me. Why did they return? They had a sense of loyalty, but also a sense of curiosity as to what was going on in their homeland. Her parents were educated people, they put her in a school, and they only lasted a couple of years before her parents said, “Eff THIS noise” and moved back to the States. But she spent her formative years as a child in Tehran in the early 80s when things were pretty nuts, to say the least. Her mother was beaten in the streets for not wearing proper head covering. You know. You can be as loyal to your country as you like, but when that shit starts going down …

Gertrude Bell was one of a host of “sand-mad Britons” who got desert fever and couldn’t seem to stop themselves from riding camels through treacherous terrain, exploring desert ruins, and writing multitudinous books about the glories of the desert, and the Bedouins, and the stars, and the heat. Gertrude Bell is a phenomenal writer, by the way – I highly recommend checking out some of her books. Janet Wallach’s book about Gertrude Bell was the book most referenced when it came to biographical data, so that’s the conventional biography I read as I was preparing to play the role.

Gertrude Bell was born in 1868, so she was coming into full flower in the height of the Victorian age. She was born into wealth, and her yearly allowance from her father (her mother died when she was a baby) allowed her to pursue her interests and do whatever she wanted. Which she did. She never married. She barely had a love affair. Her passion was the deserts of Mesopotamia. Her uncle was the British minister to Persia, and after she graduated from Oxford she traveled to meet him there. Traveling was obviously arduous in those days, but Bell got her first taste of desert life and Middle Eastern charm, and wrote her first book about traveling to Persia called Persian Pictures. She constantly came back to London, but for many years she really never seemed to have a home base. She loved mountain-climbing, so she spent a lot of time in Switzerland. She also devoted herself to the study of languages, eventually becoming fluent in Italian, Turkish, Persian, French, German, and Arabic. The deserts were being opened up at that time, due to the “sand-mad Briton” craze, and archaeological digs were cropping up everywhere. Gertrude Bell became an amateur archaeologist – although amateur may not be the right word. She came across the ruin of Ukhaidir in Iraq (near Karbala). She organized excavations of that site and created a map of the entire layout. She became obsessed with the “Nejd”, the forbidding desert in Central Arabia. It was her goal in life to experience it, to get herself there. Arabia was wild at the time, with warring tribes and fierce territorial Bedouins, and it was dangerous for anyone, let alone a British lady traveling with a cook and a translator. But Gertrude Bell pretty much did whatever she said she wanted to do. She was proud of her negotiating skills with the Arabs, how she got people on board with her schemes, and found help in unlikely places. Gertrude Bell was a bit of a sexist, and had no interest at all in the plight of Muslim women, although many of her fellow sand-mad Britons tried to get her to take an interest. She was more interested in hanging out with the men. She was proud that she was considered an honorary man. It gave her a bit of contempt for her fellow women: I can hack it in a man’s world – YOU can’t. Her letters home to her father are filled with proudly related anecdotes about how she was accepted into this or that man’s world. The Arabs she met brought sexism to a whole other level, of course, and eventually Gertrude Bell did come around and start to insist that Muslim women should be educated, should be allowed medical care, should have independence. But it took some time. She was free and independent, as a British woman, and she wanted to go where she wanted to go. The fact that 100% of the women in Arabia were kept behind closed doors didn’t matter to her at all. Too bad for them, I’m getting on my camel and riding into the desert.

Of course, if Gertrude Bell had just taken journeys into the desert, and written books about them, she would have been lumped in with people like Freya Stark, and other fantastic writers who fell in love with the desert and made writing about it their life’s work. But Gertrude Bell was born in interesting times. And as World War I heated up, and as Arabia and the entire region became important chess pieces in the game being played by the Great Powers – what the hell was going to happen in the Middle East became paramount. Gertrude Bell, at that time, was the British subject who knew the most about Mesopotamia and its people. So her home country turned to her for help.

She’s not known as the female T.E. Lawrence for nothing. Those two actually had a couple of encounters, one at the Arab Bureau meeting, held in Cairo in 1915. They were in sync on many of their ideas. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling faster than anyone knew how to handle or interpret. Lawrence and Bell, who had lived among the Arabs and knew their capabilities, were insistent that the Arab lands should be returned to the Arabs – keep the Turks out of it. Naturally, seen in another light, Gertrude Bell had no business butting her nose in in the first place. You’re English, lady, how dare you come along and butt your nose in to another country’s business. But in the context of the time, it made perfect sense. Not only was Gertrude Bell familiar to the people in Baghdad (as well as Syria, Palestine, etc.) – she was trusted. People in Mesopotamia, the tribal leaders, and Arab power brokers, actually liked her. Winston Churchill trusted her judgment. When she recommended Faisal (a fascinating guy – book excerpt about him here) to be installed as King of the new Iraq, Churchill agreed.

Her love of archaeology never left her, and she continued to head up excavations, bringing back artifacts, etc., to Baghdad (which became her home base). She formed the Baghdad Archaeological Museum (which then was renamed the National Museum of Iraq – which, as you will recall, was so horribly looted in 2003.) Again, there was this eerie feeling doing this play about Gertrude Bell, all while watching events in Iraq unfold on television/newspaper. Hearing about all of the missing artifacts from the museum (some of them have never been found), I thought of Gertrude Bell and I was pissed OFF. The museum, since then, has had a troubled history. One of the museum directors fled the country because the radicals were forcing him to promote an Islamic agenda in the museum and had threatened his life if he didn’t comply. Of course, because it’s an archaeology museum, you dumbasses, many of the artifacts are PRE-Islam, but, you know, you can’t explain that stuff to people with an agenda. Many of the Christian fundamentalists in this country have a similar unwillingness to handle/deal with anything out of their rigid closed-off world view. Parroting their idiotic and incorrect talking points (“America was formed as a Christian nation”, etc.), and jabbering on about their version of U.S. history which is very very important to them – crucial, because it’s the only way they can understand THEIR place in such a Godless world. Oh well. It’s a shame to be so intellectually un-curious. To be so threatened by things that don’t “fit” into your carefully tailored world view. That sense of threat surrounds the National Museum in Iraq to this day. “What’s in there? Does it support our theocratic agenda? Does it support our idea of what Iraq is or does it disagree with it?” Guys? Who the fuck cares. It’s a freakin’ spoon from 400 A.D. Why does its existence threaten your whole world view? Slowly but surely, many of the looted artifacts have been returned to the museum, thanks to giant international searches with many cooperating organizations working together. But whatever, that’s a side issue. I still don’t think the museum has re-opened. Down in the basement storage area, there’s a bronze bust of Gertrude Bell, the museum’s founder. Her presence would obviously be problematic, in such wartorn times. But, ironically, Gertrude Bell is generally thought of fondly in Iraq – or, at least, MORE fondly than her fellow British compatriots. Maybe it was because she took that risk, to recommend Faisal, to stand up for the Arabs. She was not perched on her high horse back in London re-drawing borders. She was traveling throughout the country, meeting people, talking to them, holding meetings, listening.

Anyway, she’s an interesting lady, I’ll tell you that. She intersected with important times, important people, and it’s well worth a look seeing Baghdad and that whole region through her eyes. Ridley Scott is apparently working on a biopic of Gertrude Bell. I have no idea what to think about that, but I do know that she was a brave and somewhat crazy headstrong interesting person. Well worth getting to know her a little bit.

This is such a huge story, and I’m totally skimming over it, but hopefully, if you were unaware of Gertrude Bell, your curiosity has been piqued. Janet Wallach’s book is a readable and fascinating volume, with lots and lots of excerpts of Gertrude Bell’s actual writings. If you’re interested even more, then seeking out Bell’s actual books (she wrote a ton) are also worthwhile.

She died in 1926, in Baghdad. Her funeral was a giant event, with a crowd of people attending. The King was in mourning for the loss of his friend. She is buried in the British cemetery in Baghdad.

Here’s an excerpt from Janet Wallach’s book.

Excerpt from Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

Within several days she had left behind the villages of the plains and entered the empty sands, where treacherous Arab raiders roamed the desert preying upon each other’s flocks. “All this country is racked, as it has been for the past four thousand years, by the lawless Arab tribes,” she wrote him. No government had ever discovered a way to keep the tribes in check. When she asked her men to accompany her on a nighttime ride, they were so frightened of blood-feud enemies that not a single man would go alone. But if the Bedouin feared each other, she was afraid of no one. Instead, she dove into the wilderness, leading her men through heat that burned the evening air, across land so dry that the oases offered the animals only caked earth in place of drinking water. Her throat was parched and her body was coated with dust.

She had ridden more than four hundred miles toward Baghdad when, in the middle of March, she arrived at the town of Hit, known since ancient times to be a source of petroleum. The Babylonians, Assyrians and others had used its dark sticky fuel to light their lamps and fire their cooking stoves. Hit was an ugly place, the air choked with smoke and the ground pitted with refuse, not unlike the grim industrial English town that housed the Bell Brothers’ Ironworks. “Except for the palm groves,” she wrote, “there is very little difference between Hit and Clarence.” Oil oozed from the earth, and peril menaced the air as she and her men continued on, rifles strapped to their sides, through sinkholes of pitch and across black crusty land.

They rode warily, searching for Arabs to camp with. The rule of the desert prevailed – “Everyone is an enemy till you know him to be a friend” – and they could not risk setting up their tents alone. They could be murdered; robbed at best. But if they found a tribe to camp near, the hosts would protect them as though they were guests. This was the territory of the Dulaim, notorious fighters, but at the sight of their black tents, her men slowed their horses. Approaching carefully, she gave the salaam. The Dulaim chief, Sheikh Muhammad el Abdullah, “a handsome creature”, invited the Englishwoman inside his tent, and together they sat in front of the fire, drinking the bitter coffee of the Bedouin. A few hours later, inviting him to her tent, she offered him afternoon tea. “The bonds of friendship are firmly knit,” she declared in her letter home. At night, after Fattuh cooked her dinner, she rolled herself up in her rugs and fell soundly asleep.

Toward the end of March she wrote home excitedly: she had come upon a spectacular ruin, the most important relic of its period. “As soon as I saw it I decided that it was the opportunity of a lifetime.” Not a word had been written about it, and it was hers to shout to the world. The Arabs called it Ukhaidir, meaning a little green place, but it was neither small nor green. A huge stone and wood castle surrounded by round towers set in immense outer walls, inside it had one court after another with domed and vaulted rooms, gorgeously decorated plaster walls, hidden chambers with high columns and round niches. By studying this palace she could learn more about sixth-century Eastern art than in all the books she could read.

She worked steadily, photographing, sketching, drawing the plan of the castle to scale. Dressed in her white cotton shirt, petticoat and long patch-pocketed skirt, black stockings and laced-up shoes, a dark kafeeyah wrapped around her sun helmet, she gauged the building, walking around the standing walls, lying down on the hard cold floors to take the measurements. Her men stood by her side, cooperative but on guard against the Bedouin raiders, who were everywhere. “Nothing will induce them to leave their rifles in the tents,” she complained. “They are quite intolerably inconvenient; the measuring tape is for ever catching round the barrel or getting caught up in the stock, but I can’t persuade them to lay the damnable things down for an instant.” One night as she lay awake in her tent, she heard the sounds of gun shots whizzing overhead. Her men went out to chase them, but the invisible attackers appeared into the dark.

Working on Ukhaidir convinced her that this was an archaeological find that would impress even the most important authorities in the field. “It’s the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me. I shall publish it in a big monograph all to itself and it will make a flutter in the dovecotes,” she wrote home. The discovery would secure her reputation as an archaeologist.

On the last day of March 1909 Gertrude left the castle, sneezing and coughing from the drafty halls of Ukhaidir. Traipsing across the windy, dusty, drought-ridden desert, its landscape strewn with dead sheep and goats and with human corpses, she was overwhelmed by a rush of sadness.

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2 Responses to The Books: Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, by Janet Wallach

  1. Paul H. says:

    The photo on the cover looks to be the famous one showing Churchill flanked by Bell and Lawrence. Bell appears to be wearing a feather boa. As you do when you visit the Sphinx.

    I love desert writers. If I wasn’t travel phobic, I would go myself.

  2. sheila says:

    “As you do …” hahahaha

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