US Edition Daniel Johnson reviews Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell.
In Greenmantle, the sequel to The Thirty-nine Steps, John Buchan pits his hero Richard Hannay against a German 'she-devil'. The sinister Hilda von Einem is an archaeologist-turned-spymistress who dreams of rousing the Islamic world against the British, and enlists Hannay's fellow-spy, Sandy, in her project. While Sandy is based on T. E. Lawrence, the model for Buchan's villain is less obvious - she was not a German, but an Englishwoman: Major Miss Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary and Director of Antiquities in Baghdad.
What was it about this slight, brittle redhead that aroused such misogyny? She was certainly fearless. Men were murdered on her account and she slept with a revolver under her pillow. She did not suffer fools of either sex gladly.
As one of the first generation of women to study at Oxford, she immediately put the dons on their mettle. At her first lecture, the women undergraduates were obliged to sit apart from the men. After he had finished, the lecturer inquired: 'And I wonder what the young ladies made of that?' Gertrude shot back: 'I don't think you added anything to what you wrote in your book.'
Taking her degree a year early in 1888, Gertrude Bell became the first woman to take a First in Modern History at Oxford. There were to be many more firsts in her short life. She was the first woman to make major contributions to archaeology, architecture and oriental languages; the first woman to achieve seniority in the British military intelligence and diplomatic service; the first woman to travel alone in the remotest regions of the Middle East; the first woman to be respected and treated as an equal by rulers of East and West.
She was a daughter, not of 'the desert', but of Yorkshire. She came from a steel dynasty and, though immensely rich, she inherited a Spartan distaste for anything 'fancy'. She could endure incredible physical hardship, and well into her forties she courted death from frostbite in the Alps, marauding tribes in the Arabian desert, and enemy Turkish forces in Mesopotamia.
You don't have to share Gertrude Bell's passions in order to be her biographer, but it helps. Georgina Howell could hardly be less like her subject: a fashion editor of the Observer and a feature-writer for Tatler and Vogue. The book began life as a newspaper feature about 'My Heroine', but hero-worship is not enough to justify a new biography. Not only do title and subtitle echo Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, which appeared a decade ago, but both books adopt a similar approach.
Much of Howell's biography is devoted to Bell's unhappy love affairs, the experience of which fed into her fine translations of the great Persian poet Hafiz. Having renounced domesticity, Gertrude Bell spent her life in the company of men: scholars and statesmen, writers and explorers, soldiers and sheikhs.
Howell sees her heroine as a feminist who broke the mould of her sex and class. Gertrude Bell herself wanted to be judged by the standards of the masculine world that she chose to inhabit. She saw herself primarily as a player in the Great Game. She rewrote the rules that governed what women did, but only as a means to force men to take her seriously. Howell does not take Bell seriously enough to assess her critically as an actor on the political and diplomatic stage.
When the First World War came, Bell lost Dick
Doughty-Wylie, the married man she loved, at Gallipoli. Overcoming her grief, she threw herself into the war against Turkey. As an archaeologist studying everything from Babylonians to Byzantines, she knew the Middle East intimately: the perfect training for a spy. Her expeditions had given her an instinctive grasp of Muslim hierarchies, moving effortlessly from caliphs to camel-drivers to get the information she wanted.
She soon made herself influential as an adviser and intermediary. But Gertrude Bell's ambitions went far beyond influence. Like her friend Lawrence, she realised the war had created a unique opportunity to realise their dream of Arab self-determination. Turkish defeat enabled her to play a key role in creating the new state of Iraq. At this point her life becomes both pertinent and controversial.
Gertrude Bell thought the Arabs were not suited to democracy. She admired Arabian royal families and thought only a king descended from the Prophet would do for Iraq. She placed all her faith in one man: Faisal, the third son of the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca. She ignored the fact that most Iraqis, being Shiite, loathed a Sunni king.
The French had already ejected Faisal from the neighbouring throne of Syria, and it soon became clear after his installation in Baghdad in 1921 that he was, as she later admitted, 'vain and feeble and timid'. When she remonstrated with him, he won her over - literally - with kisses and promises. Though the British later disowned Faisal, he and his progeny (the last of whom was butchered in the Baathist coup of 1958) were as much a British creation as Iraq itself.
The blame for imposing this disastrous dynasty on the Iraqis rests largely with Gertrude Bell's infatuation with Faisal. If Iraq was her brainchild, it was crippled from birth. In the 37 years that the constitutional monarchy bequeathed by the British lasted, there were several coups, 57 ministries and countless revolts. In 1940 the British returned to crush Rashid Ali's pro-Nazi regime.
Gertrude Bell's hostility towards Zionism was as passionate as her advocacy of the Arab cause - she thought the Jews had no place in Palestine. She was the first Westerner to interview Muslim women in Arabia, but their suffering left her sentimentality about Islam intact. The historian Elie Kedourie was not unjust when he charged that 'her approach to oriental politics' was 'sodden with emotion'.
Gertrude Bell's name deserves to be as inseparable from Iraq as Lawrence's from Arabia, but they must both bear a heavy responsibility for the fatal illusions of the Arab world.