THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300206
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY RUTH WALKER
LENGTH: 77 lines
DESERT QUEEN
The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
JANET WALLACH
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 419 pp. $27.50.
Gertrude Bell, a daughter of the Victorian age, was a traveler, a mountain climber, a writer, an archaeologist, a bureaucrat, an associate of Lawrence of Arabia and a friend of King Faisal of Iraq.
In her new biography Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Janet Wallach emphasizes the part that Bell played in Faisal's ascent to the throne in 1921.
Bell was born in 1868 to a wealthy family in the north of England, where her grandfather and his two brothers established what became a vast iron-smelting enterprise. She distinguished herself in modern history studies at Oxford and then packed an almost overwhelming amount of adventure into a life that ended, from an overdose of sleeping pills, shortly before she was 58. In her will she left 50,000 pounds for the antiquities museum she had created in Baghdad, where she died.
The author, who, with her husband, John Wallach, wrote Still Small Voices: The Real Heroes of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, gives her readers an impressive amount of information, but sometimes she mars the presentation with an omniscient viewpoint that is out of place in a work of this kind. For example, she describes - with no source apparent - how ``the slightly agitated, 45-year-old Miss Bell stepped impatiently from her carriage, smoothed the wisps of ginger hair peeking out from her feathered hat, straightened her hobble skirt and marched briskly into the lobby of the Damascus Place Hotel.''
And we are given the manager's reaction: ``Flustered by the arrival of the famous lady (everyone in Damascus knew of the intrepid Englishwoman who traveled alone through the desert), he welcomed her with a profusion of bows and salaams and she returned them routinely.''
It's misleading to say that this Englishwoman, however intrepid, traveled alone. The author tells us about the caravan of camels and various Arab attendants, with luggage that included china, crystal stemware and silver flatware.
It was in 1911 on the site of Hittite ruins in Turkey that Bell met two young archaeologists, one of whom was Lawrence, who became a leader of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks. Lawrence and Bell were to have an important association. David Hogarth, an archaeologist who became head of the Arab Bureau, a British intelligence operation in Cairo, paid tribute to the part that Bell played in the revolt: Lawrence, in the campaigns of 1917 and 1918, used her information about tribal elements.
For a time in Baghdad, Bell had the title of Oriental secretary. This was an intelligence post in which she served the British high commissioner.
Wallach judges that Bell and Lawrence were similar. ``Oddities, and out of the mainstream, both were loners who felt more at ease in the empty desert than in the crowded drawing room,'' she writes.
Lawrence and Bell were among those summoned by Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, to a conference in Cairo. The British public, it seems, was concerned about the cost of maintaining a presence in Mesopotamia (the name ``Iraq'' was about to take over). The conferees agreed that with an Arab government installed, Britain could decrease its outlay. They favored Faisal as king; he was Bell's choice. His father was Sharif Hussein of Mecca, here described as one of the three most powerful men in Arabia.
An Arab Cabinet of Ministers named Faisal as king and then his election was confirmed in a referendum. Bell frequently socialized with the ruler.
Information that Bell supported the anti-suffrage movement in England comes as a surprise. Wallach explains: ``The suffragists' behavior shocked the public, especially people like Gertrude Bell, who valued tradition. To her, the harassment of public officials was nothing short of heresy. After all, they were among her closest friends and family.'' MEMO: Ruth Walker is a retired book editor of The Virginian-Pilot. She
lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Gertrude Bell became an influential Englishwoman in the Middle East by CNB