Bell was the leading orientalist of her day. She mastered Persian with infuriating ease, translating the poet Hafiz in two years. No less an authority on Persian literature than Edward Browne pronounced her work ‘probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet ever produced in the English language’. Scholar, archaeologist, mountaineer, poet, travel writer, Bell seemed to excel at anything she put her mind to.
Her greatest failing, if that is the right word, exacted the heaviest price. Professionally triumphant, Bell remained personally unfulfilled throughout her life. She dabbled in the emotional world with a couple of doomed, unconsummated love affairs, but the sexual companionship of a soul mate proved tragically elusive.
It was one reason, surely, why she threw herself into Middle Eastern politics with such gusto, becoming Oriental Secretary to Sir Percy Cox in Baghdad in 1917. Her formidable intellect, linguistic talent and indomitable will, married with the financial independence of a wealthy industrialist’s family and an anachronistic fearlessness amid hair-raising adventures in a foreign world even more male than her own, were credentials unmatched by her contemporaries. There are times when Bell makes T. E. Lawrence look like the shallowest of dilettantes, a two-dimensional Boys’ Own cut-out.
Howell is not a Middle Eastern expert (her journalistic background includes stints at Vogue, Tatler and the Sunday Times) and she writes with greater confidence and authority on Bell as a character than on the mercurial world of Middle Eastern politics. Sir Mark Sykes, one half of the Anglo-French team which in 1916 drew the infamous Sykes-Picot line, carving up the region between the two colonial powers, barely gets a look-in bar his uncharitable description of Bell in a letter to his wife: ‘Confound the silly, chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump- wagging, blethering ass!’
Howell’s evident sympathies for her subject can get the better of her. Bell’s behaviour while working for Sir Arnold Wilson, Civil Commissioner for Iraq, writing letters to all and sundry undermining the official British position, would have seen her sacked by any boss today. Howell doesn’t really admit it, but by the mid-Twenties Bell was no longer as useful either to her great friend King Faisal or to London as she once was and she felt the diminution of her status keenly. With no family to sustain her, she took her own life in 1926.
So what of Bell’s lasting legacy? She would doubtless have been horrified to see the 2003 looting of the national museum she created. The state of Iraq, in a sense the child she never had, has lived on in varying health. The monarchy she helped establish under Faisal lasted only until 1958. Coups, military dictatorship, wars and bloodshed have been the order of the day ever since. Perhaps it will get worse.
In 1920, flushed with the hope of success in Iraq, she wrote:
Oh, if we can pull this thing off; rope together the young hotheads and the Shiah obscurantists, enthusiasts, polished old statesmen and scholars — if we can make them work together and find their own salvation for themselves, what a fine thing it would be. I see visions and dream dreams.
As Lawrence said and the Bush administration is still learning, such dreamers in Iraq are dangerous creatures.
Justin Marozzi is writing a book about Herodotus for John Murray.
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