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I first encountered the work of the British traveller, archeologist, and spy Gertrude Bell many years ago, while hunting in the archives for a Carmelite priest named Pre Anastase-Marie de Saint-lie, an obscure figure in the history of Arabic lexicography. Hes a jolly monk, an Arab from the Lebanon straight out of Chaucer all the same and with a clear eye fixed on the main chance; very learned in his own tongue, he speaks and writes French like a Frenchman, Bell wrote of Anastase, in a letter to her father on November 9, 1917. I like him none the worse for his being in spite of his cloth, Im persuaded, a rogue.

In the course of the afternoon, I forgot about the priest and became absorbed by Bells letters, which are as rich in ethnographic detail as any of the great nineteenth-century European travelogues, but chattierdevoid of the heroic rhetoric of T. E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Bell, who was born in 1868 to wealthy industrialists, and earned first-class honors in Modern History at Oxford, was sent to Persia by her stepmother in 1892, and, staying with the family of the British ambassador in Tehran, was immediately captivated by her environs. She returned to the region to travel across Syria and the northern reaches of the Arabian desert, taking photographs and excavating ancient ruins as an amateur archeologist. She also became fluent in Arabic and Persian, spending months at a time exploring some of the most forbidding landscapes in the Middle East. During her travels, she learned about the politics of the desert: who had sold horses, who owned camels, who had been killed in a raid, how much the blood money would be or where the next battle, as she put it in a letter to her family, in May, 1900. She also unnerved the authorities. The Ottomans thought her a spy, and the British made a show of discouraging her from venturing into unsafe territory, while also hoping to benefit from the information she gathered.

Eventually, Bell was entrusted by the Britishgovernment, on the basis of her unparalleled knowledge of the region, to sketch out what she describes as a reasonable border between Iraq and the territory controlled by Ibn Saud, the founder of the future Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This task, along with her advocacy for Arab self-determination at the Cairo Conference of 1921, is one of the reasons why historians, biographers, and filmmakers have crowded around her, particularly since Iraq has again become a focus of geopolitical contestation. The other reason is her letters, which capture both her charisma and the intensely social character of her time in the Middle East. Like the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks in recent years, Bells archive of correspondence is a reminder of the daily disorder obscured by other political documents: maps, treaties, bulletins.

In Letters from Baghdad, a new documentary about the life of Bell, by the filmmakers Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbhl, Tilda Swinton reads from the letters with a pitch-perfect mix of wit, world-weariness, and often childlike exuberance. The result is a film with the confessional authority that was lacking in Werner Herzogs Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, which was a sort of Downton Abbey on the Tigris. The fakery of Letters is more artful; in recreations shot in black-and-white, actors read the reminiscences of characters such as David Hogarth, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, and Lawrence, whom Bell described, with characteristic cheek, as an interesting boy. The documentary also includes loving descriptions of her, written in Arabic, by her many Iraqi friends.

Bell could be sentimental about the East, but, for every saccharine description of her beloved Damascus (the air was sweet with the smell of figs and vines and chestnuts, the pomegranates were in the most flaming blossom), there is an account of enduring the boredom of an endless Bedouin meal held in her honor. One of the most telling of these accountswhich doesnt feature in the filmdescribes a meal that took place in 1921, soon after the Kingdom of Iraq had been established, when the soon-to-be-king, Faisal ibn Hussein, was celebrated with various notables in attendance, including a Sunni poet named Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi and a Shiite who, in the letter about the event, goes unnamed. Bell writes that al-Zahawi stood up and recited a tremendous ode in which he repeatedly alluded to Faisal as King of Iraq and everyone clapped and cheered. The Shiite, meanwhile, stepped forward . . . in white robes and a black cloak and big black turban and chanted a poem of which I didnt understand a word. It was far too long and as I say quite unintelligible but nevertheless it was wonderful.

The question of what, exactly, Bell heard when she listened to Iraqis speak is treated only obliquely in Letters from Baghdad, which nonetheless acknowledges Bells prejudice that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority. (The voices of Shiite clerics are largely absent from the letters, perhaps because, as Bell demurred, Their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets dont permit me to veil.) What the film cannot avoid is that, gradually, Bells optimistic tone about the country she helped to found gave way to something darker. After Faisal was made King of Iraq, Bell became his indispensable adviser, a right-hand man, as the British press clippings shown in Letters from Baghdad put it, but she was later marginalized by other influence-seekers. Bell occupied herself with antiquities, establishing the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, while battling bouts of depression, before her death in 1926 from an overdose of sleeping pills. These final moments in the film cast Bells letter-writing project in a new, melancholy light. I write you such long letters because its the only form of Diary I keep, Bell once wrote to her father, launching into an account of yet another dinner. In retrospect, the compulsion to write might also have been a way for Bell to imagine her own Iraq into being, to pull together the disparate narratives and connections that she had so effortfully forged. Oh, if we can pull this thing off; rope together the young hotheads and the Shiah obscurantists, she wrote home. If we can make them work together and find their own salvation for themselves, what a fine thing it would be.

Link:
What Gertrude Bell's Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq - The New Yorker