by Derek Johns
The book is divided into five sections: on Egypt and Sudan; on the Nile; on Syria, Lebanon and Jordan; on the Arabian Peninsula; and on Iraq and Persia. Published in 1957, it is the fruit of James’s years as Middle East correspondent of The Times, informed also by his experiences in the army and at the Arab News Agency in Cairo. Its lead actor is President Nasser of Egypt, around whose actions much of the concerns of the Arab world then revolved. Its supporting cast is very large, including not only the actors in the region itself but also Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Middle East was almost as fevered in the mid-1950s as it is today. And the origins of many of today’s troubles may be traced back to that time. James described the book at the time of its composition as rambling and ramshackle, but while it encompasses a great deal, it is in fact clearly organised.
James’s narrative method in this book customarily takes in his own actions as well as his observations, adding authority to what is in any case a comprehensive account. Always the voice is melodious, with sardonic undertones. The Egyptian scene is set with a description of the world of King Farouk, who had been deposed by Nasser:
This was the palace of King Farouk, a coarse but witty monarch, until in 1952 he was deposed by the Egyptian Revolution and shipped away to Italy in the royal yacht. Sad speculations may cross your mind as you stand in the sunshine looking at Montaza; for this great silly palace is a symbol of a vanished Egypt, and thus of wasted years, of talents perverted, of corruption and greed and cruelty. There was a pungent feeling to that old Egypt, a country of laissez-faire and belly-dancers, with the indolently hanging tassels of its red tarbooshes, and the avaricious pashas rolling from their cars to the tables of the Mohammed Ali Club. There was an easy-going, hubble-bubble, sleight-of-hand manner to society in those bad old days, when a discreet bank note would get you almost anything, and a Cabinet office was a passport to fortune, and the exiled aristocracy of Europe lived elegantly along the corniche at Alexandria.
This demonstrates something Jan used often in her writing, the substituting of ‘your’ for ‘my’, as in the sentence ‘Sad speculations may cross your mind as you stand in the sunshine looking at Montaza …’ Those speculations were of course the writer’s, but the reader is invited to share them, involved in the experience, placed on the spot. It is a very effective technique.
By the time of writing The Market in Seleukia James had travelled all over the Middle East, and was able to gain entry into the corridors of power. One day in the Sudan he was enjoined by a cabinet minister ‘to produce thrilling, attractive and good news, coinciding where possible with the truth’. This droll remark, and Jan’s pleasure in recounting it, says a great deal about her attitude towards the raw material of her writing. She has sometimes been accused of exaggeration and distortion, a charge she denies, saying that she has always felt a responsibility to the facts. A reading of all of Jan’s work suggests that this sense of responsibility is stronger in books such as The Market of Seleukia, grounded as it was in recent events, than in the more impressionistic writings about places that came later. A transition from reporter to writer was underway.
Beirut, and Lebanon generally, was a place James had a particular curiosity about, and it brought out the writer in full flush:
Above all, they have sharpened the tangy Phoenician commercialism that has been driven from Alexandria by the earnest affronts of politics. Lebanon is a land of money-makers. It lives by its itchy palm. Its burghers are rich, shrewd and greedy, and in its banks you can acquire any currency under the sun. I once bought a book of American travellers’ cheques by converting East African rupees, Maria Theresa dollars and a British gold sovereign … They say that just as the bumblebee is aerodynamically incapable of flying, so the Lebanon is an economic impossibility; but it lives on lavishly, a place of ski-lifts and night-clubs, black-heeled nylons, air-conditioned hotels and American cars. It does so by being frank about its morals.
As ever, buildings fascinate and inspire. It was the structures of Jerusalem that had first caught James’s imagination in the Middle East. Now, in Damascus, he visits the Great Mosque:
Most wonderfully of all, you may find yourself stumbling in this way through the gateway of the Great Mosque of the Ummayads, the noblest thing in Syria and (to my mind) one of the two or three most fascinating buildings in the world. Of all the sensations I have ever experienced from proximity to architecture, the most compelling of all is the feeling I have when I emerge from the shade of the Damascus cloth bazaar to find myself at the doorway of this marvellous structure. It is a mixture of styles and periods, an amalgam of varying tastes, but it has the manner of some calm, unshakable organism, or perhaps a clipper ship, or a great mountain. In Damascus, of all cities, its rock-like serenity is marvellous to encounter.
This sense of awe in the face of great buildings characterises much of Jan’s writings. It is very evident in the books about Oxford and Venice, and later she came to write a book about the buildings of the Raj and to edit an edition of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. The adventure in Oman notwithstanding, it is the urban world that primarily interests Jan, and the cities of the Middle East – Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Isfahan – she describes with great precision as well as flair.
James had been in Palestine during the last days of the British Mandate, and since then he had observed the creation of the state of Israel, observed too how its idealism came to be tinged with paranoia, how its relations with its neighbours came to be poisoned by mistrust. By 1955 the problem of tension between the Jews and the Arabs was already acute:
The poor Arab, shifting stones from an inhospitable hillside with his raw bare hands, can look down the hill to see the skilful Israeli farmers working away there with their tractors and their trim scurrying trucks, looking (at least through binoculars from Jordan) more like Middle Westerners than citizens of the Middle East. No Jordanian can legally visit Israel, for in Arab eyes a state of war still exists, and all this dispossessed peasantry may do is gaze in fury across the line towards its ancestral lands. I have travelled to this salient from both sides of the frontier, and I know that most of those Israeli farmers, though an unusually determined folk, are chiefly concerned with leading their lives securely and prosperously after generations of persecution. From Qalqillya, though, through the eyes of a man who was born and brought up among those fields … those Israeli farmers look extraordinarily like thieves.
A reading of all Jan’s writings about the Jewish world, in her essays as well as in this book, suggests that she has a stronger sympathy with the Arabs than with the Jews. James’s experiences with Jewish resistance fighters had surely not disposed him against them, and in Pleasures of a Tangled Life there is a chapter on Jan’s Jewish friends. But the reader nonetheless sometimes detects a preference for things Arab. This is to do with culture rather than politics or religion. Indeed, Islam runs like a dark thread through The Market of Seleukia, and James is forthright in his ideas about it:
It is fashionable nowadays to proclaim Islam the most tolerant of faiths, to compare the chivalry of Saladin with the frequent barbarity of his opponents, and to exalt the climate of opinion which allows so many minorities to flourish within the Moslem countries. I do not altogether accept this view, and I would suggest that one of the Western apologists for Islam make the journey (not in disguise) to the Holy Places of the Hejaz, where he would probably be torn into a million tolerant pieces. No great religion spews up so many vicious extremist groups as does Islam, and no religion of my experience is animated by so constant an undercurrent of intolerance.
Whether the reader agrees with these sentiments or not, they make uncomfortable reading sixty years later.
Not so much a thread as a shadowy presence in the background is the history of British engagement with the Middle East. The Market of Seleukia was written soon after the humiliating withdrawal of British forces from the Canal Zone and the shambles of what was described as a peace
-keeping intervention but was in fact an attempted invasion of Egypt. This represented the last imperial act of the British. From now on the sun would set on the empire for most of the day. But old attitudes died hard:
What is more, the British persisted, all too often, in a stand-offish, holier-than-thou aloofness that could be almost unbearably irritating. A century before, Britain had enjoyed a privileged position in the world … By the 1950s all had changed; but it was difficult for any Englishman, however liberal his sympathies, to resist the illusion that he was somebody special in the Middle East, somebody to whom the normal rules did not apply, a being apart and divinely favoured. I knew this sensation well.
The Market of Seleukia is a remarkable book, remarkable for its range, for the authenticity of experience that informs it, and for the elegance of the writing. The Middle East was generally an unstable place in the 1950s, the end of colonialism (not just British) and the discovery of oil upsetting old ways without yet putting new ways in their place. In many of its aspects it seems familiar to the reader of today, but in others it is wholly different. James sums up his thoughts in this way:
… the Muslim Middle East was always vicious and generally chaotic, and its inhabitants seemed so totally hopeless as to be beyond reclaim. But the Arabs have a word, baraka, which they use to describe the elusive, indefinable quality of being at once blessed and benevolent … Squalid and depressing though the affairs of the Middle East might be, there were many places there, many people, many things still endowed with baraka in the autumn of 1956. There was the persistent and irrepressible humour of the Arabs, still a joy and a stimulation. There was the natural equality and hospitality of these strange peoples. The stately cadences of Arabic had baraka still, and so did the sweet voices of the muezzins at sunset … Often and again, for all the threadbare pettiness, the violence and the mediocrity of the Muslim Middle East, you would find something good or noble or inspiriting embedded in the rubbish.
The third book James wrote about the Middle East, published in 1959, was The Hashemite Kings. The Hashemite clan claimed to be direct descendants of the Prophet. Certainly they were the guardians of the Holy Places of the Hejaz, Mecca and Medina. Jan thought of them as the oldest, proudest, most romantic and most tragic family of Arabia. By the late 1950s they had been swept away, supplanted by the Sauds in Arabia and by usurpers in Jordan and Iraq. But for a few decades they were the most powerful element in Arabian affairs. And to a great extent they owed this status to having been selected by the British as their allies in the region.
James began the writing of this book with certain misgivings. He had not written history before, and indeed had not written anything that did not stem directly from his own experience or observation. He worried about an overuse of ‘the instruments of fine writing’ – metaphor, simile and so on. This anxiety about whether he really was a bit of a show-off in his prose recurs throughout James’s writing life. And it is certainly true that on occasion he overdoes things. But it is very easy to become attuned to the writing style, and to overlook any excesses. And in later life Jan seems to have simply stopped worrying about her style, reckoning that this was how she wrote, this was who she was.
The idea for The Hashemite Kings came after James attended a press conference in Amman at which King Hussein of Jordan announced that his cousin Feisal, the King of Iraq, had been assassinated by revolutionaries. James described in an article for the Manchester Guardian the brave demeanour of Hussein: ‘His throne was threatened, his life was in danger, his dynasty had crumbled, and there were tears in his eyes.’ The Harrow-educated Hussein was a familiar figure to the British in the 1950s, someone who had seemed to represent hopes for stability in the Middle East. These hopes were now shown to be forlorn.
The paterfamilias of the Hashemites was an earlier Hussein, who in 1914 made a pact with Lord Kitchener, then the British High Commissioner in Cairo, that apparently secured British backing for Hashemite kingdoms in Arabia, Jordan and Iraq. The events of the First World War led to a very different arrangement, however (one execrated by T. E. Lawrence), under which the Hashemites indeed sat on their thrones, but essentially as vassals of the British. James describes the relationship between the British and the Arabs in this way:
The meetings he [Ronald Storrs, the British ‘Oriental Secretary’ in Cairo] had there with Hussein and Abdullah might almost stand as microcosms of the Anglo-Arab relationship, so contrapuntal were their motives, and so charged were they with pride and policy. On the one side stood the British, at once high-principled and opportunist, harassed by their usual ethical self-questionings, but chiefly determined to win the war and safeguard their grand position in the world. On the other side stood the Hashemites, beguiling but exasperating, with intentions scarcely more altruistic, but with simplicities and naiveties that cast upon the British a perpetual sense of obligation.
Once again there is the hint of ambivalence in James’s tone about the conduct of the British. Were they in 1914 the same ‘wisest and most trustworthy force in world affairs’ they were for him in 1955? Throughout the writings about the British Empire James manages a sort of balancing act, setting convictions born in early life against evidence (mounting, as he conducted his researches) of violence, greed and duplicity. This renders him one of the most stimulating commentators on the history of the empire.
The Hashemite Kings is divided into four sections, on the father (the older Hussein), the sons, the grandsons and the great-grandsons (including the younger Hussein). Spanning the period between 1914 and 1958, it tells the tangled tale of the family’s relationship with the British, and through this the history of the Middle East during this time. James wove his own experiences into the story where it was appropriate (he at one point refers to the comments of ‘a writer in The Times’; this person can only have been James himself). He is clearly fond of the Hashemites, both those he met and those he didn’t. In his ‘Envoi’ he writes:
‘A caravan of martyrs’ is how young King Hussein, looking back over five decades of struggle and violence, saw the progress of his family. The Hashemite kings, though, will leave little more than a scratch upon the surface of history, for they were only the instruments of greater forces. The visionaries of the family believed it to have a divine unifying mission, a mystic place in the progress of the Arabs: but in the end the Arabs themselves discarded the Hashemite kings, for they were born out of their time.
Jan later wrote many essays on the cities of the Middle East. It is fair to say that as a region the Arab world has interested her greatly. Certain individual cities elsewhere may claim her heart, but the delights, the horrors, the complexities of the Arab world, first encountered at such a young age, have held her in thrall throughout her life.
JOURNALIST
For a full decade I had a grandstand view of the world’s great events, and I was constantly astonished … that I was actually being paid for the privilege.
It was clear to James from his time at Lancing that he would be a writer. Journalism provided the practical application of this craft, and his apprenticeship began very early. Unhappy at Lancing, he returned home and persuaded the Western Daily Press, a local newspaper based in Bristol, to take him on as an unpaid cub reporter. Before the days of journalism schools this was the traditional way to begin a career – the memoirs of any number of distinguished journalists tell of the often trifling and hilarious assignments they were given as novices on the newspapers of provincial towns.
James was just sixteen and a half when he joined the Western Daily Press. It was 1943, he was marking time until he could join the army, and this was a far more interesting way of doing so than languishing unhappily at Lancing. In addition to the usual humdrum assignments James had the extraordinary good fortune of interviewing visiting American entertainers, including Cary Grant, James Cagney and Irving Berlin. Bristol was one of the main ports of entry for American soldiers being shipped to England to prepare for the invasion of Europe, and with them came the s
tars whose contribution to the war effort was to keep them happy. For a young man for whom being elegant and racy mattered greatly, these must have been thrilling experiences.
It seems remarkable that a boy of his age and background should have been able to obtain leave to finish his schooling and simply push off into the world. But there was a war on, and his father had been dead for several years. In the absence of any corroborating evidence, and given Jan’s now rather hazy memory of the events, we must conclude that this episode represents the first demonstration of the sort of independence of mind and resolve she became known for in later life.
James’s journalistic career properly began when he joined the Arab News Agency in Cairo in 1947. He intended to return to Oxford to get a degree, but Christ Church could not take him for a year or so. He took a London telephone directory, looked up the word ‘Arab’, and lighted on the ANA. He was interviewed in London and then sent to Cairo, to the part of the world he most wanted to explore.
‘I was a writer,’ Jan says in Conundrum.
Full as I was of more recondite certainties, I had always been sure of that too. I never for a moment doubted my vocation, except when I briefly pined for a more immediate audience, envying musicians their cadenzas, actors their applause. I spent some ten years in journalism, mostly as a foreign correspondent, and worked for three disparate institutions, the Arab News Agency, in Cairo, The Times of London, the Manchester Guardian. I would be a hypocrite to pretend I did not enjoy those years. No life could have been more interesting. For a full decade I had a grandstand view of the world’s great events, and I was constantly astonished, like my colleague Neville Cardus [a writer on cricket and music] before me, that I was actually being paid for the privilege.
