Letters from Doughty-Wylie...Today world premiere of QOTD in Berlin

today the highly anticipated film of Werner Herzog has world premiere on the Berlin Film Festival and it seems Damian Lewis and Nicole Kidman will attend together with Herzog...let's wait and see but first let's read letter extracts from Doughty-Wylie to Gertrude Bell.if Damian Lewis attends as usual you will read and see it here and on our main site damian-lewis.com :-)

Read here some extracts from the letters:

Their letters constitute an excursion into late Victorian romanticism.

His are filled with poetic images of an enclosed garden, his metaphor for their relationship. 

Invoking, as he consistently did, the heart of the mind instead of the body must have

seemed a rather breath-taking evasion to a woman long deprived of earthly love.

How unfulfilling for her to read in his letters about an imaginary place where the two of them might

dwell together in spiritual ,if not physical, union.

It was the latter that Bell both feared and desired, having learned that attachments could be ephemeral.

She Wanted commitment; he could not give it.

 Thus, they reached an impasse that neither was able to resolve.

“If you knew the way I have packed backwards and forwards on the floor of hell for the past few months. “  Bell wrote a friend before leaving for Arabia in November 1913,” you would think me

right to try and find any way out.”

(Winstone 1978b132)

There would be consolation in the desert.

Rumors increased Arab displeasure with Turkish rule were an added enticement.

“My dear “Dick wrote that autumn, as she made plans to leave England

“ I want to see you but that of course can’t be until God pleases ----my dear, I wish

you the best of Luck on your adventure , and may all run easy for you….someday perhaps we will do

a track together” (Charles Doughty-Wylie to Gertrude Bell 6 Oct.1913)

to speak lightly about danger was part of the sangfroid of prewar Edwardian culture.

In truth she was going headlong into a thicket of tribal war, a place few Westerners had entered

and only then  when compelled by important errands.

To be continued …

Source : Gertrude Bell The Arabian Diaries ,1913-1914