Dubai International Festival of Literature: Alexander Maitland on Sir Wilfred Thesiger

I start the second day of the festival with Alexander Maitland in conversation with Ian Fairservice on the travel writings of Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

Maitland (Thesiger's authorised biographer, literary executor and friend) is an angular, scholarly man. He begins the session by describing his first meeting with Thesiger, recalling Thesiger's nasal voice, stylised way of speaking, and odd habit of emphasising prepositions ('This is utterly meaningless to me', Thesiger would say). (Thesiger also apparently smelled of Brylcreem and mothballs at that first encounter.)

We move on to Thesiger's writings and photography, which both Maitland and Fairservice assert were the by-product of his travels, in that he never travelled with a book or a photo project in mind. Seeking 'savagery and colour', Thesiger travelled instead to be with the people he came to love, and to experience (as Lawrence did) the 'keenness' of the desert. The tale is told of an encounter between Thesiger and Sheikh Zayed, following Thesiger's arrival in Abu Dhabi after crossing the Empty Quarter.
'But why did you take such a long way to get here?' asked the Sheikh.
'Your Highness,' Thesiger replied, 'I wasn't travelling to get here. I was travelling.'

Those of you familiar with Thesiger's writings will know them to be spare and lyrical. There is not much humour in 'Arabian Sands' or 'Marsh Arabs' (both widely regarded as Thesiger's finest works), but Thesiger the man (though 'farouche and unpredictable') could be very funny. Once, when an expensive car sent to ferry him around on a return visit to the Gulf broke down, he reputedly quipped 'At least when your camel breaks down, you can eat it'; and, on another occasion, to a dowager regaling him with tales of society cocktail parties, he reputedly said, 'Madam, last week I was at a party where all the guests arrived naked and we ate one of them before leaving'.

The session is accompanied by a slideshow from Thesiger's photo-library. Thesiger hated colour photography, and worked almost exclusively in black and white. He had a 'tremendous eye', and insisted that his pictures were published as the 'photographer's composition', without editorial cropping. I find myself mesmerised by his work - here are mementoes of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah from a vanished era.

'How would Thesiger have reacted to the Middle East today?', asks a member of the audience.
Maitland and Fairservice both agree that Thesiger would have found the Gulf today 'an Arabian nightmare'. The Gulf had begun to change during his latter years, and Thesiger was never one for modernity. Although he accepted the need for people to enter the twentieth century, this didn't prevent him from feeling a 'tremendous sadness and nostalgia' for the way of life he had known.

His works, however, stand as a 'literary, visual, historical and very human imprint' of a bygone world.