Harrison’s pastoral, stay-at-home sketching session was hardly typical of how he spent his early days in Jerusalem. From the outset, he found himself overwhelmed with work, most of it far from inspiring. In fact, the gap between his architectural ideals and the very real drudgery of his position couldn’t have been more yawning.
His talents were certainly recognized by his superiors. A confidential dossier that would one day be filed among the yellowing papers of the by then defunct British Colonial Office provides the report-card-like estimation that in 1924, Palestine’s director of public works considered A. St. B. Harrison a “very capable officer and a skilled architect both in design and the preparation of quantities and estimates,” while no less than the chief secretary of all the land had “formed a high opinion of this officer’s capacity.” Harrison was, in clipped English sum, “the right man in the right place.” A range of substantive architectural prospects were, accordingly, dangled before him: Ronald Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem, announced himself eager to appoint him to the still only hypothetical position of chief architect of the city; the director of antiquities appreciated his knowledge of archaeology and wanted him to transfer to that department; “vague rumours” circulated about a “gift of £10,000 for a Museum” that he might be asked to design; and it seemed he might be entrusted with planning a costly countrywide system of police barracks and outposts.
But meetings swallowed much of his time, as did writing and rewriting official letters and humoring small-minded administrators like his supervisor, who may have enthused about Harrison’s skills in his confidential reports but in person nitpicked relentlessly, apparently for nitpicking’s own sake: “When I give him a draft letter he reads the first paragraph and begins to criticize it saying that I have omitted this that and the other,” Harrison fumed to his sister Ena. “When he has blown off steam and has tried to give me the impression that only he has the foresight to remember these factors he reads on and finds them all duly noted in the later paragraphs. Then he does not apologize—he never does this—but looks annoyed.” And it wasn’t just his boss who irritated Harrison. Most of what went on in the office was, he declared, “pure humbug. At a committee meeting they will rush business because they have another committee to attend; and when it is concluded they forget all about it and sit about wasting time sipping tea and talking drivel until they are ejected.”
Even though the Mandate was brand-new, it was already creaky as a colonial arthritic. Political and budgetary constraints made productive, creative thought seem slightly futile. “A general feeling of uncertainty and pessimism,” he wrote, hovered over the government offices, and with the need for an official government architect being constantly questioned for financial reasons, he was forced to protect his position by adding to it the role of town planning adviser for the entire country. “This will bring,” he sighed to his sister, “a lot of niggling uninteresting work which I would rather not do.” And indeed he soon found himself a “little overawed by the immensity of the task” he had undertaken in “launching forth into the sea of Town Planning. I don’t know where it will end: there is no shore within sight.” The job was, he wrote, “Herculean,” since “the towns are a mess and the committee of pots haven’t an idea what to do. I am not sure that I can improve the position very much seeing there is no budget voted. I may be useful as the Committee’s scapegoat.” He’d much rather be at home, drawing. (He planned, he wrote, to transfer some of his sketches to wood, for engraving.) In the meantime, he was learning about the intricacies of building in Palestine the cold and wet way. The first rains had begun to fall, and everyone was scrambling to mend their roofs. His own ceiling “shows patches of damp in places so that I am not without anxiety.” But worrying seemed to be part of his job description.
* * *
Between stabilizing Jerusalem’s newly unearthed pre-Jebusite wall and planning a school in Tulkarem, a market in Tiberias, a police station in the town of Madjal, and a police post in the village of Lajjun, Harrison had his hands full—if full of what he called “hack work.” Among other things, he’d been ordered to design the Palestine Pavilion for the so-called British Empire Exhibition to be staged on a massive fairground at Wembley in suburban London.
With its miniature Taj Mahal, Burmese Chin-long players, and butter sculpture of the Prince of Wales decked out by Canadian dairy farmers in full Native American headdress, this colonial lollapalooza had other things on its mind besides Palestine’s plain block of a whitewashed, black-striped, Muslim-mausoleum-like pavilion, which by the time it was complete Harrison said was, anyway, “ruined by a committee.” He had poured himself wholeheartedly into the plans for a “characteristic” local building, but after endless wrangling at meetings, all that remained of what he’d proposed were “the two terminal domes.” Those in charge had, he wrote his father “so modified it, cut it about that I refuse to recognize it as my baby, or rather I cannot. I long for a Maecenas instead of a Committee so that I can do something worthwhile.”
The extravagant Wembley opening ceremony in April 1924 was, meanwhile, attended by 110,000 rapt spectators and presided over by King George V himself. Multiple military bands and a grander-than-gala performance by a choir of 3,000 capped off the proceedings. Conducted by “Pomp and Circumstance” composer Sir Edward Elgar, this vast assemblage of white-surpliced singers belted out William Blake’s fiery words, broadcast to ten million radio listeners all over the world:
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Not everyone was as ecstatic about the fair and its prophetic visions. The lavish but wholly willed and self-satisfied exhibition prompted one visitor among the hordes who made their way there during its first few weeks, a skeptical Virginia Woolf, to describe the windstorm that swept the concourse the day she wandered its pathways as somehow presaging the end of an era and the demise of a certain British way of being. “Pagodas are dissolving in dust,” she’d write, conjuring her vision of an oddly welcome sort of apocalypse: “Ferro-concrete is fallible … The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins…”
Harrison may have had similar premonitions about the fallibility of ferroconcrete. As a paid employee of that same empire, however, he had little choice but to keep on working—in the actual Jerusalem. (In December of that same year, one of the city’s central avenues was christened with King George V’s name, the occasion marked by a ceremony that was modest light-years away from all the pageantry at Wembley: a banner was hung and a small ceremonial arch erected. A trilingual cornerstone commemorating the event still rests at the intersection of Jaffa Road.) With the arrival in Palestine during the summer of 1925 of a new high commissioner, the much decorated and extremely mustachioed Field Marshal Lord Plumer, there was talk of Harrison’s being asked to plan several large post offices, a central prison, the museum, and even the main government compound. His position remained wobbly as that ancient city wall, though, and he felt he must take each commission, small or large, odd or end, as it came to him.
So it was that in a single month that fall he submitted for approval plans and estimates for the house of the British chief representative in Amman and designed the new Palestinian coinage, the first since the English took control of the country. “I don’t relish this job because I have to drive a tandem—a Hebrew and an Arab scribe, neither of whom are likely to have much respect for my ideas and I have to satisfy too many masters: the Colonial Office, the High Commissioner, the British mint and George Rex.” His drawings for the coins would eventually be approved, though the official communications described them as “somewhat austere” (the chief secretary insisted he liked “Mr. Harrison’s austerity”), while Harrison himself was scornful of his own handiwork, which he had “reason to believe is horrid. I am not a medallist and the sculptor has not appreciated my intentions. Moreover I know neither the Arab nor the Hebrew script so perhaps the result was inevitable.”
More meaningful than his first (and last) stab at numismatics was his first attempt at a substantial local building. English and unsurprising though the Amman residence was meant to be, with its drawing room, study, garage, playroom, and so on, all set forth in a strictly outlined “schedule of accommodations” approved in London, he meant to design a structure that suited its setting in both climatic and cultural terms. Explaining that “the house must be as habitable in the hot dry months of midsummer as in the chilly wet ones of winter,” Harrison conceived the building according to the airy symmetries of the Ottoman-era urban mansions he knew from his travels throughout Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. As in many of these subtly capacious homes, the living quarters would consist of an array of rooms radiating around a cavernous central enclosure. In particular, he’d taken to architectural heart the floor plan of the grand Çinili Kiosk, the “tiled kiosk,” built “in a Persian mode” by an anonymous fifteenth-century architect on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople. With its quartet of high, vaulted chambers, or iwans, surrounding a domed, cruciform hall, this garden pavilion was the only remaining one of three, built at the command of Mehmet the Conqueror. Each stood for a far-flung kingdom the sultan had vanquished and made part of his sprawling empire. All of which rendered the kiosk, in slyly scaled-back form, an excellent model for the home of yet another representative of yet another empire on which its leaders claimed the sun would never set.
For Harrison, though, the symbolic assertion of Britain’s global political reach was a good deal less interesting than the progress that the kaffiyeh-wearing workers were making on his first major building in this Middle Eastern mode. Now they’d started blasting rock for the cisterns; now they’d finished the ground-floor windows; now “the stone vaulting (my first) will soon begin,” he reported with his usual understated excitement to his parents. The wife of the chief representative was “unfortunately … only just beginning to understand what it is she is being given.” When she imagined her properly British and bourgeois abode, Harrison’s variation on a Turkish pleasure palace was perhaps not what she’d had in mind.
* * *
As he worked, he walked and looked, and he was always working, walking, looking—sketching, scribbling, roaming wadis and rooftops and back alleys on his days off. He often did this alone, as on the weekend when he trekked some forty miles from Jaffa to Caesarea on foot, or the Sunday he walked by himself for hours from Ramallah to Jericho and almost collapsed in the heat. And he sometimes set out on longer journeys—with just a driver and his own thoughts—traveling to Nazareth and Gaza, from Beirut to Baalbek.
But for all his reclusiveness, he also liked company on such outings. When Ena came for an extended stay in the spring of 1925, they explored closer to home as they scrambled over rocks and hills and took cameras down into Siloam, or Silwan, that ancient village just below his house. Over the course of her several months in Palestine, they hiked to Bethlehem, rode donkeys to the pools of Ain Farah, drove all around the Dead Sea. Another guest, Patrick Geddes’s son-in-law, the architect Frank Mears, arrived in town the next year to work on the plans for the Hebrew University and the national library and wound up staying with him in his Abu Tor house. “A clever modest fellow…,” according to Harrison, “he is very much older than I am and I am learning much from him.” They visited “interesting buildings together,” as Harrison wrote his father. “This I particularly enjoy as never before have I found anyone who cares to do this kind of thing.” They’d just been to Nablus and hoped soon to explore Hebron.
His traveling companions were, in other words, helping him to better see the place where he’d landed and where he was starting to build. And these sociable surveying excursions weren’t confined to Palestine. One of his closest friends in Jerusalem was the English archaeologist and architect George Horsfield, then excavating and working to preserve the ruins of the Roman city of Jerash in Transjordan. When Harrison went to spend “a glorious ten days in the broiling sun” there with Horsfield around the time of Ena’s visit, he rendered plans of one of its ancient amphitheaters and found himself contemplating the startling sight “after a motor run of six hours from Jerusalem” when “you come suddenly upon a great triumphal arch standing in the middle of a wide plain. Then, as you proceed, one after another there appear the ruins of two temples, two theatres, two baths, a colonnaded forum and half a dozen colonnaded streets. The whole is surrounded by the fallen walls of the city which is about a mile square … The cemeteries without the walls are of enormous extent.” With its crumbling fortifications and vast stretches of graves, Jerash sounded strangely like a depopulated version of Jerusalem.
This abandoned Roman town was hardly the only derelict imperial relic through which he had occasion to ramble. On another trip to Transjordan—with Palestine’s director of antiquities and head of the British School in Jerusalem, John Garstang, who kept urging Harrison to transfer to his department—they wound up making their way out of Amman and toward Qasr Amra, where a bathhouse was all that remained of the best-known of the so-called desert castles. Built in the early eighth century by a pleasure-loving Umayyad caliph from Damascus, the small, plain, vaulted structure stood alone in the middle of a desolate expanse. All around, Harrison wrote, were “graves of nomads and in one of the rooms was a corpse which had been deposited there by passing nomads.” Flies abounded, as did frescoes teeming with fading zodiacs, flowers, animals, and “girls doing salome dances and men playing pipes and flutes.” However vivid, these traces seemed haunted: the chipping wall paintings, the dead body, the flies, “a wide-mouthed well … but this well is now dry.”
Harrison didn’t really need to venture so far, though, to absorb the local landscape in excellent company. Of all the Jerusalem friends and visitors who taught him to see more sharply where he was, the one from whom he learned the most—“certainly much more than from anyone else in Palestine,” as he’d put it years later—he met just outside his very own garden in the moonlight. On that particular dazzling night, he mistook David Bomberg for a chimney.
The squat British painter in the soft hat might have chosen to pitch his easel anywhere in the bright Jerusalem dark, so it seems almost fated that he’d picked this spot, right beside Austen Harrison’s Abu Tor home. The two didn’t yet know each other, and Bomberg had gravitated to this perch because of the wide-open angle it afforded him onto the slopes of Mount Zion, the Old City walls, and the funnel-shaped roof of the Dormition Abbey. New to Jerusalem, he and his wife, Alice—a free-spirited convert to Judaism and a divorcée some ten years his senior—had just moved into half a rented house immediately below Harrison’s.
Their bearings and biographies were so wildly at odds, it’s hard to imagine the men tolerating, let alone enjoying, one another. The calm, reserved, politely Protestant Harrison was descended from what he called “undistinguished country gentry” in Kent, and although he was living in relative rusticity here in Palestine, he hadn’t shed all the genteel trappings of his old British life. He employed an Arab servant, Yacoub, to keep house, and he found money to pay for both Greek and singing lessons. He liked to be alone; his letters that have survived into this century are entirely silent on the subject of romantic or sexual attachment.
The depressive, aggressive, and very Jewish Bomberg, meanwhile, was raised in the impoverished East End of London, one of eleven children born to a temperamental Polish immigrant father and a doting if harried mother. His marriage to Alice was tempestuous in the extreme; one acquaintance from their Jerusalem years reported in her diary that “they can behave like wild cats and quarrel fiercely.” Usually living from meal to meal and painting to painting, he was ferocious about his art, and his work was fueled by a gnawing restlessness, a constant need to upend his own and others’ conceptions. He both craved the attention of his peers and scorned it, refusing to sign their manifestos or appear in their magazines. A childhood friend would later recount that “pugnacious is too mild a word” to describe him as a young man. “He wanted to dynamite the whole of English painting.”
By the time he planted his canvas on that hillside in Abu Tor, he was thirty-three years old; his explosive relation to the tradition had been severely tempered and darkened by his harrowing experiences in the Great War’s trenches and by the loss of several close friends in the fighting. He was also troubled by his increasingly marginal status in the English art world, and by the paralyzing sense that he had exhausted the possibilities of painterly abstraction. Understanding that Bomberg had reached something of a crisis in his work, the Scottish etcher Muirhead Bone had intervened and encouraged him to take up a more realistic tack. At the same time, Bone had lobbied the Zionist leadership to hire the painter, since the work of a talented artist working in situ in Palestine would lend, Bone suggested, “more variety to their propaganda and … strike the minds of thoughtful imaginative people to whom photographs make little or no appeal.” He should be, in Bone’s unfortunate animal-trainer-like terminology, the Zionists’ “tame artist.”
So it was that Bomberg’s and Alice’s boat tickets were paid for by Keren Hayesod, or the Palestine Foundation Fund, in exchange for paintings of the “Zionist reconstruction work”—swamp draining, settlement building—that its leaders were eager for him to get down to producing for use on their posters. But when he and Alice visited the Jewish settlements, “David got no inspiration from them,” as she’d later report. “They seemed to be untidy and shiftless and to lack a sense of order.” Instead of the “heroic pictures” the Zionists had ordered, he found himself drawn instinctively to rendering the shapes of Jerusalem’s minarets and city walls, its domes and church spires, whose most minute details he became possessed with the idea of re-creating on canvas. He was, as Harrison would one day put it, “the most intense painter I’ve ever known. He could be elated or depressed; and when he finished a painting, he would claim it to be either a masterpiece or a total failure.”
Unlikely as a friendship between them seemed, Harrison scraped together the money to buy one of the first paintings that Bomberg completed in and of Jerusalem (Siloam and the Mount of Olives, a more accomplished variation on the drawing that he himself had been attempting while sitting in his garden on his days off), and they grew extremely close, bound by the numerous traits and fascinations that, for all their differences, they shared. Both were highly gifted visual artists, obsessed with their work and unrelentingly critical of their own creations; both had experienced hallucinatory visions of death and destruction during the war. Both had broken free of England and its stifling manners; both came alive in the open air of Palestine, while both held themselves aloof from society there. As awkward as Harrison felt among groups of Englishmen, Bomberg seemed uncomfortable at gatherings of Palestinian Jews.
Both responded strongly to the light of the place. Bomberg set out in his paintings to try to capture it baldly and in all its parched starkness (or moonlit calm), while Harrison worked his hardest to create in the cloisters and courtyards of his buildings cool pockets of much-needed shade. Although Bomberg had veered from the pure abstraction of his earlier work, he was still propelled by what he called “a Sense of Form”—as was Harrison. Both aimed to strip away all “irrelevant matter” from their creations. As their work evolved in this setting, it evolved in tandem. The logic, restraint, and complex placidity of Harrison’s architecture were mirrored in the eerily vacant, controlled cityscapes of Bomberg’s Jerusalem paintings and drawings, which show a town nearly empty of people but still alive with stark edges, looming uprights, gentle curves.
Both were introverts who relished friendship and serious, frank conversation: “We talked of everything…,” Harrison would remember, decades after Bomberg’s death. “No subject was taboo not even Zionism, Jews, imperialists, civil servants round which subjects most Christians & Jews skirted in those days. But above all we talked about art … I learned so much from him … He was so patient with my ignorance & innocence.”
He was being overly modest, since they both taught each other—Bomberg would later insist as much—and if anything, Bomberg’s newly naturalistic, precise, and emphatically architectural paintings of Jerusalem seemed to reflect the city as the men came to view it together. Even after Bomberg and Alice moved to a room at the top of the Banco di Roma building inside the Jaffa Gate, the painter spent long days and nights intent at his easel in Harrison’s garden. All his most vivid landscapes of the Jerusalem rooftops are seen from this, his friend’s, angle.
* * *
For better or worse, the men were also bound by their relationship to what Harrison wearily called “propaganda.” Both were skeptical individualists working for political bodies whose ideological certainties unnerved them—though to varying degrees they did what they must in order to eat. Harrison proved more skillful at this than the fiercely uncompromising Bomberg.
The architect would later recall one of the early pictures of “Palestine Development” that Bomberg rendered in his role as dutiful hired hand. This was a grim, blurred set of huddled gray and black forms, meant to represent workers laboring in a quarry, and not surprisingly his Zionist handlers found it “void of propaganda value & refused it. I remember what a state David got into … trying at one & the same time to please his masters & preserve his integrity.” He might as well have been describing himself—though Harrison’s temperament was much more controlled and he’d made his peace with this state of affairs in ways that the chronically agitated Bomberg never would.
When Plumer took up the high commissioner’s post, Harrison knew the demands on him would change, “as I expect I shall find it less easy to avoid Government House functions. I have contrived so far to attend none.” He’d even had to order a dress suit from the Army and Navy stores “just in case I am commanded to attend.” Annoyed as he was by this expense—he’d rather have spent his money on Bomberg’s paintings and gramophone records—when he finally did make his way to Government House for lunch, Plumer impressed him; he was “very gracious and had obviously informed himself about me.” The new high commissioner had plans for the government architect, and for the country at large. He “hates the house in which he is obliged to live”—the drafty and fortresslike Augusta Victoria Hospice built in a heavy German style at the behest of the kaiser on the Mount of Olives at the start of the century and used as German military headquarters during the war—and was eager to replace it. He was also eager for the Public Works Department to step up construction of the various police buildings, post offices, and quarantine stations that a properly functioning British territory demanded. Plumer may have been a war hero whose chest was thick with military medals, but he prided himself on his common sense and his matter-of-fact, nonpartisan approach to maintaining law and order—as though by means of firm will and good manners one could rule Palestine like a sleepy English village. Never mind all the violently competing claims to every inch of land in the land. He himself had, he asserted, “no personal policy.” His policy was “that of His Majesty’s Government.” He ordered his district commissioners to stop issuing their regular political reports because, as he insisted, “There is no political situation—don’t create one!”
Harrison had no such illusions about the politics of Palestine. “Everything is propaganda,” he repeated, ruefully, several times in one 1925 letter to his father. He had been asked to weigh in, for example, on what he called “the great University scheme,” the plans that Geddes and Mears had drawn up for the campus on Mount Scopus. Much as he appreciated both architects personally (his affection for Mears was plain, and he’d later call Geddes “that unappreciated genius”), over the course of eighteen months he’d pored over and discussed the design with Magnes and other officials, and discovered that “the whole thing was based on pious hopes and little cash … The Geddes dream was propaganda.” And it wasn’t just Jewish or Zionist intentions that he doubted. He was also wary of various Englishmen in authority. “For a second time I have been pressed (by Sir Ronald Storrs) to give up my Government job and become City Architect of Jerusalem. I was asked to state my own terms. I have categorically refused because I believe the proposal only propaganda for Storrs.”
But for all his wariness, he was eager to get down to more serious work, and Plumer’s presence made that possible. In October 1926 he wrote his mother to say that “everything is now settled as regards Government House.” While the secretary of state had offered to “send a ‘competent’ architect from England to do it,” his superiors wanted Harrison to render the plans. Noting that he was “somewhat of an expert on the historic side of near Eastern architecture,” one of them scribbled in the Colonial Office file that “I have always heard very high accounts of Mr. Harrison, the only criticism being that his artistic tastes were of too high an order to be wasted on the erection of police barracks & public lavatories. Government House should give him better scope.”
And as Harrison himself summed up the situation, “To cap it all Lord Plumer, of whom everybody is a little frightened, said that ‘even if Mr Harrison was not in Palestine but in England he is the man I would wish to build the House and I would send for him to do it.’ So that’s that.” He hoped to be relieved of the hackwork he had complained of “so that I can concentrate on the design of important buildings.”