Bruce Chatwin is one of the most significant British novelists and travel writers of our time. His books have become modern-day classics which defy categorisation, inspired by and reflecting his incredible journeys. Tragically, Chatwin’s compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he had found it. ‘Bruce had just begun’ said his friend, Salman Rushdie, ‘we saw only the first act’.
But Chatwin left behind a wealth of letters and postcards that he wrote, from his first week at school until shortly before his death at the age of forty-eight. Whether typed on Sotheby’s notepaper or hastily scribbled, Chatwin’s correspondence reveals more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books; his health and finances, his literary ambitions and tastes, his uneasiness about his sexual orientation; above all, his lifelong quest for where to live. Comprising material collected over two decades from hundreds of contacts across five continents, Chatwin’s letters are a valuable and illuminating record of one of the greatest and most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century.
Bruce Chatwin reinvented British travel writing with his first book, In Patagonia, and followed it with four other books, each unique and extraordinary. He died in 1989.
Elizabeth Chatwin was born in the USA. She came to London in 1961 to work at Sotheby’s, where she met Bruce Chatwin. They married in 1965. She now keeps Black Welsh Mountain Sheep.
Nicholas Shakespeare was born in Worcester in 1957 and grew up in the Far East and Latin America. He is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards, The High Flyer, for which he was nominated as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, The Dancer Upstairs, Secrets of the Sea and most recently, Inheritance. His non-fiction includes In Tasmania, winner of the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize, and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.
In Patagonia
The Viceroy of Ouidah
On the Black Hill
The Songlines
Utz
What Am I Doing Here
Photographs and Notebooks
with Paul Theroux
Patagonia Revisited
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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Letters: Copyright © The Bruce Chatwin Estate
Introduction and Notes: Copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin 2010
Bruce Chatwin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Extract from The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly copyright © Cyril Connolly. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN.
Extract from Ups and Downs: Diaries 1972-5 by Frances Partridge copyright © Frances Partridge. Reproduced by permission of the Partridge Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN.
The author and the publishers have made every effort to trace the holders of copyright in illustrations and quotations. Any inadvertent omissions or errors may be corrected in future editions.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Jonathan Cape
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099466147
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Bruce Chatwin
Title Page
Preface
Elizabeth Chatwin
Introduction
Nicholas Shakespeare
CHAPTER ONE
SCHOOLDAYS: 1948–58
CHAPTER TWO
SOTHEBY’S: 1959–66
CHAPTER THREE
EDINBURGH: 1966–8
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE: 1969–72
CHAPTER FIVE
SUNDAY TIMES: 1972–4
CHAPTER SIX
GONE TO PATAGONIA: 1974–6
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH: 1976–80
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON THE BLACK HILL: 1980–83
CHAPTER NINE
THE SONGLINES: 1983–5
CHAPTER TEN
CHINA AND INDIA: 1985–6
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HOMER END: 1986–8
CHAPTER TWELVE
OXFORD AND FRANCE: 1988–9
Picture Section
Acknowledgements and permissions
Index
Copyright
I first met Bruce in late 1961 at Sotheby’s, where I came to work for a couple of years. I was the first American that the auction house had employed in London and was, of course, a curiosity. Not long afterwards, Bruce was sent on his first trip to New York, to look at collections of paintings for possible sale. He was enchanted by everything, especially the glamorous old wealthy Wasp milieu which made a fuss of him. After that trip – from which he returned wearing a large checked woollen jacket and hat to match, the sort worn by country people at work – I became more interesting.
During the next few years we spent weekends in the Black Mountains, walked the Malvern Hills with his father, and one summer we almost rendezvoused in Libya. We were married in 1965.
His letters and postcards from that time have disappeared. I managed to keep most of the subsequent ones. I am thrilled that a collection of his correspondence is to be published. Letters are the most vivid writing of all. His mother kept his weekly notes written from prep school and these are already full of different interests and enthusiasms. It is fascinating to see the child develop into an art historian at Sotheby’s. He was always good at stories, which became his eventual career.
Bruce was Sotheby’s expert for the Impressionist and Modern Art (excluding British) and the Antiquities Departments. The latter meant artefacts from India, the Ancient Near East and Europe and Amerindia, the Pacific and Africa – the World – and involved endless research at the British Museum and Musée de L’Homme in Paris. He became more and more disturbed by archaeological objects brought in to sell – some of which were stolen from unrecorded sites – and fakes. He began to regret that Sotheby’s had cajoled him into not going to Oxford when a place came up. They persuaded him that he would do very well without a degree.
By 1966 he was looking at universities with the idea of reading archaeology … Only Edinburgh and Cambridge offered a degree course for undergraduates, so to Edinburgh he went. It would mean a dramatic fall in income but we reckoned we could manage.
Edinburgh in those days was very grim in the winter. The Royal Mile on which we had rented a flat in a newly built block had 23 pubs and none with chairs to sit on. To get green vegetables and salad, I had to go to the New Town (across the bridge in the eighteenth-century part) where there was a proper greengrocer. The huge North British Hotel did not know what a salad was. The best things were the fish and the outside oyster bar. You took your white wine and they provided brown bread and butter with the oysters. Freezing but fun.
Bruce worked terribly hard and well into the night. He was very competitive and at 26 was a mature student up against teenagers just out of school. He studied Sanskrit as well as archaeology and came out top of his class, to his delight. Then, after two and a half years of a four-year course, he quit. He did not even tell me he was going to. He became disillusioned after going on digs in the summer and realising he didn’t like disturbing the dead.
By this time he had become fascinated by nomads and he began to write about them. Thanks to a fee to go and look at a collection in Egypt he had enough money to travel a bit. In 1969 he and Peter Levi went to Afghanistan on a grant Peter had from Oxford. This was Bruce’s third visit. I joined them after two months and was utterly beguiled by the country. Nine years later, the Russians upset the balance forever.
He worked on the nomad book for several years, but it was and remains unpublishable. Then he was persuaded to go and work for the Sunday Times magazine, quite a distinguished publication in those days. He made many lifelong friends there.
Bruce began as the art expert to replace David Sylvester who was leaving. He ended up doing articles on Algeria, Mrs Gandhi, André Malraux as well as on art. He met Eileen Gray, an Irish designer of furniture and interiors who was an important influence in the use of new materials such as Perspex in combination with traditional ones. She had lived in Paris since 1904. Gray encouraged him to go to Patagonia for her, as she had always wanted to go but was now too old.
So again he made a dramatic move in his life, without telling anyone till he was nearly on his way. He wrote a letter to the Sunday Times on a little piece of yellow foolscap now lost or stolen. He usually telephoned me from some tiny bar on the road as he was moving south. He was full of praise for Moet & Chandon Argentine bubbly. To find champagne in an unlikely place was a great lift to his morale. He loved it.
He nearly always travelled alone: two people have a defence, but a single person is approachable. He could never have managed Patagonia with me tagging along, or The Viceroy of Ouidah or most of his books.
He slightly altered the people he met along the way – the brothers in On the Black Hill were not twins; a nurse in In Patagonia was a devotee of Agatha Christie, not Osip Mandelstam. It enraged the people thus altered, as Nicholas Shakespeare and I found when retracing his steps in 1992 in Patagonia – all part of his storytelling. The Songlines has completely invented characters.
People used to ask me how I felt about his endless absences from home. Sometimes it was annoying that I had to cope alone, but I knew he was working; he had to be free. At the very beginning of our marriage he said he hoped I didn’t mind, but he had to go off by himself – The Cat that Walks by Himself, a lovely picture by Kipling is on my kitchen dresser.
Bruce always kept in touch by letter or telephone from the ends of the earth and I simply wasn’t curious about what he was doing. He would entertain me with stories on his return.
In the early 1970s I was given my first Black Welsh Mountain ewes, and from then on my calendar was set to a sheep timetable. I still have their descendants and am just as fond of them.
Bruce attracted all sorts of people throughout his careers. He had a talent for making friends wherever he was: on buses, trains, ships. Somehow he discovered a stranger’s abiding interest within minutes, and they chattered away like old friends. It always amazed me. They thought it was friends for life. Exchanging addresses meant letters coming to him from all sorts of unlikely places. A Nigerian had a plan to start a shop and asked for a huge list of things like socks and shirts and pants and cotton thread to stock it with. More lists would arrive. I’m afraid we ignored them.
Once Bruce began to write books he became addicted to it and woke up in the morning thinking of the work. When we travelled together on the Continent he would become very restless if he had not been able to write for more than a couple of days. He would rearrange the room we were staying in so he could sit and work. I was sent out to sightsee for myself.
It is wonderful how many people kept his letters, even before he became a well-known writer. He never kept anything, including the first editions of his books.
I simply don’t know what he would have thought of computers and of using them to write books on. He might have felt it was more fun than anything to talk to any person anywhere in the world, or he might have hated it. When we were trekking in the Everest National Park in 1983 we were approached by a lone American who tried to attach himself to our camp (repulsed by evasion eventually). He said that within a few years Bruce would be using a word processor to write with. He got a mocking reply from us, and indeed Bruce never even looked at a computer as far as I know. But he observed that most books published after the advent of word processors were much bigger. Nothing wrong with them, but too long, as it was so easy to correct and adapt with the machine.
His system was to write by hand on yellow (American) legal foolscap and correct and delete and discard sheet after sheet. When he was fairly happy, he typed it out with large margins and then corrected and changed it some more. Then maybe another handwritten copy and definitely more typewritten ones. He threw away mountains of paper, so there are no working manuscripts to be seen.
He never showed his work to anyone till he was satisfied with it, but he read it aloud to me. Everything had to sound right and flow easily. The letters are the only unreworked writing of his. He felt that writing was a labour. A computer made it too easy.
And now that communication has become so fast and easy with mobile phones and e-mail, no one writes letters any more. No notes from the little darlings at prep school to treasure, maybe no love letters and no travellers’ accounts. Does anyone print the communications they get for keepsakes?
So Bruce’s letters, starting from a very young age and continuing through life, are a last example of a traditional form of communication which may now disappear.
ELIZABETH CHATWIN
I am most certainly in the mood for writing letters
A year before his death in January 1989 Bruce Chatwin opened a letter from his London publisher Tom Maschler and read the following:
‘I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.’
Twenty-one years on, Maschler finds no reason to alter his opinion. ‘Of what I call “my lot” – Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie – Bruce was the one I was most anxious to know where he was going to go. I think had he lived he would have been ahead of all of them,’ he told me.
Chatwin’s compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he found it. In his last months, wrapped in a shawl beside the stove at Homer End near Oxford, he lamented to Elizabeth: ‘There are so many things I want to do.’ A work on healing to be called The Sons of Thunder; a triptych of stories after Flaubert’s Trois Contes, ‘one set in Ireland in the days of Irish kings’; an Asian novel about the Austro-American botanist Joseph Rock who lived in China; another novel, based in South Africa, which would explore the gossip and jealousies of a Karoo dorp. And, of course, his Russian epic Lydia Livingstone, a love story first and foremost which was to weave in three cities – Paris, Moscow, New York – and attempt to fictionalise his wife’s Jamesian family. ‘Bruce had just begun,’ says his friend Salman Rushdie. ‘We didn’t have his developed books, the books that might have come out of falling in love with his wife. We saw only the first act.’
One of the titles he liked, though he did not yet have a book for it, was Under the Sun.
It was a foreigner who asked the question: ‘Why should the disappearance of Bruce Chatwin make such a difference?’ Writing in June 1989 in the Times Literary Supplement, Hans Magnus Enzensberger answered his own question in this way: ‘it is surely as a storyteller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed – a storyteller going far beyond the conventional limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and gossip.’ For Enzensberger, with whom Chatwin had plotted a future walk along the Berlin Wall and down the East German border, it was not enough to say that he died young or was full of promise. ‘Chatwin never delivered the goods that critics or publishers or the reading public expected. Not fearing to disappoint, he surprised us at every turn of the page.’ Enzensberger concluded: ‘Underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev. When we return to Bruce Chatwin we find much in him that has been left unsaid.’
While we shall never know the surprise of his unwritten works, Chatwin has left behind a body of writing that is striking for its freshness; an authentic conduit which allows us to return to him and even to be rewarded in the manner Enzensberger hints at: namely the letters and postcards that he wrote from his first week at boarding-school, two weeks shy of his eighth birthday, until shortly before his death at the age of 48.
* * *
Assigned in Nazi-occupied Paris to censoring civilian mail coming from Germany, Ernst Jünger, the subject of one of Chatwin’s best essays, confided to his diary: ‘There’s nothing people won’t set down in letters.’
Whether typed on Sotheby’s notepaper, or written with a Mont Blanc pen on sheets of blue stationery from a shop in Mount Street (with a proper die for his address), or scribbled on the backs of postcards with a blunt hotel pencil, Chatwin’s correspondence reveals much more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books.
Alone in his letters did he make known that he had been present on a February day near Johannesburg when a cracked fragment of antelope bone was prised from the floor of the Swartkrans cave, soapy-feeling and speckled with dark patches as if burned: evidence, it turned out, of man’s ‘earliest use of fire’. For all his brilliance, Chatwin could be disarmingly modest, hiding his light under the same bushel as his well-concealed darknesses. The Bruce Chatwin who appears in The Songlines, In Patagonia and What Am I Doing Here is his own best, most achieved character: observant, intelligent, sharp-witted, heterosexual, generous, intrepid. This persona was an essential part of the appeal of his writing. ‘In his books you were addressed not merely by a distinctive voice,’ observed Michael Ignatieff, ‘but by the fabulous character he had fashioned for himself.’ The Bruce Chatwin of the letters is less certain of who he is, more vulnerable but more human. Delicate about his health and finances; uneasy about his sexual orientation and his relationship with England; above all, restless almost to the point of neurosis.
In his passport, Chatwin put ‘farmer’ as his profession, but his life was spent on the hoof, a sizeable proportion of it in the study of nomads. An internal memo circulated at Cape in October 1982 gives a flavour of his travels, their tern-like spread. ‘Publicity have no idea when Bruce Chatwin will be in Australia – neither does his agent! As far as we know he is still in Siberia/Russia.’ He copied into one of his signature Moleskine notebooks this telling line from Montaigne: ‘I ordinarily reply to those who ask me the reason for my travels, that I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am looking for.’ About the motivations for Chatwin’s restlessness, I have not yet found a more convincing explanation than this, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyen Qui Duc. ‘Nomads in the old days travelled around looking for food, for shelter, for water; modern day nomads, we travel around looking for ourselves.’
Written with the verve and sharpness of expression that first marked him out as an author, Chatwin’s correspondence gives a vivid synopsis of his interests and concerns over forty years. To read his letters and postcards is to be with him on the road: in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Niger, Benin, Mauretania, Tierra del Fuego, Brazil, Nepal, India, Alice Springs, London, New York, Edinburgh, Wotton-Under-Edge, Ipsden – in pursuit of the restless chimera that was Bruce Chatwin, that ‘haunting’ and elusive presence who is at once ‘sparse and solitary and moving’.
* * *
A life revealed through letters is not nowadays so linear as a biography. It zig-zags through time and space rather in the manner of Chatwin’s accounts of his journeys to Patagonia and Australia; it is messy, repetitive, congested, of the moment. Nor, frustratingly, can you rely on it to deliver letters when you want – from periods, and about incidents and people, just when their insight might prove most welcome. But it has this virtue: it is a life told at the time in the subject’s own voice and words. It is the closest we have to his conversation.
The multifaceted narrator of Chatwin’s books is a person who says remarkably little. He is virtually a mime artist, a character of laconic observations and lapidary asides that camouflage what he is thinking – ‘stepping back to hide himself,’ as his friend Gregor Von Rezzori saw it, ‘in the cultivated impersonality of a newspaper article’. This impression is misleading. In his letters, as in life, Chatwin was no less voluble than was Marcel Marceau when not being silent on stage.
‘I don’t believe in coming clean,’ Chatwin famously told Paul Theroux. In his letters, he cannot avoid it. They are the raw matter of his thoughts, a way of trying them out on the page, the first version. They chart his struggle with who he was and what he wanted to be; art expert, husband, archaeologist, writer – first as an academic theorist, then as an unrepentant storyteller. They are as much a communication with whoever he is writing to as a continuing natter with himself.
Chatwin’s Gloucestershire neighbour, Jim Lees-Milne, recorded in his diary the local Duke of Beaufort’s opinion that ‘posterity should never judge people by their correspondence, as what they wrote one day was often the opposite of what they thought the next.’ The shifting stream of Chatwin’s mental processes is part of what injects his letters with their vitality. It is not uncommon for him to change his mind from one letter to the next, even between the paragraphs of a single letter. He changes his mind about his house, Australia, Africans, about whether to join his wife in India. ‘He’s thinking on paper and clarifying his mind, like a conversation,’ Elizabeth says. Especially volatile are his travel plans, more uncertain than the on-again-off-again sale of his Maori bedpost that once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt; or the saga of the long-awaited cheque from James Ivory to cover the cost of a week’s car hire in France. No sooner does he arrive anywhere than he is shouldering his rucksack, plotting to leave. ‘Everything is always perfect to begin with, but he gets fed up with a place very quickly and in no time at all he’s picking holes.’
Then, sent as often as not from the next place – a postcard.
For Paul Theroux, with whom he once gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society, Chatwin’s postcards have the effect of miniature billboards, being ‘the perfect medium for many boasters, combining vividness, cheapness and an economy of effort’; they allow him to stay in touch without the depth and commitment of letters. But another American writer, David Mason, is less sure that these postcards betray the vice of the self-advertiser. Mason met Chatwin just once, at a bus stop in Greece: ‘His terse correspondence with acquaintances like me was surely the product of a gregarious sensibility. Some writers become self-advertisers out of a grating neediness. What I sensed from Bruce was more akin to uncontainable enthusiasm.’
This enthusiasm is certainly what appealed to Chatwin’s editor, Susannah Clapp, for whom the idiom of the postcard chimed with his dash and mystery and elipses as a writer. He liked short sentences, short paragraphs; the condensed description of the Sotheby’s cataloguer and postcard sender. ‘Pungent, visually arresting and on the wing,’ Clapp writes, ‘for Bruce Chatwin postcards were the perfect means of communication’ – and allowed him to startle with a bolt from the blue. Arguably his most famous sentence (though the hardcopy has not been traced) was the telegram (it may have been a letter) that he is reputed to have sent to his editor at the Sunday Times magazine, saying GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS (it may have been six). A postcard to his Italian publisher (also missing) contained, apparently, the warning line: ‘Australia is Hell.’
A phrase that does reoccur is ‘I think of you often.’ One of many to receive it was the Queensland poet Pam Bell, with whom Chatwin stayed on the last leg of his second and final journey to Australia. ‘There was warmth in his postcards,’ she said. ‘You felt he really wanted to bring you up to date. People very often say they thought of you and it’s just a skim, but with Bruce, you did feel that for some minutes he cared about you.’ He posted a card to the classical historian Robin Lane Fox, whose ancestor General Augustus Pitt Pivers had amassed a collection of priceless Benin Bronzes seized by a British raiding party in 1897. ‘Bruce wrote that if I didn’t get in touch he would launch a punitive expedition and come and take my willow-pattern cups away.’
* * *
Chatwin is not everyone’s cup of tea. Under-appreciated for most of his writing life – more or less until the publication of The Songlines (1987) – his reputation after he died ballooned very briefly into a cult-like phenomenon, only to undergo a deflation. The nation’s favourite author, Alan Bennett, was turned into a ‘mean-minded’ reader by Chatwin’s introduction to Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. ‘One afternoon,’ Chatwin writes, ‘I took The Road to Oxiana into the mosque [of Shei Luft’ullah in Isfahan] and sat, cross-legged, marvelling both at the tilework and Byron’s description of it.’
‘It’s the “cross-legged” I dislike,’ Bennett wrote, ‘partly because five minutes of it and I’d be crippled. But why tell us?’ Bennett recoiled from what he perceived as Chatwin’s ‘snobbishness’ towards travellers who had come after Byron, ‘the droves of young people who took to the road in the sixties and seventies’. Nor was Bennett engaged by a description of how Wali Jahn helped Chatwin to safety when he got blood-poisoning, which struck him as ‘sheer Buchan’ in ‘the permitted degree of male camaraderie, men caring and crying for each other, both nobly’.
Barry Humphries was typical of several former friends who pretended they were no longer beguiled, writing in the Spectator in May 2006: ‘Starbucks, incidentally, is on my list of the grossly overrated, along with Bruce Chatwin, Cézanne’s Bathers, French onion soup, Bob Dylan, Niagara Falls, Citizen Kane, the Caribbean, the novels of Patrick O’Brian, Pilates, lobster, The Lord of the Rings, and most sculpture.’ And yet to a generation which has grown up grazing on the Internet, it can seem as though Chatwin, far from being overrated, has slipped back into the obscurity in which he laboured while he wrote and published his first three books. Interviewed in Australia twelve years after his death, I was asked by a puzzled young journalist: ‘Who was Bruce Chatwin?’
My answer, roughly, was that Chatwin was a precursor of the Internet: a connective super-highway without boundaries, with instant access to different cultures. He was a storyteller of bracing prose, at once glass-clear and dense, who offered a brand new way of representing travelling; further, he held out in his six books the possibility of something wonderful and unifying, inundating us with information but also the promise that we will one day get to the root of it. And I quoted his friend Robyn Davidson: ‘He posed questions that we all want answered and perhaps gave the illusion they were answerable.’
If his questions have not gone away, nor have queries over Chatwin’s reputation. The interrogation mark omitted deliberately from the title of his last book continues to hover over the character of its author, who, on scant evidence, has been accused of making things up, of not telling the truth. He may be guilty of other sins – for example, not telling Anatoly Sawenko that he was modelling the principal character in The Songlines on him, or failing to send him a copy of the published book. And yet Chatwin was not a ‘whopper merchant’. In following his trail, I found errors, but strikingly few examples of mere invention, fewer than in the case of one or two of his disciples; or, say, Norman Lewis, who, imperishable travel-writer though he is, enjoys a reputation as a ‘truth-speaker’ that would have amused him enormously, and probably did.
‘I absolutely deny to the end of my days that Bruce was a fraud, a poseur and a sham,’ says Robin Lane Fox. ‘I don’t think he was any of these things. He had sharp beams of knowledge and a range of fragmented, intimately observed allusions that he could piece together in the most extraordinary original whole, beyond the frontiers of normal publication. There was no object I could allude to that he didn’t know – a Spartan bronze, the Vix Crater in Burgundy, a silver plate on a Greek Bactrian elephant and a drawing of a similar object known in the Channel Islands in the nineteenth-century and since lost. He would have a wild card on the uses of it, and off we’d be on a vast horizon expanding all the way from Russia to Siberia – a phenomenal imaginative display, entirely spontaneous, but based on genuine knowledge. It wasn’t fraudulent balls. He understood. I learned so much from Bruce. Boy, he knew.’
For Elisabeth Sifton, Chatwin’s American editor: ‘Bruce was an artist not a liar.’ Paradoxically, he did not have a fictional gift. He had the imagination to tell stories, to connect them, to enlarge, colour and improve them, but not to invent. Whether this reflects the terror of the autodidact, Chatwin more than most writers felt compelled to meet the people he wrote about, go to the places, read the books – where possible in the original language. ‘His art of arranging, composing and enspiriting the material was, though, more like a novelist’s than a journalist’s,’ says Sifton.
Perhaps the way to understand his stories is to treat them as Graham Speake advises us to view the stories of monks on Mount Athos, the place which in important respects marked the end of Chatwin’s quest – i.e. as ‘embroideries of a fundamental truth’. At his worst, he can irritate like any writer can; he can be cold, peremptory, relentlessly exotic. At his best, though, he is less economical with the truth than spendthrift. He tells not a half-truth but a truth and a half.
Nowhere does Chatwin arouse more suspicion than in the manner he is perceived to have dealt with his final illness: he died of Aids, but denied in public that he had it. His denial bred a sense that if he lied about his life, he must have lied about his work. Some readers have taken this as a cue to pass judgement on his books – or else not to bother with them. It deserves repeating that Chatwin’s medical reports confirm that he said nothing he was not given leave to believe by his doctors at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. At the time he fell ill – the mid-1980s – all sufferers of Aids had HIV, but it was not known for certain whether every person infected with HIV automatically contracted Aids. The disease, which had appeared in New York in 1981, was relatively new to England and still ‘mysterious and shameful’ in the words of the gay writer Edmund White, one of a number of men who had sex with Chatwin.
Whatever Chatwin’s private fears during this period of profound public anxiety, he clung to the shred of hope offered by the presence of a then-rare fungus that he might not, after all, necessarily develop Aids (the fungus is now known to be an Aids-defining illness). It is unfair to judge him for any pronouncements that he made once his brain had been poisoned. By the time his HIV had developed into full-blown Aids, he was much like his description of Rimbaud, who died in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, ‘mumbling in his delirium a stream of poetic images which his sister Isabelle, though she had paper and pencil to hand, did not think to write down’.
Typical of Chatwin’s Protean nature was that after he died friends should disagree about him almost to the extent of his readers and critics. In Australia, Murray Bail, one of his closest correspondents, reacted to news of his death with a single paragraph, a notebook entry Chatwinesque in its deadpan concision. ‘18.1.89 All head and bulging blue eyes. No sense of humour, yet could recognise and tell well a story – always based on a person, an experience, usually slightly extreme. Travelled – geographically, intellectually, aesthetically and, apparently, sexually. These strange confused feelings when a friend, or even an acquaintance, dies at a faraway distance.’
If Bail recollected Chatwin’s lack of humour as a chief characteristic, for Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing from Greece, his child-like humour was the quality he cherished: ‘though very mature in experience, discernment and learning and enormously travelled and worldly wise, he had the utterly convincing aura of an infant prodigy shot up like a beanstalk into a sort of open-air Radiguet. Everything – the striking looks, the fluency and verve of his talk, the extraordinary adventures, the urgency, the enjoyment and humour, the nearly fiendish laughter that ended some of his sentences – increased the impression of youth and made his vast conversational range seem more surprising still.’ What Leigh Fermor missed most about his ‘amazingly gifted and suddenly absent companion’ was ‘the energy, the originality and the laughter’.
To Salman Rushdie, Chatwin was one of the two funniest people he had known. ‘He was so colossally funny, you’d be on the floor with pain.’
Trying to corner Chatwin’s elusive quality, the novelist Shirley Hazzard cast him as an illuminator, shedding light rather in the way of a lightning-struck bush dragged back to the Swartkrans cave. She wrote to me when I was struggling to bring shape to his life: ‘What is difficult to convey is how much he gave, above all by the enchantment of his presence and his crystal renderings of what had seemed ordinary things.’
Not one of those Chatwin worked with at Sotheby’s predicted that he would throw up a lucrative partnership to become a student archaeologist, still less a writer. ‘No one would have thought this belated youth capable of writing anything more than his own name,’ believed Von Rezzori in Anecdotage. If the character Chatwin presented in the flesh was an ever-altering scrum – ‘I think I hardly knew him, there were so many of him,’ says his sister-in-law – so also his books, each of them set in a different continent, resisted categorisation. Few understood his enterprise and significance better than a German author whose only experience of meeting him was on the page. W. G. Sebald was foremost of those writers set free by Chatwin. In the last essay that Sebald published before his own untimely death, he touched on Chatwin’s achievement in trampling down the fence-posts imposed by publishers, booksellers and critics. Taught by his example not to be tamed by conventional boundaries, Sebald went on to suggest that Chatwin’s invigorating legacy lay in pointing a way forward as well as back:
‘Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are real, or whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial. Anthropological and mythological studies in the tradition of Lévy-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, adventure stories looking back to our early childhood reading, collections of facts, dream books, regional novels, examples of lush exoticism, puritanical penance, sweeping baroque vision, self-denial and personal confession – they are all these things together. It probably does them most justice to see their promiscuity, which breaks the mould of the modernist concept, as a late flowering of those traveller’s tales, going back to Marco Polo, where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.’
* * *
The process of hunting down Chatwin’s correspondence began in 1991, when I was commissioned to write his authorised biography. I spent seven years working on his life as a matter of choice and made liberal use of letters gathered in the course of interviewing people in 27 countries. Almost everyone – there was one exception – gave me permission to make full transcriptions. Some of his correspondents I talked to for long periods; others, I never bumped into. A notice placed in the Times Literary Supplement, following the biography’s publication in 1999, attracted five replies, plus copies of Chatwin’s letters to Michael Davie, David Mason, Charles Way and J. Howard Woolmer. This book represents about 90 per cent of material collected over nearly two decades. Our hope is that it might result in the discovery of more. A day after the manuscript was delivered to the publisher, a cache of four letters and a postcard written to Susan Sontag was traced to an archive in Los Angeles; we have been able to include these.
Chatwin’s principal correspondents were his parents Charles and Margharita, who in the early 1960s moved from Brown’s Green Farm outside Birmingham, to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they remained for the rest of their lives; Elizabeth Chanler, to whom Chatwin was married for 23 years, despite a brief separation in the early 1980s; her mother Gertrude Chanler, who lived in Geneseo, New York State; Cary Welch, an American collector who was married to Elizabeth’s cousin Edith; Ivry Freyberg, the sister of Raulin Guild, his best friend at Marlborough; John Kasmin, a London art dealer with whom he travelled to Africa, Kathmandu and Haiti; Tom Maschler, his publisher at Jonathan Cape; Diana Melly, his hostess in Wales; Francis Wyndham, the writer, who worked with him at the Sunday Times magazine and was the first to be allowed to see his finished manuscripts; the Australian writers Murray Bail, Ninette Dutton and Shirley Hazzard; James Ivory, the American film director, who stayed with him in France in the summer of 1971; Sunil Sethi, an Indian journalist whom he met in 1978 while on the trail of Mrs Gandhi.
The business of love affairs is not prominent. Chatwin is often at his most intimate with those encountered fleetingly in faraway places. ‘You do not find pining lovers among the Gipsies,’ he wrote in a notebook. ‘Romantic love is played down as to be almost non-existent.’ Any letters he may have written to Donald Richards or Jasper Conran have not come to light; those to Andrew Batey were destroyed in a flood in the Napa Valley.
Missing as well are letters to Penelope Betjeman, Werner Herzog, David Nash, Robin Lane Fox, Gita Mehta, Redmond O’Hanlon, David Sulzberger; and from the archives of Sotheby’s and the Sunday Times magazine during the years of Chatwin’s employment there.
Incorporated in the footnotes are Elizabeth Chatwin’s comments on the text. These are intended to have the effect of an ongoing conversation. The poet Matthew Prior put it well in ‘A Better Answer to Chloe Jealous’:
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits; but thou art my home.
In order to include as many letters as possible and to avoid repetition, we have pruned, sometimes heavily; all cuts are marked by ellipses. On the occasions when Chatwin wrote the same version of events to several people, we have chosen the fullest or most interesting. At other times – notably in descriptions of Penelope Betjeman’s death, the house that Chatwin rented in India while finishing The Songlines, and his illness – we have included different versions in order to show that these are not duplications so much as demonstrations of the way his elaborating mind worked. In one case a single word was deleted to avoid causing distress to someone still alive. Casting Chatwin in a good or bad light has not swayed us. We have attempted to follow the advice of Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a letter: ‘we have all far more to gain than to lose by the publication of even indiscreet documents, which always emerge one day and then do more harm than if they were published openly, candidly and quickly.’ Our choice has been determined by whether the material is interesting or illuminating. Obvious errors have been corrected; punctuation, addresses and spelling regularised – although we have retained his school misspellings. Dating the letters, even when they bear a date, has not always been easy. Chatwin was uncertain even of his wife’s birthday; several letters are marked not only with the wrong month, but the wrong year.
If Bruce Chatwin were to have written an autobiography to what extent would it be this? Had he yet been alive, how much of this volume would he have left out, or rewritten? These questions have been ever-present during our preparation of Under the Sun. The answers lie, inevitably, in the same realm as his unwritten books. But a fascinating version of his life is here, from the first Sunday at Old Hall School in Shropshire when he sat down after Chapel to write to his parents.
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE
Bruce Chatwin was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth and born on 13 May 1940 in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield. His father Charles Chatwin was a Birmingham lawyer; he was away at sea in the Navy when Bruce was born. His mother, Margharita Turnell, the daughter of a clerk for a Sheffield knife-manufacturer, brought him up in the homes of great-uncles, great-aunts and grandparents. He had a younger brother Hugh, born on 1 July 1944.
For Chatwin’s first six years, mother and son were everything to each other as they fled from the noise of war. The carpet-bombing of Coventry in November 1940, in one night flattening the city centre, frightened Margharita into giving up – without telling her husband – the small house which Charles had rented for them in Barnt Green; Birmingham’s Austin Motor works, making Hawker Hurricanes, lay over the railway line on the direct flight path of Luftwaffe navigators. Her memory of the awesome orange glow in the night sky continued to haunt Margharita long after she bolted north. She had panic attacks. She would talk to herself and shout out, hunting for her absent husband, ‘Charles! Charles!’ ‘What is it, mummy?’ ‘Oh, nothing, darling. Nothing. It’s all right.’ As they shuttled on the train between a dozen dwelling-places, including poky lodgings in Baslow and Filey, Chatwin’s duty was to be the brave little boy looking after his distressed mother: aunts and uncles told him so.
When Charles returned from the war, the family moved first back to Birmingham, taking a lease on a house in Stirling Road which had been used by the army as a brothel; then, in April 1947, to Brown’s Green Farm twelve miles south of Birmingham, a ‘fairly derelict’ smallholding with eleven acres, for rent at £98 per annum. A lawyer during the week, at weekends Charles invented himself as a food-producer, keeping an eventual tally of pigs, geese, ducks and 200 chickens. ‘We were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,’ says Hugh.
At the end of April 1948 Chatwin went away to Old Hall School in Shropshire. His first surviving letter was written after attending one of three Sunday services in Chapel. He was seven years old and would spend the next decade at boarding school.
Old Hall School, a fifteenth-century manor house set in 25 acres, was a preparatory school for 108 sons of the factory-owning and professional and commercial classes of the Midlands, and the personal fiefdom of Paul Denman Fee-Smith, a stocky and energetic bachelor who advertised it as ‘The Best Preparatory School in England.’ Fee-Smith was a man of rigorous Anglo-Catholic beliefs whose conduct of three Chapel services on Sunday was in full priestly regalia of cassock, surplice and cope. Stories of the Prodigal Son, Daniel and the Lion and the Conversion of Saul were favourite readings. To the boys, he was known as ‘Boss’. Boss’s penchant for vestments and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible were to leave an indelible mark upon Chatwin.
At Old Hall School Chatwin wore a maroon and grey cap and blazer. He played games on Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and distinguished himself in boxing and acting. He was still known at this stage as Charles Bruce Chatwin; although through making a certain amount of noise he earned the nickname ‘Chatty’.
Boss noted Chatwin’s restlessness in his first report: ‘He is rather a careless worker & his attention soon wanders. He is still very young & hardly out of the egocentric stage; his behaviour is childish & very noisy at times!’ To Hugh, his elder brother’s behaviour was easily explained. ‘From my perspective, Bruce was escaping from the trauma of war by playing out parts of his own devising, by telling stories good enough to deserve being the centre of attention.’
Spelling was never Chatwin’s strong point. Like most pupils, he filled his weekly letters home using formulas; beginning each, as taught, with ‘I hope you are all well,’ reaching the bottom of the page with resumés of films, orders for books, for balsa wood models of houses and farms, or reports on his flu – his health was frail even at this stage; and ending with a separate line for each word.
Dressing up, acting, religion – already he displayed what W. G. Sebald would call ‘the art of transformation that comes naturally to him, a sense of being always on stage, an instinct for the gesture that would make an effect on the audience, for the bizarre and the scandalous, the terrible and the wonderful, all these were undoubtedly prerequisites of Chatwin’s ability to write’.
The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 2 May [1948]
Dear Mummy and Daddy,
It is a lovely school. We had a lovely film called The Ghost Train. It was all about a train the came into the station every year at midnight and if any one looked at it they wold die. I am in the second form.
With love from
Bruce
The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 31 October [1948]
Dear Mummy and daddy,
I got on very well with the aroplane kit, but it flew into a fir tree and got torn. It was going very well until it did that. We played Packwood Haugh yesterday, and it was a draw. I was eighth in form this week. Latin is getting on very well. I have got a plus for history. In Maths I am tenth. Aunt Graciefn1 sent me a postcard of London Towr bridge. Thank you very much for sending my stamps and my cigerett cards. Boxing is getting very well. I have got to have some extra boxing. Please could I have some more stamped onvelopes because I am writing so many letters. And will you send me Swallows and Amazons.
With love from Bruce
The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 29 February [1949]
Dear Mummy and Daddy,
Please could you get me a Romany Book, called Out with Romany by Medow and Streamfn2 Because I want it for a friend of mines birthday. Yesturday we had a lantern lecture on a man’s uncle who went to Africa to exploring and he took a lot of photographs on big game, and natives.fn3 In my book Wild Life there are two photographs. One of some Rock Rabbits, and another of a jackel. It was very nice. I hope you are well. Please will you send me a book called The Open Road.fn4 Tell Hugh it wont be long till I come home. Please will you save these stamps till I come home. When you see Aunt Gracie next tell her I send my love.
‘Love you pieces’
Bruce
The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 13 March, Sunday [1949]
Dear Mummy and daddy,
I hope you are all well. I wrote to Uncle Humphry and Auntie Peggey yesterday.fn5 I like the sound of Brigfn6