Bruce Chatwin (22 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

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His austerity was short-lived. Not long after stripping bare his flat, he began to refurbish it once more into a “dandified” interior. This purge-and-binge cycle punctuated his life. The textile dealer Jonathan Hope had never seen anyone with two natures at such odds. “Half of Bruce despised being European and longed to be a Mauritanian nomad, renouncing everything; the other half was a worldly, acquisitive collector with an eagle’s eye for the unusual who longed to go riding with Jackie Onassis. It was a permanent battle of values.” The peremptory
non-sequitur
which is the hallmark of his prose is no less true of his character. Hugh Honour wrote, “He was a split personality, at any rate in this respect, and his extraordinary vitality and sharpness of perception owed much to the inner conflict of his two obsessive urges, the one sparking off the other.”
Bruce had learned from his father the sailor’s economical use of space. Even in his collector phase, the flat was never cluttered. His ideal house was a three-windowed Hausa mud hut in which he stayed in 1972. The outside was “the texture of a good-natured bath-towel”. Inside, a pillar supported a vault of thornbush logs. The door was made from a crate of canned pineapples from the Côte d’lvoire and the bed was an old French military camp-bed covered with camel leather. “It is home. I am happy with it,” he wrote in his notebook.
Bruce’s white-scraped floor and his careful arrangement of objects sought to emulate a hut, a tent or an Ingres interior, but the effect betrayed to Lucie-Smith his decorative taste. “He was full of decorator
pronunciamenti,
giving me specific injunctions and saws. ‘With flowers, it is mandatory to see the stem’.”
Howard Hodgkin has the Grosvenor Crescent flat in his 1962 painting
Japanese Screen.
It shows Bruce as “an acid green smear”, turning away from his guests, Cary and Edith Welch. The dealer Christopher Gibbs remembers Bruce “entertaining sparely, deliciously, beneath a blackened silver screen painted with aquatic plants by some observant Japanese botaniser. Did we eat our scrambled eggs and white truffles off
blanc de Chine
or the blue-sprigged porcelain of the Duc d’Angoulême? At any rate there were dhurries of dirty cream and washed indigo, there was a Tilly Kettle of a young Indian girl smoking a hookah, scrolls, drawings, and objects revealed with becoming ceremony. And there were books and spears and fish hooks from Polynesia, even books about fish hooks and about tomahawks and round towers and taboos and totems.”
One night, Hodgkin dined at the flat with the collector Villiers David. “It was incredibly elegant and tidy, as if a photographer was about to arrive.” The bedroom had a futon and a duvet, the first Hodgkin had seen. The desk was a sheet of thick plate glass on two trestles, with lots of blue writing paper in piles. The paintings, hung at eye level if you were sitting in a chair, included an eighteenth-century oval relief portrait, French, of a man in a wig, and landscape drawings by Cros and Le Roiseau. His Louis XVI chair was now upholstered in shiny black leather. He had bought from Lucie-Smith a Japanese Ngoro lacquer tray; and swapped his Piranesi of the Antonine Column for the skin of a small tiger shot by the Maharajah of Bikaner in the 1930s and given to Robert Erskine’s mother. Plus “The Bottom”.
Hodgkin, looking at the skylight, said to Villiers David: “What Bruce needs is a huge chandelier.”
“Dear boy, where would he get money from?”
In despair, Bruce replied, “I can cook. I could always make a living by cooking.”
“He really minded about not having money,” says Hodgkin, “and nobody was quicker to say in his inimitable way: ‘Could be valuable, you know.’ He was always thinking he’d found something valuable, that the philosopher’s stone was lurking in the next antique shop. He was forever a dealer.”
Bruce’s friendship with rich collectors like Villiers David, Welch and Ortiz encouraged him to spend more than he could afford. Kenelm Digby-Jones, who succeeded Peregrine Pollen as Wilson’s assistant, made him a member of the St James Club, where he dined on Sundays. “Bruce didn’t mind putting on a dinner jacket at all.” He bought a
Messerschmitt
bubble car and at work he began to stand out by virtue of his clothes. Discarding his stiff collars, his knotted ties and brogues, he began to dress in light grey suits, tailor-made from Henry Poole in Savile Row, and silk ties and slip-on shoes.
Ortiz says, “He liked to live well, but he told me he didn’t have enough money. How can you submit a young man to a first-class flight to Chicago to see the Campbell’s soup man, be met by his chauffeur, drive to his huge estate full of Impressionist paintings – and not be affected?”
Bruce made money dealing during his holidays. One attraction of working for Sotheby’s was the long summer break. He would set off abroad without telling anyone where he was going. “His idea of a holiday,” says Nash, who went with him to Afghanistan, “was to go where no one could reach him on the telephone.” Lucie-Smith says, “Bruce understood the value of absence and not just in his art.”
In his first summer, July 1959, he had gone, alone, on a walking tour of eastern Sardinia. He wrote, “It was terrifying to walk at dusk up the main street of Orgolos, the legendary ‘home’ of the Sardinian bandit, looking for a bed and having every door slammed in one’s face.” Finding Sardinia impossible in the heat, he headed for Tarquinia on the mainland, to explore the Etruscan painted tombs. The journey showed him to be a delicate traveller. He wrote to his parents: “My nose bled solidly for no apparent reason the day before yesterday for 1½ hrs.”
In December 1961, Bruce made the first of two journeys to the Middle East with Robert Erskine, who knew dealers in Cairo. Erskine says, “We were wheeling and dealing in antiquities and we thought, ‘Why not go to the source?’”
It surprised Erskine to discover how raw a traveller was his companion. “I don’t think Bruce liked travelling by himself. He was always worried about his stomach.” Arriving in Cairo on 17 December, they stayed in a little hotel, The Golden Tulip. Bruce opened his suitcase. It was stuffed with pills. When he discovered in Erskine’s valise a pill he did not have, he purloined the pillbox and added it to his own. “It was another example of the collector,” says Erskine.
Inevitably, Bruce’s stomach suffered. The principal dealers insisted on inviting them home to “pretty revolting” meals. Women peeped through the keyhole, while the host stood behind, not eating but offering more food and watching like a hawk, dish after dish. “Bruce was aghast. He thought he would catch every single disease – and did.”
Bruce’s Teutonic looks were appreciated by the Arabs. Erskine says, “I was in some shop in Luxor looking at coins when I heard: ‘Robert, Robert, rescue me!’ There was the sound of many running feet and Bruce burst in, followed by a mass of people who went away with a hang-dog look. Then we were sitting in Luxor station, waiting for the train, and a man suddenly jumped between us and said to Bruce: ‘You are my brother. I will never leave you.’ We had to push him off.”
They spent Christmas Day on the Nile, taking a Sudanese railway steamer from Aswan to Wadi Haifa. Lunch posed a new threat. The waiter served a blancmange topped with a green leaf to resemble a Christmas pudding. Then, beaming like anything, he poured petrol over it from a can and set the creation alight.
Erskine found Bruce an imaginative traveller and fun to be with. As they wandered through the Temple of Hathor at Denderah, Bruce was seized by the idea, which he intoned in French, of buying the place and turning it into a grand hotel in which immensely rich American women could live out their last years. They would call the hotel The Hathor, after the goddess of love, and there would be another hotel for men, The Horus in the Temple of Horus at Edfu, 80 miles up the Nile. Erskine says, “He had this daydream, imagining the dining room over there, the bar obviously here, aspidistras, magenta lighting, Marlene Dietrich singing in the cabaret and plots of desert behind where they would be buried in grand, quasi-Egyptian tombs.”
On 6 January, the extent of Bruce’s naïveté declared itself as they prepared to leave Cairo with their spoils. In three weeks, they had bought much good material. In Luxor, while poking around a heap, Bruce had picked out a few bits of wood that turned out to be the parts of a 3,000-year-old stool. Erskine had also acquired some heavy Pre-Dynastic stone pots. Now the difficulty was to get them out of the country. It was not strictly legal then to take antiques out of Egypt.
One of Erskine’s dealers in Cairo claimed to have arranged for the customs officers to be bribed so that their cases were not looked at. “Bruce was in an absolute funk about this kind of thing. Quivering all over. ‘Oh my God, I feel very ill. You’d better go.’ Finally, we went through customs. When no one stopped us, he became a different person. He was like a fish which changed colour,” says Erskine. “A terrible old funker.”
It had been a profitable trip. A piece of Mycenaean silver bought for £90 fetched £250. Bruce paid £5 for the stool, and sold it to an American dealer for $300.
XI
 
A
goût de monstres
The ugliest men loved the most beautiful things.
—
Utz
“
IT’S EXPENSIVE, SPENDING TIME WITH RICH PEOPLE,” SAYS
Robert Erskine. “They never think of paying for anything.” Bruce’s superiors watched his extravagance with alarm. In New York, where he had arrived in March 1960 to open the American office, Peregrine Pollen received a letter from Wilson. “PCW was worried about what to do with Bruce. He couldn’t live within his income and was always sending in expenses for far more than anyone had anticipated.” Pollen wrote back. “I said that Bruce would be a brilliant business-getter, but that he was never going to live within his income because he had rich friends and there was no point in sending him where he couldn’t pay his way.” Pollen suggested that Bruce be given a proper expense account. “Not hearing back from PCW, I assumed that is what happened.”
When the 1961 auction season opened in October, Bruce had been at Sotheby’s three years. He held the reins in both Antiquities and “Imps”. But as the appetite for these paintings grew Wilson decided Impressionist sales were too important to be left in the hands of his protégé alone.
In November 1961, Bruce turned up at work and was taken aback to discover two new faces: Michel Strauss, who was to run the department with him; and David Nash, who was to be a porter.
Nash – or “Nashpiece” – Bruce knew from Marlborough. After leaving school, he had worked as a gravedigger in a Wimbledon cemetery and as an electrical engineer at the Horton lunatic asylum. He knew nothing about art and his interview reflected the amateurishness which still reigned. “PCW asked me what I was interested in. I wasn’t interested in anything, so I said Impressionist painting. I’d been on a day trip to the Monet exhibition at the Tate because it meant a day in town.”
Michel Strauss posed more of a threat. Four years older than Bruce, he had been at Oxford, Harvard and the Courtauld. His grandfather was an important collector of Impressionists. His stepfather was the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “I was 25,” says Strauss, “with a degree in history of art, and came from an intellectual, cultured background. Bruce was unpleasant and difficult. He wouldn’t help at all.”
Their rivalry came to a head in barely a month over the sale of 35 Impressionist paintings belonging to William Somerset Maugham. Frightened by a spate of burglaries in his neighbourhood in France, the author had decided to consign the paintings to Sotheby’s. For many years they had given him pleasure. “Now,” he wrote, “they are an anxiety.”
In January 1962, the collection arrived. Bruce and Strauss agreed to catalogue the pictures together at 9.30 the following morning. Strauss arrived to find that Chatwin had been in the office since 5.30 a.m. He had catalogued the lot on his own. “He was very competitive.”
After the Maugham sale, Bruce and Strauss – whom Bruce nicknamed “Shellers” – settled into a respectful professional relationship. Socially, they never mixed, but Strauss became the sane core and it was felt that Wilson had successfully played one against the other. The department would have collapsed with Bruce alone in charge; with Strauss alone, it would have lacked the desired zest.
Bruce was still the blue-eyed boy, but he exasperated those who worked with him. “He was not a team player,” says Judith Landrigan. “He’d come in late, leave early, was never around when the crunch was on. It was Michel who organised, answered letters, wrote the catalogue, met the printer’s deadline.”
David Ellis-Jones says that while Bruce moved at “a young prima donna’s speed”, others had to clean up the mess after him. “If anything got too hot, he was off to Antiquities.” Ellis-Jones called him “Chatswein”.
When Sue Goodhew had to leave she gave her successor, Sarah Inglis-Jones, some advice:
“1. When Bruce dictates too fast tell him to go slower
  2. When he gets in a temper shout back
  3. If he throws anything at you, throw it back.”
  This last tip referred to an incident with a snake.
At Marlborough, Bruce had collected lizards in glass jars. At Sotheby’s, he kept for a short while a six-foot white and black royal python.
One day, about to set off for Paris, he had asked Goodhew a favour. If she was in London over the weekend, would she feed his python, which was housed in a suitcase beside his radiator?

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