Bruce Chatwin (23 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

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

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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“No, I won’t,” said Goodhew, who was terrified of snakes.
“It’s terribly easy, you just go in and I’ll give you some white mice.”
“I absolutely refuse.”
“You spoilt little deb!”
Then he picked up a blue volume of Benizit’s
Dictionnaire des Artistes
. The book hit Goodhew on the corner of her forehead, blackening her eye. “I was so shocked I burst into tears and ran from the room. I had to go to the doctor and wear a velvet eye patch.”
Bruce was guilty enough to bring her a Hermés scarf back from Paris. He told her he had smuggled the snake past customs under his shirt with a coat over him.
“I hope it hugs you to death,” Goodhew said.
The Congolese python belonged not to Bruce but to a wealthy young American living in Paris, Jimmy Douglas. Douglas had bought the snake from Harrods’ pet department when staying with Bruce. In Paris, where he kept his pet in a fishtank in the bathroom, the python gained a speedy notoriety. “Rather like Bruce, it got talked about,” says Douglas. “You’d find it wandering around on the bed. Sometimes I’d force-feed it hot-dogs. Otherwise I’d give it white mice.” The novelist Françoise Sagan, invited to dinner, reacted to the feeding ritual with the same horror as Goodhew. She stuffed the mice into her handbag, later releasing them to maximum effect on the floor of La Coupole. Salvador Dali wore the snake as a turban on a television show, while Bruce scarfed it around his neck to the opening of the “New Jimmy’s” night-club where, placed on a table, someone mistook it for a modern ashtray and stubbed out their cigarette. “The python,” says Douglas, “started to uncoil.”
At some moment, the bird-dog became the prey. It was one reason Bruce gave Lucie-Smith for leaving Sotheby’s: “I can’t face being chased around one more beach umbrella by one more lady in palazzo pyjamas.”
Lady Peel, the former actress Beatrice Lillie, was always ringing in a fluster from the South of France: “
Içi Lady parle qui Peel
.” From New York, there was the wealthy Mrs Brummer, whom Bruce impressed to such an extent in the course of cataloguing her late husband’s collection, that she told him: “Ah Bruce, the eye of my husband Ernest is alive in you.”
Not only women chased him. Collectors in the main were homosexual. “Many were queer beyond description,” says Peregrine Pollen. “There was the creature supposed to have been the catamite of the Cardinal Archbishop of Prague. He used to breeze in to sales wearing grey flannel trousers and a double-breasted jacket. When accosted by Carmen Gronau, in charge of Old Masters, he would flap this open – to reveal a naked torso.” James Crathorne once had to make a valuation for an American collector, “a frightfully camp creature in Milwaukee who did awful things with his quite big dog.”
Wilson favoured the personal touch. He knew his protégé’s value in this market. Pollen says, “He knew how the most hard-bitten, iron-jawed businessmen could be completely naïve when it comes to works of art. The same person who might have crushed Bruce to dust on the futures market would, if the subject was a Matisse, listen to him mouth open, ears flapping.” Here again Wilson deployed his genius for promotion and for encouraging different attitudes to works of art. To invest in a Matisse was not only a demonstration of wealth, but of artistic sensibility: it showed you had taste. The Florida rich were especially susceptible to this line of thinking, says Lucie-Smith, but they tended not to get on with Old Etonians like Pollen.
“Bruce, on the other hand, bowled them over.”
“I’m quite sure that physical things happened and he must have had to contend with that,” says Brian Sewell, who spoke from his own experience at Christie’s.
In the majority of cases, Bruce was an innocent feted by rich men: the Bey of Albania, Paul Adamidi Frahseri Bey, who looked like a retired brigand and stayed at the Ritz; the Bey’s friend, Douglas Cooper, heir to an Australian sheep-dip fortune at whose villa in the south of France Bruce probably met Picasso. (“Douglas took a tremendous shine to Bruce who was fairly adept at wriggling out of range while batting an eyelid at everything in sight,” says John Richardson, who lived twelve years with Cooper.) Then there was the mildly talented painter Villiers David, who told Bruce: “You’re not sensual enough.”
It was perfectly obvious to Lucie-Smith, if not to Villiers David, that Bruce would not succumb. Watching Bruce’s pursuit by a series of rich and elderly collectors, Lucie-Smith was put in mind of a pull-along crocodile, popular at the time, with a mechanism which made its jaws snap at a butterfly balanced on its head. “Bruce’s relationship to a certain kind of sacred monster resembles that between butterfly and crocodile: a great deal of flapping and agitation and colour, with the crocodile thinking at any moment he’s going to swallow this satisfying morsel. Of course, it’s set up so the crocodile never succeeds.”
In fact, one crocodile did get to eat the butterfly. In July 1963, Bruce went on a visit to Glenveagh castle in Donegal. The owner, Henry Mcllhenny, was a collector from Philadelphia whose grandfather had migrated from Ireland and invented the gas meter. McIlhenny, then in his fifties and not a timid person, had approached Sotheby’s to have Glenveagh’s contents appraised for insurance. Wilson selected Bruce for the task.
The castle was five miles from the gates and the guests dressed for dinner. Another guest was Giacometti’s biographer, James Lord, who kept a diary. He says, “I know they went to bed together. Henry did the seducing. He was very boastful about it to me. He called him ‘Bruceykins’.”
Brian Sewell identified with Bruce’s predicament. “He told me of a hugely embarrassing night in a castle in Ireland. What do you do? There is a certain outrage in one’s reaction. If there is one thing a young homosexual really resents, it’s that homosexuality being taken for granted as being in the gift of someone else. Bruce hadn’t anyway come to terms with his homosexual drive. The last thing in the world he’d want, or need, is to have to contend with an exploitation of that homosexuality for the advantage of Sotheby’s.”
This is exactly what Wilson called upon him to do in the spring of 1962.
Having catalogued the Somerset Maugham sale, Bruce was satisfied that he had completed his duties. Shortly before the sale, however, the old man changed his mind. Had it not been for Bruce, says Kenelm Digby-Jones, the sale might have been cancelled. “Maugham had been to the dentist. He had toothache, he was old, he said he wouldn’t sell. The sale was two days away. PCW nearly had a fit. He took a huge sigh. ‘I need a drink.’ He was a diabetic. It was the first time I’d seen him drink. It was late, about 9 p.m. Then he had this brilliant idea of wheeling in Bruce.”
His hair freshly washed (on Wilson’s instructions), Bruce went to meet Maugham at the Dorchester. “Somerset Maugham recognised Bruce as a bit of live bait: exactly what he was. It was very cynically done. Bruce didn’t have to do anything but talk about Maugham’s toothache and the sea and calm him down. But it was one of the things Bruce got miffed about.”
Bruce supplied more details to Maugham’s grandson, Jonathan Hope. As he entered the room Maugham’s companion, Alan Searle, said: “He wants you to go and sit next to him.” Bruce complied – whereupon Maugham reached out a hand.
“His awful old fingers going through my hair!” he told Hope. He added that Maugham, in his opinion, was the most over-rated writer of the twentieth century. Bruce wanted Hope to believe that, because he had allowed Maugham to ruffle his hair, he had secured the whole collection for Sotheby’s. But that was only part of it. “He wanted to emphasise how grotesque was the atmosphere of corruption and oiliness. He implied he had to do this on other instances, tart up clients, soften them up, charm people to get money out of them, and he became quite hysterical at the recollection, bouncing up in his chair, saying ‘I hated it, I hated it!’”
Chatwin’s first story, “Rotting Fruit”, is based in part on a Maugham figure and seems to contain everything Bruce knows and feels, and it was written at about this time. The unpublished story had its origin in one of Bruce’s most elaborate comic routines. Lucie-Smith says, “I heard it several times over and laughed until I was nearly sick.” He suggested that Bruce put it down on paper.
Not one of Bruce’s colleagues imagined for him a career as a writer. Hewett said, “If you had told me he would have been a famous writer, I never would have believed it. I would have thought his ambition was wealth, to buy things for his own personal collection.” Another who worked with him says: “He didn’t appear to be able to string two words together on paper.”
Lucie-Smith was the only committed writer Bruce knew. He ran a poetry circle called The Group, celebrated in its time, whose members – including Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove and George MacBeth – met at Lucie-Smith’s house every Friday. “I didn’t ask Bruce to The Group because he expressed no interest. Anyway, it never occurred to me. He and the membership would have been oil and water. When Bruce finally became interested in my status as a writer, it was for two reasons. I told him he should write things down because some of his ‘narratives’ were so funny, and it was very much part of The Group philosophy that
anyone
could write if they really wanted to. Secondly, I was almost certainly the only member of his fairly close circle who had a literary agent.” His agent, Deborah Rogers, later became Bruce’s agent.
The story which Lucie-Smith told him to write down reveals a narrator wrestling his confusion into a drama that celebrates – as it subverts – the excesses of the art world. The story is transparently autobiographical, a display case of rare clues to Bruce’s emotional life. It is overlong, unfocused, undigested, and it is unlikely that he showed it to anyone.
“Rotting Fruit” was Bruce’s only attempt to deal in fiction with this homosexual world. He resuscitated it for the director James Ivory, thinking it would make a marvellous film. “I have a
goût de monstres
,” Bruce wrote to Ivory in 1971, “but this was the best ever and I ended up feeling the deepest compassion for him.” The monster was a combination of Somerset Maugham, Peter Wilson and “an elderly slum property developer from Miami” who came each year to London. Bruce named him Norman Scott Lauderdale and cast him as the seedy protagonist.
Not much happens in the story except for a series of charged encounters between the dying Norman and the young narrator, who at one point is despatched to Portugal, where he is required to dress in powder blue hip-hugging pants and a pink shirt and to perform Nazi salutes for the delectation of Norman’s large photographer friend, Seymour Ross. Norman and Seymour are archetypes for all the rich homosexual collectors whom Wilson had sent Bruce to charm. The young narrator is called Peter.
Events are triggered by Peter’s reception at Sotheby’s of a pink and faintly scented letter from Miami decorated with bees and bearing the initials NSL, an unmistakable jibe at the type of letter which often landed on Bruce’s desk:
I am in possession of a painting by Henri Matisse
– Les Lilas –
signed and dated 1916. I desire to sell this work as soon as possible and I understand from an acquaintance that you can assist me. I shall stay at the Dorchester Hotel from June 8 through June 15 and would be pleased to hear from you.
.
Probably Bruce had in mind the same Matisse that he had wanted to buy. The narrator visits Norman in his hotel room ostensibly to discuss its sale, but the encounter is quickly complicated by Norman’s attraction to the young art dealer. Norman’s face “resembled a Venetian blind. The mouth was thin and the lips colourless. He had a tendency to salivate at the corners.” He flatters Peter (“They tell me you are very brilliant”) and invites himself to dinner at Peter’s modest flat.
“Was his interest in me sexual or financial? I dreaded either. Where was the famous Matisse?”
Norman’s car, “a vast grey Rolls Royce”, with a grey chauffeur to match, recalls Ivry’s dramatic arrival at Marlborough. Even the contents of Norman’s dinner parcel faithfully reflect Ivry’s picnic: Prunier’s bouillabaisse, Charbonnel and Walker chocolates, Chateau Montrachet 1956. Norman’s father, a Pittsburgh steel millionaire “whose furnaces lit up the Allegheny river”, points directly forward to the family Bruce would marry into, while Norman’s hypochondria carries a self-mocking reference to Bruce’s own: he arrives with a pigskin bag containing “a battalion of pills”, arranging these in neat formations around his plate.
Norman admires Peter’s apartment, the Japanese screen illuminated by a single spotlight. “Its austere chastity appeals to me.” He becomes expansive, the wine unlocking the saga of his Miami childhood, the huge house on a coral beach with a swimming pool painted by a fashionable New York artist with images of copulating crocodiles, the sadness he had to endure when his parents ran to ruin (“he didn’t stop beating her till she threatened to throw herself over the parapet”) and finally his own inexpressible beauty as a boy. “I was the most beautiful thing you ever saw . . . when Mother and I walked into Maxim’s, the band stopped playing, the people stopped talking, they rose to their feet and they cheered.” As an adult, however, he had to hide behind “a thick curtain” which he could pull down at will.
At this point the story becomes most obviously autobiographical: the mask slips and Chatwin the writer begins to call his narrator by his own name.
“I assure you, Bruce,” says Norman, speaking of the protective curtain, “it has saved me a lot of heart aches and misty eyes.”

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