Bruce Chatwin (29 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce’s second trip to Afghanistan, the following summer, was more focused. He had met Elizabeth, he was fed up with Sotheby’s and he was seeking a deeper purpose. Having exhausted Robert Byron, he moved from buildings to botany.
A botanist friend, Admiral Furse, had been forced to abandon a mission from Kew Gardens to bring back a sample of cow parsley growing only on the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. Bruce, hoping Kew might offset his expenses, decided to complete the Admiral’s quest. Bruce’s mission would be compromised by his susceptibility to illness.
He was, as Erskine had discovered, a terrible hypochondriac. “If Bruce had a cold, it was an extraordinary thing,” says his doctor in London, Patrick Woodcock. “If he described to you a minor epileptic fit and a discharge from his nose, it took time to realise he was in fact only describing a sneeze.”
Sunil Sethi, an Indian journalist who accompanied him through Uttar Pradesh in 1978, says that “travelling with Bruce was like travelling with your 88-year-old maiden aunt. No piece of luggage was ever good enough. The weather was never right. It was too hot, too cold, too damp. He was the mother of all Mrs Gummidges.”
Bruce was more of a risk-taker in his work than in his travels, but he did get ill. “He was never very strong,” says Elizabeth. “He would cut himself, and go septic over and over again. Then he would put it out of his mind and be furious if I mentioned it: ‘I’m never ill!’”
Bruce had originally planned to take Elizabeth with him. At the last minute, it was decided they would meet up in Lebanon on his route back from Afghanistan. Instead, he chose for companion his Sotheby’s colleague David Nash. “It was the most exciting thing I’d done,” says Nash. “Bruce was hot-headed and opinionated, but wonderful company.”
The atmosphere of an expedition surrounded the preparations. The equipment included a large flower press and a Stilton for the ambassador, which stank by the time they reached Kabul. On the way to the airport, Margharita stopped off at a garden supply shop to buy the trowel with which Bruce was to dig up the cow parsley.
Nash decided to keep a journal.
In Kabul they sought permission to visit the Karma valley in Nuristan, the source of the parsley. Just before catching the bus for Jalalabad, Bruce felt his stomach heave. “I wake up in the morning at 5 and know that something is wrong. Clamminess, violent rumblings of the stomach. Get out of bed, a dash to the rather primitive bathroom and appalling diarrhoea.” The attacks continued on the bus, from which he disappeared, Nash recorded, “clutching a handful of notepaper”. At last they arrived in Jalalabad. “B is sick and immediately makes full recovery. Afghan servant solemnly comes to empty bucket containing 3 half-chewed pills.”
By 5 o’clock the worst was over and they went in search of the local general, who after much ceremony settled down to write a long letter on their behalf to his friend the Governor of Chigar Serai, in whose province the plant was rumoured to be found.
In the morning, they boarded a pea-green bus smelling of decaying curds. Every time the engine needed water an alarm bell went off and a character in a Chitrali cap filled an old billycan from the stream. “The driver”. Bruce wrote, “was in a furiously excited frame of mind. Whether it was general high spirits or hashish was difficult to decide. In any event he revved his accelerator to a song of his own composition with an English refrain for our benefit. ‘Jesus Christ goddamn son of a bitch,’ these were the only words of English he knew.”
The grinding journey took them through a basin of emerald maize fields and rice paddies. At midday, they arrived at Chigar Serai, Bruce still feeling delicate. “My stomach gave a few rumblings and so I munched a few sulphur tablets. This had an instant effect and before long the place was seething with people demanding pills.”
At 9.30 p.m. the Governor appeared. They gave him the General’s letter, explaining their purpose with the aid of two old maps and his 12 words of English. The Governor, “who has hazy visions of the whole of Nuristan as a tourist’s paradise”, expressed enthusiasm for what he can only dimly have understood since both their maps turned out to be quite useless. “We have the Survey of India of 1947, which is largely compiled from hearsay and guesswork.” In the second map, which misplaced villages, reduced their names to gibberish and gave misleading altitudes, the Governor’s area of jurisdiction was left largely blank.
Not much wiser about their enterprise, the Governor agreed to provide an escort of a soldier and four men, one to act as guide and three to carry the kit bags and the flower press. “This works out at approximately
IS.
which couldn’t under any circumstances be called unreasonable.”
IS.
which couldn’t under any circumstances be called unreasonable.”
While the expedition was assembled, Bruce made exploratory rambles. Returning from one walk, he discovered Nash had been offered three small boys and a bunch of grapes. The youths looked like “boys from Marlborough”, identically attired in pastel green pants, brown shawls and Chitrali caps. For the rest of their journey, they would be mobbed by boys, many with blond hair and blue eyes, which disconcerted Bruce. “One of them aged about 6 had his eyes very heavily painted with antimony and would shoot alluring sidelong glances. This had a very disturbing effect as he had in every other respect exactly the appearance of an English prep school boy.” Bruce tried to photograph one boy, but was made to feel acutely embarrassed. “There was an expression of deep resentment in his eyes. He obviously felt that we looked the same and knew not why the difference between us was so wide.”
At last, on 22 August, Bruce’s expedition to locate Admiral Furse’s parsley stood ready. Accompanied by three porters and a Turkik soldier called Ahmed they set off along a narrow gorge beside a fast-flowing stream full of large trout. They walked for four hours, the flower press humped on a porter’s shoulders in a winding sheet. Suddenly, outside a shuttered teahouse, there appeared a boy carrying his little sister. The girl was about two years old and dressed in a red frock decorated with little silver coins. “The whole of her stomach and thighs were a terrible, septic, pustulant mess,” wrote Bruce. “Her brother told me that she had been stung by hornets and there were no less than 20 bites below her waist, nearly all septic.”
Through his medicines Bruce seemed to gain his most direct access. “I did my best with the limited medicines I had and bandaged all the septic wounds with an antiseptic cream while the child screamed piercingly and I gave her brother an anti-histamine pill for her in case they swelled up again.” His treatment proved effective. When, five years later, Bruce returned to this valley with Peter Levi and Elizabeth, he was remembered with touching gratitude for saving the girl’s life. “The reservations of thousands of years break down if you carry medicine,” he realised. “The doctor is the unveiler.”
For lunch, the porters gathered wild cherries, pomegranates and tiny figs. “Having been reduced to the ultimate stage of diarrhoea four days ago, I now find I am almost totally congested.” Soon they reached the most propitious spot for the parsley, near the village of Wama. Leaving Nash with the men, Bruce climbed 100 feet up a mountain stream. “I collected a thistle-like plant which I hadn’t seen before, three exiguous rock plants, one of which was aromatic when crushed and two small sedges from the stream.” Then, while hunting for his specimen among small bushes of holly oak, Bruce fell and scraped the skin off his arm.
His injury signalled an abrupt end to the expedition, recorded in feeble pencil. “Awoke at 5 a.m. feeling terrible, arm swollen, bandages a smelly mess with temperature of 100, bites from black flies, oozing yellow fluid. Nothing to do but return.” In panic, worried that he might develop gangrene, Bruce set off by himself, leaving Nash to follow with the porters. He had failed to notice that Nash was himself feverish with dysentery. Miserable, on an empty stomach, Nash walked the 30 kilometres back to Kandeh, where the bus had dropped them. There, to his fury, he found Bruce seated in a chair of state under a tree, at the centre of a colourful crowd, “looking as fine as could be”.
Neither could wait to leave Afghanistan. On 27 August, they arrived at Kabul airport for a flight to Peshawar. Their departure was recorded by Nash.
“Insoluble problem with the customs official.
“CO: You cannot leave, sir; you have no exit visas.
“B: What is this, then, if it is not an exit visa? B. flourishes a piece of paper printed in Persian hieroglyphics.
“CO: Oh no sir, that is not an exit visa, that is a request from the tourist office to the police dept asking them to provide you with an exit visa.
D: J.C! What are you going to do about it then? That plane leaves in an hour and if it leaves without us, there will be hell.
“CO: You will have to get proper exit visa from the police, but today is Friday and the police office is shut. The next plane leaves on Wednesday!
“Explosion!
“B. disappears to rout the Police Dept out of bed, gets our visas stamped by an official in his pyjamas whose friendship was immediately won by B.’s vociferous complaints about the inefficiency of the Tourist Dept; and by saying that he is reporter from
Time
magazine and so would the officer please get the King on the telephone as he wished to lodge an official complaint and get the entire Tourist Dept sacked.”
Time
magazine and so would the officer please get the King on the telephone as he wished to lodge an official complaint and get the entire Tourist Dept sacked.”
Bruce’s bluff had worked, but the trip which had begun with such serious intent had ended shambolically. “We are leaving Afghanistan, not without a sensation of the utmost relief,” he wrote. They had not managed to get the cow parsley specimen and there was another worry. He had been hoping to join Elizabeth in Lebanon, had requested the Embassy in Kabul to relay any cables, but he had not heard from her.
XIV
The Chattys
When I got married, Bruce said: “That’s marvellous, that’s marvellous. Now it means you can travel.”
—James Fox
ONE EVENING IN
1963, J
OHN RICKETT, THE DIRECTOR IN CHARGE
of Pictures, invited Marcus Linell, who had worked alongside Bruce as porter, to dinner in Kensington Square.
1963, J
OHN RICKETT, THE DIRECTOR IN CHARGE
of Pictures, invited Marcus Linell, who had worked alongside Bruce as porter, to dinner in Kensington Square.
“Who do you think is going to be next Chairman of Sotheby’s?” Rickett asked.
Linell replied without hesitation: “Bruce Chatwin.”
Bruce was then 23. The fact he was considered Chairman material at this age by his colleagues was noteworthy, but in the context of Wilson’s treatment of up-and-coming stars it was not the compliment it seemed. Wilson burned most of his favourites, including Rickett who, until the splitting of his department, had considered himself the front runner for the succession.
Bruce revealed his misgivings to Cary Welch. “Am given over to much private melancholy . . . as to my own future,” he wrote after Wilson’s audacious purchase of New York’s premier auction house, Parke-Bernet, in the summer of 1964. “It’s like a game of snakes and ladders and as far as Sotheby’s are concerned, I have slid down the snake to square one. This means that to go up the ladders again it will be a question of threats, imbecilic charm, insinuous manoeuvring and a better spy-ring. One day I shall kick the whole thing in the pants and retire to Crete. Sorry to be so devious – the details I’ll fill in when I see you . . . This is my ambition – BOTANIST written in my passport. The sale of works of art is the most unlovable profession in the world.”
Bruce’s disillusionment sharpened as he watched the man in charge of his department go, literally, mad.
The fact of John Rickett’s schizophrenia was not generally known outside Modern Pictures. It had first manifested itself with an intense preoccupation with the work of Richard Dadd, the Victorian artist who had axed his father to death in a railway carriage, believing him to be the devil. Rickett owned one Dadd and had written a paper on him. One day he surprised one of the secretaries with the declaration: “You know, Anne, I’m going to have a baby by Richard Dadd.”
Rickett lunched regularly at the Westbury Hotel, and the effect of alcohol with his medication multiplied his delusions. One lunchtime, he invited along Anne Thomson’s husband Paul, who worked for him in the Picture department. After lunch, Rickett picked up a sharp carving knife and said: “I’m going to kill the first person I see in Sotheby’s and I hope it’s Katherine Maclean [then Wilson’s personal assistant].”
He was not joking. A secretary who went into Rickett’s office one afternoon was alarmed to find him stabbing his desk and called a porter to remove the knife. This happened several times. Rickett once accosted Elizabeth Chanler with a knife, “but did not say what he wanted”. On another occasion, an injection had to be administered through his suit while Kenelm Digby-Jones held him down. Katherine Maclean wrote to Elizabeth: “Poor thing, I feel very sorry for him basically, but the awful thing is I find it hard not to get the shivers whenever I am left alone with him . . .”
Susceptible to dramas in his vicinity, Bruce began to somatize the stresses and the pressure he was feeling, the accumulation of five years at Sotheby’s.
Bruce’s misfortunes had multiplied from the moment he left Kabul. A postal strike prevented him from meeting Elizabeth in the Lebanon. “He never got my cables at all,” she complained to Gertrude. On his return to London, where he had leased Grosvenor Crescent Mews on condition he might store his belongings while in Afghanistan, he found the locks changed. Denied entry by the French photographer who had taken the lease, he was threatening to hire “two goons from Soho” to batter down the door when his father, the guarantor of the lease, stepped in. Bruce lost his christening mug, several drawings, all his books and his kitchen equipment. He moved into a small flat in Mount Street, a short walk from Sotheby’s.
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