Bruce Chatwin (3 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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Bruce called Brain’s book “the most compelling detective story I have ever read”. As a schoolboy he had held that “everyone needs a quest as an excuse for living”. Brain’s findings promised a key.
For two days Bruce engaged Brain in conversations which he described as “the most stimulating discussions in my life”. They spoke of Birmingham, where Bruce had grown up and from where Brain’s father, finding England restrictive, had departed for the Cape. They spoke about Brain’s son Ted, who died at 14 months when he choked on a piece of apple, teaching Brain – painfully – to live his life as though each day might be his last. And they spoke of the origin of evil.
Bruce seized on Brain’s discoveries to support his conviction that human beings were “not that bad” and that the predator instinct was not essential to our nature. If the leopard-like cat had preyed on our ancestors, then man in his origins was not necessarily aggressive. He lived his life in fear,
dinofelis
watching him from the shadows.
Bruce – who called the cat “the Prince of Darkness” – amused the older man. Brain says, “He understood ‘the Prince of Darkness’ as a psychological necessity. He thought we had lived so long with prowling nocturnal predators they had become part of our make-up. When we no longer had these animals in bodily form, we invented dragons and heroes who went off to fight them.” Discussing, for instance, Uccello’s painting of St George in the act of lancing the dragon, Bruce seemed to think this was an illustration of what had actually happened. Brain had misgivings about this nostalgia for “the Beast we have lost”. Nevertheless, it excited him to watch Bruce take his work and run with it. “Chatwin was like a nineteenth-century synthesiser,” says Brain. “There is a place again for that kind of generalist, someone who can wander among specialised fields and pull things together. Otherwise it’s very compartmentalised and syntheses don’t really occur.” The two men talked late into the night and on the following day they drove to the cave at Swartkrans.
From the cave entrance on a hill of pink dolomite it is possible to see, 40 kilometres to the south-west, the skyline of Johannesburg, and to the east, the dumps of chalky rock from the goldmines of Krugersdorp. Close as it is to one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Swartkrans is always tranquil. Black eagles looking for rock rabbit glide above slopes dotted with white stinkwood, and here and there are bright red flowers.
Brain completed his book in a hut nearby. Bruce, too, sensed a place of special significance. He wrote in his notebook: “Good feeling at Swartkrans.”
He was familiar with the excavation procedure. With Brain and the site foreman, George Moenda, he took up a position close to the west wall. The three started to dig into a patch of calcified earth with plastic-handled screwdrivers. At 10 a.m. one of them found a bone tool. A second grey bone looked like a scraper. “Turned out to be gnawed by a porcupine,” recorded Bruce. Over the course of 19 years, Brain told him, the cave had yielded more than 100,000 specimens like these. They had been digging in the west wall for half an hour after lunch when Moenda prised from the earth, alongside an arrangement of three stones, a cracked fragment of antelope bone. Beige white on the outside, blackened on the inside, the bone was speckled with dark patches, as if burned.
George handed it round. It had a soapy feel.
Brain was not a demonstrative man. He had so often set out to find confirmation of his thesis, suffered so many false alarms. But this time he was visibly moved. “This bone is remarkably suggestive!”
What they were looking at would eventually be validated, in 1988, as man’s first known experimentation with fire. It would predate by 700,000 years the previously oldest find, at Choukoutien in China. “That was the first convincing evidence for the earliest use of fire in any human context anywhere,” says Brain. “It was a very astonishing moment.”
Brain was quick to speculate. This bone provided a partial explanation of how our ancestors escaped the continual threat of predation. He reconstructed the scene: a thunderstorm at the beginning of summer, the yellow grass, dried to a parchment in the winter sun, a lightning-struck bush, and
homo erectus
dragging back to his cave this elusive substance, which coming with flashes and thunder must have had a magical significance.
Man’s use of the fire-struck bush represented for Brain the “crucial step in the progressive manipulation of nature . . . so characteristic of the subsequent course of human affairs”. It would not, of course, guarantee permanent protection: another half million years would pass before man could make fire to order. But it offered intermittent respite.
Bruce gave his own account of that day in a letter to Colin Thubron: “When visiting the excavation at Swartkrans with Bob Brain, one of the questions uppermost in my mind was man’s use of fire: the myth of Prometheus is absolutely crucial, to my mind, in understanding the condition of the First Man – since it is with fire that Man could adequately protect himself at night from the predators.
“Bob and I discussed the pros and cons of the first hearth over lunch. Then, in the first few cubic centimetres which we – or rather the foreman George – excavated that afternoon, there were some fragments of bone which looked most definitely charred! Since the level in question would date somewhere close to 2 million [1.2 million is now the accepted figure], I got very excited – though he, sanguine as ever, was inclined to pooh-pooh the discovery. This morning, however, I had a letter in which he says the bones were definitely burned. In other words, I may, conceivably, have turned up at Swartkrans on the day the world’s earliest hearth was found.”
The Swartkrans discovery has not been challenged and Brain remains convinced that here, more than a million years ago, there occurred the first step which released our ancestor from his subservience to big cats.
Brain took four more years to excavate the next eight metres. Close to the end of his life, impatient to have the finding registered, Bruce wrote from Vienna in 1987. “Do I take it that the bits of blackened bone were burnt? And does this mean that the use of fire
has
been found with fossils associated with
H. Habilis
[
sic
]. Or is that going too far?” Not until the following year was Brain able to demonstrate with confidence, microscopically and chemically, that the 260 charred pieces of antelope bone constituted good evidence of “the earliest use of fire”. In December 1988, the results were announced on the cover of
Nature
magazine. Bruce was dead before the news reached him.
Bruce never, except in letters, wrote about the events on 2 February, 1984. His discretion owes much to his respect for Brain: Swartkrans was his life’s work. But somehow it is typical that Bruce should have been party to this crucial archaeological discovery. So many of the threads of his life come together on that dolomite hillside: the uncanny good luck, the speedy in-and-out, the all-suggestive fragment, the speculative theory, the fascination with provenance and the origin of things. At last, he had scientific evidence to support his belief that man was not a bloodthirsty and cannibalistic aggressor, as authorities like Dart and Lorenz would have him.
Bruce hammered out his theory on the telephone to Colin Thubron. “I got this wonderful call out of the blue,” says Thubron. “He was terrifically geared up about it. After all, what could be more important than trying to diagnose the origins of evil in the world? I remember his charge of intellectual delight. He wanted to share it with someone.
He had held the bone in his hands.
‘Colin, I’ve just been down in South Africa and I’ve been at the moment that they uncovered the earliest discovery of the domestic hearth, which puts back the discovery of fire to . . . ’ and so on, then bang, down the telephone went and Bruce had disappeared for a year or two years.”
Thubron wrote down what Bruce had said: “If the sources of aggression are directed not against other human beings, but against the wild beast etc, then our condition is OK.” The glitter-eyed cat disappeared, according to Bruce, at the same time as humans developed speech. He told Thubron, “It was through language that the earliest hominids saved themselves.” Language was the medium of uniting against “the Beast”.
The discovery at Swartkrans was a glorious affirmation of the work on which Bruce had been engaged for 16 years. On his return to England he signed a contract with Tom Maschler at Cape for the book he now decided to entitle
The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.
The evidence of fire had suggested to Brain the “perfectly valid speculation” that language, and so storytelling, might have evolved from a need to issue warnings about our predator. “Language came into being,” Brain says, “out of a need for far more precise communication and identification of objects and circumstances, and for more elaborate audible signals.”
Our earliest stories were vessels for preserving vital information about how to survive: water supply, plant location and, possibly, the whereabouts of
dinofelis.
Brain makes no extravagant claims, but he does say that when fire was available, it lengthened the daylight hours and encouraged people sitting around the flames to discuss what they had done during the day. He calls fire a “social facilitator” and says that it promoted language because people had to be within the arc of firelight. “If they strayed outside, they were in mortal danger.”
The significance of fire was not lost on Bruce. From childhood he was fascinated by the priest-like figures who tended its flames. “Shamanism,” he declared at the beginning of his writing career, “has always been connected with mastery over fire.” His identification with shamans endured right to the end. In a hospital bed in Oxford, he wrote in what would be his last notebook: “Aren’t all true healers – from the prehistoric shaman on – all ‘thundermen’?” In his failing hand he added, “the feminised man, healer, songmaster etc. always set apart in every tribe . . . Appeased. Honoured. Essential. The superior man.” They were almost the last words he wrote.
For Bruce, as for “the early guardians of fire”, stories were not just entertainment: they concerned his own survival too. “Man is a talking animal, a storytelling animal,” he wrote in one of his black notebooks. “I would like to think that he talked his way out of extinction and that is what talk is for.”
Bruce Chatwin’s gift for instant intimacy meant that a lot of people felt they knew him. As often as not, it was the perishable intimacy of a first encounter. What impressed the Australian poet Les Murray was not the dazzle but the loneliness it concealed. “He was lonely and he wanted to be. He had those blue implacable eyes that said, ‘I will forget you, I will reject you because neither you nor any other human being can give me what I want’.” He reminded Murray, forcibly, of T. E. Lawrence.
Stephen Spender was also reminded of Lawrence. “Two hundred years ago, Bruce might have conquered a large slice of Empire and he probably would have died early and been buried in Afghanistan. He didn’t like England, but that is very English too. The British Empire, after all, was based on people trying to get away from Britain.”
Bruce professed a distaste for Lawrence, as he did for anyone with whom he might be compared. “I hate T. E. Lawrence. Well, I think I do. Incredibly unpleasant.” Yet he was powerfully attracted to the myth and, like Lawrence, travelled as much to leave one self behind as to find another. “He is in the tradition of Drake, Cavendish, Darwin, Bridges,” says Professor Zampini, who entertained Bruce in Patagonia. “For a long time the only way to be universal was to be English. You are an island open to the sea which takes you everywhere.” Bruce’s father was a sailor. “At heart we are an island of buccaneers and pirates,” Bruce told André Malraux.
“If he’d lived in the nineteenth century,” says Sandy Martin, an antiquities dealer who knew Bruce at Sotheby’s, “he would have got a backer, a peer who fancied him, and been a good archaeologist and discovered something.” This may account for his attraction to nineteenth-century figures: shipwrecked sailors who have lost everything and start again on the tip of the world; Europeans who create kingdoms in Patagonia; Portuguese who have the run of the Slave Coast. Ordinary folk, in other words, who leave the suburbs to reinvent themselves royally in the sticks.
In the late twentieth century, Bruce had to be “a Stanley of literature”, according to Gregor von Rezzori, exploring places which everyone else had passed over. “He was attracted to small countries like Dahomey, where he might have felt quite powerful,” says the American novelist David Plante. “His attitude seemed to be: ‘Except for the fact it’s too late, I might have run the Empire. But I certainly have a right to it in a retrospective way because I know more about it than anyone else.’ With Bruce, knowledge and fantasy became power.”
He was English in the way of Lawrence and Burton, distancing himself from where he came from. “Being an Englishman makes me uneasy,” he said. “I find I can be English and behave like an Englishman only if I’m not here.” His Englishness trailed him everywhere. It was part of him, from the way he talked, dressed, walked into any room confident of a delighted welcome. He had the self-confidence bred of the public school system, the English knack of being able to talk on all manner of subjects while being only half as knowledgeable as he was able to convey; and of disappearing – just like that. Neal Ascherson describes this trait, the smile of the Cheshire cat: “To be unfindable and untraceable – that is an English dream! It is an idea of liberty which allows the individual to be ‘present’ only when he or she chooses, but to retain the right and capacity to melt away.”

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