Bruce Chatwin (37 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

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BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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On 15 July, having barely settled in with Elizabeth at Holwell Farm, Bruce set off for Central Europe with Batey. He kept Elizabeth apprised. In Brussels, they failed to get into the Stocklett Collection. “Then we went to Aix and looked at Charlemagne and the
Schatzkammer
where there are some objects that nearly made me die, especially the engraving on the back of the cross of Lothan and Richard of Cornwall’s sceptre. We separated at Cologne after looking over that monstrous cathedral.” He planned to meet Batey again in Bulgaria once he had completed an excavation near Prague.
On 17 August, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “Andrew left on Tuesday to join him in Sofia and they were then going to Turkey together.” This leg of their trip was not a success. To Bruce’s irritation, Batey was so beguiled by Chatwin’s contacts in Istanbul that he stayed put. “My Turkish friends almost ate him up entirely,” Bruce wrote to Gertrude, “and although he was supposed to come to the wilds of Anatolia with me he never left the city for five weeks. I warned him in advance that it would happen if he weren’t firm-minded and it did.”
Batey hovered about the Chatwins until his marriage to a childhood sweetheart in October 1968. By then relations had soured. Batey was suspected of going off with too many things. (From Bruce he absconded with a blue faience Egyptian gaming piece; from Erskine, with a silver coin of Augustus that Batey gave to the doorman of the Ritz as a tip.) Batey’s impulses were “all too clear” to Welch who described it to Bruce as “a case of his being extremely, deeply upset by his ‘queer’ tendencies, which make him love you. His preoccupation with your possessions results in his wanting souvenirs. Things to him are equatable with love (as usual). As he dare not in fact love you, he loves your stuff which he must have. This is a kind of fetishism.”
Piggott changed his mind about Elizabeth after staying overnight at Ozleworth. “She was very welcoming and kind and good fun and it may all have been shyness.” Bruce “ran around like a pleased dog”. But all was not well.
February 5, 1968: “Bruce rang up and said he’d just bought some venison on impulse and would I come and eat it with him and Ruth if he could get hold of her.” Ruth Tringham, a red-haired Marxist, was a research fellow back after a year in Russia, where she had been the first westerner to excavate in Moldavia. She had bought the Chatwins’ Citroën van and remembered the negotiations principally for “this huge tension going on between them”.
At the appointed hour Tringham and Piggott turned up, but, wrote Piggott, “Elizabeth had suddenly and unexpectedly returned and gone to bed (I suspect in anger rather than the alleged migraine) and so an unholy chill was in the air and though Bruce’s cooking was marvellous I didn’t stay late and I really felt embarrassed. Bruce of course in a state of nervous volubility. He was like a small boy who in his parents’ absence has asked in some disreputable children he wasn’t supposed to play with, and had raided the larder for them. Poor Bruce. And
so
odd.”
Magouche Fielding, an older friend, once asked Bruce directly: “Why can’t you give Elizabeth a baby?”
Bruce replied awkwardly: “It’s very complicated.”
They had married with the intention of soon starting a family. “I’d simply
love
to have a little boy by him,” Elizabeth had written. It was one reason for buying Ozleworth: “It was a nice place to bring up children because it’s so safe. We fully expected to have children, and talked about whether to have two or four.” Bruce had told Gertrude that they would grow up in the Catholic faith. By the end of 1967, Gertrude and Margharita were showing impatience for the moment when Elizabeth would be busy with “family responsibilities”.
Elizabeth had been married a year and a half when she decided to submit herself for tests. They proved inconclusive. She described the treatment as “sloppy and unprofessional”. She never saw the same doctor twice, received no report. “It was in the dark days of not telling you anything.” The clinic wanted to test Bruce, but Elizabeth refused on the grounds that he was in the middle of exams. “He was never tested. So both of us spent the rest of our lives thinking it was oneself rather than the other.”
The subject was very occasionally brought up. “Bruce was depressed that he didn’t have children. It was so difficult to discuss because he always thought it reflected on him. He probably had a low sperm count. I felt it was my fault, some hormonal imbalance. At least we didn’t blame each other. We did talk a little bit about adoption. But he said an adopted child always knows it’s not with its real mother. Neither of us were maternal or paternal enough to take on someone else’s child.”
There seems little doubt that Bruce had entered marriage wanting children. “
Life is empty without children
,” he wrote in his notebook, adding a tick. He was good with children, able to see the world through their eyes. “I remember him best one Christmas when he tap-danced on the bubble wrap, making a tremendous amount of noise”, wrote Elizabeth’s niece, Alice. “He was showing us all how to pop them the fastest.” Without children he could remain the child, but he was sensitive about his childless state. In 1982, Melvyn Bragg interviewed him for
The South Bank Show
in a programme devoted to
On the Black Hill.
It struck Bragg that “childlessness, being at the end of the line, even sterility” was a big theme in the book. “Sterility is carrying asceticism a long way, isn’t it?” Uncharacteristically, Bruce was flummoxed. “I must say, I don’t know how to reply. Maybe you’ve got me.”
Chatwin’s novel of childless twins shows empathy with a barren relationship. “Time in its healing circle had wiped away the pain and the anger, the shame and the sterility.” But references in his notebooks suggest he blamed himself. In the Niger in 1972 he wrote: “Nearly became a Catholic. Childlessness. Fault.”
Bruce aestheticised his predicament, converting it into something rarefied and power-enhancing. Positive references to infertility run through his notebooks. “There is a distinct connection between brain esp. in the male and infertility.” Another entry quotes Francis Bacon: “The Noblest workes and Foundations have proceeded from childlesse Men.” To which Bruce adds: “Low fertility and rising intelligence. The position of the shamanic personality.”
Infertility came to be connected in Bruce’s mind with the position of the shaman. In 1967 Bruce gave Lucie-Smith a copy of Andreas Lommel’s
Shamanism – The Beginning of Art.
The sterile shaman of West Africa exerted for Bruce a particular fascination. “He’s a sorcerer,” says a boy in a draft of
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
“He can’t make babies so he eats them.”
He also linked infertility to the notion of escape: “Examine the possibility of sterility with bird . . . shed feathers, beating against a cage, internal fights and pecking in solitary confinement.” This sentiment was poignantly expressed in relation to himself in a paragraph of
In Patagonia.
Trudging the unused path from Harberton to Viamonte, Bruce comes face to face with a lone guanaco, an animal related to the llama.
“He was a single male, his coat all muddied and his front gashed with scars. He had been in a fight and lost. Now he also was a sterile wanderer.”
XVII
 
A Season in Hell
Sound scholarship
Is one piece of luggage
Too heavy for me
To carry
I am in a hurry
And I travel light
—BC, notebooks, Mauritania 1970
ONE DAY IN MARCH
,
BRUCE HEARD ON ELIZABETH’S RADIO THE
summons of the dolorous notes of the trumpet found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. The ancient sound, not heard for thousands of years, filled the Canongate flat. “I’m afraid he is itching to go away somewhere difficult and exotic and the US doesn’t count at all,” wrote Elizabeth. As Bruce said of Stevenson: “Samoa was the logical extension of a life in Edinburgh.” In the event, he went not to Samoa or Egypt but to Czechoslovakia. He considered Mongolia and Afghanistan, but then settled, for his summer’s excavation, on Zavist, 40 kilometres south of Prague.
He reached the massive earthen fortifications on 20 July. His destination was a wooded Celtic hill fort directly overlooking the River Moldava. Also on the Zavist excavation was a 23-year-old Italian, “who is my new friend,” he wrote to Elizabeth.
Maurizio Tosi was four years younger than Bruce, but a great deal more worldly. He had studied in Rome, had dug in Afghanistan, had met Che Guevara in Cuba and had been sent by the Italian communists to Auschwitz for intense training in anti-fascism. But “my communism was in a raging crisis,” says Tosi, who shared a room with Bruce at Zavist. In contrast, Bruce’s “interest in politics was
zero
”. Tosi forgot his troubles in women, “the top thought in my life”, and already had a girlfriend at the camp, with whom he would make love in the lunch breaks.
After months pent up with archaeological minutiae, Bruce delighted in uncircumscribed narrative. “There is every reason why I should dislike Maurizio, but somehow I do not,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “He is over six and a half feet tall and indecendy fat. Despite the solid nature of Bohemian food he needs to be refilled every half-hour. In July he was awarded a doctorate at Rome University. His thesis, calculated to make me hate him, was on the close of the Indus Valley Civilisation and the coming of the Aryans. He got it all wrong, and used a number of inapplicable analogies about the movement of the Maya from Guatemala to Yucatan. Maurizio is never at a loss for some apparently brilliant remark about some obscure facet of Central European archaeology, but I fear that his knowledge is about as superficial as mine. He tells me he was once employed in smuggling microfilms from East to West Berlin. He is a man of many parts, an archaeologist of sorts, a smuggler, an International Socialist and also a self-styled great lover. Maurizio cannot talk about the stratigraphy of the Lower Quetta valley without finding two bulges that remind him of firm breasts.
“He bent double, which for him is no mean feat, to kiss the hand of a ferocious Slav lady archaeologist. She was somewhat affronted, but in general it must be said he enjoys considerable success. He is engaged to a girl in Andover, ‘the Wessex bird’, as he calls her. This is not to say that Maurizio doesn’t have birds in any European town one cares to mention. The current object of his affections is Eva. ‘Eva, the first woman, she gave herself utterly to me.’ Eva is an enthusiastic, wide-hipped blonde with sparkling blue spectacles and buck teeth, who lives up the hill from Zavist with her refined but calculating mother, and I fear that Maurizio did not bargain for her as well. Mother and daughter work as a team, and they are determined to catch Herr Docktor Maurizio. Both have visions of a splendid Roman future, and Maurizio has built up such a baroque image of grandeur that it will be hard for him to dispel their illusions. He has already invited them to Rome. ‘Supposing they really come,’ he moans. ‘How would I explain it to my family – and the Roman bird?’ In the meantime Maurizio is eating them out of house and home – vast quantities of duck and dumplings, chocolate cake, red currant tarts and apricots. He sits on the sofa, and while mama presses her attentions and Eva ladles yet another spoonful of cherry jam down that ever open mouth, he contemplates himself in the mirror, occasionally inclining his head to admire that strange Roman profile. I cannot imagine how he will extract himself from the situation, especially as mama has specially rented a riverside cottage for the two lovers this weekend. Despite a lingering feeling that he may have made Eva pregnant, Maurizio faces the prospect of the final parting next week with equanimity. ‘It is very simple,’ he says. ‘I shall burst into tears, and when I cry who can be angry?”’
Tosi remembers Chatwin’s arrival at Zavist. “I noticed this guy was interested in people.” Before the dig, they had dinner in a hotel, sitting on wooden benches while couples danced. “A young soldier, blond, reddish cheeks and a short, buttoned tunic was dancing primly with a girl and looking up so happily. Bruce said: ‘It’s extraordinary that someone can be happy with so little’.”
Over the next week, Tosi observed Bruce in the field. “I could never foresee what was coming. He was doing nothing I expected. I spoke three or four languages and was involved in lots of political actions, but I could not compare with the wit and performing capacities and the culture, the knowledge that Bruce was able to express in a few minutes of conversation. That summer in Czechoslovakia, he was – or at least declared himself to be – an archaeologist. On the other hand, I cannot forget the sense of boredom he had any time we entered into the technicalities, the excavation, the survey work, the descriptive aspects of the site.”
Tosi took him on his first visit to the site. “While strolling though the woods from the house to our excavations I went into the most detailed explanation of the fortification’s lay-out, but he kept on pointing to the trees, giving them precise names, never responding to my attempts at professional involvement. The same applied when I showed him the trench and sections. Bruce was much more amused by the snakes. Zavist was full of snakes.”
At the end of each day Bruce and Maurizio went into Prague. They explored the old city, the synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, Rabbi Loew’s tomb, and they attended a wedding of yet another girlfriend of Maurizio’s. When the week’s dig was over, they parted: Maurizio for Afghanistan and East Iran; Bruce for Central Europe on a tour of museums in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey – and to join Batey. In a restaurant somewhere, he scribbled on the back of an envelope: “I have never known an orchestra with a greater capacity to shock. We have been running through Lehár waltzes and whenever we hit a high note it is like crossing a hump-back bridge, never fails to hit the wrong note.” On another page he made a pencil sketch of Holwell Farm, as if he is explaining to someone at dinner the house in which he lived. “Cotswold cute” and “charming pink” he wrote underneath the drawing. “
Tout à fait tip-top noblesse d’Angleterre
.” In the third week of September, he made his way home. “I’m in a horrid hot little room and I miss you,” he wrote to Elizabeth.

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