Bruce Chatwin (41 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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Straker may well have been the impetus behind Bruce’s need for a small flat in London. In April, he signed a short lease on a studio at 9 Kynance Mews, owned by an actor who played secondary roles in James Bond films. “Bruce has hardly been here at all as he’s been preoccupied with his play, his book and selling things & getting the flat ready,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude on 26 April. “B came down Thurs night with a rent-a-van and took some things up – including a double bed.”
Kynance Mews was Bruce’s London base for a year. He later shared it with Oliver Hoare, the carpets expert at Christie’s, with a stipulation that he and Elizabeth had squatting rights once a week. Hoare’s taste for kelim-covered benches and hessian cushions led to the flat’s nickname, The Great Bed. That summer, Bruce lent Kynance Mews to Straker while he was abroad.
In June 1969, the nomad book supplied Bruce with an excuse to visit Afghanistan for the third and last time. He intended to follow the Silk Route with Peter Levi, who had been commissioned to write a book focusing on the Greek influence in the area. Levi originally had in mind a long
Childe Harold
kind of poem on Afghanistan, but he scaled down his ambition proposing instead “the kind of topographical or travel book that used to be written in the nineteenth century, only with sharper edges and a more modern prose”.
Collins agreed to pay him an advance of £250. “You can look at nomads and I can look at Greeks,” Levi told Bruce.
Bruce, “a compass without a needle” as one friend called him at this time, fastened on to the poet. “He was then in the process of transforming himself from an archaeologist into a writer,” says Levi, “and so far as any advice was called for, it was I who advised him to make the change.”
They had renewed acquaintance on Bruce’s vacations from Edinburgh. In Oxford to use the libraries, Bruce would meet up with Levi at Campion Hall. “One reason why we were friends,” says Levi, “is that I never asked him questions. I just said: ‘You do? You don’t? Oh!”’
Their relationship was observed by Iain Watson, an academic living at Yarnton. “One had the impression Bruce didn’t have anyone whom he trusted to tell him where to go. Peter helped him.”
According to James Ivory, the thin and handsome Levi was for Bruce “a figure of glamour”. Levi is aware that Bruce romanticised his life as a poet and Jesuit priest. “He thought it a wonderful idea to have all these pads all over the place: a room at Campion Hall; a room in Athens; a room in Eastbourne, where my mother lived. He wanted from me a way of life that was largely in his imagination. He thought my life was some kind of solution: I travelled about and I was a writer. That interested him for the first time while we were in Afghanistan. We talked about the problems of writing, about Russian poets like Osip Mandelstam. What I didn’t know or notice was that Bruce was changing
himself
. You write in order to change yourself in my view. He was trying to remake his life and become a writer.”
The two men met throughout the spring to plot their itinerary. Elizabeth walked with her cat in the Botanical Gardens while Bruce and Levi discussed the site of Ay Khanoum, a Hellenistic city which French archaeologists were then excavating on the Oxus. “Peter Levi is absolutely neat,” wrote Elizabeth, “& I think Bruce will have a lovely time travelling with him.”
Their plans were also observed by Maurizio Tosi, whom Bruce took down to Campion Hall. Tosi was in London to lecture on his exciting excavations at Seistan. In 1968, a year after digging with Bruce at Zavist, he had broken the hard soil with a pick and uncovered the Burnt City of Shahar-i-Sakhta in Eastern Iran, proof of an unknown civilisation between the Indus and Mesopotamia. Such a discovery Bruce might once have wished for himself, but it was evident to Tosi that archaeology was over for Bruce. “He spent one full day with me at the Institute of Archaeology to photograph the pot shards from Baluchistan which I had been studying. But it was very much like an elder brother helping the naïve dreams of his younger brother. His eyes were shining with excitement only when he spoke about the trip to Afghanistan which he and Peter Levi were to undertake that summer.”
Before meeting Levi in Teheran on 17 June, Bruce flew to Cairo to earn the money which would finance the three-month journey. He concealed his mission from everyone, except Elizabeth. It was vital that nobody guessed the identity of his paymaster: Sotheby’s rival, Christie’s.
Once he moved on, Bruce did not look back. “I’ve never felt a twinge of regret about Sotheby’s,” he wrote to Gertrude, “and every time I go back and see my poor ex-colleagues, I find they all want to do the same.”
He was well aware of the unwritten rule that neither auction house poached staff from the other: these were rivals so bitter that Wilson could not tolerate mention of their name. “Christie’s are crazy to have him work for them,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude, but she felt alarm about Wilson’s reaction. “He could do B a lot of harm.” And indeed, says Elizabeth, “PCW did his nut” when news reached him that Christie’s were flirting with his former protégé. What had soured their relationship prevented Wilson from tackling Bruce face to face. Instead, he invited Elizabeth to his London house and told her furiously: “We feel Bruce’s knowledge is ours because he got it when he was at Sotheby’s.” Wilson offered to set Bruce up with capital to become a dealer, but Elizabeth refused on his behalf. “I said he would have made a lousy dealer. He was fine with other people’s money, but useless with his own.”
Elizabeth’s allowance had cushioned him when he left Sotheby’s. “It was a help, but you certainly couldn’t live on it entirely,” she says. Bruce had supported himself at Edinburgh by dealing, the junk shops providing a steady source of income. In one shop he had bought for £20 a chalcedony salt cellar. “He found the pair to it in the
Schatzkammer
in Vienna and the date is Burgundy, 1490!” Many of the objects had been collected by Scots seafarers, including a Maori sculpture, once belonging to Sarah Bernhardt, “for which he has already been offered more than twice what he paid”. This rapid turnover upset Elizabeth. “I hate having him buy things & then sell them because it seems such a pity to let them go after we get attached to them . . . but it’s a constant struggle, because people are always offering him huge sums for something he bought for £100 & it’s a temptation.”
After Edinburgh, where he had been on a student grant, Bruce’s financial position forced him to reconsider Christie’s offer. He agreed to work for them on a freelance basis – so long as his name did not appear on their books. On 25 January, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “For goodness sake, don’t tell ANYONE.”
Bruce’s retainer from Christie’s amounted to £1,250 a year. This is what he lived on for the next two years, supplemented by the sale of various objects belonging to him or Elizabeth. The first part of his retainer was paid after a visit to Egypt and financed his journey to Afghanistan.
On 7 June, Bruce flew to Cairo with Christie’s managing director, Guy Hannon. Their mission was to secure the sale of the contents of the Cairo Museum. The Egyptian government, anxious to raise hard currency to pay for the war with Israel, had decided to sell off some of its national treasures in order to buy a squadron of MiG fighter planes. They had approached Christie’s with a list of tantalising objects. “The whole thing was too fraught for words,” says Hannon, who took along Bruce because “he was reckoned to know more than anyone else”.
They found Cairo tense and deserted. “Nobody was there because people thought the Israelis were going to drop bombs.” Bruce and Hannon sat before a committee and together they ran through the list, providing their estimates. But the Egyptians had changed their mind. They no longer wished to sell their most important sculptures. “They wanted to sell us a huge number of stuffed ibis,” says Hannon.
Surrounded in the Cairo Museum by the implacable face of the Pharaoh, a thought struck Bruce. “Where is the face of Moses, I said, amongst all this lot?” Every vestige of Rameses II was on view, down to his mummified fingernails, but nothing remained of the nomad who had gone out from the city and died in the desert. “And you have to ask that question in history: Who is a more important figure, Moses or Pharoah? And you come to the conclusion: it’s Moses.” This sweeping question, as he prepared to join Levi in Afghanistan, became central to his thesis.
Bruce and Levi landed in Kabul on 25 June, and dined with an English public school master who was hoping to be allowed to lead a team of undergraduates to the northern province of Badakhshan.
Among the missions to Kabul in 1841 was a Society for the Suppression of Vice among the Uzbeks. Rather in this vein, Peter Willey, a senior housemaster at Wellington College, had arrived from London to make a study for the Anti-Slavery Society. “They are, if the whole story bears credence, investigating the bond relationship between the growers of opium and Indian hemp and those who control the market,” Bruce wrote in his journal. “This constitutes a master-slave relationship . . . Col Gregory has therefore provided funds and button microphones and miniature cameras. The expedition lives on corned beef.”
The Willey Expedition seemed so ludicrous to Bruce that two years later he proposed it to the director James Ivory as a fit subject for cinematic treatment. “No spectacle, not even the Angel Gabriel on a trip, was more bizarre than one puffy public school master followed by three of the most exquisitely dressed and pretty and flirtatious boys, one with boots and marginally more masculine than the other two with handbags, as they picked their way delicately from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of the Exterior to the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Culture and finally when the Afghan government had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to be investigated, least of all by an ex-British army major, the party dropped in on the PM to be shown the door, first of all quite politely and then really rather rudely . . . My Dear, it was funny, very funny.”
Willey and his entourage haunted Bruce’s third Afghan journey, hovering around Kabul, “because Kabul was where the Afghans said the expedition must remain and remain it did”. Despite the criticism he heaped on the Anti-Slavery Society, his own expedition was not without its absurdities.
His expedition started with a whipping. On 12 July, Bruce sent a postcard to Elizabeth from the British Embassy in Kabul. “British School in Teheran was populated by the most
awful
Cambridge archaeologists you can imagine. Breathing tomb fungus. We barged in on the Bala Hisar, a military fort, and both got lashed at by a very irate infantryman with his belt. Very uncomfortable but in fact quite funny.”
Bruce and Levi were looking for pottery shards below the Bala Hisar, an imposing castle on the south of the Kabul river, when an enraged private soldier attacked them, unarmed except for his military belt. Levi dismissed the episode as an “odd little incident of fantasy” explained by midday heat. Bruce, in his journal, showed less composure. “A refreshing spot after a fiendish day. Poor P. He was wrong, obstinate and wrong. I warned and was right, triumphantly right.”
Kabul, smelling of balsam poplars and petrol, held no more charm than before. Whenever they returned from an expedition, they heard the same donkey in the Embassy garden screeching with unsatisfied desire. At least Shah Jahan’s marble pavilion, once offered to Bruce and Robert Erskine, had been restored among its mulberry trees.
From Kabul, they visited Bamiyan in the passes of the Hindu Kush. Bruce was looking for nomad tombs in the upper pastures. The highest point of his summer occurred early on in a valley behind Shar-i-Golgola. After walking 35 miles they came to a line of four nomadic burial mounds. “We looked and neither of us spoke, being unwilling to believe our eyes,” Levi wrote in
The Light Garden of the Angel King.
“It was too good to be true, after so many enthusiastic conversations, that you only had to move an hour into the hills to come across unexcavated and uncharted burial mounds.”
For Bruce, “the moment of sitting on the hot mounds was one of the rare occasions when poetry and life are mingled.
Plongé dans nature.
One has a desperate wish to communicate the almost mystical sensation, but finds oneself parched and impotent.”
He turned to poetry to express his feelings. This was his legendary back of beyond, where the Animal Art of the Eurasian steppes had evolved. He was excited by his discussions with Levi and possibly by Basho and Marvell whose poems he carried in his rucksack. Higher up the same valley he watched a hawk chasing a lark over the rocks. He put the image into verse form.
A Crested lark
Caught in the wind
Lost a feather
The lark sang
On a smooth stone
The feather floated up
and was chased by a hawk.
 
His notebooks from now on contain frequent attempts at Levi’s speciality.
“Afghanistan was the ideal place for these kinds of reflection,” says Maurizio Tosi. In few other countries were the remains of the past so ubiquitous, mixing together civilisations arriving from distant corners with the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols. Tosi, having excavated there, well understood Bruce’s fascination. “You stand in a barren countryside watching a group of camel and horse-mounted nomads moving with all their stuff and flocks and behind them are still standing the most magnificent ruins of splendid buildings made by kings who ruled over farmers and craftsmen in large cities.”

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