Bruce Chatwin (42 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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In the three months Bruce spent in Afghanistan he travelled almost everywhere on all kinds of vehicles and often on foot. Only in Patagonia and West Africa would he ever be such an intense traveller. “Peter told him about the joys of writing,” says Tosi. “He came back and made up his mind to be a writer.”
Levi was generous about Bruce in
The Light Garden of the Angel King.
“It will be obvious from every page of this book that I was extremely fortunate in the travelling companion I did have, Bruce Chatwin. Most of our best observations and all the best jokes were his; it was he who was interested in nomads, he who told me to read Basho, he who had done all the right homework in my subjects as well as his own, who knew the names of flowers and who understood Islamic art history.”
Bruce was less charitable. By the time of publication, in 1972, Peter Levi had fallen the way of Bruce’s previous mentors. In a letter to Elizabeth, he claimed Levi’s book “drove me wild with rage and I think I’d better not read it or I shall become apoplectic”. A paragraph later, he added: “the thing that really infuriates me about the Afghan book is that all my remarks and observations are repeated verbatim as an integral part of his text.”
Bruce began as a disciple, taking photographs for Levi’s book. Yet he was an old Afghan hand. Levi’s Hellenistic project soon irritated him, as did Levi. “Peter is being used by his neighbours as a spittoon. He declares that never will he again go on a bus. I can’t imagine what alternative he has to suggest. It’s perfectly all right to me. Behaving very stupidly. Says he goes to pictures to see the country.” Bruce wondered how he could write poetry of any meaning with that attitude. He cautioned him about his behaviour towards officials. “Tell P he must not call the men at the ministry buggers, bastards, or anything else. If he believes they are, he will greet them accordingly . . . ‘You’ve no sense of the practical,’ I say.” In August 1988, Bruce looked back on their trip without enthusiasm. “It was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. Peter always believes there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He kept picking up bits of pottery and saying they were from a great Greek temple.”
Levi for his part was irritated by Bruce’s habit of “playing at Napoleon”. He was amused by Bruce’s inability to set correctly a special altimeter he had bought in Holland. “It turned out he had us up Everest.” And Bruce’s one-upmanship sometimes tested his patience. At Kunduz, they found a watch in working order dated 1748 and afterwards wandered into the meat and vegetable markets. “I declared loftily but truthfully that all this was nothing to the fishmarket in Venice. Bruce turned out to be another enthusiast for that labyrinth of experiences, but infuriated me by saying, ‘Aha, it was nothing to the fungus season in the market at Brno’.”
Bruce’s competitive spirit was strongest in his feelings towards Levi’s book. “Peter says he was asked to write a book about Balkh. I countered by asking how on earth he could write a book about it when he’d been there for half a morning. He said it would take him a month to look up the necessary references.”
The moment would come on their journey when Bruce became impatient to surpass his mentor.
Bruce succumbed to his usual sickness in Kabul. “Bruce had mild heat exhaustion and a sunstroke temperature,” wrote Levi. “He sat dazed on his bed dressed in a long Arab gown, reading aloud fearsome sentences from the Royal Geographical Society’s
Traveller’s Guide to Health
, such as ‘after collapse, death soon ensues’.”
Levi meanwhile suffered from dysentery, refusing to eat “white food” like rice, milk or yoghurt.
In Kabul, an English hippie called Nigel joined them. Nigel, whom Bruce described as “small, elfin, mischievous, very queer and highly likeable”, incarnated every fear the Willey Expedition entertained for Afghanistan. “Nigel has been approached by a young man who offers a complete armour of hashish,” wrote Bruce. “Pectorals, body belts, cross over braces, necklaces, thigh packs, back packs, holding some 10 kilos in all. Costing not much more than $20 a kilo for high quality stuff. I am bored by the whole business.”
Bruce felt Nigel was someone to be saved, not least from the clutches of the Anti-Slavery Society, still agitating to leave Kabul. He asked Levi whether they might hire him as an interpreter on their journey to Chagcheran in the north-west district of Ghor. “‘Can he come with us? We might save his soul.’ I said, ‘Oh?’ ‘Well, you see,’ said Bruce, ‘he was at Marlborough’.”
They flew to the barren grazing grounds of Chagcheran, where Bruce had heard of a huge annual nomad fair. A week earlier there had been 1,000 tents. Now about 40 flapped in a dust storm, exciting Bruce, who had once slept beneath a jousting tent in Grosvenor Crescent Mews. “I am always moved by the sight of tents and I thought of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the last gasp of a medieval chivalry that owed so much to the mounted cavalry of the Steppe.”
The tents belonged to the Firuzkuhi, who came into Afghanistan with the first Turkish conquerors. Bruce’s destination was their lost capital city, locked in the mountains of the Ghorat and identified as the modern village of Jam.
On 10 July, the three of them reached Shahrak in a bus, from there intending to ride to Jam. “Officer in charge is 23 and has offered us a room and use of his servant Jon-o, which means ‘Soul-Ho!’ One syrupy glance from our new soulmate makes me very nervous. He is so thin and angular one expects him to collapse in a disjointed heap. Deep, deep glance, rolling of eyes, and wide toothy smiles. In bazaar he has helped me stock up with provisions, carrying eggs in his turban . . .”
Not for the first time was Bruce unnerved by syrupy glances, but Levi is quite certain: “He didn’t go to bed with any monkeys or goat-boys. He led the life of a Cistercian monk.”
That night Bruce danced for his supper, “an ecstatic dance with 5 emphatic and suggestive thumps at the climax. An old man highly complimentary on my ‘lady movements’ and kept dragging me to my feet.”
They set off on horseback for Jam, 14 hours away, Bruce perched in agony above some lilac tweed saddle bags which contained the horses’ food. To his apoplectic mirth, Nigel and Levi had bought turbans. They looked to him “sensationally like crested pouter pigeons”, Nigel bearing a resemblance to Lady Hester Stanhope. But the turbans saved their lives in the heat and Levi in his journal records that not long after mocking their appearance, Bruce talked about buying a black one.
Jam was famous for its apricot groves and its minaret of strawberry-coloured brick. This was situated in a shiny black gorge and rose into view at the apex of a chasm of nearly vertical cliffs. “One cannot adequately describe one’s feelings of surprise and bewilderment at this marvel,” Bruce wrote. Planted in a desolate, forlorn valley, the Minaret of Ghyath-ud-Din Muhammad, Sultan of Ghor for the last 40 years of the twelfth century, was, believed Bruce, one of the world’s most audacious monuments. “It rears to the sky like some triple-tiered Moon Rocket and was built with exactly the same aspirations.” Inside, a birch staircase swirled to the muezzin platform. Bruce climbed to the top where a few timbers stuck out like the frame of a worn-out umbrella. “High above me white vultures are spiralling in a thermal, and the crenellated turrets of the castle cling precariously to the peaks opposite. They were once adorned, we are told, by a pair of gold griffins, each the size of a camel. The permanence of the castle is due, perhaps, to the strength [of the mortar] for which Ghyath-ud-Din’s father had a special recipe. Captives from Ghazni were forced to carry dried earth in sacks on their shoulders. They were beheaded and their bodies mixed in to form a paste. Charming . . . ‘Nasty people,’ says Peter as we take one last look at the minaret. ‘Always cutting each other up. And horrible to their women’.”
It was probably in Jam that Bruce decided – without a word to his companion – to write a book on Afghanistan.
Levi had assumed Bruce to be researching his work on nomads. “Bruce has been reading Genesis & has been confirmed in his view of the essential role of vegetarianism in Paradise.” Bruce’s notebooks are clotted with conundrums for
The Nomadic Alternative
: “The main question is this. Is wandering – the urge to travel – an endoeomatic genetically inherited manifestation of a biological urge to explore or is it culturally dependent?” Occasionally a note of doubt creeps in. “I am afraid that I have conducted in truly nomadic fashion cavalier raids on specialised disciplines I have not even begun to master.” Yet he never doubts the magnitude of his task. “Book must carry a new theory of motion as a mainspring of life.”
At the time, Levi hardly suspected the scale of Bruce’s ambition. Later, he would compare him to Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, always writing an important book that remained unpublished. “He was desperately competitive in a way I’d never have grasped. It was a pointless ambition, like a fire eating him out.”
Bruce extolled the nomads for having left no traces. In the same breath he marvelled at the buildings he found in Jam and Balkh and Herat. Setting aside his obligations to Maschler, he would set down on his return to England an outline based on his three visits to be called
On the Silk Road.
Bruce’s agent does not remember receiving his proposal and nothing came of it, but it reads not unlike Levi’s proposal to Collins and matches many of Byron’s aspirations in
The Road to Oxiana.
“The book would take the form of a travel diary with diversions to take in the aspect of the country, the mountains, trees, the crops and animals and birds; the travellers from the Buddhist pilgrims, who have passed through, the great conquerors; architecture, mostly Islamic, and art; the complicated ethnography; trade from ancient times to the present.” Bruce would also provide illustrations. “Mostly the diaries will be used as a vehicle for my photographs.”
One of Bruce’s selling points was that nowhere else did there exist as at Jam such outstanding and visible examples of Islamic architecture. “Afghanistan is perhaps the last country where important Islamic monuments conspicuous above the ground can still elude the attention of scholars.”
He had experienced the high points. From now on, the trip frustrated him. “I am in a mood of insufferable depression,” he wrote in his notebook while waiting for permission to travel to Nuristan. “I feel I have achieved virtually nothing on this journey. No sense of a path travelled, just an aimless flailing around, a pointless dispiriting succession of visits to Kabul punctuated by occasional relief journeys into the hinterland. The peaks beyond seem far more exciting. Search for a Paradise which is elusive. Major Willey omnipresent . . . He has now been told [by the authorities] that he is suspicious.”
In fact, the Willey Expedition had begun to inform the spirit of his own expedition with Peter Levi. When Levi was expelled from Greece three years later, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “PL is really about on the level of Major Willey.”
*2
The hashed-out Nigel had proved to be one of Bruce’s follies, useless both as interpreter and travelling companion. Bruce grew fed up when he was late for aeroplanes, and wanted nothing more to do with him. His anonymous photograph, taken by Bruce, appeared on the cover of Levi’s book, but all mention of him is rinsed from the contents.
In this mood, Bruce started to miss Elizabeth. “There comes a point when this aggressive masculinity becomes a bore. One longs for the female.” On the day he was belted at the Bala Hisar his mind had travelled back to his honeymoon. “I think of the New England coast, lobsters, pines, fog, clams and cranberry swamps.” He wrote in his notebook: “The lone wandering man feels a definite need for his wife on his wandering.”
On 21 July, he wrote to her: “So what I suggest is this . . . that we meet somewhere in Western rather than Central Asia on or around Aug 25.” As always when he found himself “festering away in exotic climates I have a longing for CIVILIZATION with a capital C.” He added: “I have realised several things on this trip. You know – they are very good for me. They act as purgatives. I am nearly 30 and instead of being fretted by it and imagining it not the case, I am pleased about it and have decided to act upon it.” The trip had made him realise that above the rest:
“I am going to be a serious and
systematic
writer.”
And: “I love you.”
Elizabeth arrived in early August. Bruce collected her from Kabul and they joined Levi at the Spinzar Hotel in Kunduz. “Anyone who thinks of bringing his wife on a journey like this should be warned that Elizabeth has unusual qualities,” wrote Levi. The rugged conditions did not daunt her, not even when she had to be pulled by rope up a scree at 16,500 feet during a snow fall.
By the Kokcha River she immediately rescued a bedraggled quail which some children were pestering in a lane. She bought it for a shilling and carried it home in a hat. The bird, caught in the mountains, would eat only the tiniest crumbs. “Pinioned. Motionless. Lacking wing feathers and the feathers of the crown,” noted Bruce. Elizabeth absorbed herself in the quail’s recovery, taking it on the bus. “‘How are you?’ I call to Elizabeth as we crash over the rocky road. ‘The bird is drinking,’ she calls back.” The quail prompted memories of a pet chicken she kept as a child. “Look out!” Gertrude would cry as it swooped at the lunch table across the pedimented porch. When Levi suggested Elizabeth might let the bird go, Bruce warned: “Better a quail now than a lion-cub later.”
In Kunduz, there was a brief parting of the ways. Peter Levi pressed on to Kabul while Bruce took Elizabeth and the quail on a lightning tour. Near Faizabad they heard the sound of camel bells. The Kuchi nomads were packing up their tents to go down to Sind for the winter. “The women and babies sat on camels at the rear,” says Elizabeth. “There were men on nice horses shouting at goats and mastiffs to keep the leopards at bay.”

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