Bruce Chatwin (47 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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On 3 November, Lees-Milne was invited to Holwell for dinner. “[Bruce] was not very nice to Elizabeth, who cooked a delicious dinner; he was very abrupt and discontented; whereas when he came to tea with me the day before he was all charm. I have seldom met a human being who exudes so much sex appeal with so comparatively little niceness. What does this boy want? He is extremely restless. He hates living at Holwell, has to be continuously on the move . . . He has finished his nomad book, and I wonder how good it is. When the gilt has worn off his
jeunesse
how much substance will be left underneath?”
Lees-Milne records the occasion when he challenged Bruce. “Found myself lecturing him about treatment of his wife, but good naturedly. We laughed. He asks me frankly if I was glad I was married. Was able to say, yes, very. I don’t think he is at all. He is going off for three months’ writing and will not tell his wife where he is going. I said that was cruel. He agreed.”
By now, Elizabeth’s family had become accustomed to finding one or other partner away. The marriage gave her father the impression of a weather cottage: “When one comes out, the other goes in.” In January 1972, John Chanler and his wife Sheila came to stay. Elizabeth greeted them alone. “Every single time we stayed in that house, Bruce was not there,” says Chanler. He and Sheila both understood her to be lonely. The vivacious girl they had known had grown introverted after seven years of marriage. And they could not help noticing her reduced circumstances. “She was literally pinching pennies,” says Chanler. It upset him to discover that Bruce had sold some chairs and a table which Gertrude had sent from Meridian House. Elizabeth had taken to hiding valuables out of reach of her husband’s “eye”. She relied on a steady trickle of cheques from Gertrude to cover her bills. “I’m so broke I can only just eat nowadays,” she wrote to her mother during John’s visit. “Thank Heavens B is away as there is one less to feed & he likes to have proper meals anyway.”
But she missed her husband: “Dear Max, well here I go again in hope one of these letters one day will reach you . . .”
Elizabeth was unlike most wives. “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,” she would say. Beyond the reverence and despite their problems there was a genuine
entente
that had given the couple their nickname: “the Chattys”. Salman Rushdie says, “They were the only two people I know who were able to talk simultaneously, non-stop, for very long periods of time, about completely different subjects, while seemingly knowing exactly what the other was saying and not finding it a problem.”
There was also a complicity. Jessie Wood, who shared a house with the Welches on the Greek island of Spetsae, says, “Elizabeth and Bruce were locked into a much more solid reality than many people realised.” She and her husband Clem saw much of the Chatwins, who often stayed in their Paris apartment. “Bruce would never have done anything that he did if he hadn’t had this feeling for Elizabeth. I mean, can you imagine Bruce with anyone else?”
Clem Wood from the dock at Spetsae once watched the spectacle of “the Chattys” leaping into the harbour. They were seeing Elizabeth’s younger brother Ollie off on the Athens ferry, when, with no warning, the hydrofoil pulled away from the quay. “We jumped without a single word,” says Elizabeth. “It was the only thing to do.” Clem never forgot how the two of them hit the water together, in time, plunk – and then were arrested by the harbour master.
The
entente
was understood by Elizabeth’s former flat-mate, Pattie Sullivan, who visited Bruce in one of his flats in London. “He could live like that because Elizabeth sat in the country with a warehouse of the stuff he’d acquired.” Their existence reminded Sullivan of Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut – “which is only possible because of a Victorian house up the road from which the food comes, the supply tent”. In the same way, says Sullivan, “Elizabeth took care of things so that Bruce could appear on the stage of life in the way he wanted: ‘I travel light, I have no possessions, I don’t care about things, what are things to me?’”
In October, Bruce sent
The Nomadic Alternative
to the typist. He was unsatisfied to the last. “I have just read some latest books on my line, and they show where I am wrong,” he wrote to Ivory. “Whole tracts will have to be rewritten, though the main thesis doesn’t change. I hope to give the thing in to the publisher in early Nov . . . In the end they’ll probably turn the bloody thing down. It’ll be interesting however to see which way the escape route runs.”
In March 1970, one of the firm’s readers had delivered a report on a sample chapter which Bruce had delivered to Maschler at Jonathan Cape. “Bruce Chatwyn [
sic
] is obviously a lively-minded and contentious young man, not afraid to take a swipe at all the ethnologists within reach and some out of it.” The chapter was “all over the place, but I am inclined to think that it would be better to give him his head for the moment and let him do his own disciplining as he goes along . . . If he keeps his eye on the subject he may produce a rather good book.”
Deborah Rogers recognised the untitled chapter to be “terribly raw”. Careful not to say anything negative, she and Maschler agreed that Bruce should carry on. In early November 1972, Bruce arrived at Rogers’s office in Goodge Street and delivered his manuscript with a great deal of fluster and apology.
Rogers waded conscientiously through it. “You’ve been waiting with such expectation, and you get this huge, unwieldy text. I remember the heart sinking.” She found the writing leaden, the content plodding. “When you think of Bruce’s prose as it became, the impeccable intellectual digestion – this was completely undigested. There was too much there.” Unable to see a way to salvage the book, she nevertheless sent it to Cape.
Maschler read 50 or 60 pages. “They were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write. Had he said: ‘This is my book,’ I would have rejected it.” He delivered his verdict to Bruce face to face. “I was without hesitation able to say: ‘Something’s going wrong here and maybe you should not be doing this’.” Maschler believed that Bruce, while shaken, had agreed with him. The project was suspended rather than rejected and Maschler did not ask for the £200 advance to be returned. “I remember Bruce saying as he left: ‘I’ll think about it.’ I hoped I’d put him off.”
* * *
 
Not for another 15 years, until after he had left her agency, did Bruce tell Deborah Rogers how angered and upset he had been by the Maschler/ Rogers response. But there was one writer at the time who observed the levelling effects of Maschler’s words.
James Thackera, a New England novelist who had worked with Costa-Gavras, was writing film scripts in London. He and Bruce used to meet at Don Luigi’s in the King’s Road to discuss ideas. “I knew Bruce when it was still possible to know Bruce.” Thackera had studied under Robert Lowell at Harvard and was writing a script on doubles. They talked about Lowell, Dostoevsky, Conrad. “He cared about me because I cared about writing.” But Thackera observed his impenetrable solitude.
Once Thackera looked out of the window at Don Luigi’s and saw Bruce walk by. “He was walking slightly stooped, not mincing but shuffling, with a look on his face, when he thought he wasn’t being watched, of desolation.” This fear is what most struck Thackera: “you felt he was terrorised”. Bruce’s expression reminded him of Wu Cheng Fu’s definition of genius: “fear of vacuity”.
Bruce’s need to write his book was not going to be extinguished by one disappointing response, although he conveyed his fatigue to the Leigh Fermors: “I have finished my book, but am so heartily dissatisfied with it, I hope it won’t be published,” he wrote on 30 November. “It’s turned out to be the great unwriteable. But there’s no point in letting it ruin one’s life.” He and Elizabeth were supposed to spend Christmas in Ireland. “But I have the most itchy feet and want to go to
Niger
– more nomads, the Bororo Peuls, the most beautiful people in the world, who wander alone in the savannah with long-horned white cattle and have some rather startling habits like a complete sex-reversal at certain seasons of the year. So I may be off.”
To raise money for the journey to West Africa, he contemplated selling the Inca feathers that he and Elizabeth had bought with their wedding money. “Yesterday the phone rang from a friend asking whether I would accept $22,000 for it. You bet I bloody well would.” The sale would contribute towards the cost of buying a flat in London. In a poignant letter to Gertrude, Elizabeth wrote: “At the moment there’s no definite flat in sight, but it’s better to have the cash ready when one does come. I’ll be sad to lose the feathers though.”
In early January, after spending a “rather disgruntled” Christmas at Holwell, Bruce flew to Niger. “I am at my lowest ebb at the minute, but will probably recover once the voyage starts.”
For three months he travelled through Niger, Dahomey and Cameroon. On a ten-day camel ride to the Mountains of Ayr, he tried to re-seed himself. “Feeling very Beau Geste and have grown neat military moustache to match,” he wrote to Elizabeth. He reported its progress a fortnight later: “At the moment one might well have had a career in the movies in the age of Ronald Colman. It’s sort of d’Artagnanesque.”
One reason for coming to Niger was to make a short film about nomads. “Bruce has been talking about nothing but filming,” wrote Elizabeth. He had borrowed a 16mm camera from Erskine, who since their journey to Afghanistan had become well known on television. He presented a ten-minute item on works of art each week called “Collector’s Piece”, and a series of archaeological films called “The Glory that Remains” set on location. Taken with his example, Bruce planned to make a documentary about the market of Bermou in the Niger. “Most aesthetic market I’ve ever seen,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “Tuareg, Bororo Peuls and Hausas, camels, cattle that might have come from Egyptian tomb paintings etc.” As he told Ivory, he was excited by the concept of trade as “a language which prevents people from cutting each other’s throats”. But he had failed to take into account the demands of filmmaking. Not only was the equipment heavy to carry around without a car, but the film jammed and “people threw things at the camera when I pointed it at them”. He wrote in his notebook:
“Jeudi, Tahoua, Niger
“Day of the market. Day of the film. Devoid of all human interest. Fingers tired from working the infernal machine, which didn’t break down, as I feared. Exhausted return to
campement
where became embroiled in discussion, black racist farrago. Insulted right and left. Five bottles of beer presented to me unwillingly had the effect (when mixed with the sour milk of the market) of turning my stomach into a volcano.”
In early February, he was back in Niamey from where he wrote again to Elizabeth. “Have just returned here after shooting the bloody film. I hated doing it – a blank day in my life. Can’t remember anything at all.”
It was not a complete waste. Out of the process had emerged the idea for a short story, “Milk”. “I have started writing a long story – may even be a short novel. You know how I have an incurable fascination for French hotel/bordel keepers of a certain age in an ex-colonial situation. Well, I’ve been in on a most amazing series of encounters with one in Tahoua. Even held the fort while she had a
crise cardiaque
after sleeping with a Togolese bandleader (
L’Equipe Za-Za Bam-Bam et Ses Supremes Togolaises
). Much better than writing a travel piece because one can
lie
.
“
Second
– my moustache. It’s beginning to curl up at the edges in a raffish, almost Blimpish way. I have to confess it is highly chic and for the first time in my life I feel I have got away from that awful pretty boy look and can envisage the possibility of growing old – if not with dignity at least with a certain style.”
From Agades in north Niger, he cabled to Elizabeth not to sell the Peruvian feathers after all. “Don’t know why I think it’s the one thing we should keep.”
He arrived back in March. “I have a moustache. I am thinner. I am crazy about Africa and the Africans,” he wrote to Ivory. “Am about to send a letter to an African boy, who has just written ‘I am very happy I have saved the money to write to you’, also hoping that I am well and strong enough to do my job.”
In London, he now supervised the decoration of a minuscule flat he had rented in Sloane Avenue, “a hideous one-room affair, shaped ‘in the form of a pompadour wafer’ to quote the estate agent.” Bruce thought it more resembled the bridge of a second-class cruise ship of the 1930s. “The building was a famous call-girl warren before and after the war, and the whores are still there, mainly Hungarian, who drop their handbags in the lift and ask you ‘Zahling, plis . . .’ to pick them up. I am on the 9th floor with a panorama over London, which at that height doesn’t remind me of London, so that’s all right.”
With Erskine’s help he edited his nomad footage into a 25-minute documentary for Vaughan Films. He enjoyed the experience even less than the filming. “I always think I’m pretty disorganised but they are something else,” he wrote to his parents. “I’d go in each day prepared to work on it and there’d be some hold up. I couldn’t use the cutting room or my assistant was needed to pay court on some movie mogul. It’s a terrible business. At least if you write, you are your own master.”
Unfortunately, the only copy of Bruce’s film vanished in the course of being hawked around European television companies. Erskine, who recorded the voice-over, remembered the result as “a bit wobbly”, and Bruce told Ivory that “it’s far too amateurish to be of any use”.

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