Bruce Chatwin (51 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, who was himself often mistaken for a German, chastises Jünger – just as he chastises Robert Louis Stevenson and T. E. Lawrence – for those same characteristics that he himself possessed. “His eyes are a particularly cold shade of blue. He has a light cackling laugh and drifts off when he is not the centre of attention.” Bruce observes Jünger’s “frozen, brilliantly-coloured style”, comparing it to “the prose equivalent of an art nouveau object in glass”. He attacks Jünger’s style for the faults which critics later detected in Bruce’s work. “He writes a hard, lucid prose. Much of it leaves the reader with an impression of the author’s imperturbable self-regard, of dandyism, of cold-bloodedness, and finally, of banality . . . the diary is the perfect form for a man who combines such acute powers of observation with an anaesthetised sensibility.”
The two writers overlap in other respects: a taste for “obscure allusions and philosophical speculation” combined with a “spirit of higher curiosity” which induces Jünger, for example, to watch the execution of a deserter. Jünger observed his pain in a distancing, enamelled light. “No one but a man of Jünger’s composure could describe the appearance of a bullet hole through his chest as if he were describing his nipple.” No one, perhaps, but Bruce.
“Bruce absolutely nailed him,” said Stephen Spender, who had interviewed Jünger at the end of the war. “He was an excellent journalist in the best sense. He saw
through
people.”
Alongside the absolute confidence of the cataloguer, he brought to his journalism the knowledge of what to leave out. He was able to suggest, to supply just enough data but no more. He knew the magic of a name and of the specific detail that gives authenticity and conviction. “An observed detail has a resonance – a branching truth – that no generalisation can match,” wrote John Updike. In his writing as in his conversation Bruce had an eye for what makes a person or an object leap into relief. “We would probably all notice it to some degree,” says Freddy Eberstadt, an American psychologist who knew Bruce in New York, “but he would focus on the thing which casts that person in a vivid light, like the way their hair was dyed. It was too apt to be a caricature or cartoon. It was not a Proustian or Joycean talent; more like a Daumier or a Toulouse Lautrec.” He knew, too, what to leave out in his images. His short sentences delight in abbreviations. An old gentleman in Moscow “owned a wing strut of the glider Letalin”; a Prussian Junker on the Volga was a proud ex-aviator who balanced his Leica on the stump of his arm. A long list of Guggenheim descendants ends with Iris Love, “an irrepressible archaeologist who excavated the right index finger of the Venus de Milo”.
Bruce’s profiles do not observe the conventions of the normal interview. His subjects say little, perhaps because he renders them mute. Nor is he shy to voice disappointment. With Sonia Delaunay, he tells us, “conversation is not easy.” Gaston Lefferre, the Mayor of Marseille, says even less. “In interview, he gives out virtually nothing: there is little point in repeating what he said.” The same goes for Mrs Gandhi (“the interview was a bitter disappointment”) as well as Ernst Jünger. “In answer to questions, he simply recited an excerpt from the diary . . .” But Bruce with his fount of knowledge elicits more. “Since I had an interest in Montherlant, I was able to draw Jünger out a little further.” For Bruce, Jünger produces a photocopy of his friend Montherlant’s spattered blood on his suicide note.
This sort of name-dropping and one-upmanship irritated older journalists. On the
Sunday Times
, his manner came to represent everything Linklater had been appointed to flush out. Cyril Connolly, for one, did not warm to him – nor he to Connolly. “He was”, wrote Bruce, “extremely nasty to me. The dreaded Widow Orwell first introduced me to him, saying: ‘You two must get to know each other. You’re both so interested in . . . er . . . the truth.’ ‘Oh?’ said Connolly, ‘and what particular aspect of the truth are you interested in?’”
But younger colleagues rated him above senior writers on the magazine like V. S. Naipaul: “Personally, I would swap every Naipaul in the world for Bruce Chatwin, a Linklater discovery whose work I first read in the Magazine,” wrote Philip Norman. “While a Naipaul winces by an hotel pool, Chatwin is out, speaking in local dialects, translating hieroglyphics and riding the pampas on horseback without a saddle.” James Fox, who became a friend, also admired Bruce’s style. “He had the ruthlessness to get where he wanted to, but he managed to combine this calculatedly with just enough good manners for it not to be offensive.” And unlike other journalists, Bruce immediately became part of the circle of those he wrote about. “He infiltrated, was accepted as an equal.”
One of his subjects was André Malraux. In the winter of 1973, over a lunch meeting at the Working Men’s Club, Bruce suggested a profile of the reclusive French writer. He believed the author of
La Musée Imaginaire
to be “one of the most original minds of our time”.
They had met before. On 12 February 1970, on his way to Mauritania, Bruce had dined in Paris with Jessie Wood, the daughter of Malraux’s late companion Louise de Vilmorin. “Malraux was there and was obviously deeply upset, both by the political state of France and the death of Jessie’s mother – but what a fascination it was to hear someone who knew Stalin, Ho and the General well.”
Malraux told stories. Afterwards, Bruce wrote them down:
“1. He and de Gaulle showing Kruschev round Versailles and somehow the simple severe parquet de Versailles is mentioned. Kruschev interposes and says that they have the same in Russia but theirs is inlaid with ebony. The General in an aside to Malraux:
Cet homme commence à m’ennuyer.
2. A meeting of the Kremlin:
Stalin says – holding his vodka – toasting his comrades – welcoming them – cajoling them.
Comrade Patagoskin, c’est le Ministre de Communications
–
et si les communications ne marchent pas
(here he breaks his glass in his fingers)
Comrade Patagoskin sera perdu.”
Other subjects discussed that night were the political origins of the Mongol Empire (they agreed, “a very, very difficult problem”) and Hemingway (
“un fou qui a la folie de simplicité”
).
Three years later, Bruce entreated Jessie Wood to arrange an interview. “One rule I made,” she says, “is that I never, never asked Monsieur de Malraux to see people. People were always calling up. It’s something I never did for any of my children who were journalists.” Nevertheless, on Bruce’s behalf she asked Malraux, and he agreed.
One cold afternoon, Bruce, the Woods and the photographer Eve Arnold drove in a battered Simca to Jessie’s family house at Verrières-le-Buisson, 20 minutes from Paris. In the Salon Bleu, Bruce sat talking with Malraux, in French, for four hours. The lights were not turned on and as the afternoon progressed they went on speaking in the half-light, Malraux sitting among the framed doodles of cats he had drawn during his cabinet meetings with de Gaulle. He was frail, propping up his chin with trembling hands. “Since I found him sad, I only took one photograph,” says Eve Arnold. The rest of the time she listened. “Bruce flicking out his tongue – with his green biro racing across the page – had such dynamic force. The range of things they talked about was incredible.” The English gentleman, how there was no such thing in France and this was too bad; Afghanistan; the Mughal Empire; de Gaulle and T. E. Lawrence.
“In Lawrence’s career and personality Malraux seems to have recognised elements that coincided with his own.” Bruce responded similarly to the elderly French writer, “a talented aesthete who transformed himself into a great man”. Bruce was able to understand Malraux’s incarnations better than anyone: archaeologist, aesthete, art smuggler, adventurer, “compulsive traveller and talker”. The meeting had elements of the archetypal Borges story in which a young man encounters an elderly stranger who turns out to be his older self, his
fait accompli.
Bruce did see in the Frenchman a version of himself. “Malraux is alone. He can have no followers. He never allowed himself the luxury of a final political or religious creed, and is too restless for the discipline of academic life. He is unclassifiable, which in a world of -isms and -ologies is also unforgivable.” In Bruce’s final question there is an urgent need for reassurance about the landmines ahead: “And what of the prospects for an adventurer today?”
Bruce was euphoric. The afternoon was so much more than he had anticipated. Malraux had been quite open. “He was totally enchanted by Bruce,” says Jessie. “He called me up afterwards. There was a bond between these adventuresome spirits. He saw all Bruce’s fantasies and originality.”
The German writer and polemicist Hans Magnus Enzensberger was another who understood Bruce’s penchant for “adventurers of the mind” (and for such “doubtful figures” as Malraux and Jünger) as an aspect of his flight from Englishness. “
What Am I Doing Here
is a title which can do without the question mark,” he wrote in a review for the
Times Literary Supplement
, “the summary of someone who never found a definite place for himself, a man forever on the move, both in terms of space and social context.” In these pieces, most of them written for the
Sunday Times
, Bruce began to close the gap between journalism and literature. “Chatwin’s meticulous sense of the metier made him steer clear of the pitfalls of the commission. Not for him the know-all attitude, the jaded taste and the flashiness of the reportage. Here is the uncommon spectacle of a writer using the press on his own terms, using the tools and opportunities of journalism to the advantage of literature. This gives a rare freshness even to the most ephemeral pages.”
Bruce specialised in returns and departures, taking what he needed and moving on. His Malraux profile was published in June 1974. By then his interest in journalism was waning. He worked on a retainer until October 1975, although in the last year he took advantage of the
laissez-faire
spirit to award himself an unofficial sabbatical while he researched what was to become his first published book. Thereafter he would accept commissions if they took him to places he hankered to visit: Capri, the Volga, Nepal, Hong Kong, India. In 1978, three years after he had left the
Sunday Times
, he wrote a profile of Mrs Gandhi for the magazine. This and “One Million Years of Art” were the only assignments he did not choose himself. His experience of writing the Gandhi piece, commissioned at Wyndham’s suggestion, affirmed his decision to leave the magazine for a larger, more enduring project. “I do not want to
have
to make bread and butter doing journalism, because ultimately it corrodes,” he wrote to Elizabeth. Where the experience of meeting Malraux had inspired him, Mrs Gandhi produced in Bruce a seesaw of emotions: “I go through alternative phases of ‘Love Indira’ or ‘Hate Indira’.” He came to know her as “that nightmaring lady”. But this was not his first impression.
Eve Arnold was again the photographer. She flew out a week after Bruce. She found him “passionately in love” with Mrs Gandhi. She was like Joan of Arc, he said. He wanted to protect her. Nobody had prepared him for her “most marvellous sense of the ridiculous” – a quality she shared with Malraux. The two of them had been sitting in a circuit house when she turned to Bruce and said: “‘Bruce, you have no idea how tiring it is to be a goddess,’ and then she said, ‘Have you got any more of those cashew nuts?’ After that I really started to love her.”
Eve Arnold watched Bruce at work. “From the beginning Bruce considered himself a writer,” she says. “If you dared say ‘journalist’ he’d go into orbit with anger. He kept insisting to Mrs Gandhi he needed more time with her. When she said ‘Why?’ he insisted he was a
writer
, his piece should be lasting. She was not very gracious about it, but she did knuckle under.”
Arnold was amused to read the finished piece. Bruce had not changed the facts, but she could not help noticing his tendency to become the protagonist. In a hotel near Assam, Mrs Gandhi had offered her bed to Arnold “because it makes me tired to watch you work”. In Bruce’s account, Mrs Gandhi, solicitous for his grazed forehead, asks instead if
he
needs a rest. “Not the case at all,” says Arnold. Nor did he have any compunction about pinching Arnold’s story. In his profile, he tells Mrs Gandhi about a wolf child he had been to see in Sultanpur. The boy had been found, playing with wolf cubs, in the forest. He ate chickens alive, including entrails, and was unable to speak, emitting a noise between a growl and a howl.
Interested, Mrs Gandhi says: “Well, Sanjay didn’t speak until he was six . . .”
Sensing her vulnerability (her son Sanjay had just been arrested) Bruce brushes her hand and murmurs, “Don’t worry.” Gradually, he writes, Mrs Gandhi picks up the conversation and he is amazed to hear her say “Thatcher”. Then she says to him: “How that woman wants to be PM! When she came here to Delhi she was so nervous. I felt like telling her, ‘If you want to be PM that badly, you’ll never make it’.”
These words had been said to Eve Arnold while Bruce was in Sultanpur. Knowing Arnold was syndicated and Bruce was not, Mrs Gandhi had requested Arnold sit next to her on the plane. “She asked me ‘What’s your next assignment?’ ‘Mrs Thatcher,’ I laughed. I told Bruce later what she’d said . . . He was a sponge. He absorbed everything around him and transmuted it into something all his own. He was faithful to the story line. He just found it made a better story if he was the No. 1. Normally, you edit out something. Bruce edited himself in.”

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