Bruce Chatwin (63 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
If Donald loved Bruce, it was a love that could accommodate a multitude of partners. By keeping out of reach, he generated in Bruce unfamiliar pangs of jealousy and longing. “Talked to D.R. in morning,” reads a rare reference in his notebook. “Bitter sweet phone call. Less obtainable than ever – was at Oxford exploring the bisexuality of undergraduates.” Upon learning that Hodgkin had become involved in a triangle with Walker and Donald, Bruce attacked him at a party. “What the hell are you doing sleeping with Donald and Sebby?” Hodgkin says, “I was full of tears. Bruce in one of his many borrowed voices said: ‘Don’t be so lachrymose!’”
Hodgkin sensed that Donald was flattered by Bruce’s love yet found it awkward. This is borne out by a breezy letter from Donald, by now an opera buff, after a visit to see
Carmen
at the Edinburgh Festival. His letter to Bruce, the only one to survive, is shot through with the stock observations which animate the text of
Know Your Cats.
“I do love the borders (tho I remember your bad times in this town!) . . . I do apologise for not writing; but I have been paralysed since returning from NY – with work, swollen glands (I think I’ve contracted mumps from Jaimie Astor), a venereal scare (all OK!), ennui . . . I long to see you, so I can relax, and tell you
everything.
Rest assured I do look forward to
that.
Meanwhile take care, and keep writing, with my love x x x x D.”
Carmen
at the Edinburgh Festival. His letter to Bruce, the only one to survive, is shot through with the stock observations which animate the text of
Know Your Cats.
“I do love the borders (tho I remember your bad times in this town!) . . . I do apologise for not writing; but I have been paralysed since returning from NY – with work, swollen glands (I think I’ve contracted mumps from Jaimie Astor), a venereal scare (all OK!), ennui . . . I long to see you, so I can relax, and tell you
everything.
Rest assured I do look forward to
that.
Meanwhile take care, and keep writing, with my love x x x x D.”
Bruce behaved as if stricken by Donald, but Hodgkin questions the depth of his feelings. “He’d come out. But it wasn’t real, more like a garnish to his identity. And it didn’t save him from sentimentality. When he talked about being in love with Donald, it wasn’t about that: it was about Donald being in love with him. I don’t think Bruce ever passionately loved anybody.”
Bruce indicated his painful situation to Sunil Sethi. “Such a monumental depression that I couldn’t drag myself out of bed in the morning for fear of what frightful things the day had in store. I
think
I gave you to understand I was going back in such haste to see someone. This is not my usual practice: usually I delay departure for England
(Le tombeau vert)
until the last possible moment. However, when the someone met me at the airport, I knew that something was seriously wrong (frightening how people can change in a month), and for three weeks the wrongness built up in a crocodile of misery, while I battled at my typewriter with that beastly woman who had ruined my journey to India [Mrs Gandhi].” A month later, Bruce revealed that the someone “is Australian”. “The fact is,” he wrote, “I have left England feeling exceptionally bruised, bruised not the least by some of my closest friends, who use my obvious discomfiture to turn it into heartless gossip. There is something horribly claustrophobic about my country and yet . . . I cannot get used to the life of exile.”
think
I gave you to understand I was going back in such haste to see someone. This is not my usual practice: usually I delay departure for England
(Le tombeau vert)
until the last possible moment. However, when the someone met me at the airport, I knew that something was seriously wrong (frightening how people can change in a month), and for three weeks the wrongness built up in a crocodile of misery, while I battled at my typewriter with that beastly woman who had ruined my journey to India [Mrs Gandhi].” A month later, Bruce revealed that the someone “is Australian”. “The fact is,” he wrote, “I have left England feeling exceptionally bruised, bruised not the least by some of my closest friends, who use my obvious discomfiture to turn it into heartless gossip. There is something horribly claustrophobic about my country and yet . . . I cannot get used to the life of exile.”
Flying to Boston that December, Bruce wrote in his notebook: “England more depressing than ever. The spirit of meanness and envy. Idiotic posturing. I am terrified in England of allowing myself to get drawn into an old-fashioned nostalgic conservatism. That kind of attitude would lead to an intellectual hardening of the arteries which already I see in many of my contemporaries.”
To escape the “heartless gossip”, Bruce took Donald abroad. One weekend they stayed with the fashion designer Loulou de la Falaise near Fontainebleau. “We shared an ecstasy pill,” says la Falaise. “Bruce started winding forget-me-nots through Donald’s hair and we said: ‘Now listen,
enough
of that Lady Chatterley stuff!’ He’d come to us because we were ‘family’ and less critical.”
enough
of that Lady Chatterley stuff!’ He’d come to us because we were ‘family’ and less critical.”
Their most frequent destination was New York, where Bruce had access to his mother-in-law’s apartment on East 79 Street. Bruce had no reservations about implicating his wife. In June 1978 Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude with a request: “Two friends of ours called Sebastian Walker & Donald Richards want to know if they can stay in the apt . . . They could go in the double. They are really nice – great help to me as they’re opera fans & go to everything so I can always have company. They tell me when things are worth going to and & get me tickets. Just what I’ve always wanted. Sebastian is an editor at Chatto & Windus & Donald is a stockbroker & I’m sure you’d like them if you met them.”
Whatever Elizabeth suspected of her husband’s activities, she did not let on. She was used to people falling in love with him, or wanting to possess him, and had taught herself not to be threatened. “He was constantly gyrating on his own axis, to cause a sensation, to find a sensation. That’s what made him so exciting, but you couldn’t get close to him. People thought they did. Half the time he tried to get away.” Given his secrecy, she could not easily untangle the nature of his affairs. Further, she chose not to. “It didn’t worry me. It was just: ‘Oh, here we go again.’ I always felt he was going to come back. There was no point in confronting him. He didn’t like show downs at all. Occasionally, I
would
wonder why on earth we’d come back from somewhere having had a very nice time and he’d simply drop out of sight. He didn’t tell me, but I worked out that he’d gone off to see Donald.”
would
wonder why on earth we’d come back from somewhere having had a very nice time and he’d simply drop out of sight. He didn’t tell me, but I worked out that he’d gone off to see Donald.”
Gertrude allowed Bruce free run of the apartment when she was at Geneseo. She was less aware than Elizabeth about what Bruce got up to in New York. Hodgkin, expecting to find Bruce installed alone, once surprised Mrs Chanler in her sitting-room. “She was sitting with a
comme il faut
young man,” says Hodgkin, “very expensive clothes, brilliant, doctorate – and black. And he was in New York because, says Mrs Chanler leaning forward, he’s Bruce’s friend. ‘That’s how we met, isn’t it?’ To me, she said: ‘I suppose you’re looking for Bruce?’ I asked, ‘Where is he?’ The black man replied: ‘He’s out running round the park trying to keep Old Father Time at bay’.”
comme il faut
young man,” says Hodgkin, “very expensive clothes, brilliant, doctorate – and black. And he was in New York because, says Mrs Chanler leaning forward, he’s Bruce’s friend. ‘That’s how we met, isn’t it?’ To me, she said: ‘I suppose you’re looking for Bruce?’ I asked, ‘Where is he?’ The black man replied: ‘He’s out running round the park trying to keep Old Father Time at bay’.”
Bruce’s excursions with Donald Richards to New York coincided with a point at which the gay world became the chic scene: universal, glamorous, freewheeling and not so underground. He felt free to introduce his lover to old friends as well as to new.
In December 1980, Bruce took Donald to a dinner given for him by Freddy Eberstadt. Bruce had suggested the guests. His marriage had put him in touch with high society in New York, but it was not the sort of society that appealed to Elizabeth. That night they included the opera director Robert Wilson, Kynaston MacShine from the Museum of Modern Art, Keith Milow, Edward Albee, Jerzy Kosinski, Diana Vreeland and Gloria Vanderbilt. There was also there Pam Bell, an Australian poet whom Bruce had met in London. “The people were so grand you weren’t introduced,” she says. ‘“What was your name again?’ I said to Jerzy Kosinski. You looked down a long line of tuberoses and there was Gloria Vanderbilt with diamonds literally from one tit to another. She looked like she’d robbed the burial mound at Ur.” Bell thought Bruce that evening was at his most manic. “He had on a dinner jacket and bow-tie and jeans and high-heeled yellow boots. Every now and then he threw his knees up to his chin and collapsed in hyena laughter. His face was a Halloween mask: ugly, hysterical, grotesque.”
Bruce’s behaviour could be explained by his infatuation. “He was arse over tea-kettle about Donald,” says Eberstadt. “If one had ever seen a passionate relationship, this was it. He talked constantly about Donald in terms I could not understand. ‘Don’t you think he’s so amusing and bright?’ while all you’d heard Donald say was ‘Shut the door’. The Donald he talked about and the Donald I could see across the room seemed to have nothing to do with one another – and this from the most perceptive talker you’re likely to come across in a lifetime. But he knew Donald, and I did not and I guess we were both happy with that situation.”
Baldly apparent to Eberstadt was the fact that Donald did not reciprocate. “At the far side of the room he was cruising Robert Wilson.”
Donald continued in flamboyant pursuit of Wilson at a benefit gala where John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, was also present. “Bruce stood back watching Donald operate. I remember him commentating with masochistic glee: “Isn’t he
hateful
? Now just watch him for a moment. He’s after Robert Wilson. He’s rubbing up against him. It hasn’t worked, my dear. Poor Donald is looking so stricken. Isn’t he vile? But I am
absolutely obsessed
’.” Bruce discussed his passion with strange detachment, says Richardson, as if it were a rather interesting symptom. “It was curious that the only person with whom he could become obsessed was an incredibly third-rate character who behaved unbelievably badly.”
hateful
? Now just watch him for a moment. He’s after Robert Wilson. He’s rubbing up against him. It hasn’t worked, my dear. Poor Donald is looking so stricken. Isn’t he vile? But I am
absolutely obsessed
’.” Bruce discussed his passion with strange detachment, says Richardson, as if it were a rather interesting symptom. “It was curious that the only person with whom he could become obsessed was an incredibly third-rate character who behaved unbelievably badly.”
George Steiner in an essay on Ernst Jünger describes the German writer’s “terrible detachment” as the focus of the dandy who masters experience by elegance: “The dandy confronts the sum of life, but keeps it at gauntlet’s length.” Something of this pose is hinted at in Bruce’s journal entry for Tuesday 17 February 1979. “DR easing up gradually. He looked congealed with a kind of terror at the sight of Kynaston’s apartment, but began to thaw when we went to the Chelsea Hotel . . .” The entry comes from a time when there were few boundaries left. “Next day worked in the morning: but at 12.30 we went to see Robert Mapplethorpe.”
In his essay for the Asia House exhibition in 1970, Bruce cited Diogenes’s deprecation of city life and wrote of how, locked within a city’s walls, men “committed every outrage against one another as if this were the sole object of their coming together”.
Mapplethorpe’s studio, wrote his biographer Patricia Morrisroe, was a port of call for men with every perversion. “They dressed up as women, SS troopers and pigs. One wore baby clothes and a bonnet, drank from a bottle and defecated into his diaper.” Another liked having initials carved into his skin.
Bruce was photographed on one of his visits to Mapplethorpe’s studio loft on Bond Street. In 1983, he repaid the compliment by contributing an introduction to
Body and Eyes,
Mapplethorpe’s book of portraits of the female body-builder Lisa Lyon. The novelist Edmund White judges Bruce’s introduction as “by far the best essay ever written on Mapplethorpe”, but it reveals no less of its author. In 1974, Bruce had held up Cartier-Bresson as one of the models for
In Patagonia.
He was now evolving a new aesthetic for his second book: the exotic and sadistic history of a slave-trader. He found one aspect of it on the walls of Mapplethorpe’s studio.
Body and Eyes,
Mapplethorpe’s book of portraits of the female body-builder Lisa Lyon. The novelist Edmund White judges Bruce’s introduction as “by far the best essay ever written on Mapplethorpe”, but it reveals no less of its author. In 1974, Bruce had held up Cartier-Bresson as one of the models for
In Patagonia.
He was now evolving a new aesthetic for his second book: the exotic and sadistic history of a slave-trader. He found one aspect of it on the walls of Mapplethorpe’s studio.
Bruce observed “a black bedroom behind a white wire-netting cage and, ranged around, the paraphernalia of an irreverent perversity: a scorpion in a case, a bronze of Mephistopheles and a much smaller bronze of the Devil with his toasting fork.” Here Mapplethorpe took his “haunting portraits of men women and a series of ‘sex pictures’ that froze – in more or less liturgical poses – the intimate activities of the so-called ‘leather scene’.” Bruce is as incisive about Mapplethorpe as he was about Jünger: “His vision is cold and sharp. He is fascinated by the satanic, and confronts his night-biased world with the elegant and melancholic stance of the dandy. His eye for a face is the eye of a novelist in search of a character; his eye for a body that of a classical sculptor in search of an ‘ideal’. His sitters – whether celebrities or pick-ups, beautiful girls or his black friends – seem mesmerised not by the lens but by his presence, and temporarily transported into a dream world.”
The photographer told him: “I really don’t know how I take these pictures,” but Bruce, who lit his prose in the same way, understood Mapplethorpe’s techniques. Mapplethorpe’s effect was achieved not by contact but by detachment, seeing with the clarity of first impressions and avoiding the mess of intimacy. “Except for a few close friends, Robert rarely took pictures of the same sitter twice – an hour or two of intimacy, an inimitable image, and that was all.”
“Talk about birds of a feather!” says John Richardson, who knew them both. “Mapplethorpe was a shoddy version of Bruce.”
That Mapplethorpe should have photographed him is a sign of Bruce’s effect, also of their complicity. “I, too, was photographed by Robert,” says Adam, who was one of Bruce’s lovers during this period. “But Bruce was one of the few people Robert took with his clothes on. To use Mapplethorpe as a society photographer does seem to be a little bit far-fetched.”
Possibly this was the occasion when Mapplethorpe suggested to Bruce he might like to meet his brilliant writer friend, Edmund White. Mapplethorpe telephoned White, who lived nearby. Bruce walked around, rang the bell. White wrote down what happened next: “Maybe it was the excitement of druggy, sexy New York before AIDS, or of the Mapplethorpe connection, but seconds after he’d come into my apartment we started fooling around with each other.”
Many of Bruce’s partners at this period had the attributes of Edmund White: good-looking, interesting and famous. Even if Bruce was not as guilt-free as White or Keith Milow or Sam Wagstaff, he knew how to pick. These artistic, highly intelligent people were different from old-fashioned intellectual homosexuals like Forster and Auden who could only sleep with the lower orders. “Now you went to bed with your own kind,” says Adam. “By pushing back the limits, homosexuals . . . experienced an exhilaration, a joy few people know,” he wrote in his autobiography
Not Drowning but Waving.
“They had arrived at a point where society would have been free of the hypocrisy of sexual guilt it had carried for centuries.” Without this feeling of real joy and liberation Bruce would not have travelled down this road. “Maybe by joining in that dance of death,” says Adam, “he thought to conquer his terrible guilt feeling.”
Not Drowning but Waving.
“They had arrived at a point where society would have been free of the hypocrisy of sexual guilt it had carried for centuries.” Without this feeling of real joy and liberation Bruce would not have travelled down this road. “Maybe by joining in that dance of death,” says Adam, “he thought to conquer his terrible guilt feeling.”
Anonymous sex was also seductive. Mapplethorpe’s “night-biased world” was based on S & M clubs like the Anvil or the Mineshaft, a two-storey warehouse in the meat-packing district on the corner of Little Twelfth and Washington Streets. Here Bruce could enter a sex department store where everything in the world was available. People were tied up and beaten; there were baths where they were pissed on. Muscular men jangled about in chains wearing nothing but leather jockstraps, caps and masks; or lay back in slings, waiting to be fist-fucked, their legs up, taking poppers, eyes rolled back, moaning. And everywhere huge pots of Crisco lard.
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