Bruce Chatwin (64 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
The Mineshaft, a former slaughterhouse, was not to everyone’s taste. Donald once took along Sebastian Walker who confessed afterwards how repelled he was by the degree of promiscuity and “the image of people lying in rows on their stomach waiting to be buggered and an awful lot of blood around”.
Bruce left so many crossed-trails, it is hard to gauge how much he participated in, or enjoyed, Mapplethorpe’s hard-core world. He spoke to a female friend of going to the Anvil, “sticking your prick through a hole in the door, what fun it was – but maybe he was trying to
épater,
to shock us.” A black teacher, Louis Grant, told Welch that “Bruce was behaving badly” in New York: “He was not doing things right, something was going wrong.” Given the emotional triangle of which he was a part, it is likely he was exposed to Walker’s conflicting attitudes. Richardson could not picture him as a whole-hearted participant. “I used to go a lot to baths in the Village: the Eagle’s Nest, the Spike, the Ramrod. They came and went. I was the old hand. I never saw Bruce in any. I didn’t have the feeling Bruce was an habitué.” Richardson once took Bruce to a leather bar for blacks. “He was too grand for them. It’s no good being sort of la-di-da. He stuck out in any company, whether in a gay bar or drawing room by playing the star bit.”
épater,
to shock us.” A black teacher, Louis Grant, told Welch that “Bruce was behaving badly” in New York: “He was not doing things right, something was going wrong.” Given the emotional triangle of which he was a part, it is likely he was exposed to Walker’s conflicting attitudes. Richardson could not picture him as a whole-hearted participant. “I used to go a lot to baths in the Village: the Eagle’s Nest, the Spike, the Ramrod. They came and went. I was the old hand. I never saw Bruce in any. I didn’t have the feeling Bruce was an habitué.” Richardson once took Bruce to a leather bar for blacks. “He was too grand for them. It’s no good being sort of la-di-da. He stuck out in any company, whether in a gay bar or drawing room by playing the star bit.”
Bruce was unforthcoming with Richardson as with everyone else about his sex life. “I never felt he was nearly as much a cruiser or sexually-obsessed person as most of my gang. But I think Bruce had a lot to hide. I think he liked danger. I always assumed he liked being violated in some way and preferably by brigands, gypsies, South American cowboys. It was part of his nomad pattern, to go off into the desert and get raped by Afghan brigands. It’s something Lady Hester Stanhope-ish. It wasn’t so much the sex as the sauce it came in, some Afghan chieftain draped in a cartridge belt.”
One of Bruce’s notes for his Viceroy reads: “As if to purge himself in blood, he worked in the abattoir.” He told Ben Gannon, an Australian television producer: “You know Donald experimented with everything in New York and so did I.” Donald, certainly, participated. He was the relatively anonymous subject of a Mapplethorpe study in which two black hands are photographed gripping an erect penis. Likewise, the hero of Blaise Cendrars’s
Moravagine
“experiences a sensual pleasure in plunging at last into the most anonymous abyss of human poverty. Nothing discouraged or disgusted him, not even the enervating promiscuity of the poor folks who took [him] in.”
Moravagine
“experiences a sensual pleasure in plunging at last into the most anonymous abyss of human poverty. Nothing discouraged or disgusted him, not even the enervating promiscuity of the poor folks who took [him] in.”
The author Gita Mehta saw Bruce in London and New York and New Delhi over this period. “The whole point of promiscuity is that you avoid big emotions, you don’t trail any weed.” In India, Mehta was with a gay friend when Bruce dropped in. “‘Have we met?’ he asked my friend, who replied, ‘Oh, we had a raging affair five years ago.’ Bruce’s promiscuity probably was escapist,” she says. “He found his danger in his solitariness.
In Patagonia
was about the danger of travelling alone.”
In Patagonia
was about the danger of travelling alone.”
Bruce’s tendency to view himself as a separate self gave him enormous freedom to misbehave. Promiscuity provided release for a streak of masochism. Bruce’s notebooks make frequent mention of “the pleasures of pain”. David Sulzberger once drove with him and Elizabeth to Clouds Hill, T. E. Lawrence’s cottage in Dorset. “Bruce was aware that comparisons were being made. He was very silent. He loved it. I found it very sinister: tiny,
faux
-monastic, sadomasochistic.” Bruce later gave the National Trust pamphlet on Clouds Hill to Loulou de la Falaise’s husband, Thadée. “He was fascinated by this lodging, thought it quite wonderful,” says Thadée. “He pointed to the leather couch in the photograph: ‘That’s where he was whipped!’ He wasn’t interested enough in people to have a proper sexual relationship. He had this masochistic fantasy of being overpowered and abused by bandits.” The Australian novelist Murray Bail, who would become one of Bruce’s most intimate correspondents, was conscious of this strain when he visited Bruce in England. On 24 October 1987, Bail wrote in his notebook: “He told of a Russian he’d met in Prague. Dark ex-monk who after being harsh with women would slash his face with a razor, his face criss-crossed multiplying the torment.”
faux
-monastic, sadomasochistic.” Bruce later gave the National Trust pamphlet on Clouds Hill to Loulou de la Falaise’s husband, Thadée. “He was fascinated by this lodging, thought it quite wonderful,” says Thadée. “He pointed to the leather couch in the photograph: ‘That’s where he was whipped!’ He wasn’t interested enough in people to have a proper sexual relationship. He had this masochistic fantasy of being overpowered and abused by bandits.” The Australian novelist Murray Bail, who would become one of Bruce’s most intimate correspondents, was conscious of this strain when he visited Bruce in England. On 24 October 1987, Bail wrote in his notebook: “He told of a Russian he’d met in Prague. Dark ex-monk who after being harsh with women would slash his face with a razor, his face criss-crossed multiplying the torment.”
As Ivory observed, a part of Bruce responded to the idea of being violated. “Always with Bruce there was this playing-with-fire thing, seeing how far you could go. He did all these things which are dangerous: he did literally go to the edge in various treks he made to remote villages. That also was a testing of himself.” Sometimes he trekked too far. “Bruce was doll-like,” says Magouche Fielding, “also devilish. I was worried he’d get murdered.”
One night in July 1978, the collector Paul Walter, another of Mapplethorpe’s subjects, was walking with a friend through the gay quarter of Barcelona when he came upon a dazed Bruce in a rough area near the port. He was alone and dishevelled, wearing a white linen suit and a white shirt practically unbuttoned. “He was all in white,” says Walter, “except there was a trail of blood on his shirt.” Walter’s first thought was that Bruce had been beaten up. “He didn’t look like he was in trouble, but he looked like he may have been.” Walter waited for Bruce to recognise him, give a signal. But he walked on.
In conversation with Arkady in
The Songlines,
Bruce described a visit to the Nemadi in Mauritania with the authority of one who has lived among the tribe. In fact, he was with the Nemadi only two or three days. One of the tribe was an old woman who smiled at him. He told Arkady: “I live with that old woman’s smile.” The sentiment may be honest, but one cannot help feeling a little duped. It is the same with Bruce’s nightlife. It would be more in character for him not to participate – and then to turn the story into something fantastic, suggesting the reverse.
The Songlines,
Bruce described a visit to the Nemadi in Mauritania with the authority of one who has lived among the tribe. In fact, he was with the Nemadi only two or three days. One of the tribe was an old woman who smiled at him. He told Arkady: “I live with that old woman’s smile.” The sentiment may be honest, but one cannot help feeling a little duped. It is the same with Bruce’s nightlife. It would be more in character for him not to participate – and then to turn the story into something fantastic, suggesting the reverse.
He told Muensterberger just how much he enjoyed playing the role of voyeur. In becoming a writer, he had legitimised that impulse. At a party in London in the early 1980s the photographer Russell Dexter was screwing Nureyev, who was leaning out of the window, when suddenly both men became aware of someone standing behind them in the doorway, watching. It was Bruce.
Bruce’s sexual awakening through Donald Richards coincided with the emergence of his literary fame.
In June 1978, the 38-year-old Bruce was working unhappily in Spain on
The Viceroy of Ouidah
. “On Monday, stuck in bed at 10 a.m. on a bright sunny morning, Tom Maschler my publisher rang to say that
In Patagonia
had won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (previous winners include Evelyn Waugh and Dom Moraes!). So I stopped mooning and pulled myself together.”
The Viceroy of Ouidah
. “On Monday, stuck in bed at 10 a.m. on a bright sunny morning, Tom Maschler my publisher rang to say that
In Patagonia
had won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (previous winners include Evelyn Waugh and Dom Moraes!). So I stopped mooning and pulled myself together.”
In England, the book had sold nearly 6,000 copies in hardback. But its publication in America one month after winning the Hawthornden eclipsed even Maschler’s expectations. Bruce’s editor at Summit Press, Jim Silberman, had bought American rights for $5,000 after reading Theroux’s review in
The Times
.
The Times
.
One after another the critics stood up.
“
In Patagonia
takes travelling back to its magic roots,” wrote Alasdair Reid in the
New Yorker
. “We must look with enormous anticipation to wherever Mr Chatwin goes for us next.” In the
Detroit News
James Vesely wrote that Bruce was “the kind of fellow Noel Coward had in mind when he wrote his song about mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun.” In the
New York Review of Books
, Sybille Bedford began her review:
“In Patagonia
is one of the most exhilarating travel books I have read. Chatwin has a young and individual voice and yet writes in the tradition of the traveler scholar or the traveler poet – one of the
vrais voyageurs
of Baudelaire’s lines,
ceux-la seuls qui partent / Pour partir, coeurs legers semblables aux ballons.”
The
New York Times Book Review
carried two reviews within a fortnight. The first, by Ted Morgan, believed Bruce’s book the equal of Graham Greene’s
Journey without Maps
; Somerset Maugham’s
The Gentleman in the Parlour
and Paul Theroux’s
Great Railway Bazaar.
Hilton Kramer, in the same newspaper, judged
In Patagonia
“a little masterpiece of travel, history and adventure”. Kramer was not the first critic to be left “most curious” about the author.
In Patagonia
takes travelling back to its magic roots,” wrote Alasdair Reid in the
New Yorker
. “We must look with enormous anticipation to wherever Mr Chatwin goes for us next.” In the
Detroit News
James Vesely wrote that Bruce was “the kind of fellow Noel Coward had in mind when he wrote his song about mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun.” In the
New York Review of Books
, Sybille Bedford began her review:
“In Patagonia
is one of the most exhilarating travel books I have read. Chatwin has a young and individual voice and yet writes in the tradition of the traveler scholar or the traveler poet – one of the
vrais voyageurs
of Baudelaire’s lines,
ceux-la seuls qui partent / Pour partir, coeurs legers semblables aux ballons.”
The
New York Times Book Review
carried two reviews within a fortnight. The first, by Ted Morgan, believed Bruce’s book the equal of Graham Greene’s
Journey without Maps
; Somerset Maugham’s
The Gentleman in the Parlour
and Paul Theroux’s
Great Railway Bazaar.
Hilton Kramer, in the same newspaper, judged
In Patagonia
“a little masterpiece of travel, history and adventure”. Kramer was not the first critic to be left “most curious” about the author.
Bruce had rented a house near Ronda. “Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out,” he wrote to Elizabeth in Holwell. “Doesn’t mean to say they won’t come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as
Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant,
Kipling’s
Letters of Travel
etc. People lose all sense of proportion.” There was even a
Rolling Stone
cartoon showing the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat. “The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (
Boston Globe
): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his madeleine’ –
ENFIN
somebody’s got the point.”
Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant,
Kipling’s
Letters of Travel
etc. People lose all sense of proportion.” There was even a
Rolling Stone
cartoon showing the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat. “The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (
Boston Globe
): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his madeleine’ –
ENFIN
somebody’s got the point.”
He said to his mother: “Who knows? I might even make some money.”
Most astonishing was the response of Elizabeth’s cousin, Chanler Chapman. Writing from his hospital bed in Rhineback, New York, Chanler warned Gertrude: “my mother’s namesake, your concupiscent, luminous, spangled daughter, Elizabeth, will have trouble with Bruce Chatwin. This electric conversational account of the greatest most terrifying wasteland in the world is a 5 alarm message from Orion’s Belt . . . It compels belief. The man writes the way he looks in the snapshot on the jacket blurb. Bruce Chatwin is suddenly & conclusively shown to be a writer on the same ultimate level of excellence as John Livingstone Lowes in
Road to Xanadu.
”
Road to Xanadu.
”
The plaudits continued as the sales passed 20,000 in hardback. In December 1978,
In Patagonia
was chosen by the
New York Times Book Review
staff as their book of the year. And in May 1979 Bruce flew to New York to receive another prize: the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “Ushered into a colossal cocktail with the faces of every book-jacket exposed behind their martinis,” he wrote in his journal. “All the sacred cows hauled out for the lunch.” In the room were Elizabeth Hardwick, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, I. B. Singer, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut and Caroline Blackwood. “Barbara Tuchmann gave me my prize.
In Patagonia
apparently . . . put me ‘in company with the great travel writers’ . . . Very curious my new literary life.”
In Patagonia
was chosen by the
New York Times Book Review
staff as their book of the year. And in May 1979 Bruce flew to New York to receive another prize: the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “Ushered into a colossal cocktail with the faces of every book-jacket exposed behind their martinis,” he wrote in his journal. “All the sacred cows hauled out for the lunch.” In the room were Elizabeth Hardwick, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, I. B. Singer, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut and Caroline Blackwood. “Barbara Tuchmann gave me my prize.
In Patagonia
apparently . . . put me ‘in company with the great travel writers’ . . . Very curious my new literary life.”
Bruce embraced it giddily. “After
In Patagonia,
he became an overnight sensation,” says Eberstadt. Just how much so was signified by an interview with William Shawn at the
New Yorker.
“The BIG NEWS is this,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth, “when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn’s pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a
New Yorker
writer who had never written for the
New Yorker.
The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through Eastern Europe directly I finish Mr de S. plus as many thousand dollars as I need.”
In Patagonia,
he became an overnight sensation,” says Eberstadt. Just how much so was signified by an interview with William Shawn at the
New Yorker.
“The BIG NEWS is this,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth, “when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn’s pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a
New Yorker
writer who had never written for the
New Yorker.
The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through Eastern Europe directly I finish Mr de S. plus as many thousand dollars as I need.”
His new sense of worth revealed itself in his changing attitude towards writers previously admired, like Paul Theroux whose enthusiastic review of
In Patagonia
had contributed to its American publication. Two years earlier, he had praised Theroux. Now, in a letter to Sethi, he was less sure. “Paul Theroux’s
The Old Patagonian Express
(such a cheat the title!) although it’s a success commercially is not good. He happens to be a friend of mine, though, and if I can’t quite stomach what he does, he is one of the more lively spirits around London. In November we gave a combined talk to the Royal Geographical Society, which completely bewildered types like Lord Hunt, as we took the audience breathlessly through a literary excursion to the Antipodes.”
In Patagonia
had contributed to its American publication. Two years earlier, he had praised Theroux. Now, in a letter to Sethi, he was less sure. “Paul Theroux’s
The Old Patagonian Express
(such a cheat the title!) although it’s a success commercially is not good. He happens to be a friend of mine, though, and if I can’t quite stomach what he does, he is one of the more lively spirits around London. In November we gave a combined talk to the Royal Geographical Society, which completely bewildered types like Lord Hunt, as we took the audience breathlessly through a literary excursion to the Antipodes.”
Theroux gave an account of that evening in
Granta 44.
“In it, I suggested that he was something of a mythomaniac and had a screaming laugh and bizarre conceits that provoked him to such behaviour as monologuing to the mountaineers Lord Hunt and Chris Bonington about great climbs he had made.”
Granta 44.
“In it, I suggested that he was something of a mythomaniac and had a screaming laugh and bizarre conceits that provoked him to such behaviour as monologuing to the mountaineers Lord Hunt and Chris Bonington about great climbs he had made.”
Bruce also appeared with Theroux on BBC2’s
Book Programme
with Jan Morris “in her/his twinset and pearls. Going back to London in the taxi she/he said: ‘I was so interested by what you said about the dangers of travel. You see, having travelled all over the world, both as a male and as a female, I can safely say it’s far safer to travel as a female’.”
Book Programme
with Jan Morris “in her/his twinset and pearls. Going back to London in the taxi she/he said: ‘I was so interested by what you said about the dangers of travel. You see, having travelled all over the world, both as a male and as a female, I can safely say it’s far safer to travel as a female’.”
Bruce was not part of an intellectual cabal in London, but in New York he infiltrated several. “New York was important for him,” says Elisabeth Sifton, who became his American editor. “He made deep friendships and his artistic life regenerated.” He mixed with Susan Sontag, Lisa Lyon, Jasper Johns, Bill Katz, Loulou de la Falaise, Barbara Epstein, Robert Hughes, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “He seemed to know people in all sorts of spheres, from the ultra rich to the chic,” says Enzensberger who first met him with Hughes at the home of a Brooklyn heiress. “The three of us erupted in conversation. Bruce had such a lot of éclat. He was very brilliant, very good-looking, very stylish, but also something of an alien. Millionaire ladies were impressed to be his inferior in some way. He managed them very well, with a sort of hauteur. He was almost French in his stance. He had something then of the dandy which never disappeared. But when he got outside in the street, I sensed a sea-change. He was very simple, not interested in this any more. It was clear he belonged to us, he was an intellectual.”
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