Bruce Chatwin (73 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
In April, Hodgkin received a postcard from Bruce in Kenya. “He wrote something to the effect that until you’ve screwed inside a tent with lions roaring outside, you’ve never lived. I told this to a friend in New York who said: ‘Poor Bruce. Poor Donald’.” It was to be their last journey together.
Once he had installed Elizabeth in Homer End, Bruce rarely saw her. He wrote her one letter in three years, about money. But he regularly communicated by telephone, ringing up at any hour from all over the world.
In April, he was in New York, irritating Gertrude for the first time (“I do think he might have called me up. I kept wondering when he would arrive. Anne B said she met him on the street one day. I thought he was going to stay here”). In May, he rang from Italy, where he was promoting
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
He had been interviewed by Italo Calvino and appeared on television to inveigh against the Falklands War. “I suggested that no encouragement should be given to either belligerent by the Common Market Community. Next day Italy refused to renew economic sanctions – for which of course I was roundly castigated by the British Embassy. Someone even suggested I should be put in the Tower of London.” In July, he was in Millington-Drake’s house in Greece. “Bruce is in Patmos for a few weeks & I don’t know where after that,” wrote Elizabeth. “Now he has his flat he seems quite content with London and goes down to Wales the rest of the time. He can’t bear my animals so he only comes down here when he wants a book or piece of furniture for the flat.”
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
He had been interviewed by Italo Calvino and appeared on television to inveigh against the Falklands War. “I suggested that no encouragement should be given to either belligerent by the Common Market Community. Next day Italy refused to renew economic sanctions – for which of course I was roundly castigated by the British Embassy. Someone even suggested I should be put in the Tower of London.” In July, he was in Millington-Drake’s house in Greece. “Bruce is in Patmos for a few weeks & I don’t know where after that,” wrote Elizabeth. “Now he has his flat he seems quite content with London and goes down to Wales the rest of the time. He can’t bear my animals so he only comes down here when he wants a book or piece of furniture for the flat.”
Elizabeth, meanwhile, needed to earn money. She continued to lead treks to India with Betjeman and in August 1982 she began work at Toad Hall, a garden centre near Marlow. She earned £45 for a three-day week, working on the counter. “I have to man the till (which I told them I can do, but of course I never have before).” For the first time, she acknowledged to Gertrude that Bruce was not the person she had married and her situation was less than ideal. “But don’t say anything if you run into him in N.Y. He’s changed a great deal in the past year and I can’t predict what his reaction might be.”
She could no longer conceal her pain from friends. She spent that Christmas in Suffolk with Anne Thomson, whom she had known from Sotheby’s. “I’ve got to get used to the fact my marriage is at an end,” she said. Thomson was heartbroken to see Elizabeth in such a reduced state. “You wanted to say to her: ‘Get him out of your system.’ Any other woman would have caved in or shot Bruce or shot herself.”
A letter from a friend from before her marriage called to a spirit that seemed to have died: “I’m so sorry to hear about Bruce. I think for years you have been going through this anguish with him and I can understand how bitter you must be feeling. Listen, Elizabeth – don’t lose heart. If you really do care for him – FIGHT – but be subtle about it. I personally think (I may be wrong) that all these years he took you for granted and walked all over you and he still does. Perhaps he feels that he can have his fling and that you will still welcome him back with open arms when he needs you. You must be a little tough – I’m telling you it pays. What is all this talk about old people’s home etc!! Look – all my time in London I admired you because you were so clever and at the same time so gentle and charming. Lots of men loved you. You must look around and be a little more forthcoming (in the sense of giving something of yourself instead of being a closed book) to men around you . . . Just don’t dry up – Elizabeth. You are bright and loveable. Just exploit your qualities. No man is worth pining for when he exploits you. Let BRUCE feel what he is losing, if he loses you.”
Donald had never seriously threatened Elizabeth. But that summer when Bruce was visiting Millington-Drake in Patmos, what she had most feared finally overtook her.
Bruce and Jasper Conran met in a restaurant in Greece. “I was with a girlfriend,” says Conran. “We’d gone down to the port for dinner and somehow we all came round a table. It transpired Bruce knew everybody – my family, Paul Kasmin. When we got back to London he got my phone number from Paul and he rang me up.”
Conran was 22, already a successful couturier. The son of the novelist Shirley and the designer Terence, he had studied at the Parson’s School of Design in New York where he had been taken up by Mapplethorpe’s patron, Sam Wagstaff. In London at the end of the 1970s, he had offices in Great Marlborough Street. He designed two collections of women’s clothes a year and among his clientele was the Princess of Wales. “Bruce loved that,” says Paul Kasmin, Jasper’s best friend. “Both were on the up. They knew the same people and had a lot in common. Jasper very much liked Bruce’s style, his information and energy.”
Bruce had known Paul Kasmin through childhood and corrected his essays when staying in Gloucester Terrace. On his return from Greece, he stayed with him at Kasmin’s cottage in Devon. “Before going to sleep he talked about a friend of mine he’d met. He started off timidly asking about Jasper and continued next day. ‘It would be
so
nice if we saw more of each other. Couldn’t you arrange a dinner with your friend from Greece?’ My father hated the whole thing. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. Jasper was like a surrogate son to him.”
so
nice if we saw more of each other. Couldn’t you arrange a dinner with your friend from Greece?’ My father hated the whole thing. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. Jasper was like a surrogate son to him.”
Jasper was 20 years younger than Bruce, but he was more intellectually matched to him than was Donald. “I felt in the role of Zeus to Ganymede,” Bruce told Leigh Fermor, “whirling him off like an eagle.”
He invited Jasper to his newly refurbished flat. “Bruce was pretty straightforward. He made the lunge.”
Sybille Bedford, a guest of Bruce’s at this time, felt the magnetism that must have overwhelmed the 22-year-old. She recalled Jasper as a small, jockey-like creature who catapulted into the room and collapsed on the floor. “Bruce didn’t turn a hair.” After dinner, Jasper drove her home in a large open Mercedes, playing
Don Giovanni.
“Thank you for a dazzling evening,” she wrote to Bruce. “I’m still trying to find a way of describing your habitat to myself. You have achieved an essence of simplicity, order,
raffinement
and security that must be Carthusian. I think of the
Trois Contes
, the sensuous food and the Montrachet – and there was that return in that extraordinary car drenched in Mozart. Dear Bruce, thank you indeed.”
Don Giovanni.
“Thank you for a dazzling evening,” she wrote to Bruce. “I’m still trying to find a way of describing your habitat to myself. You have achieved an essence of simplicity, order,
raffinement
and security that must be Carthusian. I think of the
Trois Contes
, the sensuous food and the Montrachet – and there was that return in that extraordinary car drenched in Mozart. Dear Bruce, thank you indeed.”
“I was in love,” says Jasper. “It was very much my first love. There was nobody like him. He was gorgeous and knew it. To be clever, witty and bright is a devastating combination.”
And Bruce responded. Fox watched Bruce in amazement standing in the drive at the Mellys’ house in Wales, anxious and jittery, waiting for Jasper to arrive. “It was the first time I’d seen this side of him.” Friends commented on the pride Bruce took in Jasper. “He was slightly fatherly: he wanted to teach him things,” says Honour. They travelled to Greece, Venice, Donnini, Bali. “They were very much a couple,” said Millington-Drake. “Before, there was never a ‘we’,” says Sarah Giles. “With Jasper it was totally ‘we’. ‘We’re going to run around the park now’.” Staying with the Rezzoris for New Year with Jasper, Bruce appeared dressed in a toga with his eyes made up. It was the first time Rezzori had seen Bruce looking like a homosexual and not a Boy Scout.
“It was the closest thing I knew to Bruce being in love,” says Paul Kasmin, “but he was very much on to the next thing.” Barely had he started his relationship with Jasper than he took off to Australia for four months. He may have been infatuated, but it was not going to change the way he lived or worked. And there was another reason for him to go abroad. He had just come out of St Thomas’s Hospital after an operation. He convalesced with Diana Melly at her London home in St Lawrence Terrace. “It was something genital,” she says. “It was mysterious, painful and embarrassing and he did not want to talk about it.”
XXX
Australia
Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs! Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through?
—The Moor’s Last Sigh
, Salman Rushdie
, Salman Rushdie
IN HIS GRANDMOTHER’S CABINET THERE WAS A VICTORIAN WALKER’S
compass and next to it a pocket sundial with the names of cities written on the rim: Boston, Easter Island, Buenos Aires, Ochotsk, Tartary, and – on the dial just below the needle – Botany Bay.
compass and next to it a pocket sundial with the names of cities written on the rim: Boston, Easter Island, Buenos Aires, Ochotsk, Tartary, and – on the dial just below the needle – Botany Bay.
After the success of
On the Black Hill,
Bruce confessed to Elizabeth “my tremendous difficulty dreaming up what to do next.” He wrote to his parents: “With so many ‘cooked-up’ books knocking around, I don’t really believe in writing unless one
has
to.” In December 1982, he gathered up the card index of
The Nomadic Alternative
and flew to Sydney. Elizabeth expressed her relief to Gertrude: “I’m glad he’s finally gone as he’s had a fixation about it for years. He’ll either love it or hate it, but he might find a vehicle for the nomads or it’ll finish him off.”
On the Black Hill,
Bruce confessed to Elizabeth “my tremendous difficulty dreaming up what to do next.” He wrote to his parents: “With so many ‘cooked-up’ books knocking around, I don’t really believe in writing unless one
has
to.” In December 1982, he gathered up the card index of
The Nomadic Alternative
and flew to Sydney. Elizabeth expressed her relief to Gertrude: “I’m glad he’s finally gone as he’s had a fixation about it for years. He’ll either love it or hate it, but he might find a vehicle for the nomads or it’ll finish him off.”
He had long wanted to visit Australia. His cousin Bickerton Milward had worked as an engineer in the Broken Hill gold rush; Donald was Australian, as were Bruce’s friends Robyn Davidson and Pam Bell. And through the work of the Australian anthropologist Theodor Strehlow he had developed a romantic notion of Aboriginals. “I am turning towards both the idea and actuality of Australia with something like the fervour of a first love affair,” Bruce wrote to Robyn Ravlich, a producer for ABC radio.
In the course of two visits he made in 1983 and 1984 to Central Australia he would find, at last, a people on whom he could graft his 15-year-old theory. The journeys would result in his fourth book,
The Songlines.
The Songlines.
He landed in Sydney on 19 December, slipping effortlessly into the embrace Australians extend to outsiders. For the next month, he passed “a mindless time with lots of exercise and lots of sun”. Still fragile after the operation, he wanted to recuperate as far as possible from England.
His time in Australia coincided with a wave of acclaim in America for
On the Black Hill
. John Updike in the
New Yorker
and John Leonard in the
New York Times
both reviewed it at length. “The reviews such as I’ve seen are not simply favourable; they understand what’s going on,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. “Robert Towers on the
front
page of the
New York Times
completely got the hang, but the one that pleased me most was the man in
Time,
and the concept of the ‘still centre’.” Wyndham cabled news of another positive notice in the
New York Review of Books
by V. S. Pritchett. “Good for Sir Victor!” Bruce wrote back. “
On the BH
is also, I may say, no 4 on the
Sydney Morning Herald’s
hardback best-seller list.” In April, he learned it had won the James Tait Black prize for the best novel of 1981.
On the Black Hill
. John Updike in the
New Yorker
and John Leonard in the
New York Times
both reviewed it at length. “The reviews such as I’ve seen are not simply favourable; they understand what’s going on,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. “Robert Towers on the
front
page of the
New York Times
completely got the hang, but the one that pleased me most was the man in
Time,
and the concept of the ‘still centre’.” Wyndham cabled news of another positive notice in the
New York Review of Books
by V. S. Pritchett. “Good for Sir Victor!” Bruce wrote back. “
On the BH
is also, I may say, no 4 on the
Sydney Morning Herald’s
hardback best-seller list.” In April, he learned it had won the James Tait Black prize for the best novel of 1981.
The reception encouraged Bruce to shed the inhibitions he felt in England about discussing his work. In Australia, he would agree to half a dozen radio interviews, one of them overheard by the Nobel Laureate Patrick White, who had read of the trouncing given to
On the Black Hill
by “the evil Pearl Barley” as he called Paul Bailey. He telephoned to request a meeting and Bruce recorded their conversation:
On the Black Hill
by “the evil Pearl Barley” as he called Paul Bailey. He telephoned to request a meeting and Bruce recorded their conversation:
“‘Can I speak to Bruce Chatwin? It’s Patrick White here.’
“‘I’m he.’
“‘I was thinking of you the other day. I thought of going to Patagonia – to die there. What are you doing this extended weekend?’
“‘Going to Adelaide.’
“‘A pity. We could have met.’
“‘Can I call you when I get back?’
“‘You could have done, if I could have remembered my phone number. Here try this’.”
While their eventual meeting, at a restaurant in Sydney, was not a success, Bruce told the ABC that he was “constantly being jolted into serious and moving conversations”. As in Patagonia, his appetite was whetted at every turn by the incongruities that immigration had made possible: in a fibreboard house in the outskirts of Sydney, a former concierge to Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez
(“agréable, MAIS
. . . ”); or later on, a policeman on an Aboriginal reservation whose favourite book was the
Ethics
of Spinoza. “You wouldn’t find
that
in a Manchester constabulary.” He told his interviewer: “I’d like to
live
in Australia.”
(“agréable, MAIS
. . . ”); or later on, a policeman on an Aboriginal reservation whose favourite book was the
Ethics
of Spinoza. “You wouldn’t find
that
in a Manchester constabulary.” He told his interviewer: “I’d like to
live
in Australia.”
Bruce’s literary success did not dazzle his Australian hosts, who regarded him with a kindly, sardonic eye. “A lot of people didn’t know who he was or care or were particularly impressed,” says Ben Gannon, a television producer at whose beach house Bruce stayed in Bondi. “He quite liked that, although he did also like to perform.”
He responded physically to the sun and the surf. Sobered by his operation, he took an excessive interest in his health and appearance. He worked out at City Gym in Williams Street. He ran along Bondi beach, swam laps at the Bondi Iceberg Pool, windsurfed. He ate healthily, mixing goat’s yoghurt and fruit in a blender. “We’ve got to get the fruits going,” he would say in the morning, wielding a knife. There was vanity in his body consciousness, also the element of “keeping Old Father Time at bay”. People in England looked like slugs, he told the ABC: in Australia, the women were “beautiful, resilient and resourceful”.
So far as Elizabeth and his parents knew, he was staying on the waterfront at Darling Point with Penelope Tree. “She, as you may know, was once the most photographed model in the world: but has now decided that she can’t bear either England or the US and has settled here.”
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