Bruce Chatwin (74 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
More often, Bruce lodged elsewhere. His anonymity in Sydney allowed him to live life on several levels. To Wyndham and Rogers, he gave his address as 11 Gaerloch Avenue, the tiny downstairs room in Gannon’s 1950s beach house.
Bruce had met Gannon in London eight months before at a production of Racine’s
Bérénice.
As Gannon was leaving the theatre, “on the other side of the foyer Donald and Bruce were deciding whether to have dinner and you could tell the relationship was really rocky. Then Bruce came up without Donald and said ‘Let’s go out to dinner’.”
Bérénice.
As Gannon was leaving the theatre, “on the other side of the foyer Donald and Bruce were deciding whether to have dinner and you could tell the relationship was really rocky. Then Bruce came up without Donald and said ‘Let’s go out to dinner’.”
Gannon went back to Eaton Place, sitting on a chest while Bruce produced a bottle of warm, very good champagne. “I was completely entranced by him as anyone was first meeting Bruce. He talked fanatically of Racine, the flat. He was flirtatious and sweet. I ended up staying the night in this uncomfortable broom cupboard. I have the feeling he picked me out. He was the active partner and so was I. So it was unsatisfactory, but because it was Bruce it was rather funny and it didn’t matter, which was unusual.”
Bruce had not yet met Jasper and was still too preoccupied with Donald Richards to take on anything more than a casual encounter. The relationship had ground both of them down. “Bruce by now wasn’t in love with Donald,” says Gannon, “but he felt guilty. He’d introduced him to something and Donald didn’t have any follow-through when Bruce was gone. There were a lot of arguments. ‘Donald’s being so
difficult.
I had to give him all this
money
’.” Finally kicked out by Sebastian Walker, Donald had moved into the Covent Garden flat. But he had no job and when that autumn he decided to return to Australia, it was Bruce who paid his fare. “It was absolutely impossible to have him moping around, penniless and frustrated,” he wrote to Diana Melly.
difficult.
I had to give him all this
money
’.” Finally kicked out by Sebastian Walker, Donald had moved into the Covent Garden flat. But he had no job and when that autumn he decided to return to Australia, it was Bruce who paid his fare. “It was absolutely impossible to have him moping around, penniless and frustrated,” he wrote to Diana Melly.
The end was played out in Australia over that New Year. Penelope Tree joined Bruce and Donald at a house in Byron Bay on the coast north of Sydney. “We were on a roof and a huge fog descended,” says Tree. “Bruce was sitting on one deck chair and Donald was next to him in another and you thought: ‘How the hell did they get together?’” On New Year’s Day they entered the rainforest. “We spent a lot of time taking mushrooms. Everything was dripping and undulating and moving and sinister. Bruce looked up, trying to find the sky, and said: ‘God, this is the most depressing place I’ve ever been. I feel so claustrophobic.’ Suddenly, I looked around at all these writhing vines and black rocks – and he was right.”
Tree had known Bruce since the 1970s. She had never seen him in such low spirits. “He was so curious about everything – everything except feeling,” she says. “He did feel – as in that New Year – but you could tell he put a tremendous lid on it, and that’s what made feelings so unpleasant.”
His depression and restlessness infected everyone.
“Jan 2, 1983 – B back from Queensland,” Gannon wrote in his diary. Bruce stayed a further three weeks in Gaerloch Avenue. After a swim and a yoghurt, he would make a stab at working. “You’d hear a constant clattering from his little Olivetti,” says Gannon. His thirst for diversion exhausted Bruce’s host. “He talked a lot and most of the time it was fascinating, but sometimes you’d want a bit of a break because generally it was all about Bruce.” There was little work done. “The sky is so blue, the sea is so blue, and the surfers so unbelievably elegant,” Bruce reported to Rogers, “that the room in which I have been trying to write has not seen much actual writing.”
On 12 January, he wrote to his parents: “Well, I must say, I’m feeling extremely revived. I seem to have recovered totally in the sun and wide open spaces . . . But so far, I’ve really done nothing, except recuperate, read books, windsurf and go to aerobics class in the gym with Penelope Tree.”
At night, he cruised Oxford Street. “When he was here he’d go to clubs and saunas and pick up people,” says Gannon. “It was a liberated time. Bruce was more free and easy here than he could have been in London. He didn’t bring anyone home, but he used to go out on the prowl.”
One of the clubs he frequented was Ken’s Karate Klub. Modelled on the bath houses of New York and San Francisco, this “sex on premises venue” was designed in imitation of a fantasy Roman baths. Horned satyrs and concrete putti (from a garden supply shop) stood guard over the entrance to the steam room where, shielded by steam and bathed in marine lights, visitors reclined on a columned platform.
“Once you’re in here the real world does not exist; you’ve no idea whether it’s morning or evening,” says the manager, a German Buddhist who came to Sydney in the early 1980s. It delighted Herr Becker to arrive from Stuttgart in this unrestricted country where no one required him to carry an identity card. Clubs like Patches, Kings’ Steam and The Roman Baths provided a respite from the world outside. “If you’re a relationship person, you wouldn’t enjoy it. There’s no courting, no getting to know you and you don’t have to see them after. It’s a very practical and unromantic approach to life.”
Bruce never struck Gannon as being in any way embarrassed, ashamed or unhappy about his homosexuality. “Nor was he a conventional homosexual. He talked about Elizabeth all the time and she was frequently mentioned in conversation as his wife.”
On 12 January, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “This, I must say, is the country to settle in. You’ve no idea how beautiful the land is, and the climate, just on the fringe of the arid and wet zones . . . Of course, on one level, it’s a complete Cloud-cuckoo-land, really very far away from the rest of the world; and it’s going through a recession; but if anywhere has an underlying optimism this is it. I think really a combination of things like the Malvinas (as I now persist in calling them) and Paul Bailey’s snarky review have made me feel so irreversibly un-English that I really had better start doing something about it . . . I have an idea – yes. A relatively outlandish one, that will take me to Broome in the Far North West, or rather to a place called Beagle Bay. I have a card index of the old nomad book to plunder – but God knows what’ll happen.”
At the end of January, he cleared out of town with his rucksack to pursue his idea. “I am hoping that the concept of the new book will begin to germinate, however blank I feel about it at present,” he told his parents.
He had in mind to write a “sustained meditation on the desert”, intending to establish himself “in the most abstract desert I could think of” and sift through his card index: “I thought I would go to the hottest part, Marble Bar, and sit in a hotel,” he said on ABC radio. “But I never got to Marble Bar.”
His first stop was Adelaide where he intended to meet the widow of Theodor Strehlow whose work on Aborigines, he claimed, was “indeed perhaps the reason for my being here in Australia”.
Strehlow was an embattled autodidact who had suffered a cardiac arrest at his desk in 1978, four months after selling colour photographs of secret initiation ceremonies to
Stern
magazine (subsequently published in Australia) and four hours before the official launching of the Strehlow Research Foundation to commemorate his life’s work. His father had been a Lutheran pastor at the Hermannsburg mission outside Alice Springs and Strehlow had grown up among the Aranda, an insider. Like Verger, he called himself
inkata
, or ceremonial chief. For 40 years, between 1932 and 1972, Strehlow collected from Aranda groups some 1,800 objects, many of them sacred, and so the source of the controversy which may have led to his death. He also collected, wrote down and recorded Aboriginal songs, “ancient and traditional poems, intoned according to old and customary modes,” and in 1972 he published
Songs of Central Australia.
It was this difficult book, long-ignored and virtually impossible to buy, which moved Bruce to contact his widow Kath Strehlow.
Stern
magazine (subsequently published in Australia) and four hours before the official launching of the Strehlow Research Foundation to commemorate his life’s work. His father had been a Lutheran pastor at the Hermannsburg mission outside Alice Springs and Strehlow had grown up among the Aranda, an insider. Like Verger, he called himself
inkata
, or ceremonial chief. For 40 years, between 1932 and 1972, Strehlow collected from Aranda groups some 1,800 objects, many of them sacred, and so the source of the controversy which may have led to his death. He also collected, wrote down and recorded Aboriginal songs, “ancient and traditional poems, intoned according to old and customary modes,” and in 1972 he published
Songs of Central Australia.
It was this difficult book, long-ignored and virtually impossible to buy, which moved Bruce to contact his widow Kath Strehlow.
“When Bruce introduced himself on the phone, my words to him were: ‘Let me say hello to the first man in the world who’s read it’.”
A profile of Strehlow was one of the ideas Bruce had proposed to the
Sunday Times
magazine in 1972. Strehlow was a figure after Bruce’s heart – “he’d grown up speaking Aranda, Classical Greek, German and English – in that order”. Bruce had closely read Strehlow’s
Aranda Traditions
and it scandalised him to learn that this, too, was out of print. “It is a twentieth-century lynchpin: you only have to look at the work of Lévi-Strauss to realise this,” he told Kath, convinced of Strehlow’s impact on
Pensée Sauvage
. He confided to another friend that Strehlow “was a real homespun
genius
: examples of which, as we know, are in short supply. His
Songs of Central Australia
– wildly eccentric as it is – is not simply some kind of ethnographical tract, but perhaps the only book in the world – the only real attempt since the
Poetics
of Aristotle to define what song (and with song
all
language) is. He arrives at his conclusion in a crabby way. He must also have been impossible. But nonetheless VERY great.” He wrote to Kath: “Sometimes, when reading
Songs of Central Australia,
I feel I’m reading Heidegger or Wittgenstein.”
Sunday Times
magazine in 1972. Strehlow was a figure after Bruce’s heart – “he’d grown up speaking Aranda, Classical Greek, German and English – in that order”. Bruce had closely read Strehlow’s
Aranda Traditions
and it scandalised him to learn that this, too, was out of print. “It is a twentieth-century lynchpin: you only have to look at the work of Lévi-Strauss to realise this,” he told Kath, convinced of Strehlow’s impact on
Pensée Sauvage
. He confided to another friend that Strehlow “was a real homespun
genius
: examples of which, as we know, are in short supply. His
Songs of Central Australia
– wildly eccentric as it is – is not simply some kind of ethnographical tract, but perhaps the only book in the world – the only real attempt since the
Poetics
of Aristotle to define what song (and with song
all
language) is. He arrives at his conclusion in a crabby way. He must also have been impossible. But nonetheless VERY great.” He wrote to Kath: “Sometimes, when reading
Songs of Central Australia,
I feel I’m reading Heidegger or Wittgenstein.”
On 28 January, Bruce arrived at Kath’s chaotic house in the Prospect suburb of Adelaide. She showed him the specially built cabinet which housed the artefacts willed by Strehlow to her for safekeeping. “Things never seen by whites before – now pasted up with brown paper,” wrote Bruce. “The horror of anyone looking. The pricelessness of the information.” Stored in the cabinet were sacred poles covered with feathers, feather boots to disguise footprints and black engraved stones, oval in shape, which represented a man’s external soul as well as the title deed to his territory. These stones or
tjuringas
were wrapped up in leaves or paper bark and hidden in caves, or carried round by their owners in a bag or suitcase. They did not properly belong in a suburban house in Da Costa Avenue. Thomas Keneally says: “The great tragedy is for a human to lose his
tjuringa
.” Without a
tjuringa
, you could not attend to your ceremonial life with vigour. You were deprived of vital contact with your land, your identity, your ancestor. Kath Strehlow’s cabinet was a Pandora’s box of untended ancestral voices.
tjuringas
were wrapped up in leaves or paper bark and hidden in caves, or carried round by their owners in a bag or suitcase. They did not properly belong in a suburban house in Da Costa Avenue. Thomas Keneally says: “The great tragedy is for a human to lose his
tjuringa
.” Without a
tjuringa
, you could not attend to your ceremonial life with vigour. You were deprived of vital contact with your land, your identity, your ancestor. Kath Strehlow’s cabinet was a Pandora’s box of untended ancestral voices.
These
tjuringas
were the subject of a ferocious debate. Strehlow’s enemies accused him of wrongly assuming that he was the last anthropologist to see the Aboriginals in their native habitat. At the end of his career his political focus came unstuck. He found himself in the untenable position of attacking modern Aboriginals, implying they were not Abor-i-ginal enough and not worthy of maintaining their land because their culture had degenerated. The collection, Strehlow argued, was bequeathed him by concerned Aranda elders. “The collection was his to decide what to do with,” says Gary Stoll, a Lutheran pastor whom Bruce visited at Hermannsburg. Stoll once asked Strehlow if the elders had given any instructions about what to do with the collection if he became too old. Strehlow replied: “I was told that if at the end of my life I could find a totally trustworthy white person, I was to pass it onto them.”
tjuringas
were the subject of a ferocious debate. Strehlow’s enemies accused him of wrongly assuming that he was the last anthropologist to see the Aboriginals in their native habitat. At the end of his career his political focus came unstuck. He found himself in the untenable position of attacking modern Aboriginals, implying they were not Abor-i-ginal enough and not worthy of maintaining their land because their culture had degenerated. The collection, Strehlow argued, was bequeathed him by concerned Aranda elders. “The collection was his to decide what to do with,” says Gary Stoll, a Lutheran pastor whom Bruce visited at Hermannsburg. Stoll once asked Strehlow if the elders had given any instructions about what to do with the collection if he became too old. Strehlow replied: “I was told that if at the end of my life I could find a totally trustworthy white person, I was to pass it onto them.”
“If not?”
Strehlow hesitated. “They did say if I couldn’t find a totally trustworthy white person, I was supposed to destroy it.”
He left the collection in the care of Kath, his second wife, until their baby son Carl came of age, but this deepened the injury felt by a younger generation of Aborigines. For them the artefacts were elements of a sacred male domain: it was considered a gross violation for a woman to possess or to view them.
Bruce did not yet appreciate what he had stepped into. His concern was to find out what he could about songlines and to buy a copy of
Songs of Central Australia
. Kath sold him an unbound proof. “I put a map in the back so he could see where the songlines were.” She also produced her husband’s daybooks and diaries for Bruce to read. The next couple of hours defined Bruce’s next four years. “I sat down, only for a morning,” he said, “and I suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just
were
.”
Songs of Central Australia
. Kath sold him an unbound proof. “I put a map in the back so he could see where the songlines were.” She also produced her husband’s daybooks and diaries for Bruce to read. The next couple of hours defined Bruce’s next four years. “I sat down, only for a morning,” he said, “and I suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just
were
.”
A “songline” is the term popularised by Bruce for
“tjuringa
line” or “dreaming track”. It is not translatable in any sense. It is at once a map, a long narrative poem, and the foundation of an Aboriginal’s religious and traditional life. For an outsider, the songline’s sacred truth is inaccessible, its mechanism fantastically complex. It is secret and there are penalties for those who transgress in the manner Strehlow did.
“tjuringa
line” or “dreaming track”. It is not translatable in any sense. It is at once a map, a long narrative poem, and the foundation of an Aboriginal’s religious and traditional life. For an outsider, the songline’s sacred truth is inaccessible, its mechanism fantastically complex. It is secret and there are penalties for those who transgress in the manner Strehlow did.
But to a writer like Bruce, searching for the essence of “wandering”, how attractive: to imagine that the meaning of a country could be established by the stories written across its landscape. Strehlow, by making accessible this landscape, revitalised Bruce’s thinking. He found in Strehlow’s work a structure on which to hang not only his nomad theories, but more or less everything else in his notebooks: quotations, meditations, sketches, telephone conversations, encounters which had taken place all over the world whether in an Afghan bazaar, a Sudanese desert or a New York drawing room. Later that year Bruce would appear in a television discussion with Borges. The programme was prefaced by Borges’s parable of a lost man who discovers himself on his deathbed: “A man set out on a quest to discover the world. Through the years he populates a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses and people. A little before his death, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.”
Strehlow was overwhelmed by the beauty of the songlines as an idea as well as baffled by their complexity. He compared his attempt at understanding them to opening a door in a secret palace and entering “a labyrinth of countless corridors and passages”. To Bruce, the whole notion of the tracks of ancestors seemed a “vastly grander” conception to anything man had hitherto constructed: “The pyramids are little mud pies in comparison.”
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