Bruce Chatwin (76 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
* * *
At Ti-Tree they had camped beside the tin shack of a brusque and likeable ex-seaman called Jack Clancy. Once prominent in the union movement, Clancy remained a Communist (he had given Sawenko a copy of Lenin’s speeches in Russian). Clancy had a withered arm, but was “tough as nails”, says Sawenko. “He treated Bruce like a toffee-nosed Pom.”
In
The Songlines,
their encounter constitutes a seven-page interlude. Apart from changing Clancy’s name to Hanlon, Bruce transcribes the incident as it occurs.
The Songlines,
their encounter constitutes a seven-page interlude. Apart from changing Clancy’s name to Hanlon, Bruce transcribes the incident as it occurs.
“‘So you’re a writer, eh?’ Hanlon said to me.
“‘Of sorts.’
“‘Ever do an honest day’s work in your life?’”
Sawenko says: “Clancy gave Bruce a real confrontation. But he was lonely for stimulating company. Bruce picked up on his vulnerability. When we left Clancy said to him, ‘There’s a caravan out there – if you want to write books’.”
Clancy died in 1997. Today his tin shed is deserted, eaten by white ants, and the light pushes through a smashed window. No one has stolen his communist library, his collected Auden, nor the stove on which he slapped steaks for Bruce and Sawenko; outside, his derelict Chevrolet still pokes out of the tall grass.
Fifteen years on, Bruce’s tracks are a bit derelict too, but they may be traced. Little of what occurs in his “novel” is invented. Mostly, it is modified reportage. The character of Arkady is at best an embellished version of Sawenko. So are the male and female characters that Bruce meets on his journey. The reader might be able to recognise the real-life characters, but none of them can recognise the narrator. If there is anyone who is truly fictionalised in this cast, it is the novel’s all-seeing narrator: the “I” named Bruce.
Those who met Bruce while he was researching
The Songlines
noted a discrepancy between the Bruce they met and the Bruce in the book.
The Songlines
noted a discrepancy between the Bruce they met and the Bruce in the book.
“He places himself not only in the centre of every situation and scene, but reflects himself in the most positive and self-serving way,” says Phillip Toyne. “He’s sensitive, insightful and full of cosmic observations.”
This was not how Toyne remembered Bruce. Having read and admired
In Patagonia
he provided Bruce with information. Toyne nonetheless grew irritated at the way Bruce behaved then. “He wanted to find out as much as he could on a super-accelerated fast-track basis, but he didn’t like to be told there were limits on his right of access to things that he would have to be here years to truthfully acquire. It’s disingenuous for him to say that he’s not interested in sacred knowledge because songlines
are
sacred knowledge. The very issue of songlines is as sensitive as you get with Aborigine people, who don’t readily talk.”
In Patagonia
he provided Bruce with information. Toyne nonetheless grew irritated at the way Bruce behaved then. “He wanted to find out as much as he could on a super-accelerated fast-track basis, but he didn’t like to be told there were limits on his right of access to things that he would have to be here years to truthfully acquire. It’s disingenuous for him to say that he’s not interested in sacred knowledge because songlines
are
sacred knowledge. The very issue of songlines is as sensitive as you get with Aborigine people, who don’t readily talk.”
In
The Songlines
Toyne is spread over two characters: the host of a barbecue and Kidder, the gym bore: a rich city interloper, “good-looking in a sourish way”, who flies his own plane and who shames his lifelong friend Arkady into saying, behind Kidder’s back, savage and bitchy things about him. “The shrill upward note on which he ended his sentences gave each of his statements, however dogmatic, a tentative and questionable bias. He would have made an excellent policeman.”
The Songlines
Toyne is spread over two characters: the host of a barbecue and Kidder, the gym bore: a rich city interloper, “good-looking in a sourish way”, who flies his own plane and who shames his lifelong friend Arkady into saying, behind Kidder’s back, savage and bitchy things about him. “The shrill upward note on which he ended his sentences gave each of his statements, however dogmatic, a tentative and questionable bias. He would have made an excellent policeman.”
Bruce’s resentment grew out of a barbecue held in Toyne’s garden in Alice Springs. “He wrote spitefully of me because I was bitterly resentful of the fact he gatecrashed my party,” says Toyne. “I specifically told him it was inappropriate. He was desperate to meet Pat Dodson, who was avoiding him. He just turned up and Pat, lucky for Bruce, was too polite to leave.”
Named Father Flynn in the book, Dodson is an important Aboriginal leader. Of mixed Aboriginal and Irish descent, he was a Catholic priest in Broome before exchanging the cloth for Land Rights. In 1983, he was Director of the Central Land Council and one of the authorities whose brains Bruce was eager to pick. Together with Strehlow and Sawenko, Dodson was pivotal to Bruce’s enterprise, someone who might articulate the songlines from an Aboriginal’s perspective.
Toyne’s barbecue is a centrepiece in
The Songlines
and Bruce wrote about it as if he were a welcome guest. Not only did he gatecrash, after being advised by Toyne, twice, not to come, but he monopolised the principal guest.
The Songlines
and Bruce wrote about it as if he were a welcome guest. Not only did he gatecrash, after being advised by Toyne, twice, not to come, but he monopolised the principal guest.
“A good deal of indignation brewed up in P. T.”, Bruce wrote in his notebook. Speaking to him by the fire, Toyne told Bruce the cautionary tale of an American anthropologist who had recorded secret songs from the western desert for a company in America specialising in ethnographic music. On behalf of two distressed Aborigines, Toyne brought an injunction against the record distributors, who returned all 300 copies. Toyne took the records back to the community, built a huge bonfire and ceremonially burnt the lot.
Bruce tried to explain his own project, how it differed. “Lost P. T. in the process. I was extremely jittery and didn’t put my point clearly enough – but eventually did arouse the interest of Pat D. He was it seemed interested by the nomadic hypothesis.”
Bruce had been aware of Dodson appraising him. “Could only see the bumps of his face in the firelight and a huge beard and long legs. An immensely strong brooding silent presence.” The reason Dodson had already declined to speak to Bruce, had consistently refused to see him, was that, like Pierre Verger in Ibadan, he was tired of being cornered by outsiders.
Dodson may now be dismissive of Bruce, but that night he did speak to him. Their conversation by the fire lasted into the small hours while everyone else peeled off or fell asleep around them. “We all went to bed and still it went on and on,” says Phillip Toyne’s then wife. Gradually, skilfully, Bruce drew Dodson out until he would be able to weigh Father Flynn’s voice with all the sacred knowledge required to explain a songline.
They discussed Christ and the Devil; they discussed the Old Testament and New; and it is apparent from Bruce’s notes that they discussed the tracks of the ancestors. “P. D. explained how if the track from A to B went across others’ land the people of point A would have to ask their permission before singing the song.” The former priest told Bruce, giving him his leitmotif: “In theory the whole of Australia resembled spaghetti.” Whether Bruce pushed Dodson to go further, to say things he should not have said, is unclear. But the spectacle of Bruce, the unwanted guest, stealing secrets at the fire is what makes his host of that night so annoyed even now. “He gives readers the impression it’s his knowledge and it’s not,” says Toyne. “The book would collapse if he didn’t have access to other people’s insights. He got his real information from Pat Dodson and Strehlow. What he wrote was not a novel, it was a barely-veiled diary. It’s a cheap escape to say: ‘it’s a work of fiction and therefore I can do what I like’.”
The camouflage of fiction
did
allow Bruce to do what he liked. Asked on ABC radio whether the Bruce who narrates the book is the same Bruce who writes it, he hesitated: “Whether it happened to me there and then is another thing which I keep rather close to my chest.”
did
allow Bruce to do what he liked. Asked on ABC radio whether the Bruce who narrates the book is the same Bruce who writes it, he hesitated: “Whether it happened to me there and then is another thing which I keep rather close to my chest.”
There are moments when the two Bruces are not the same at all. Bruce the author, for instance, was terrified of snakes. Bruce the narrator is fearless, with a Hemingwayesque bravado that allows him to arrive in any country speaking the language and knowing the local customs.
Bruce and Sawenko camped the second night at Osborne Bore. As Sawenko went off to fetch water, Bruce asked nervously: “Are there snakes?”
“Nothing’s going to bother you,” said Toly. “Tuck your mosquito net under the swag, don’t think about it.”
Their two Aboriginal companions sensed Bruce’s concern. If he was afraid of snakes, they said, the best thing was to tie up the corners of the swag to little sticks so it would be six inches off the ground. “They did it for him,” says Sawenko, “and then they curled up flat on the ground. Bruce said, ‘What are they doing?’ I told him: ‘They’re fine, they’re not going to think about snakes. But if you’re going to think about snakes, it’s worth everything for your peace of mind’.”
In
The Songlines,
by contrast, the sight of a snake-trail in the sand plunges Bruce’s companions into hysterics. The men get twitchy, Arkady so fearful that he decides to sleep on the roof of the vehicle. But “Bruce” is unfazed.
The Songlines,
by contrast, the sight of a snake-trail in the sand plunges Bruce’s companions into hysterics. The men get twitchy, Arkady so fearful that he decides to sleep on the roof of the vehicle. But “Bruce” is unfazed.
“For myself, I rigged up a ‘snake-proof’ groundsheet to sleep on, tying each corner to a bush, so its edges were a foot from the ground. Then I began to cook supper.”
Upon rereading the passage, Sawenko says: “How impressed people must have been. The reader feels inadequate.”
The Songlines
is as much about nomads as it is about Bruce inventing himself as his best, most achieved character: intrepid and practical traveller, humble sage, sharp-witted inquisitor. This was Chatwin as he liked to see himself, a Hemingway hero full of deep feeling yet economical with words. But as Jenny Green says: “He murdered people with talk.”
is as much about nomads as it is about Bruce inventing himself as his best, most achieved character: intrepid and practical traveller, humble sage, sharp-witted inquisitor. This was Chatwin as he liked to see himself, a Hemingway hero full of deep feeling yet economical with words. But as Jenny Green says: “He murdered people with talk.”
The same kind of reinvention takes place with Bruce’s sexuality. For the first time in his books, he is a sexually-alive observer.
There is a curious probing heterosexuality that surfaces in
The Songlines
. Separated from Elizabeth, new female friendships sprang up, all of which carried the charge of romantic possibility.
The Songlines
. Separated from Elizabeth, new female friendships sprang up, all of which carried the charge of romantic possibility.
“So what was it, I wondered, about these Australian women? Why were they so strong and satisfied, and so many of the men so drained?”
Robyn Davidson saw Bruce in Sydney on his return from Alice Springs in March. “I know he had infatuations. He thought Australian women marvellous: ‘They can do anything: fix trucks, fly aeroplanes, talk about any book you’ve ever read’.” Davidson was an archetype of this kind of strength: highly intelligent, competent, unusual. One night she and Bruce hugged each other goodnight. “It was not asexual. Having thought he was homosexual, I then revised my opinion: he simply chose to withdraw from it rather than was naturally repelled by it. He had a very complicated sexuality: he refused to be categorised or sewn up. Women weren’t cut out of it at all, but men were probably simpler for him.”
Two of Bruce’s “infatuations” were Davidson’s friends in Alice Springs: Sawenko’s former girlfriend, Jenny Green, whom Bruce met while walking along the road at Ti-Tree (Green, he told Davidson, was “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”); and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist who had worked with Sawenko on Walbiri land claims. In the novel, Arkady’s wife Marian is a hybrid of these two women, but mostly she evolves out of Bruce’s attraction to Petronella.
“In Alice Springs he had this frisson,” says Davidson. “He told me it was very hard to leave.”
Bruce introduced himself to Petronella in the middle of February, at the end of his first visit to Alice Springs. He knocked on the door of her house on Winnecke Avenue while she was mowing the lawn. She was dressed in shorts, her long blonde hair in a scarf to keep the grass and dirt away. She invited him into the house that she shared with the sociologist Pam Nathan, who was a twin.
“How remarkable,” said Bruce. “I’ve just finished a book on twins.”
Petronella was Dutch, from a family of Amsterdam artists. Her father had lived in Haiti and the South Pole. Her ex-husband had become a Sufi in Morocco after coming out as a homosexual.
Petronella had watched her husband struggle painfully with his homosexuality. “To have this dissonance in your soul is a wretched thing. It sends off tremors which are debilitating and motivating as well. Which is not to say he didn’t give in to it and enjoy it when it happened. But all the time it was a struggle more complex than guilt, worrying each aspect of your life.”
Bruce walked and talked with Petronella during his second week in Alice Springs. They had a genuine rapport. “It felt like a long conversation lasting days,” she says. “I felt he had a warm and generous heart. He leaned towards the goodness of people. Even though a lot of what he wrote in
The Songlines
was shallow, he still had the ability to touch base with things that were genuine.” She was excited by what she understood to be his spiritual quest. He spoke of his interest in nomads in terms of the great religions of the world, of prophets who disappeared into the desert to have visions. Bruce was keen to hear from Petronella of her experiences with the Walbiri and Kaytej. She had worked with Aborigines for a long time and Bruce, watching her at ease with them, found exhilarating their acceptance of this blonde-haired woman. It is possible he supposed that intimacy with her would lead to an intimacy with their culture.
The Songlines
was shallow, he still had the ability to touch base with things that were genuine.” She was excited by what she understood to be his spiritual quest. He spoke of his interest in nomads in terms of the great religions of the world, of prophets who disappeared into the desert to have visions. Bruce was keen to hear from Petronella of her experiences with the Walbiri and Kaytej. She had worked with Aborigines for a long time and Bruce, watching her at ease with them, found exhilarating their acceptance of this blonde-haired woman. It is possible he supposed that intimacy with her would lead to an intimacy with their culture.
Bruce was staying at the Melenka Lodge, a back-packers’ hostel. One night he took her for dinner to the Alice Hotel, a smart 1950s establishment with a cricket pitch on the roof. “Bruce waltzed in, commanding. He was very big. He filled up spaces. He didn’t tone things down.” That night he tried to seduce her. “He made it clear he found me attractive and said he’d been writing another novel, about a romance. After dinner he said: ‘Come back with me.’ I said No, I’d walk him. He tried to persuade me. He almost pleaded. ‘This is so important to me. I need to know certain things.’ Of course, I was tempted because I was attracted to Bruce, but it was clear to me it was much more about himself. There was a sense in which he was intoxicated by the place, the things he had found out, and I was part of it.”
Next day, Petronella saw him off on the bus to Broome. “I remember him embracing me, jumping on to the bus.” Months later, he wrote to her: “
Never
have I caught a bus in such a DIZZYING way.” He was coming back to Australia, hoping to see her. “I’m writing something very odd, which although set under a gum tree somewhere in the MacDonnells has nothing much to do with Central Australia. No, that is wrong, it has everything and nothing to do with Central Australia and I need desperately to know certain things.” He had used the same phrase as they walked home in Alice Springs.
Never
have I caught a bus in such a DIZZYING way.” He was coming back to Australia, hoping to see her. “I’m writing something very odd, which although set under a gum tree somewhere in the MacDonnells has nothing much to do with Central Australia. No, that is wrong, it has everything and nothing to do with Central Australia and I need desperately to know certain things.” He had used the same phrase as they walked home in Alice Springs.
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