Bruce Chatwin (81 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
A Time of Gifts
had come out the same year as
In Patagonia.
While Leigh Fermor felt Bruce should “let it rip”, Bruce believed the other should prune. “Paddy and Bruce are a very different type of creature,” says Sybille Bedford, “but they are both grandees of style and erudition. In both a toughness goes with a certain sybaritic quality.”
had come out the same year as
In Patagonia.
While Leigh Fermor felt Bruce should “let it rip”, Bruce believed the other should prune. “Paddy and Bruce are a very different type of creature,” says Sybille Bedford, “but they are both grandees of style and erudition. In both a toughness goes with a certain sybaritic quality.”
Leigh Fermor was then working on the second volume of his walk to Constantinople. He found Bruce “one of the most extraordinary people one has ever met. Very, very extraordinary, highly gifted, rare person.” He was impressed by his wide and accurate knowledge, by his energy and diligence. “Bruce was a very punctilious note-taker – ‘I must just make a note’ – when something cropped up in conversation. He had tremendous filing cabinets and a card system. The amount of prep he’d done was fantastic. I’d just read in Jordanes about the costumes of the court of Attila. I said to Bruce: ‘Do you know what the women of Genghis Khan wore in the evening?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. They wore the skins of fieldmice sewn together. Probably the jumping jerboa that jumped around in the Asian steppes. There was a good example of this in Katanda a few years ago where they dug up a Khan woman, a leader of Huns who’d been kept intact by preserving her in a patchwork jerkin made of these skins.’ I was dazzled. I was astonished by the idea of Huns wearing a garment of field-mice, that was quite enough for me, but he knew everything. He knew more about the Europe of Philip II than Braudel.”
Writing after Bruce’s death, Leigh Fermor described the quality of his friend’s erudition. “Abstruse art-forms and movements of thought, history, geology, anthropology and all their kindred sciences were absorbed like breathing . . . There was always John Donne or Rimbaud to think or to write about, palaeontological riddles to brood over, speculation on the influence of Simonides of Ceos on the memory techniques of counter-Reformation Jesuits in China, and the earliest whereabouts of Mankind.”
Bruce was competitive with the older man. “He did like to get things right,” says Leigh Fermor. “He was talking about elephants moving across those Central Desert prairies. I said, ‘Bruce, it’s not pronounced
mahoot
, it’s
mahout
.’ A flicker of vexation would go over his face if one corrected him. But he did occasionally cap me. About seven years before he came to stay, I couldn’t resist it, I swam across the Hellespont. It took me a long time, nearly three hours. Joan was there with a boat, shouting, ‘Come on, get a move on.’ Bruce said: ‘I haven’t swum across the Hellespont, but I have swum across the Bosphorus, which is a bit wider and the current a bit stronger.’ I said, ‘Anyone with you?’ ‘Yes, there was a very nice
caique
following me with three Turkish princesses’.”
mahoot
, it’s
mahout
.’ A flicker of vexation would go over his face if one corrected him. But he did occasionally cap me. About seven years before he came to stay, I couldn’t resist it, I swam across the Hellespont. It took me a long time, nearly three hours. Joan was there with a boat, shouting, ‘Come on, get a move on.’ Bruce said: ‘I haven’t swum across the Hellespont, but I have swum across the Bosphorus, which is a bit wider and the current a bit stronger.’ I said, ‘Anyone with you?’ ‘Yes, there was a very nice
caique
following me with three Turkish princesses’.”
Invariably, if there was an audience of four or five, Bruce would get carried away. “He loved parties, to which he contributed a great deal. In our village taverna one night there was a certain amount of drinking. Bruce got up on the table and did a dance, like a solitary dervish, with a demonic expression on his face. One thing Caspar Fleming noticed, and I saw what he meant: Bruce sometimes opened his mouth in such a way that it went, ‘clackety-clackety-clack,’ rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Sometimes he’d get so excited that he’d go into a kind of tailspin and end up with a sort of ‘pop’ in mid-air, very curious and difficult to describe.”
He was at his most rewarding when alone on a long walk with nobody else to dazzle. “He had rather a harlequin quality, very light on his feet, up and away, eyes sparkling. Wherever he went, he was off like a bullet to the horizon, learning everything at tremendous speed.” Leigh Fermor wrote of him surging across the headlands and the canyons “as though he were in seven-league boots, only stopping to identify a momentarily puzzling flower or some rare hawk flickering high overhead . . . Bruce was interested in everything.”
“Up behind Kardamyli, there is a first line of hills with little villages dotted about, and then a line of snowy mountains,” Bruce wrote to Diana Melly. “I usually break off at 2 and go walking with Paddy.”
He was a living illustration of his own “crackpot theory” that the human frame was designed for a day’s march. He once received from Redmond O’Hanlon a postcard of an emaciated, Giacometti figure with the inscription: “
Après
a short walk with Bruce.” He believed that walking “is not simply therapeutic for oneself, but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills”. Plante found a clue to his restlessness in Thoreau’s
Walking.
“To saunter, [Thoreau] thinks, could mean to be
sans terre
, without land or home, but to be equally at home everywhere. Bruce did have a home with his wife Elizabeth but his restlessness was such that she herself accepted his feeling that he was
sans terre
.” In medieval times children would shout, “There goes a Sainte Terre, a saunterer, a Holy Lander” of someone asking for charity under pretext of going to the Holy Land. Plante believed that Bruce in his wandering “was looking for the Holy Land, looking at least for the small objects that remained of its former habitation as evidence of something deep in humanity that might be humanity’s saving grace”.
Après
a short walk with Bruce.” He believed that walking “is not simply therapeutic for oneself, but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills”. Plante found a clue to his restlessness in Thoreau’s
Walking.
“To saunter, [Thoreau] thinks, could mean to be
sans terre
, without land or home, but to be equally at home everywhere. Bruce did have a home with his wife Elizabeth but his restlessness was such that she herself accepted his feeling that he was
sans terre
.” In medieval times children would shout, “There goes a Sainte Terre, a saunterer, a Holy Lander” of someone asking for charity under pretext of going to the Holy Land. Plante believed that Bruce in his wandering “was looking for the Holy Land, looking at least for the small objects that remained of its former habitation as evidence of something deep in humanity that might be humanity’s saving grace”.
One day while exploring the limestone gorges with Leigh Fermor, Bruce came across the tiny ruined church of St Nicholas in Chora. “I hadn’t seen it for donkeys’ years,” says Leigh Fermor, “a tenth-century Byzantine church on a headland two miles up a mountain, surrounded by oaks and olives and full of bats.” The dust-coloured interior, painted with blue and yellow frescoes, was no more spacious than Bruce’s London flat and contained a marble, three-legged stool from a pre-Christian shrine. Bruce said of the Greeks that they reserved all the best building sites for God. He loved the building and its views over the Messinian headland to Venetico, the Venetian isle. “We’d often go and have picnics there,” says Joan Leigh Fermor. “One always thought of it as Bruce’s place.”
On his walks he resembled the Old Testament scholar in
On the Black Hill
, “a hollow-chested figure with white hair blowing about like cotton-grass, striding over the heather and shouting to himself so loudly that he frightened off the sheep”. Bail was struck by how much he looked at the ground; also by how someone of such taste could, at the same time, be so utilitarian. “He was a fearless pisser. He’d stop and piss right in front of you while talking. He used to fart very freely, too.” Kasmin was not alone in trying to keep up. “He always walked ahead of everyone, talking to himself and to you and you could never quite hear what he was saying.” An entry in his notebook reads: “Nothing can be more irritating than walking long distances with someone who cannot keep up.”
On the Black Hill
, “a hollow-chested figure with white hair blowing about like cotton-grass, striding over the heather and shouting to himself so loudly that he frightened off the sheep”. Bail was struck by how much he looked at the ground; also by how someone of such taste could, at the same time, be so utilitarian. “He was a fearless pisser. He’d stop and piss right in front of you while talking. He used to fart very freely, too.” Kasmin was not alone in trying to keep up. “He always walked ahead of everyone, talking to himself and to you and you could never quite hear what he was saying.” An entry in his notebook reads: “Nothing can be more irritating than walking long distances with someone who cannot keep up.”
Leigh Fermor was an exception. Wanting to learn from him, Bruce reined himself to walk side by side. On one of their walks, Leigh Fermor told him the Latin expression
solvitur ambulando
– it is solved by walking – “and immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook. Everything was useful to him. He piled it into a great sack and when alone winnowed and used it when most apposite, which is what a writer should do.”
solvitur ambulando
– it is solved by walking – “and immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook. Everything was useful to him. He piled it into a great sack and when alone winnowed and used it when most apposite, which is what a writer should do.”
Bruce sewed many of their conversations into
The Songlines
. “Compression is what’s needed,” he wrote from India. “And when talking of compression, how’s this for the thud of nomad horsemen into one line (I mentioned it on one of our walks)? Juvaini in his
History of the World Conqueror
reports this unconscious hexameter from the mouth of a refugee from Bokhara after the sack of Genghis:
‘Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand’
[They came, they sapped, they burned, they slew, they trussed up their loot and were gone.] Juvaini, quoted by Yule in his edition of Marco Polo, says that the essence of all his book is contained in this one line.”
The Songlines
. “Compression is what’s needed,” he wrote from India. “And when talking of compression, how’s this for the thud of nomad horsemen into one line (I mentioned it on one of our walks)? Juvaini in his
History of the World Conqueror
reports this unconscious hexameter from the mouth of a refugee from Bokhara after the sack of Genghis:
‘Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand’
[They came, they sapped, they burned, they slew, they trussed up their loot and were gone.] Juvaini, quoted by Yule in his edition of Marco Polo, says that the essence of all his book is contained in this one line.”
Bruce, like Leigh Fermor, hated the classification of travel writer. “He was a writer who happened to travel. He was writing to prove or further some idea, like the songlines.” Leigh Fermor could tell what a burden the novel had become from their discussions in Joan’s kitchen where Bruce took turns to cook dinner. “One always had the idea he was going to devote his life to a really tremendous book on nomadism which didn’t see the light of day. He would like to have unravelled everything about humanity. He was engaged in a sincere fumbling. It was an imaginative peregrination, taking a Nijinsky leap into history.
The Songlines
covered a lot of the ground. He wrote it all out at Kardamyli – and he suddenly tore it in half: he wasn’t happy about the narrative in Australia.”
The Songlines
covered a lot of the ground. He wrote it all out at Kardamyli – and he suddenly tore it in half: he wasn’t happy about the narrative in Australia.”
One afternoon Leigh Fermor visited Bruce. “The room was total chaos, like the leaves of Vallombrosa. He was elated. He had thrown the pages everywhere. ‘I’ve suddenly seen the light. I know how to write this book’.”
He had decided to change its shape a third time after a long telephone conversation with Sifton. “He had a powerful argument he wanted to make about the origins of human culture,” she says. “But whenever he tried to make it, the result read like a pseudo-academic ex-poet who wished to be a social scientist. I discouraged him from the sequential. I thought it ought to be intuitive and poetic rather than logical. I said: ‘Instead of considering the notebooks as a problem, why not consider them as part of the solution? Why don’t you just use them?”
He did indeed incorporate his notebooks into the text. “His
moleskines
came to the rescue,” says Leigh Fermor. “They gave it a kind of keel.”
moleskines
came to the rescue,” says Leigh Fermor. “They gave it a kind of keel.”
XXXIV
There is a God
And I will be a monk on Mount Athos.
—The Station
, Robert Byron
, Robert Byron
FIVE MONTHS OF SUN AND WIND RESTORED HIM. THERE WAS
no visible sign at Kardamyli that he was ill. He was a picture of fitness, windsurfing across the bay in an elegant wet-suit. He was still Gregor von Rezzori’s “‘Golden Boy’ . . . In his eyes the Aegean, the wind of a long road in his close-cropped blond hair.”
no visible sign at Kardamyli that he was ill. He was a picture of fitness, windsurfing across the bay in an elegant wet-suit. He was still Gregor von Rezzori’s “‘Golden Boy’ . . . In his eyes the Aegean, the wind of a long road in his close-cropped blond hair.”
In May, a week after his 45th birthday, Bruce set out to fulfil a boyhood ambition: to visit Mount Athos. He had wanted to see the Holy Mountain since reading
The Station
at school. Robert Byron’s account of his 1927 visit with Talbot Rice was a eulogy to this sacred, all-male enclave: “To anyone who has sojourned beneath the Holy Mountain, there cannot but have come an intensification of his impulse to indefinable, unanalysable emotion.” Byron was atheist; the monastic republic had been dedicated to Orthodoxy since the ninth century. And yet, wrote Lees-Milne, “his entrenched aesthetic principles responded to the mystical abracadabra of the Orthodox Church’s ritual.”
The Station
at school. Robert Byron’s account of his 1927 visit with Talbot Rice was a eulogy to this sacred, all-male enclave: “To anyone who has sojourned beneath the Holy Mountain, there cannot but have come an intensification of his impulse to indefinable, unanalysable emotion.” Byron was atheist; the monastic republic had been dedicated to Orthodoxy since the ninth century. And yet, wrote Lees-Milne, “his entrenched aesthetic principles responded to the mystical abracadabra of the Orthodox Church’s ritual.”
Cary Welch in 1953 had hired a
caique
, stopping off at each monastery to listen to the services. “After two hours of chanting suddenly this thing occurred, of short duration, but astounding. Two monks achieved a mystical soaring height, like Couperin’s Third Tenebrae Service.” Welch recalled that sound when in 1964 he had a vision of St Francis. “I was in bed one morning in Channing Street. It was a classic trite flash of light. I felt my brain and heart joined and I was amplified ten times. There was a lot of chirping of birds and a wonderful sense of innocence and paradise.” The vision was Giotto’s fresco of St Francis with the birds.
caique
, stopping off at each monastery to listen to the services. “After two hours of chanting suddenly this thing occurred, of short duration, but astounding. Two monks achieved a mystical soaring height, like Couperin’s Third Tenebrae Service.” Welch recalled that sound when in 1964 he had a vision of St Francis. “I was in bed one morning in Channing Street. It was a classic trite flash of light. I felt my brain and heart joined and I was amplified ten times. There was a lot of chirping of birds and a wonderful sense of innocence and paradise.” The vision was Giotto’s fresco of St Francis with the birds.
Of his friends, Lees-Milne and the artist Derek Hill were annual pilgrims. Bruce importuned both to take him. Lees-Milne records in August, 1980: “No, Bruce, I said, you can’t. Was I fear rather bossy. Would not let him open roof of car. Bruce asked me if I had known Robert Byron. Able to say, yes . . . He admired Robert’s writing, but says the strained jokiness of that generation embarrasses him.”
Next, Bruce asked Hill, who had visited Mount Athos 15 times. Hill was a friend of the Abbot at Chilandari monastery, who could facilitate their permits. Finally in 1985 Hill agreed to accompany Bruce. “I was slightly apprehensive because he was a great complainer. I thought he’d find the monks smelly or the beds hard or that the loos stank. But it was a revelation to him and it altered his life too late.”
Bruce and Hill arrived at the frontier village of Ouranoupolis, the Gate of Heaven, on 21 May. They bought provisions for four days and the following morning joined a group of noisy German tourists on the boat to Daphne. The wind blew offshore and the waves glittered as they headed towards the faint grey outline of the mountain.
A fortnight before his visit to Athos, Bruce wrote to Bail: “Athos is obviously another atavistic wonder.”
Bruce did not impress friends as religious. “There was never, not a word talked about God,” says Leigh Fermor, reflecting on their conversations over five months. “I’d always assumed he was agnostic or atheist. Religion was understood to be a corollary to his attitude to life. Everything had a physical or natural explanation.” Bruce once told Charles Tomlinson: “What we want is not more belief, it’s more scepticism.” He wrote: “My whole life has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavour of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific.”
As a 15-year-old, Bruce had made a journey to Rome to visit the Pope. Before his wedding, he took religious instruction from Father Murray. “Nearly became a Catholic,” he wrote in his notebook. Then, just before they were married, the priest at Geneseo gave Elizabeth the leaflet explaining why she should not marry a non-Catholic. “That put Bruce off for ever,” says Elizabeth. Thereafter, his religious faith became subsumed in his nomadic theory: he believed that movement made religion redundant and only when people settled did they need it. “Some form of religion is the brain’s system of putting a brake upon change,” is an entry from his Benin notebook in 1972. “Religion is a travel guide for settlers.” The nearest thing he had to religion was his theory of restlessness. Just as he was a nomad
de luxe
, so he was an ascetic
de luxe
. His London apartments were decorated with religious artefacts to resemble a Greek cell, but his response to organised religion was dictated by aesthetic consideration. “He turned it into a costume drama,” says Elizabeth, who had never abandoned Catholicism and went to church once a week. “When I wanted to buy an old priory, he said: ‘I can walk around in robes’.”
de luxe
, so he was an ascetic
de luxe
. His London apartments were decorated with religious artefacts to resemble a Greek cell, but his response to organised religion was dictated by aesthetic consideration. “He turned it into a costume drama,” says Elizabeth, who had never abandoned Catholicism and went to church once a week. “When I wanted to buy an old priory, he said: ‘I can walk around in robes’.”
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