Bruce Chatwin (90 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Many of Bruce’s readers would be disappointed to learn that he had actively denied his illness, even to himself. They might have wished for him the courage of Gillian Rose, to speak about the impasses, the limitations and the cruelties of a peremptory death. He had developed a powerful thesis for travel and so they expected him to be a fearless strider everywhere, or at the very least to provide them with an original, clear report from his visit to what Bruce himself called “the scene of the Grim Reaper”. (“I’ve been on the scene of the Grim Reaper, and I can tell you it wasn’t too bad,” he told an interviewer.) It frustrated them that he had not responded to the huge idea of living with death as another journey. Instead of pushing to the limits, he had retreated. “If you read into what he writes something which has an impact on your own moral life, why shouldn’t it have an impact on
his
moral life?” says Sean Beaumann, an eminent South African psychiatrist. Beaumann had worked in the community around Bruce’s Black Hill and was himself a twin. “He should have said he was dying.”
his
moral life?” says Sean Beaumann, an eminent South African psychiatrist. Beaumann had worked in the community around Bruce’s Black Hill and was himself a twin. “He should have said he was dying.”
Bruce’s “moral” life was, no doubt, impinged upon by his illness. His abiding ambivalence about his sexuality and his fear about dying of AIDS, inextricably linked anyway, are bound up in the same energies which drove him to travel and to write – a case, perhaps, of a deficiency on one side of the balance producing the fruit of the other. If, in fact, the Beast which stalked him all his life grew out of this fear, there is pathos that he never engaged or resolved his ambivalence. Yet it seems reductive to say his Beast was purely sexual.
“He
was
ashamed,” says Peter Adam, speaking from experience. “Part of it, the outward sign, was his homosexuality, but there was the much wider thing of not knowing how to belong. He was deeply aware of his non-commitment.”
was
ashamed,” says Peter Adam, speaking from experience. “Part of it, the outward sign, was his homosexuality, but there was the much wider thing of not knowing how to belong. He was deeply aware of his non-commitment.”
Bruce’s ambivalence, his suppression of not the truth so much as any enquiry into the truth, is what makes him the writer, the journey-maker and the storyteller that he is, wholly unwilling to be categorised by anyone. But some think he might have written better novels, been a greater man, if he had, confronted with death, been less of a “Bruce”.
Duncan Fallowell argues that it is Bruce’s very fear that clips his wings, prevents him from being a writer in the way of his models. “AIDS and the prowling death gave Chatwin the opportunity to write an extraordinary book – his character, which gave us the books we have, meant that he couldn’t take that opportunity.” Speaking as a gay activist, Fallowell voiced the harshest objections to Bruce’s management of his illness. “Hypocrisy, lies, distortion, deceit, threats, self-disgust, cooking the facts and shame – all these may make life more interesting, but they’re no good when trying to cope with AIDS and all are exemplified in the case of the writer Bruce Chatwin, the most important AIDS casualty in the arts to date.” This was written after Bruce’s death, on World AIDS Day, and Fallowell, while among the more vociferous voices, was not alone in his punishing verdict. Peter Adam also wished Bruce had come out openly. “A great man had,” says Adam, “the writer Jean-Paul Aaron: ‘
Mon SIDA à moi
,’ he said on
Apostrophes.
If Bruce had not been such a moral coward he could have come to terms with his dying much better, and his living. Why prolong the prejudices?” But Adam also remembers how slow England was to wake up to AIDS. At that time in England, very few well-known people had AIDS, or, if they had, it was a secret disease more so than in France or America. “With AIDS came also the big lie,” Adam wrote in his autobiography,
Not Drowning but Waving.
“Sons would not tell their mothers, husbands protected their wives from the truth – the list of people who died became longer . . . it was usually the most brilliant, the most shining, the most hopeful who left us.” Adam and Fallowell felt that the gay community needed an articulate spokesman. They felt that as a public figure, and writer of proven worth, Bruce had a responsibility to lead the way. On 26 October, the day after Bruce’s spectral face had appeared on BBC television’s coverage of the Booker Prize, Tony Parsons requested an interview for the
Sunday Times
: “Seeing someone as special and precious as Chatwin with AIDS would perhaps bring home the enormity and horror of the disease to the millions who read the
Sunday Times
and – maybe – inspire a little more understanding and compassion than sufferers have received so far.”
Mon SIDA à moi
,’ he said on
Apostrophes.
If Bruce had not been such a moral coward he could have come to terms with his dying much better, and his living. Why prolong the prejudices?” But Adam also remembers how slow England was to wake up to AIDS. At that time in England, very few well-known people had AIDS, or, if they had, it was a secret disease more so than in France or America. “With AIDS came also the big lie,” Adam wrote in his autobiography,
Not Drowning but Waving.
“Sons would not tell their mothers, husbands protected their wives from the truth – the list of people who died became longer . . . it was usually the most brilliant, the most shining, the most hopeful who left us.” Adam and Fallowell felt that the gay community needed an articulate spokesman. They felt that as a public figure, and writer of proven worth, Bruce had a responsibility to lead the way. On 26 October, the day after Bruce’s spectral face had appeared on BBC television’s coverage of the Booker Prize, Tony Parsons requested an interview for the
Sunday Times
: “Seeing someone as special and precious as Chatwin with AIDS would perhaps bring home the enormity and horror of the disease to the millions who read the
Sunday Times
and – maybe – inspire a little more understanding and compassion than sufferers have received so far.”
But do people who are not dying have a right to judge those who are? It is unlikely that Bruce would have told another how they should exercise their own free will.
Colin Thubron defends Bruce’s decision. “Ideally, I would have liked him to have spoken publicly, but he didn’t and why should he? His reasons were respectable. It wasn’t anybody else’s business. It was his own affair. Simply because AIDS has become politicised is not enough. And with nobody knowing what your personal affections are, it’s somewhat presumptuous. The AIDS riposte would be that people should not feel ashamed of it anyway – but that’s all very well if your wife is alive or your middle-class elderly parents. I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to put the well-being of all those dying from AIDS before a number of people who would feel deeply ashamed of it.”
The novelist and biographer Sybille Bedford also supports Bruce’s non-committal stance: “I think it’s entirely private. It would have been distasteful for him to have been an example of the brave AIDS sufferer. Aldous Huxley died of cancer: he didn’t tell anyone, even his son. He just carried on as long as he could with enormous courage. It builds a wall around you, or let us say some screens. It’s very bad for your profession. People whisper in corners.”
Despite all his efforts not to be English, Bruce would die a quintessentially English death: abroad, clothed in secrets (“his impenetrable aura of concealment,” Adam called it), holding out, deflecting to the end and not without a profound sense of shame and regret. “My life isn’t as it should be,” he told Adam, remembering with envy the gypsy boy on his horse whom he had watched as a child.
Bruce was not a clichéd self-hating homosexual. He met interesting people through sex. According to James Ivory, he found sex “as natural and easy as eating”. He even fell in love. But he was not at ease with his sexuality (a word he mocked). “There was a kind of guilt thing about his homosexuality, as if he had not quite come to terms with it,” wrote Adam in
Not Drowning but Waving
As his HIV developed into AIDS, Bruce associated his homosexuality with what was happening to his body. “He had a great self-disgust and guilt,” says Wyndham. From his hospital bed in Oxford, Bruce whispered bitterly to Wyndham: “I’ve never spoken to you about sex before, but sex is madness.”
Not Drowning but Waving
As his HIV developed into AIDS, Bruce associated his homosexuality with what was happening to his body. “He had a great self-disgust and guilt,” says Wyndham. From his hospital bed in Oxford, Bruce whispered bitterly to Wyndham: “I’ve never spoken to you about sex before, but sex is madness.”
“At this point, the idea of homosexuality was repulsive to him,” says the composer Kevin Volans. “He associated homosexuality with disease.” To expect him to be a spokesman for homosexuals was to ask him to step outside his character and serve a political agenda from which, by temperament, he was estranged.
“He is famously criticised for the way he dealt with AIDS,” says Wyndham. “His evasion may not be politically correct or crowd-pleasing, but I think he was dealing with it in a wonderful and very heroic way. He assented to it being a kind of secret in order to protect Elizabeth, his parents, the Chanlers, Jasper. He turned it into a Bruce.”
The Songlines
had made Bruce a public figure. “My book”, he wrote to Cary Welch on 22 February, “has brought me a host of new friends from ‘every quarter’. But the latest is a simply astonishing person. He is called Kevin Volans, an Anglo South-African composer – and composer of genius – who has gone into the field in Africa rather as Brahms or Dvo
ř
ák went looking for folk-songs. He has filled his head with the sounds of the veldt, with Zulu chant, the shepherds’ pipes echoing across the valleys of Lesotho – and without in any way being ‘ethnic’ he has produced an entirely new modern music that also makes me think of Schubert. He is the favourite composer of the Kronos Quartet, who, it would appear are the best string quartet in America for modern music. Unfortunately, their record of Kevin’s work entitled
White Man Sleeps
, which is a huge hit in the US, omits the 4th movement which is so utterly transporting that one gasps with wonder. Anyway this is to me one of the really nice things that’s happened to me.”
had made Bruce a public figure. “My book”, he wrote to Cary Welch on 22 February, “has brought me a host of new friends from ‘every quarter’. But the latest is a simply astonishing person. He is called Kevin Volans, an Anglo South-African composer – and composer of genius – who has gone into the field in Africa rather as Brahms or Dvo
ř
ák went looking for folk-songs. He has filled his head with the sounds of the veldt, with Zulu chant, the shepherds’ pipes echoing across the valleys of Lesotho – and without in any way being ‘ethnic’ he has produced an entirely new modern music that also makes me think of Schubert. He is the favourite composer of the Kronos Quartet, who, it would appear are the best string quartet in America for modern music. Unfortunately, their record of Kevin’s work entitled
White Man Sleeps
, which is a huge hit in the US, omits the 4th movement which is so utterly transporting that one gasps with wonder. Anyway this is to me one of the really nice things that’s happened to me.”
The Kronos Quartet wished to commission a new theatre score: Volans, composer in residence at Queen’s University, Belfast, had suggested
The Songlines.
Volans sent Bruce his narrative piece,
Hunting: gathering.
Bruce responded at once. “It was music I had never heard before, or could have imagined,” he wrote. “It derived from nothing and no one.” He left a message on Volans’s answer-machine. “I’ve listened to your tape. I think your music’s wonderful and you must come straight away.”
The Songlines.
Volans sent Bruce his narrative piece,
Hunting: gathering.
Bruce responded at once. “It was music I had never heard before, or could have imagined,” he wrote. “It derived from nothing and no one.” He left a message on Volans’s answer-machine. “I’ve listened to your tape. I think your music’s wonderful and you must come straight away.”
Volans travelled nervously to Homer End. “I was convinced he thought I’d be some South African hunk in a bush jacket and I was terribly aware that I wouldn’t fulfil that expectation. I arrived. Elizabeth took me upstairs. The first thing he said was: ‘Elizabeth, fetch Kevin some champagne’. There were then three minutes of awkwardness, because he was adjusting to the way I didn’t look.”
Later Bruce said: “I then realised you looked exactly the way you should look.”
By the end of the three minutes, Volans had fallen in love. “I sat there like Scheherazade at the foot of his bed while he told me stories. There was literally nothing I wouldn’t have done. I adored him. He was one of those people who did have the key to the world.”
On the day after Volans left, Bruce would telephone him: “Since your massage, I’ve got the feeling back in my leg – so you see, I can’t live without you.”
“I feel the same,” replied Volans.
“Enough said.”
But after their first series of talks both realised that
The Songlines
was not suitable for a theatre piece.
The Songlines
was not suitable for a theatre piece.
“In the morning,” says Volans, “I went through to his room and he told me: ‘But I know
exactly
what we can do: Rimbaud.’ Bruce considered Rimbaud’s
Une Saison en enfer
a western Songline: he had written about going to the desert
before
he went there. Bruce told me about Rimbaud’s death scene and phoned Michael Ignatieff. ‘I want this book from Paris.’ He didn’t waste time. Ever.”
exactly
what we can do: Rimbaud.’ Bruce considered Rimbaud’s
Une Saison en enfer
a western Songline: he had written about going to the desert
before
he went there. Bruce told me about Rimbaud’s death scene and phoned Michael Ignatieff. ‘I want this book from Paris.’ He didn’t waste time. Ever.”
Volans, who had lived in Africa, expressed his “perfect empathy” for the idea. On his return to Belfast, he set immediately to work on the libretto with Roger Clarke, a poet whose work Bruce admired. The opera was first performed at the Almeida in London, in July 1993, as
The Man with the Wind in His Heels
.
The Man with the Wind in His Heels
.
Bruce had already been considering an operatic project at the time of Volans’s visit. In one of his remissions, he approached Peter Eyre to write an opera based on the salon of Florence Gould in wartime Paris. Gould was an elderly biddy in the tradition of Madame Vionnet: a soprano at the Opera Comique, a collector of Impressionists and porcelain, and during the occupation of France an extravagant hostess to several in Junger’s collaborator circles whom she entertained at the Hotel Bristol. “The opera would begin in English and end up in French,” says Eyre, who scratched his head at Bruce’s behaviour. “I went with him to ‘Mario’s’ round the corner to have lunch and he insisted on paying. I said afterwards to Valerie Wade: ‘Something must be wrong with Bruce. I’ve never seen him pay’.”
Bruce began to puzzle friends in other small ways. In his letter to Cary Welch about Volans, he mentioned his interest in the astonishing revival of Orthodoxy in Russia. “I didn’t know if you know, but I now think of myself as Orthodox and will be going back at some point to Athos to stay with my Serbian friends at the monastery of Chilandari.” A week later he wrote to Nin Dutton of other goings-on. “The first news is that I finished and edited a new book: the tide
Utz. Tout court
! Anyhow, it seems to have caught the imagination of the publisher because we’re suddenly inundated with money which we don’t really want. My temperament tells me to give it away: but that’s not so easy. And it’s certainly a change from being on the breadline.”
Utz. Tout court
! Anyhow, it seems to have caught the imagination of the publisher because we’re suddenly inundated with money which we don’t really want. My temperament tells me to give it away: but that’s not so easy. And it’s certainly a change from being on the breadline.”
Two of his books –
On the Black Hill
and
The Viceroy of Ouidah
– had just been adapted for film.
*1
His new agent, Gillon Aitken, had at this point also secured an advance of £100,000 for
Utz
as well as for a collection of journalism to be titled after the question posed by Rimbaud in the Ethiopian desert: “What am I doing here?”
On the Black Hill
and
The Viceroy of Ouidah
– had just been adapted for film.
*1
His new agent, Gillon Aitken, had at this point also secured an advance of £100,000 for
Utz
as well as for a collection of journalism to be titled after the question posed by Rimbaud in the Ethiopian desert: “What am I doing here?”
After 20 years of struggling to make a living, Bruce was in a better financial position than he had ever been. He had a sense of new-found wealth; also of new-found health. “Still convinced that he is making a unique recovery,” read his medical report.
What also surprised friends about his illness was the way he became more himself. A new strain of sweetness entered his observations – an enjoyment of simple pleasures.
Propped up in bed in the Churchill, he registered in his notebook an uncomplicated satisfaction with life. “Last night Sister Patterson came in and gave me one of her ‘healing touch’ massages. She really does make me believe in the ‘laying on’ of hands. Afterwards I felt completely relaxed . . . After she massaged my hands, she flicks her own as if she were casting out demons . . . This time the oil smelled of something I knew perfectly well, lemony. But I was so perfectly happy I forgot to ask her.”
Once he had finished
Utz,
he threw himself into editing his journalism. He helped me – by no means a close friend – with my first novel. He understood immediately how to make it better and asked me to dedicate it to him. In his notebook he alluded to future projects. He wanted to write a book on healing. In hospital, he read a small-printed Bible from which he marked passages that seemed consistent with his pilgrimage, including a verse from Saint Mark: “And he ordained twelve that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to paradise. And to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out devils.” Thrilled by the description of the Boanerges as “the sons of Thunder”, he wrote: “That’s it. Now I know where to start. The title can be everything.”
Utz,
he threw himself into editing his journalism. He helped me – by no means a close friend – with my first novel. He understood immediately how to make it better and asked me to dedicate it to him. In his notebook he alluded to future projects. He wanted to write a book on healing. In hospital, he read a small-printed Bible from which he marked passages that seemed consistent with his pilgrimage, including a verse from Saint Mark: “And he ordained twelve that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to paradise. And to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out devils.” Thrilled by the description of the Boanerges as “the sons of Thunder”, he wrote: “That’s it. Now I know where to start. The title can be everything.”
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