Bruce Chatwin (94 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
For Robert Erskine, the spectacle was too painful. “For the first time Bruce’s ‘eye’ had gone.”
Bruce’s final destination on Friday was Rebecca Hossack’s gallery of Australian art. “He said I made him remember his time in Australia. He kept coming because he said there was energy in my smile.” Over the summer Bruce had grown to be a regular visitor at her new gallery. Impressed by a still life on show, he had wanted the artist to paint the backdrop for the Rimbaud opera. In June, he saw Hossack’s Aboriginal exhibition. He took to turning up three times a week. “I’d be sitting there late at night in a track suit and a car would draw up with Bruce and his brother. He’d sit in his wheelchair and hold court. On one of his last visits, he said: ‘You know I’m HIV positive, but we’ve worked out a cure. It’s terribly exciting and it involves the blood of a Nubian slave.’ I don’t have much sense of humour and I took it literally and thought, Well, that’s interesting.”
All week, he had been high on his need to achieve his collection, but on the Friday evening, “he crumpled and went frail,” says Hugh. “He said: ‘I’m done, done, done’.” Hugh lifted Bruce into his Jaguar and drove him to Oxford. Halfway down the M40 he turned to his brother and said: “I think we might go to hospital.”
Bruce was kept in Room 9 on the John Warin ward. Five days later, on 10 August, Nurse Patterson found on her patient’s report in red ink: “Not to leave the ward under any circumstances. To be sectioned if necessary.”
Bruce’s plans had been getting progressively grander. In the Churchill, his mind started racing again. He wanted to buy the Duchess of Windsor’s clothes. He wanted to buy Elizabeth a Bugatti for £2 million. He wanted to found a city and to develop underwater tourism. “It was a burlesque,” says Kevin Volans. “He was terribly excited about being made an Oxford don because of his incredible theory of archaeological virology. He said they were wrong to call it that: it was historical virology: he’d invented the notion.” He had solutions for ending the Cold War. “He was going to write to Gorbachev and go and see him and stop all this nonsense, sort it out, and he, Bruce, was going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.” John Pawson, the architect who had converted Bruce’s London apartment, was having an early-morning swim at a hotel near Dallas when Bruce telephoned: he had been appointed Minister of Architecture, he wanted Pawson to be his paid adviser, would send a car to collect him from the airport and which flight would he be taking? “There was an incredible enthusiasm. He was always quite convincing. One had to prick oneself to say that isn’t going to happen, but one wanted to will it.” Paddy Leigh Fermor was about to leave for Bulgaria when Bruce called. “He wanted me to meet him on Mount Athos and join the Orthodox Church and act as his sponsor.” A helicopter would fly Bruce, Leigh Fermor and Volans to the Holy Mountain. There Bruce intended to become a priest. He told June Bedford he had already decided on his religious name: Father James. “He did see himself as a priest,” says Hugh.
Many of the proposals announced by telephone sprang from an urge to heal others. “Aren’t all true healers – from the prehistoric shaman on – all ‘thundermen’?” he wrote in his notebook. Not his least ambitious plan evolved from an idea planted by Hugh: to construct field-hospitals out of castor bricks and parachute them into trouble spots.
“It was an idea to keep him amused,” says Hugh. “I’m involved with Crisis Action Hospitals. I told him of the Natural Resources Group, a company in the north of England that was making plastics and closed-cell rigid foam blocks out of vegetable oils like soya, castor, desert weed, rape, palm oil.” The company had sold artificial rubber sheeting to India and was negotiating to build a factory in China.
Bruce leapt on the possibilities held out by Hugh’s castor-brick hospital with all the enthusiasm of their great-grandfather who had once seen a future for the leather tyre. He believed he had a perfect troublespot for such a hospital: Afghanistan, the site of his earliest expeditions. Through the Aga Khan’s wife he was put in touch with Prince Saddhruddin, who had at the UN a specific responsibility for Afghanistan. “The last words I spoke to Bruce,” says Hugh, “were to arrange for a pile of 50p coins to put in a pay-phone by his bed to ring up Saddhruddin Aga Khan.”
The report Nurse Patterson found was based on the patient profile from the ward psychiatrist. “Mr Chatwin is, of course, a man of great intelligence and ability who has led a most unusual and interesting life. On at least a couple of occasions he has been under considerable personal stress. I am told that ‘living on his nerves’ is a fundamental part of his personality.” However, Bruce’s pressing speech, his grandiose ideas, his variety of “inappropriate associations” suggested that “he is suffering from mania as a complication of his HIV infection.” If the patient remained unwilling to take medication voluntarily, the psychiatrist advised David Warrell, “I think there would be an argument for your signing a three-day order under Section 5 of the Mental Health Act.”
On the same day, Juel-Jensen telephoned Hugh Chatwin with a request that he go immediately to the Radcliffe. There Hugh was informed that the reasoning side of Bruce’s brain had shrunk. The doctors wished to give him a drug to control the mania, for which they needed the family’s consent. In Elizabeth’s absence, Hugh signed the paper. He then told his father, who took over.
Charles Chatwin was acquainted with the drill. He had lived with the spectre of his grandfather’s gross debts and he had experience of his mother certifying lunatics. He swiftly arranged through Wragge & Co. for the Court of Protection to appoint a receiver. Bruce was put on lithium and his chequebook taken away. David Warrell was asked to sign an order restraining his patient. “As doctor in charge I had to say from a medical point of view he was temporarily not responsible. I felt very uneasy and Bruce was absolutely furious when he discovered. It was the episode that precipitated my losing his confidence.”
Elizabeth came back from America on 15 August, and went straight to Bruce in hospital. He was muttering that the doctors had told him part of his brain was dead. Confined forcibly to the ward, he had violent mood swings, was demanding and irritable. He seized Kevin Volans’s arm. “You must save me. You must get me out of here. They all think I’m mad. I’m not. They can’t keep up. I’m simply thinking too fast for them.”
“The saddest thing,” says Shirley Conran, “is that Bruce was well enough to know that what he was most terrified of was happening to him: his brain had been affected.”
Slowly the lithium worked its effect.
One day Bruce decided he wanted back his wax Neptune. As part of a ploy for getting such works of art out of the house, Elizabeth had suggested they should be carried to London to be photographed. When she asked Vic Pearson to retrieve the tiny figure from his warehouse, he could not find it. One of the keystones of the Homer Collection had disappeared. (It was never found.) The news crushed Bruce. Miserable, he told Elizabeth: “It’s symptomatic of everything.”
His wild behaviour predictably found its way into the gossip columns. On 6 September,
Today
broke the following story:
TOP AUTHOR CHATWIN FALLS VICTIM TO AIDS
. “To the horror of his charming wife Elizabeth and the total shock of close friends like Jasper Conran, author Bruce Chatwin has become Britain’s first outstanding talent to succumb to the full force of AIDS.”
Today
broke the following story:
TOP AUTHOR CHATWIN FALLS VICTIM TO AIDS
. “To the horror of his charming wife Elizabeth and the total shock of close friends like Jasper Conran, author Bruce Chatwin has become Britain’s first outstanding talent to succumb to the full force of AIDS.”
For Charles and Margharita, the gossip that this story generated realised their worst fears. Charles contacted Hugh. “I want to know: are you holding something back from me? Can you tell me whether this story is true?” Hugh told him it was. “He didn’t say anything. Professional men don’t show their reaction.”
Bruce had at last confessed to his brother, but he still had declined to tell his parents. His aunt Barbara, a deaconess in the Church of England, supported his decision. As soon as Elizabeth landed in England, Bruce insisted that she drive him to see his father’s sister in Pershore. On 16 August he was taken on a day outing. He demanded the two of them be left alone. “I thought how lovely to want to see me,” said Barbara Chatwin. Unable to sit, Bruce was laid out flat on a rug on the grass. “I sat on a garden chair looking down at him and he started to talk. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’ And I sat and listened and it wasn’t until after he’d gone that I realised he’d found a clergyman in order to make a confession. I suddenly realised: ‘I’m sure he knows he’s dying’.”
Barbara Chatwin felt it best that her nephew protect his parents from the truth: she, like Charles, had lived through the scandal of Robert Harding Milward. But she had underestimated her brother. Bruce had gone to great pains to conceal something which, in the end, his father – if not Margharita – might have been equipped to handle. During the war as a naval commander, Charles had presided over a court martial on board the
Cynthia.
On the day before his own death in 1996, he told Hugh: “I’m sorry to say we had to part company with the ship’s carpenter. He was caught interfering with young sailors on board.”
Cynthia.
On the day before his own death in 1996, he told Hugh: “I’m sorry to say we had to part company with the ship’s carpenter. He was caught interfering with young sailors on board.”
“Bruce had worried about Father,” says Hugh. “He thought his mother would understand and that his father wouldn’t. It was actually the other way round.” Margharita suffered the more visibly. “It was an awful, terrible sorrow,” says Hugh. “It was total pain.”
The story in
Today
was kept from the person it most concerned. Efforts to divert Bruce concentrated on the imminent publication of
Utz.
Tom Maschler, who had taken a four-month sabbatical, was moved to make his warmest commendation to date. “Let me put it in writing,” he wrote to Bruce. “The first pages of
Utz
are the most perfect Bruce Chatwin that I have ever read at an early stage. Come to that, they may be the most perfect Bruce Chatwin, period. This book will be a little gem.” He had finished reading the corrected manuscript before going on leave. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.”
Today
was kept from the person it most concerned. Efforts to divert Bruce concentrated on the imminent publication of
Utz.
Tom Maschler, who had taken a four-month sabbatical, was moved to make his warmest commendation to date. “Let me put it in writing,” he wrote to Bruce. “The first pages of
Utz
are the most perfect Bruce Chatwin that I have ever read at an early stage. Come to that, they may be the most perfect Bruce Chatwin, period. This book will be a little gem.” He had finished reading the corrected manuscript before going on leave. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.”
Utz
was published on 22 September and seemed everything that
The Songlines
was not: in place of a sprawling, philosophical treatise on movement which roamed the globe, he had written a compact, old European love story whose drama concentrated on the objects in a single room. “Each book of his seems to set out to contradict the expectations aroused by its immediate predecessor,” wrote John Lanchester in the
London Review of Books
. Peter Conrad in the
Observer
saw “tantalising” links with the last book. “The timeless space of Aboriginal dreaming resembles the illusions of Prague, a labyrinth where you can wander back through history.” Several reviewers perceived in the author the fragile and masked Harlequin, seldom what he seemed, forever pivoting on his base of gilded foam. For Robert Stone in the
New York Times Book Review
, the novel represented Chatwin “at his most erudite and evocative”, but he found the author’s world “a stern, unforgiving place; the worst crime there is obviousness, followed in order of gravity by complaining and scrupulosity.”
was published on 22 September and seemed everything that
The Songlines
was not: in place of a sprawling, philosophical treatise on movement which roamed the globe, he had written a compact, old European love story whose drama concentrated on the objects in a single room. “Each book of his seems to set out to contradict the expectations aroused by its immediate predecessor,” wrote John Lanchester in the
London Review of Books
. Peter Conrad in the
Observer
saw “tantalising” links with the last book. “The timeless space of Aboriginal dreaming resembles the illusions of Prague, a labyrinth where you can wander back through history.” Several reviewers perceived in the author the fragile and masked Harlequin, seldom what he seemed, forever pivoting on his base of gilded foam. For Robert Stone in the
New York Times Book Review
, the novel represented Chatwin “at his most erudite and evocative”, but he found the author’s world “a stern, unforgiving place; the worst crime there is obviousness, followed in order of gravity by complaining and scrupulosity.”
Most British critics echoed Philip Howard in
The Times
: “This shiny little novel is not just about pretty little porcelain figurines, but about dirty great issues of life and creativity.” The British edition of
Utz
outsold
The Songlines
in hardback. Final hardback sales were 21,745 and in early October it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later for the Whitbread.
The Times
: “This shiny little novel is not just about pretty little porcelain figurines, but about dirty great issues of life and creativity.” The British edition of
Utz
outsold
The Songlines
in hardback. Final hardback sales were 21,745 and in early October it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later for the Whitbread.
Also on the Booker shortlist of six was Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses.
“Bruce always used to deride the Booker and along comes
Utz
and gets itself onto the shortlist,” says Rushdie. “He suddenly became keen on a literary image in which he’d never been interested before. Two days before the prize-giving he rang me up. ‘Salman, I’ve come to a decision. If I win the Booker, I’m going to say I’m going to share it with you and if you win you say the same thing about me. I think that would be very good.’ I stalled. I said: ‘Let’s just think about it’.” Both of their books lost to Peter Carey’s
Oscar and Lucinda
.
The Satanic Verses.
“Bruce always used to deride the Booker and along comes
Utz
and gets itself onto the shortlist,” says Rushdie. “He suddenly became keen on a literary image in which he’d never been interested before. Two days before the prize-giving he rang me up. ‘Salman, I’ve come to a decision. If I win the Booker, I’m going to say I’m going to share it with you and if you win you say the same thing about me. I think that would be very good.’ I stalled. I said: ‘Let’s just think about it’.” Both of their books lost to Peter Carey’s
Oscar and Lucinda
.
Bruce had refused any promotional work because of his illness. Yet the extent of his deterioration was broadcast on 25 October, the evening of the Booker Prize award. As his sole piece of publicity, Bruce had agreed to appear on BBC television to discuss his novel. His interview at Homer End was more revealing than he can have intended. With bright, sunken eyes, he spoke of how Marta’s love had triumphed over Utz’s collection. Love had won over art, which “always lets you down”. But almost for the first time, people were not listening to Bruce’s words. They were taking in his scooped features, his sticky-lipped enunciation, his lank ashen hair.
Bruce would not be able to retract or hide from his effect on viewers. Had he been healthy he would never have permitted the indignity of that brief appearance. It confirmed to friends like Simon Sainsbury what they had suspected all summer. “To me it was very sad. Here was this brilliant man off his head.”
XL
Fallen Angel
. . . possession
by the
Beast . . .
—BC, notebooks, 1971
HE FELT NO PAIN, ONLY WEAKNESS. THE NERVES HAD GONE. HE
blamed it all on a nurse infecting him with refrigerated blood “thereby completely screwing up the nerves in my hands and legs”. In October, no longer satisfied with the way he was being treated at the Churchill, Bruce sought the help of a doctor in Paris. “The promise of a special cure brought those who could afford it to the French hospitals in droves,” wrote Peter Adam in
Not Drowning but Waving
“Every day a new pill seemed to be found, some costing a fortune, or not available on the market.” Bruce had established contact with André le Fesvre through the Aga Khan’s wife, whose hairdresser le Fesvre had reputedly cured of AIDS. On 11 October, Bruce and Elizabeth visited the le Fesvre clinic at 7 rue Washington. They stayed in Paris for a week of tests, Bruce receiving two blood transfusions and a course of calf serum that, for a month, restored him.
blamed it all on a nurse infecting him with refrigerated blood “thereby completely screwing up the nerves in my hands and legs”. In October, no longer satisfied with the way he was being treated at the Churchill, Bruce sought the help of a doctor in Paris. “The promise of a special cure brought those who could afford it to the French hospitals in droves,” wrote Peter Adam in
Not Drowning but Waving
“Every day a new pill seemed to be found, some costing a fortune, or not available on the market.” Bruce had established contact with André le Fesvre through the Aga Khan’s wife, whose hairdresser le Fesvre had reputedly cured of AIDS. On 11 October, Bruce and Elizabeth visited the le Fesvre clinic at 7 rue Washington. They stayed in Paris for a week of tests, Bruce receiving two blood transfusions and a course of calf serum that, for a month, restored him.
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