Bruce Chatwin (99 page)

Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin

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THE PITT-RIVERS CATALOGUE
, listing accessions to the Farnham Museum between 1880 and 1900, has since been found and is now in Cambridge University Library, but not yet gifted.

PETER WILSON
died in Paris, 3 June 1984. Bruce had visited him a few months before. “I’m glad B. went to see him,” wrote Elizabeth to Gertrude, “so they ended on a good note. They hadn’t spoken for nearly 18 years & both were a bit nervous, but it was all right.”

JOHN HEWETT
died in 1994,
STUART PIGGOTT
in 1996.

DONALD RICHARDS
died in 1990, Sebastian Walker in June 1991, Robert Mapplethorpe in March 1989, Teddy Millington-Drake in 1994 – all from AIDS.

AKBAR KHAN
went back to Afghanistan, married an American girl and went to live with her in Shawnee, Kansas. Joyce Khan wrote to Elizabeth: “Kansas is a 9–5 prison of apt. complexes, suburban shopping centres, neighbourhood parks & decent schools. But it is so empty at our economic level . . . Akbar says we are too much affected by the six o’clock news – its media hype.” Akbar’s goal was “to get the hell out of here – as soon as possible” and go back to Afghanistan to help refugees. He would run a rickshaw to earn money. “We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.”

MA UTZ
. In 1989, David Sulzberger was eating breakfast at a café in Washington. “What should I find but ‘Ma Utz’s home-made potato chips’. I felt it was a solution to what had happened to the old concierge.”

REBECCA HOSSACK
called her next show “Songlines”.

THE STREHLOW COLLECTION
. On 29 May 1992 government agents raided Kath Strehlow’s house in Adelaide and seized books, papers and objects pertaining to Australian Aborigines. “One of the things bugging them,” she says, “was my friendship with the English writer Bruce Chatwin.” One of the last things Theodor Strehlow had said to his wife was that he regretted ever having had anything to do with the Aboriginals.

IN PATAGONIA
, Bruce’s first book, has had a positive effect on the Welsh community in Argentina. In 1980, six years after Bruce was there, Gaiman was a dusty grid of pale red houses, two of them tea-rooms. The Welsh language was spoken by fewer than 2,000 in the region and in danger of disappearing altogether. In the burial ground at Chapel Moriah, the headstones of the founders were pitched at an angle and vandalised plastic roses lay melted under the sun. The place was sinking back into the desert.

Today, the village spreads in a new development beyond the Bethel chapel. There are seven tea-rooms, including the ranch-style “Caerdydd” which was favoured with a visit from Diana, Princess ofWales, in November 1995. Twice a week in January, a Welsh choir performs to bus loads of tourists, among them 500 Americans on a Cunard cruise down the coast. Gaiman is firmly on the map and the eight pages Bruce wrote about it are quoted on board by the lecturer on the evening the ship docks in Puerto Madryn.

In August 1998, one of the smaller Channel Islands was invaded, in the name of the King of Patagonia, by a small group led by the French novelist, and one-time Patagonian consul in France, Jean Raspail.

THE RUCKSACK
, bequeathed to Werner Herzog. In the summer of 1998, Herzog went on an expedition into the Peruvian Amazon in search of an aeroplane that had crashed 27 years before. “I was booked on that flight, with eight actors, Klaus Kinski and some musicians. We were all taken off the list at the very last moment. We were totally disappointed.”

The plane exploded mid-flight and 92 people died. There was one survivor, a girl. She was strapped into her seat, spinning through the sky towards the jungle, which she remembers as looking like cauliflowers. She was ten days on her own. Fortunately she was the daughter of a German biologist who had taught her the ways of the jungle. She knew that when the caymans splashed in the water there was no threat: they were running away from her. When she swam down the river to safety, she knew not to put her feet on the river bed because of sting-rays. Herzog found her in Bavaria and persuaded her to help him look for the site of the crash, which three previous expeditions had failed to locate. He put into Bruce’s rucksack the fragments that they found: part of a grey plastic food tray, a woman’s hair-roller, the high-heel of a shoe, a metal disc from the flight deck – and brought out of the jungle film of the girl describing her nights alone.

In 1998, paperback sales of
BRUCE CHATWIN
’s works in Britain exceeded one million copies. He is published in 27 languages, earning more for his estate than he was ever able to achieve in his lifetime.

BOB BRAIN
’s discovery, in Bruce’s presence, of the “earliest use of fire” was the cover story of
Nature
magazine in December 1988. Bruce did not live to read it.

Brain continues his search for the roots of predation. He is now digging in Namibia for microscopic fossils about 550 million years old. “Humans are a flash in the pan,” he says. “We wouldn’t even register on the fossil record.”

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

AOR = Anatomy of Restlessness

CT = Colin Thubron

CW = Cary Welch

DM = Diana Melly

DR = Deborah Rogers

EC = Elizabeth Chatwin

FW = Francis Wyndham

GC = Gertrude Chanler

IF = Ivry Freyberg

IP = In Patagonia

JI = James Ivory

JK = John Kasmin

MB = Murray Bail

NA = The Nomadic Alternative

ND = no date

OTBH = On the Black Hill

PLF = Paddy Leigh Fermor

SH = Suzanne Hayes

SL – The Songlines

SP = Stuart Piggott

SS = Sunil Sethi

TM = Tom Maschler

VOO = The Viceroy of Ouidah

WAIDH = What Am I Doing Here

I: Fire

Was he a
. . .
AOR
, 161

This is a detective story
. . . C. K. Brain,
The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy
(Chicago, 1981), 3

The most compelling
. . .
SL
, 268

the most stimulating
. . . BC to GC, 3.11.84

Good feeling at Swartkrans
. . . BC notebooks, Box 35, 2.2.84

This bone is
. . . BC to GC, 3.11.84

When visiting the excavation
. . . BC to CT, 9.7.87

Do I take it
. . . BC to Bob Brain, July 87

the earliest use of fire
. . .
Nature
, vol. 336, December 1988

Shamanism has always
. . .
AOR, 99

Aren’t all true healers
. . . Box 34, 1988

Man is a talking animal
,
a storytelling animal
. . . Box 30

I hate T. E. Lawrence
. . . BC to CT, taped interview June 1987

Being an Englishman
. . .
Granta 21
, 1987

To be unfindable
. . .
Independent on Sunday
, 14.5 .95

le tombeau vert
. . . BC to SS, 18.6.78

a quick note
. . . BC to MB, December 1984

but
mon cul
is international
. . . Stella Wilkinson

The moment he got out
. . . From “A Nomad Collector” in
Bruce Chatwin: Searching for the miraculous
, ed. Alessandro Grassi & Neri Torrigiani (Arti-Grif, Florence, 1995)