Under the Sun (30 page)

I am sorry this has taken so long. The first letter ended up in Spain by mistake! yours sincerely, Bruce Chatwin

Dordogne | France | 25 April 1973

 

Two godfathers staggering out of a marginally drunk lunch in a fairly obscure part of Perigord send their warmest greetings to their godson and hope he will not follow their example. Bruce David.
³⁷⁷

Postcard, Ambrosius Holbein, Portrait of a boy with blond hair, Basel, Kunstmuseum | Glos | 13 September 1973

 

How I envy your eyrie in the hills. Especially after returning to the dreaded London. I walked to Kington from you, then to Penelope Betjeman nr Hay where I had two exhilarating days riding the Black Mountains bareback on her Arab. West Glos seems very heavy and dreary after the fun and games on the border. Many thanks. Much love to you both.

Telegram | October 1973

 

NO PHONE HOPELESS COME ALGIERS 9 OCT STOP BRING DESERT SHOES ONE DRESS AND NOT LESS THAN 250 POUNDS WILL REPAY WILL GO CENTRAL SAHARA BRUCE

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 2 November 1973

 

Can I come and see my godson – and his parents(!) in the near future. My life at present is the way I like it. Perpetuum mobile, so it'll have to be a snatch visit. What about a mid-week commuter special overnight stay?? Much love B

 

In November 1973 Chatwin stayed with the Rezzoris at their home near Florence. Rezzori (1914-98) was an Austrian-born author, best known for
Memoirs of An Anti-Semite
.‘It gave us great pleasure to exchange useless curiosities,' he wrote of Chatwin in
Anecdotage
.‘He went into virtual raptures when I told him that about the only thing I remembered from my studies of mining geology were the names of the five sites where gold is found in the former Dual Monarchy: Schemnitz Chemnitz Nagybanya Ofenbanya Vöröspatàk (mineral resources of the Danube region). He tried to learn these names by heart which given the challenge they posed to his Anglo-Saxon speech apparatus was no simple matter. This only doubled his enjoyment.' In the same vein, Chatwin left this entry in their visitors' book.

Donnini | Florence | Italy | 31 November 1973 [sic]

 

Menu

Huile d'olive vierge gelée avec sauerkraut

Sardines mordecai (eat a live sardine)

Gravelax (prepare 2 sides of a salmon and press between 2 slabs of stone with salt and dill. Leave 2 weeks)

Stuffing for pintade or pheasant (must wrap bird in bacon)

Sorbet aux mangues avec Rhum blanc

Cheese: formaggio tartufato – gorgon Emile Zola

Wines: Papa Blumen 1970 Vinsanto – Eger Bull's Blood 56

Camel's milk. Infusion d'hibiscus.

PS As alternative Boile of duck (with vinegar) serve with a horse-radish ice-cream

 

In spite of commitments to the
Sunday Times,
Chatwin had not abandoned his nomad book. His article on the blood-sweating horses of the Chinese Emperor Wu-Ti, and their possible descent from Alexander's battle-horse Bucephalus, drew a fan letter from Robin Lane Fox, a young classical historian then preparing his biography of Alexander the Great. Chatwin wrote a two-sided letter back. Their correspondence is lost, but Lane Fox retains a clear memory of the contents. ‘Of course, Bruce wrote, many friends had told him that there was no future chasing horse bones through the steppes of Central Asia, but he gathered that I, too, had been in Afghanistan [in 1972], and he would like to meet and discuss the discovery of Alexander's route across the desert and what I thought of Ai Khanum, the Greek city many thought was founded by Alexander. We met in London and he gave me his essay on Animal Art. We struck up an immediate friendship. I thought: “Here is someone whose horizons stretch way beyond property prices in Bayswater; here is someone who can use allusions – Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun, Flecker, Louis Sheaffer's
The Golden Peaches of Samarkand;
here is someone who has devoted his life to objects beyond “that last blue mountain barred with snow”. My book came out in November 1973 and Bruce was back in touch with a letter saying how much he caught. “I know it mattered as I missed the buff-coloured uplands of the lower slopes of the Hindu Kush in your company, with the scent of bitter wormwood in the air and white wild roses ahead of us. I want to talk to you about the Dionysiac adventures of the Macedonians in Nuristan. I have photographs which I think will appeal to you.” The photos were black and white, of boys with dark eyes, their hair entwined with long vine leaves and ivy, returning to their village in the evening. Bruce understood that Alexander's troops believed in that area they'd discovered the groves of Dionysus.'

La Fonda | Plaza Santo Cristo | Marbella | Spain | 9 April [1974]

 

Dear E.

I have got your first letter but not yet the second – and I may never get it now as I think the best thing will be if I go for a bit to the Atlas. I do love my walks so much and I get well unblocked on them, though today I have had a ? brilliant (tomorrow it will be poor) idea for one of my chapters. I am going to write my hunter's chapter in the manner of Turgenev's sketches. My first chapter is called
Diogenes and Alexandra
being the least and the most. I went from Ronda which was appallingly bleak at this time of year to Janetta's
³⁷⁹
House near the sea. Very well ordered days with Magouche and a beautiful garden etc. House was lovely
ish
. Too much care attached to
maddening
details. Incidentally, I honestly believe that what Holwell needs is the whitewash pail inside. It really is terribly easy to slap a new coat on each year. It takes a morning. And a lot of sofas covered in cotton and a lot of cushions. I'd bring down that old reed mat from the bedroom again for the drawing room – and I'd whitewash inside the fireplace. If you get the chance in Bristol why not have the Mahdi's flag
³⁸⁰
and the Moroccan (it is 16th cent) textile put behind glass – they fit exactly.

To help the house problem etc. I'd like to give you that Ibibio head (black) which you can sell. I believe it should be worth about £500 but is perhaps best sold in France or Belgium. Ask F[elicity] N[icolson] what she thinks. Also I do think that Jap box is an awful extravaganza at the moment. Perhaps we could send it back? She'll yowl in agony but
tant pis
. You should also whitewash the wall by the kitchen at the back and have masses of potted plants like they have here all round.

I saw the Connolly thing
³⁸¹
in the
Sunday Times
. Boring. But also
tant pis
. In fact it was silly egocentric drivel, but that is what goes down, so one can't mind. I've really gone off him. Magouche couldn't read
The Rock Pool
either.

I will come back at the end of May for June-July hopefully and then I suggest we think of going somewhere adventurous together?
S America. S. Seas
? (except that I'm still keen on Francisco de Souza as an idea) What are the options on the house? A professor from Bristol here for the Academic Year? Possibly Steph[anidis] might want it. Could even be persuaded to put things in it? Staff it? Why not ask him. Also say that the year's tenure is coming to an end in June on the Feathers. What to do?

Rang R.S.T.
³⁸²
and will be dining with him in Tangier tomorrow night. Alistair Boyd
³⁸³
is an extremely nice intelligent Hispanic nut, married to a second wife, who was once married to Kingsley Amis and is hopelessly drunk all the time. They are further wedded to an enormous Palazzo called Palazzo Monchagon, Moorish – 16th Cent Spanish which will be their grave unless they rid themselves of it.

Do whatever you think with the flat. I never really want to set foot in it – or ever to live in London. But cannot be bothered. XX B

 

Fiva | Aandalsnes | Norway | [Summer 1974]

 

Dear Hugh,

We are thinking of you here because we feel you would be better off than us. The River Rauma is apparently the best salmon fishing in Norway. Our hosts – the Bromley-Davenports
³⁸⁴
– own about five miles of it. Recently a salmon, more porpoise than a salmon, of about 60 lbs was hauled out of it.
³⁸⁵
All we do is watch the ten-pounders lift themselves like aeroplanes over the falls.

We are glad, too, to escape here from the angst-ridden place we left. Imagine if you can a nervous artistic German aristocrat,
³⁸⁶
married to but hating a Guinness, pretending in Norway to reincarnate her English suffragette aunt of 1905, wearing crinolines and parasols, even on the glaciers, and introducing a company of musically minded drunks, who played an awful wheezing bagpipe and were dreadful in their Irishness. It was, I tell you, frightful. It was enough to turn maddest of men into raving Whitelaws.
³⁸⁷

It is a charming country, this, but ouch the expense.
³⁸⁸
Back soon,

Bruce

On 1 October 1974 Elizabeth's father died. Bruce flew out for Bobby's funeral in Geneseo and stayed on in Gertrude's apartment on Fifth Avenue. He had $3,500 expenses from the
Sunday Times
and was supposed to be writing a story on the Guggenheim family. But he felt at the end of his tether with the magazine – ‘which we all felt was being wrecked from “above” '. On 2 November, ‘on the spur of the moment', he made a break for it; he plotted to meet up with Elizabeth and Gertrude in Peru in early April.

Magnus Linklater, the magazine's editor, has no recollection of the telegram that Chatwin claimed to have sent to the
Sunday Times
: GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS. The telegram most likely took the form of this letter to Francis Wyndham.

Lima | Peru | 11 December 1974

 

Dear Francis,

I have done what I threatened. I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America. I have been staying with a cousin in Lima for the past week and am going tonight to Buenos Aires. I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia. I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up. I do not, for obvious reasons, want to be associated with the paper in Argentina, but if something crops up, I'll let you or Magnus [Linklater] know. I'm working on something that could be marvellous, but I'll have to do it in my own way.

The third part of the Guggenheim saga
³⁸⁹
is already complete in note form and will take only a day or two to write, but we will have to compress the rest together. Later on I'll be looking at the Guggenheim mines in Central Chile because my cousin's husband runs a mine near Chuquicamata.

Can you tell Magnus that Ahmet Ertegun
³⁹⁰
is definitely on, but I want to wait until the spring and go with him to Turkey (at his expense) and watch the king of rock music, who firmly intends to be President of Turkey, in action.

I'll give you an address in Buenos Aires through which I can be contacted, but I don't want to receive any official S.T. correspondence in the Argentine. as ever, Bruce

 

Already when in New York, at the instigation of the literary agent Gillon Aitken, Chatwin had outlined Milward's story in a proposal for a book to be called
O Patagonia.
‘Among my first recollections in life is being held up to my grandmother's cabinet of curiosities and being allowed to handle a thick dry piece of animal skin with some reddish hair like coconut fibre. My grandmother
told me it was a “piece of brontosaurus” and I developed a fetishistic obession for it . . . the piece of brontosaurus began my continuing interest in palaeontology and evolution.' The book Chatwin wanted to write would be ‘on Patagonia – and a lot more besides . . . The form of the book must be dictated by the journey itself. As it will be – to say the least – unpredictable, there is no point in even trying to guess what it will hold. I shall start the diary the moment I cross the Rio Negro (I do not intend to fly unless it is absolutely vital; descriptions of landscape from the air are the most boring descriptions of all). I may cast a backward look at the horrors of Buenos Aires, but then I shall zig-zag down the country from the coast to the mountains and so on.'