Under the Sun (37 page)

She charmed me at first, I have to admit. But I couldn't stomach the pettiness of the lies. Her enemy Charan Singh
⁴⁶⁸
summed her up when he said: ‘Mrs Gandhi is incapable of telling the truth even by mistake.'

I did have some extremely funny times. Not the least was our visit to the Durga Temple in Benares, where a monkey with mastitis tried to rip off her sari. When I told the Rajmata of Gwalior that she had dipped herself in the Ganges, she said: ‘Sacrilege!'

Now Benares is a place I wouldn't mind holing up in. Where else do the Ancient World and Twentieth Century Decadence meet in such harmony? The only trouble was a temperature of 42 degrees centigrade, with the result that I came back feeling a bit dessicated.

Sorry for the quick note. We hope to be over shortly, love B

On Mr Dhavan's desk (her Assistant Private Secretary) I found a manual for ventriloquists called
Mimicry and Monoacting
.

Draft letter, Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 10 June 1978

 

Dear Monica,

Now it's my turn to apologise for the delay. Your letter reached here the morning I flew to India to interview Mrs Gandhi (and that's another story). The one to Deborah Rogers had got there three days earlier. I spent six weeks in India and since coming back have hardly had time to eat, let alone think.

In the meantime the advance copies of the New York edition of
Patagonia
have arrived here, not seen yet. I'll have the publishers send you and Lala
⁴⁶⁹
a copy each. If there's anyone else you can think of I'd be very happy to do the same . . .

Now, with regard to the stories, I accept your position and most sincerely apologise for the misunderstanding. If I am in the wrong, then I am deeply in the wrong. But I recall the matter differently: I was not at all certain, in Lima, whether you would allow me to photocopy the journal, and was therefore extremely pleased, when one day after lunch when Gertrude and Elizabeth were there, you gave me the manuscript and told me I could go to the photocopiers. I have a copy of a letter to you dated 4th of May 1975, which starts:

This letter confirms that I have photocopied biographical material relating to your father the late Charles Amherst Milward, and also a great part of his uncompleted book. I have also taken extensive notes. I understand that you have no objection to my using it in the book I shall be writing about Patagonia. I also understand that this permission is subject to the following condition: that you hold full copyright over the material in your possession and that when you come to write the full biography of your parents there shall be no prevention to stop you using the same stories that I will have used. The same will apply to any photographs that will belong to you.

On my return to England I shall ask my literary agent to confirm this arrangement so that it is watertight.

yours ever,

Bruce Chatwin

c/o Deborah Rogers Ltd | 5-11 Mortimer Stree | London | [June 1978]

 

Dear Professor Morris,

I did enjoy our conversation last week about my wolf child
⁴⁷⁰
. I enclose a fiendishly bad photocopy of the piece and hope you didn't mind my quoting you – or half-quoting you – in the final passage. If you feel that it's wrong, please don't hesitate to let me know through Deborah [Rogers].

I thought you might like a copy of the book I wrote for Tom [Maschler] last year. American edition, I'm afraid.

Yours sincerely, Bruce Chatwin

 

While following Mrs Gandhi on her election tour, Chatwin had met Sunil Sethi, ‘the 23 yr old whizz-kid of Indian journalism', who was starting out on
India Today
. Chatwin found him ‘an exhilarating companion. He had been everywhere in India,
roughing it. He could take in Hindi and spit it out in English from the sides of his mouth.'

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 18 June 1978

 

Dearest Sunil,

Well, that was a cheering letter. I had been waiting for it with a certain tetchy anticipation. Admittedly, it came at the end of a more cheering week. Had it come the week before, I might very easily have taken the next plane to Delhi. I was laid out. Laid out with such a monumental depression that I couldn't drag myself out of bed in the morning for fear of what frightful things the day had in store. I
think
I gave you to understand I was going back in such haste to see someone.
⁴⁷¹
This is not my usual practice: usually I delay departure for England (
Le Tombeau Vert
) until the last possible moment. However, when the someone met me at the airport, I knew that something was seriously wrong (frightening how people can change in a month), and for three weeks the wrongness built up in a crocodile of misery, while I battled at my typewriter with that beastly woman who had ruined my journey to India. Emotionally, I always seem to suffer from transcontinental dislocation. Anyway for the past month I've been cursing myself for leaving YOU and you'll have to put up with it.

So, on Monday, stuck in bed at 10am on a bright sunny morning, Tom Maschler my publisher rang to say that
In Patagonia
had won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (previous winners include Evelyn Waugh and Dom Moraes!). So I stopped mooning and pulled myself together. Not that I am normally a mooner, but I have discovered I am far less hard-boiled than I thought.

Of course,
In Patagonia
isn't meant to be a travel book, but only you and the T.L.S. reviewer had the wit to see that, while I have been so browbeaten by people saying it is a travel book that I half came to believe it – or believed that I had failed in my purpose – to write an allegorical journey on the classic pattern (narrator goes in search of beast etc). Thank you for ‘a matter of multiple passions resolving into a final simplicity.'

Then there were rows at the
Sunday Times
. I felt the only way to tackle the woman was to do it obliquely, elliptically. How can any European presume to pontificate about India? Vainly, I tried to describe what I saw and left the readers to make up their minds. The copy came back scrawled all over: WELL? IS SHE COMING BACK OR ISN'T SHE or WHAT IS THE POLITICAL SCENE? That kind of thing, with a request that I rewrite.

But why should I? Print or don't print, but don't bother me. That has been my attitude over the past week. Preferably, don't print, because anyway I don't like writing about people I don't like.

English newspapers are dreadful. Unreadable, so why should one presume to write for them? The besetting sin of all English writers is their fatal attraction for periodicals, their fascination for reviews, and their passion for bickering in print.

Resolution of the month: Never to write for newspapers.

Quotation of the Month (from Cyril Connolly's
The Unquiet Grave
):

‘The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their new book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them creating anything different.

‘All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing of films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, so it should not be undertaken . . .'

But what about the rent and drink bills? When the bills of his
Horizon
mounted to intolerable proportions, he sold himself to the
Sunday Times
and died there.

I am not suggesting you walk out of
India Today
, but feel you have reached a point where journalism has taught you the necessary art of condensation and the technique of story-hunting, but as such has nothing to offer you. Nor am I suggesting you abandon your project on the dynasties of the demagogues (though that is grandiose and journalistic): but with your particular gifts, with your passion for India (though you needn't confine yourself to India); with your unbearable curiosity into the motivations of people; with your capacity to arrange characters on a written page; you should be able to produce at least one lasting masterpiece. Don't leave it too late. I've left it far too late.

India is the land of the short story. It will never have its
War and Peace
. Mr Scott's opus
⁴⁷²
is a tragic bore; Mrs Jabberwallah
⁴⁷³
can't write; R. K. Narayan
⁴⁷⁴
isn't good enough and Mr Naipaul
⁴⁷⁵
is a pontificator. Nor am I suggesting that you go out like the young Kipling with his notebook. But in a world where millions of hot-air-laden pages are printed annually, it becomes a duty to go, see and condense for future readers at some unseen date.

I like
Passage to India
but believe that E.M.F[orster] is a poor model, as Somerset Maugham is a lethal one. Forgive me for suggesting you go on a course of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Maupassant, Flaubert (especially
Un Coeur Simple
) Ivan Bunin
⁴⁷⁶
(whom I'll get for you) Turgenev, and among the Americans early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway, and Carson McCullers especially
The Ballad of the Sad Café
.

I wouldn't take too much notice of this: it does reveal my inability to come to terms with English literature in general, excepting of course the Elizabethans and the outsiders. But we have nothing in the 19th or 20th Century to beat the narrative drive of someone like Poe.

My latest passion is Racine, though heaven knows where it's going to lead. But the past week has gone writing an introduction to another passion, the prose of Osip Mandelstam,
⁴⁷⁷
the most important writer to be snuffed out by Stalin. Consider this, written at the time of the purge:

‘The bourgeois is of course more innocent than the proletarian, closer to the uterine world, to the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherubim. In Russia there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and the scarcity had a bad effect on the digestion of authentic revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie in its innocent aspect must be preserved, entertained with amateur sports, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.'

Do try and come here – for or preferably not for
The Sunday Times
. If you can wangle a cheap ticket, I can fix you some money, not much, say £400, and you can pay me back some time in India.

But I, I warn you, have had quite enough of
Le Tombeau Vert
for the present. Nor can I face the idea of your country in the monsoon when I have work (sic) to do. I have chosen to go to the Spanish Pyrenees (Pray God, they are as I remember them) to hole up in some cheap hotel, with Racine, Flaubert and a manuscript. And probably to stare at blank sheets of paper!

I MAY not come back until the end of September, but you of course would be welcome wherever I am. A card (allow 10 days) or a cable to here will reach me, but I will try and furnish some kind of address.

with love – as always

Bruce

 

Please forgive this rather chaotic letter written in the small hours of the morning.

as from: Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 2 July 1978

 

Dear Desmond Morris,

I can't thank you enough for your help over the wolf child piece. Corrections noted and passed on to the
Sunday Times
.

Though I say it myself, the photo of Shamdev the Wolf Boy in the arms of his rescuer is rather amazing. I think it will be out in about three weeks.

Best wishes, Bruce Chatwin

Barcelona | Spain | 10 July 1978

 

I ate the Hawthornden Prize at the restaurant of Michel Guérard.
⁴⁷⁸
Not what it's cracked up to be.
My
cuisine minceur
seemed at least to
taste
more than his. Have been running the bulls in Pamplona. Now hopefully down to work. B

 

Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | July 26 1978

 

My dear S.,

I write also at once, but yours, alas, has had a hard time reaching me. Don't give a thought to your self-doubt: mine is in full flood. The last month has been a wearisome frittering away of time, unenjoyable, expensive, unproductive. I have at last found a place to hole up in, an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentine architect who has run out of money. BUT I FRY. I feel hotter here than in Benares. Five hours of work and I'm exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won't; don't like what I've already done: feel like burning the manuscript.

No. I wasn't being dishonest about Someone [Donald Richards] . . . yet the fact is I have left England feeling exceptionally bruised, bruised not the least by some of my closest friends, who use my obvious discomfiture to turn it into heartless gossip. There is something horribly claustrophobic about my country and yet, like you, I cannot get used to the life of exile.

Yes. Cyril Connolly was a rotten novelist. He was also extremely nasty to me. The dreaded Widow Orwell
⁴⁷⁹
first introduced me to him, saying: ‘You two must get to know each other. You're both so interested in . . . er . . . the truth.' ‘Oh?' said Connolly, ‘and what particular aspect of the truth are you interested in?' However, the
Unquiet Grave
is a book I return to again and again, so brilliant yet so terribly indicative of the pitfalls of English literary life.