Under the Sun (4 page)

Authors: Bruce Chatwin

BOOK: Under the Sun

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The process of hunting down Chatwin's correspondence began in 1991, when I was commissioned to write his authorised biography. I spent seven years working on his life as a matter of choice and made liberal use of letters gathered in the course of interviewing people in 27 countries. Almost everyone â there was one exception â gave me permission to make full transcriptions. Some of his correspondents I talked to for long periods; others, I never bumped into. A notice placed in the
Times Literary Supplement
, following the biography's publication in 1999, attracted five replies, plus copies of Chatwin's letters to Michael Davie, David Mason, Charles Way and J. Howard Woolmer. This book represents about 90 per cent of material collected over nearly two decades. Our hope is that it might result in the discovery of more. A day after the manuscript was delivered to the publisher, a cache of four letters and a postcard written to Susan Sontag was traced to an archive in Los Angeles; we have been able to include these.

Chatwin's principal correspondents were his parents Charles and Margharita, who in the early 1960s moved from Brown's Green Farm outside Birmingham, to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they remained for the rest of their lives; Elizabeth Chanler, to whom Chatwin was married for 23 years, despite a brief separation in the early 1980s; her mother Gertrude Chanler, who lived in Geneseo, New York State; Cary Welch, an American collector who was married to Elizabeth's cousin Edith; Ivry Freyberg, the sister of Raulin Guild, his best friend at Marlborough; John Kasmin, a London art dealer with whom he travelled to Africa, Kathmandu and Haiti; Tom Maschler, his publisher at Jonathan Cape; Diana Melly, his hostess in Wales; Francis Wyndham, the writer, who worked with him at the
Sunday Times
magazine and was the first to be allowed to see his finished manuscripts; the Australian writers Murray Bail, Ninette Dutton and Shirley Hazzard; James Ivory, the American film director, who stayed with him in France in the summer of 1971; Sunil Sethi, an Indian journalist whom he met in 1978 while on the trail of Mrs Gandhi.

The business of love affairs is not prominent. Chatwin is often at his most intimate with those encountered fleetingly in faraway places. âYou do not find pining lovers among the Gipsies,' he wrote in a notebook. âRomantic love is played down as to be almost non-existent.' Any letters he may have written to Donald Richards or Jasper Conran have not come to light, if, indeed they ever existed (âHe never wrote to me,' says Conran); those to Andrew Batey were destroyed in a flood in the Napa Valley.

Missing as well are letters to Penelope Betjeman, Werner Herzog, David Nash, Robin Lane Fox, Gita Mehta, Redmond O'Hanlon, David Sulzberger; and from the archives of Sotheby's and the
Sunday Times
magazine during the years of Chatwin's employment there.

Incorporated in the footnotes are Elizabeth Chatwin's comments on the text. These are intended to have the effect of an ongoing conversation. The poet Matthew Prior put it well in âA Better Answer to Chloe Jealous':

No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits; but thou art my home.

In order to include as many letters as possible and to avoid repetition, we have pruned, sometimes heavily; all cuts are marked by ellipses. On the occasions when Chatwin wrote the same version of events to several people, we have chosen the fullest or most interesting. At other times â notably in descriptions of Penelope Betjeman's death, the house that Chatwin rented in India while finishing
The Songlines
, and his illness â we have included different versions in order to show that these are not duplications so much as demonstrations of the way his elaborating mind worked. In one case a single word was deleted to avoid causing distress to someone still alive. Casting Chatwin in a good or bad light has not swayed us. We have attempted to follow the advice of Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a letter: âwe have all far more to gain than to lose by the publication of even indiscreet documents, which always emerge one day and then do more harm than if they were published openly, candidly and quickly.' Our choice has been determined by whether the material is interesting or illuminating. Obvious errors have been corrected; punctuation, addresses and spelling regularised â although we have retained his school misspellings. Dating the letters, even when they bear a date, has not always been easy. Chatwin was uncertain even of his wife's birthday; several letters are marked not only with the wrong month, but the wrong year.

If Bruce Chatwin were to have written an autobiography to what extent would it be this? Had he yet been alive, how much of this volume would he have left out, or rewritten? These questions have been everpresent during our preparation of
Under the Sun
. The answers lie, inevitably, in the same realm as his unwritten books. But a fascinating version of his life is here, from the first Sunday at Old Hall School in Shropshire when he sat down after Chapel to write to his parents.

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

CHAPTER ONE

SCHOOLDAYS: 1948-58

Bruce Chatwin was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth and born on 13 May 1940 in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield. His father Charles Chatwin was a Birmingham lawyer; he was away at sea in the Navy when Bruce was born. His mother, Margharita Turnell, the daughter of a clerk for a Sheffield knifemanufacturer, brought him up in the homes of great-uncles, great-aunts and grandparents. He had a younger brother Hugh, born on 1 July 1944.

For Chatwin's first six years, mother and son were everything to each other as they fled from the noise of war. The carpet-bombing of Coventry in November 1940, in one night flattening the city centre, frightened Margharita into giving up â without telling her husband â the small house which Charles had rented for them in Barnt Green; Birmingham's Austin Motor works, making Hawker Hurricanes, lay over the railway line on the direct flight path of Luftwaffe navigators. Her memory of the awesome orange glow in the night sky continued to haunt Margharita long after she bolted north. She had panic attacks. She would talk to herself and shout out, hunting for her absent husband, âCharles! Charles!' âWhat is it, mummy?' âOh, nothing, darling. Nothing. It's all right.' As they shuttled on the train between a dozen dwelling-places, including poky lodgings in Baslow and Filey, Chatwin's duty was to be the brave little boy looking after his distressed mother: aunts and uncles told him so.

When Charles returned from the war, the family moved first back to Birmingham, taking a lease on a house in Stirling Road which had been used by the army as a brothel; then, in April 1947, to Brown's Green Farm twelve miles south of Birmingham, a âfairly derelict' smallholding with eleven acres, for rent at Â£98 per annum. A lawyer during the week, at weekends Charles invented himself as a food-producer, keeping an eventual tally of pigs, geese, ducks and 200 chickens. âWe were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,' says Hugh.

At the end of April 1948 Chatwin went away to Old Hall School in Shropshire. His first surviving letter was written after attending one of three Sunday services in Chapel. He was seven years old and would spend the next decade at boarding school.

Old Hall School, a fifteenth-century manor house set in 25 acres, was a preparatory school for 108 sons of the factory-owning and professional and commercial classes of the Midlands, and the personal fiefdom of Paul Denman Fee-Smith, a stocky and energetic bachelor who advertised it as âThe Best Preparatory School in England.' Fee-Smith was a man of rigorous Anglo-Catholic beliefs whose conduct of three Chapel services on Sunday was in full priestly regalia of cassock, surplice and cope. Stories of the Prodigal Son, Daniel and the Lion and the Conversion of Saul were favourite readings. To the boys, he was known as âBoss'. Boss's penchant for vestments and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible were to leave an indelible mark upon Chatwin.

At Old Hall School Chatwin wore a maroon and grey cap and blazer. He played games on Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and distinguished himself in boxing and acting. He was still known at this stage as Charles Bruce Chatwin; although through making a certain amount of noise he earned the nickname âChatty'.

Boss noted Chatwin's restlessness in his first report: âHe is rather a careless worker & his attention soon wanders. He is still very young & hardly out of the egocentric stage; his behaviour is childish & very noisy at times!' To Hugh, his elder brother's behaviour was easily explained. âFrom my perspective, Bruce was escaping from the trauma of war by playing out parts of his own devising, by telling stories good enough to deserve being the centre of attention.'

Spelling was never Chatwin's strong point. Like most pupils, he filled his weekly letters home using formulas; beginning each, as taught, with âI hope you are all well,' reaching the bottom of the page with resumÃ©s of films, orders for books, for balsa wood models of houses and farms, or reports on his flu â his health was frail even at this stage; and ending with a separate line for each word.

Dressing up, acting, religion â already he displayed what W. G. Sebald would call âthe art of transformation that comes naturally to him, a sense of being always on stage, an instinct for the gesture that would make an effect on the audience, for the bizarre and the scandalous, the terrible and the wonderful, all these were undoubtedly prerequisites of Chatwin's ability to write'.

To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 2 May [1948]

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

It is a lovely school. We had a lovely film called The Ghost Train. It was all about a train the came into the station every year at midnight and if any one looked at it they wold die. I am in the second form.

With love from

Bruce

The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 31 October [1948]

Dear Mummy and daddy,

I got on very well with the aroplane kit, but it flew into a fir tree and got torn. It was going very well until it did that. We played Packwood Haugh yesterday, and it was a draw. I was eighth in form this week. Latin is getting on very well. I have got a plus for history. In Maths I am tenth. Aunt Gracie
¹sent me a postcard of London Towr bridge. Thank you very much for sending my stamps and my cigerett cards. Boxing is getting very well. I have got to have some extra boxing. Please could I have some more stamped onvelopes because I am writing so many letters. And will you send me
Swallows and Amazons.

With love from Bruce

The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 29 February [1949]

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

Please could you get me a Romany Book, called
Out with Romany by Medow and Stream
²Because I want it for a friend of mines birthday. Yesturday we had a lantern lecture on a man's uncle who went to Africa to exploring and he took a lot of photographs on big game, and natives.
³In my book
Wild Life
there are two photographs. One of some Rock Rabbits, and another of a jackel. It was very nice. I hope you are well. Please will you send me a book called
The Open Road
.
⁴Tell Hugh it wont be long till I come home. Please will you save these stamps till I come home. When you see Aunt Gracie next tell her I send my love.

âLove you pieces'

Bruce

The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 13 March, Sunday [1949]

Dear Mummy and daddy,

I hope you are all well. I wrote to Uncle Humphry and Auntie Peggey yesterday.
⁵I like the sound of Brig
⁶very much. Tell Hugh it won't be long till I come home. Thank you for the addresses. Yesturday, IVa gave a Variety Show. There was a quiz. Someone had to go up on the stage and they were asked two questions. I went up and I was asked, what was the oldest structure in England, and, what was the wing-span of a helicopter, and then I had to be dressed up as a baby. Purce was nanney. I had to have a dummy and a rattle. I was in pram. On Thursday it was Mr Fee Smith's birthday. We had a Tresure Hunt and afterwards in the evening we some films. There were two cartoons, one was called Andy Panda in Nuttywood Cavern and the other one was called The Pecquiler Penguins.

Love you pieces

Bruce XXXX

Another one was âFor those in Peril'.
⁷

The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 4 May 1949

Dear Mummy,

This is only a short letter to ask you if you could get me some rubber bands.

Love you peices

Bruce