Under the Sun (40 page)

I'll write with news. This is a quick one to catch the post.

As always, B

Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 11 September 1978

 

Dear Christopher MacLehose,

I'd very much like to see the Peter Matthiessen book.
⁵⁰⁶
He's a writer I follow with great interest, though I couldn't take (despite some beautiful lines) the Zen-influenced novel of the turtle fishers. I'll be at this address till the middle of next month.

I take it you are publishing the book: do you want me to ask John Gross
⁵⁰⁷
if I can review it?

Yours ever, Bruce Chatwin

Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 12 September 1978

 

Dear E.,

I've got masses of yellow pads. Bones
⁵⁰⁸
brought me 20 hundred pages from New York in June. My size for the button-front jeans is 32 waist 33 leg. Sunil [Sethi] is on around the middle of the month: he hasn't yet found out if he's getting a lift on a jumbo of Air India going for an overhaul in Toulouse, but if not
India Today
are giving him his ticket. Ay! the floods. Haven't heard a word since then.

Progress
pero muy lentamente
. Have just been for the weekend to Janetta [Parladé]'s and had my lounge on the beach and swim. Feeling very relaxed and well. For some weeks I had terrible stomach upsets, which I have put down to coffee made in the machine. Anyway they've gone, but they were worrying as I was sick three times in the middle of the night.

Magouche's Susannah is here: I brought them up from Malaga and we called in on Gerald [Brenan].
⁵⁰⁹
The bore is Xan: apparently when I came up with some more ‘Wind' information, he took offence and thought I was trying to patronise him. Also resents my friendship with Magouche. I've tried my best to like him, gave Maro
⁵¹⁰
endless lectures about how stupid she was being but I've come to the conclusion she was right. He's a silly, jealous A1 shit. He picks rows with M[agouche] the whole time and reduces her to a bag of nerves. She's deeply in love with him (she's crippled with the pinched sciatic nerve) and will to my mind not go without him. However. Sad about Hiram.
⁵¹¹
You're right: in places like Provence, unless you have something specific to do, you just disintegrate. Same goes for here. Alistair Boyd has taken on a completely new lease of life since he got into the House of Lords.

I bet they've chopped up the Mrs Gandhi piece: the sub-editor
manque le moindre étincelle d'intelligence et du goût et d'humeur
. I really am NOT going to write for them again.

Can you check with my bank and D[eborah] Rogers what has and hasn't been paid in. The statement runs up to August 7th with a credit for £1000. There should have been paid in the French advance, the Spanish advance, and £1000 or thereabouts from the
Sunday Times
. If all three have been paid in, then I'm far worse off than I thought, and will be running with an overdraft of around £1000. Never ends, does it.
⁵¹²

Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out. Doesn't mean to say they won't come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as
Gulliver's Travels
,
Out of Africa
,
Eothen
,
Monasteries of the Levant
, Kipling's
Letters of Travel
etc. People lose all sense of proportion.

Kasmin's cottage sounds a marvel. Why don't you go and sniff round the land agents of that part of the Dorset coast. Just get in the car one day and go.

Must go.

love B

Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 16 September 1978

 

Dear E.,

Not much here either. Xannikins has gone off to climb in the Pyrenees and so everyone is much more relaxed. He is an area of LOW PRESSURE. Susannah
⁵¹³
and I climbed the plateau of Torecilla by full moon.

I for one am not too sad about the big dhurry not selling. I feel that at some point it can be used.

I've enough yellow pads to be going on with and don't really want foolscap size, as it will bulge out of my loose-leaf folders.

The
gatito
has discovered all four palm pots for use as its W.C. The place is beginning to stink of cat shit and buzzing with bluebottles. But the headboard of the bed has become the nest of a most elusive mouse. So there you are! Trapped as usual.

Gave the Magouche
ménage
a most fruity meal: an anchoiade of figs, anchovies and garlic (delicious); salad of leeks in uncooked tomato sauce with basil, oil and lemon juice (also delicious) and a monumental Moroccan tajine of chicken and quinces and almonds and dates and roasted sesame seeds. Also raspberries. That fearsome mother of Magouche expected next week. Sunil [Sethi] having frightful time extracting himself from the floods. Expect [him] to be here next week.

Love

Bruce

 

66 East 79th Street | New York | 11 February 1979

 

Dear Maxine,

. . . Life in New York highly social. Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis
⁵¹⁴
to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells,
⁵¹⁵
and my God she's fly. Far more subtle than any American woman I've ever met. A man called Charles Rosen,
⁵¹⁶
who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating about the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned on him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: ‘Yes, of course, you can see it all in the Titian portrait.'

Also hilarious dinner with the Erteguns, Iris Love
⁵¹⁷
, the Turkish Foreign Minister and the representative in America of Mr Greater Turkey himself: am lunching with him at the U.N. tomorrow. His conversations start: ‘Look at my skull and you will see that, really, I am a Hittite.'

Have written my piece for
Geo Magazine
and got paid three thousand for it. Have been interviewed for
New York Times
. ‘Mr Chatwin looks like a schoolboy and his eyes light up with a schoolboy's enthusiasm etc . . .' despite the fact that both [legs] looked like lumps of raw meat after being cut open by Dr Espy.
⁵¹⁸

Kasmin marvellously well behaved in Haiti
⁵¹⁹
– as he had to be because the silly ass went out into a carnival crowd – despite my warning – with a wallet containing 800 bucks in cash and travellers' cheques, and we were knocked over by four transvestites wearing Fidel Castro masks and relieved of it. I paid thereafter. Mad about Haiti.

Apparently this week my photo is published large on the cover of the
Barrytown Explorer
. Unbelievable letters about
In Patagonia
from Chanler Chapman.
⁵²⁰
‘A whiff of aconite, the deadliest of poisons, a tale more heartless than King Lear etc.'

But the BIG NEWS is this. We rang up Mr Shawn's
⁵²¹
secretary on the
New Yorker
to see if he would like to see Mr Chatwin. She replied: ‘But surely it is Mr Chatwin who would like to see Mr Shawn?' However, when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn's pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a
New Yorker
writer who had never written for the
New Yorker
. The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through eastern Europe directly I finish Mr da S[ouza] plus as many thousand dollars as I need.

Jane Kramer
⁵²²
and her husband were in a fearful motor smash between Ronda and Malaga when we were there. Crapanzano nearly died of an embolism at Malaga airport waiting to go to Switzerland. And that dreadful man whom we met at the Zuluetas was instrumental in having their daughter abandoned, aged seven in a rough tourist hotel downtown, where she almost got lost.

But the Albany
⁵²³
is ready to begin work and as the workmen are on hand I suppose I must go back. Kassl has found me a flat in Covent Garden for two months while the work goes on (at £75 a week) but that is the price. I am really rather undecided. I have to say that I would like to spend about five months of the year in New York rather than London, and or even Paris. The trouble is laying out all that rent. I imagine the best would be to buy a cooperative, but the small places are v. difficult to find.

Love

B

Postcard, Christo's Wrapped Walk Ways 1977-8, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri (15,000 square yards of silk over 4.5 km of walkways) | L6 Albany | London | 21 March 1979

 

Why you should get this of all postcards is beyond me: it's the only one that happens to be lying around. Best, Bruce Chatwin

Postcard, Jean Baptiste Chardin's Pipes and Drinking Vessels | Vaucluse | France | 4 April 1979

 

I inspected Bonnieux – and concluded it was in far too tricky condition to buy; could be an endless structural headache not what we want. The Paris one was – on reflection – just that much too small: a rare
pied à terre
and nothing more.

Chardin evidently loved
his
drinking cup:
⁵²⁵
it crops up again and again in the paintings. Bruce

 

In April, Chatwin received a letter from Osip Mandelstam's translator, Clarence Brown, who asked ‘with a certain trepidation' whether Chatwin was aware ‘that the spirit of OM seems to peep out from behind this or that phrase or stroke of portraiture or landscape.' Brown also suggested that
In Patagonia
was not second but third in a fascinating succession – ‘for Mandelstam's title alone makes it clear that he was very mindful of Pushkin's
Journey to Erzerum
.'

as from Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 14 April 1979

 

Dear Clarence Brown,

Coming from you – of all people – that was indeed a gratifying letter. I owe you an enormous debt.

A friend gave me a copy of your translation of
The Noise of Time
when it first appeared. It set me off to ‘discover' [Isaac] Babel and the others. Soon afterwards I started to write.

Of course
Journey to Armenia
was the biggest single ingredient – more so even than met the eye. Perhaps too much so – ‘skull-white cabbages etc' (O that mad Veraschagin in the Tretyakov!) But one bit of plagiarism was quite unintentional (though indicative of the degree to which I had steeped myself in the
Journey
) Not until after I had passed the final proofs did I realise I had lifted ‘the accordion of his forehead' straight. I rang up the copy editor in a panic. She said it was too late and, besides, all writers were cribbers.

You must by now be viewing the O[sip] M[andelstam] translation industry with a rather jaundiced eye. But for what it's worth – and at the risk of being a bore – I'd like to put it on record that you are surely the finest translator out of Russian alive; that you have a most finely tuned ear for the cadence of a sentence; that your literal translations of M[andelstam]'s poems are far better than the work of the versifiers, and, lastly that you are TOO MODEST.

In an ideal world you would be appointed
generalissimo
in charge of vetting all translations from the Russian; one only has to think of the horrors of the so-called Oxford Chekhov.

To my shame I don't read Russian and one day will have to go to the Berlitz. I know vaguely of Pushkin's
Erzerum
and, obviously, want to know more. No translation, I suppose?

Do give my very best to Richard McKane
⁵²⁶
and to Ted Weiss
⁵²⁷
if you see him. Also could you drop me a quick card at this address, saying whether you will be around Princeton on May 23rd?

I am working here, but vaguely tempted to come and get my prize.
⁵²⁸
If you were about, it would be an added inducement.
⁵²⁹

as ever, Bruce Chatwin

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [Easter Sunday 1979]

 

Dear Valerian,

Your mother tells me you like shells. I used to have a collection of shells. During the war when I was three my father brought me a huge conch from Panama. He said you could hear the wind and the waves of the Caribbean Sea if you put your ear up close. I decided that my shell was a woman and we called her MONA, though I don't know why.