Under the Sun (75 page)

Charles Thomas (
b
.1928) had lectured in archaeology at Edinburgh since 1957. He first excited Chatwin in Darwin's visit to the Yaghans of Patagonia. Chatwin was now stuck with studying Roman Britain. E.C.: ‘This was a blow. He wanted to do the Dark Ages.'

Anthony Huxley,
Flowers in Greece: an outline of the Flora
(1964).

H.C.: ‘That telepathic thing, we both had with our mother. A year later, the girl I was in love with announced that she was going to marry one of my friends, and my mother shot up in bed. “Something's happened to Hugh, something's happened to Hugh.” '

The finals of professional surveying exams. Hugh was a chartered auctioneer and estate agent for Grimley & Son in Birmingham.

E.C.: ‘Sotheby's sent us there. The heads belonged to an old lady whose grandfather had brought them back from the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897. She remembered them being put in the yard in Galloway and hosed down and blood coming off and the yard running red.'

The Dorak Affair
(Michael Joseph, 1967) by Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor. The story of the Dorak hoard concerned the British archaeologist James Mellaart, and described the kind of hunt which, until now, had thrilled Chatwin. Mellaart had earned his reputation in Turkey where he had dug up the world's first mirrors, polished chunks of volcanic glass. In the summer of 1958, as Chatwin prepared to join Sotheby's, Mellaart claimed to have met a young woman called Anna Papastrati while travelling to Izmir by train. ‘She was very attractive,' Mellaart said, ‘in a tarty sort of way.' On her wrist was a solid gold, prehistoric bracelet. ‘She said she'd got lots like it at home and asked if I would like to see them.' Mellaart went to her house in Izmir, 217 Kazim Dirik Street, where lapis, obsidian and fluted gold objects glinted in cotton wool in a chest of drawers. Mellaart understood them to be relics of the Yortan culture. He wanted to take photographs, but she would only allow him to draw them. In November 1959 his drawings were published across four pages of
The Ilustrated London News
under the headline: ‘The Royal Treasure of Dorak – a first and exclusive report of a clandestine excavation which led to the most important discovery since the Royal Tombs of Ur'. His reputation declined soon afterwards. Attempts to track down the woman proved fruitless. Mellaart was either a dupe, or trying to dupe. Chatwin, touched for his expert opinion, knew about the site of Hacilar where Mellaart had excavated. Once, the authors of
The Dorak Affair
quoted him saying, ‘a dealer came in with a box of stuff from Hacilar. You know, pots and the usual goddesses. He left them with us until the date of the auction. One day one of our men was shifting the stuff and he dropped it. Well, that's enough to make anyone go cold, but funnily enough it didn't turn out that way. We had a look at one of the broken goddesses and it had got pink dental plaster under the armpits . . .' The authors noted that the experience of working for Sotheby's had somehow ‘soured' Chatwin.

A gloomy painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 93) of moonlit autumn leaves. E.C.: ‘£150 pounds would keep us going for months.'

H.C.: ‘I took six months off and decided to go to London, to the chartered surveyors, Weatherall, Green and Smith, where I remained for 20 years.'

C.W.: ‘I did.'

Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, New York.

James MacCracken, a young hippy painter from Detroit, whom Welch had discovered in Boston.

Elizabeth. Edith Welch was also called this.

E.C.: ‘He didn't have to drive from Edinburgh to Holwell in a 2CV which had no heater.'

Peter Avery (1923-2008) British historian of Persia.

Stuart Piggott.

A Phrygian cloak pin made of gold and electrum that Chatwin and Welch had seen at John Klejman's gallery in New York. C.W. to B.C, 11 January 1968: ‘The climax came when [Mr Young of BMFA] took out some tweezers, reached into a little crevice, and plucked out something that he put on a slide. He then whisked the slide over to a powerful microscope and looked and looked and looked. I asked what was happening. “I think I've found a piece of ancient silk,” he said. “Something left over from when it was last worn.”'

Heuneburg-Museum at Hundersingen on the Danube.

Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glyn (
b
.1937), architectural historian, Christie's representative in Ireland.

E.C.: ‘He was continually not introducing me to people. He kept them in separate compartments.'

Italian film director and actor (1901 – 74).

Of the family who made Crabbie's Green Ginger Wine; Hill used to stay with her when in Edinbugh. E.C.: ‘If I go to a pub and someone says “What do you want?” I'll have green ginger wine on the rocks.'

A tiny Chardin oil,
La Lavendeuse
; Bobby put it behind the door.

Elizabeth's solicitor.

Ruth Tringham, lecturer in archaeology. R.T.: ‘The bottom fell out of it after a year.'

Barbara Murray, cousin of Elizabeth's uncle Porter Chandler, lived outside Edinburgh.

Roger Wollcott-Behnke, journalist on
Daily Telegraph
magazine. E.C.: ‘An American friend I'd known since I arrived in London. If you weren't careful, he'd come and lodge and never go. A perfect mimic and talented in lots of ways, he had
folie de grandeur
and died of liver cancer when he was in his early thirties.'

Louise Brydon Brown, American pharmaceutical heiress.

E.C.: ‘Nonsense.'

Edward Safani (1912-98) Iranian dealer, established the Safani Gallery in New York in 1946.

Founder and writer of Albany column,
Sunday Telegraph
(1961-97) and royal biographer (
b
.1924); Chatwin had met Rose at Derek Hill's in Ireland.

Randolph Churchill in his biography of Winston Churchill made a brief reference to Milward's conviction for ‘fraudulently converting to his own use moneys entrusted to him'.

Vasile Parvan,
Dacia: An Outline of the Civilizations of the Carpatho-Danubian Countries
(1928).

E.C.: ‘I didn't go. It was too complicated, obviously.'

S.P. diary: ‘This morning Bruce's friend George Ortiz has joined us. I hope he will prove congenial – an odd young Bolivian millionaire.' Ortiz was travelling as ‘Doctor Ortiz of the Basel Museum'.

John D. Rockefeller III (1906 – 78), patron of Asia House.

Michael Fish, British fashion designer responsible for the kipper tie.

The British boutique Annacat had opened on Madison Avenue.

John Stefanidis (
b
.1937), interior designer and partner of Teddy Millington-Drake.

Hon. Desmond Guinness (
b
.1931), founder of the Irish-Georgian society.

O'Donnell Iselin, Elizabeth's cousin.

Brendan Parsons, Lord Oxmanton (
b
.1936) m. 1966 Alison Cooke-Hurle; succeeded father 1979 as 7th Earl of Rosse.

Pancakes for the Queen of Babylon
(1968).

A.V. Masson, director of Institute of Archaeology at Leningrad.

S.P. diary 12 July 1968: ‘At 4.00 we were suddenly switched into a room in the museum & plied with vodka and wine & salads. Very jolly if it hadn't been for the first of three parties that evening. On returning we went to more drinks with some Americans met in the Institute library & then to an awful interminable evening with Masson and a female cousin. More vodka more wine and fortunately a pilaff to sop up some of the alcohol. I survived miraculously as did B[ruce].' E.C.: ‘When Bruce got back to his hotel room, George said: “I have to congratulate you,” and was upset when Bruce then was sick over his dressing gown.'

Animal Style (Art from East to West)
, Bruce Chatwin with Emma Bunker & Ann Farkas, New York: The Asia Society Inc. (1970).

The eldest of Elizabeth's sisters.

Charles Tomlinson (
b
.1927), poet and translator, the Chatwins' closest neighbour; m. 1948 Brenda Raybould.

Mariano Rivera Velasquez, a Mexican friend of Batey's whom Chatwin had met in Paris at the house of Jimmy Douglas. He later killed himself.

Gordon Washburn, Director of Asia House.

Tom Maschler, head of Jonathan Cape, had published Desmond Morris's
The Naked Ape
in 1967. On 23 January 1969 Deborah Rogers had sent Maschler Chatwin's text for the Asia House Exhibition. ‘Can he come and see you tomorrow? I am sure he is worth your spending half an hour with. I have a good feeling about him.'

Kittypuss, ginger female.

Christopher Gibbs (
b
.1938), antiques dealer and collector.

A South Seas Maori door, covered with faces, sold to George Ortiz.

Desmond Morris to T.M., 4 April 1969: ‘I was interested to read Bruce Chatwin's Nomad summary. It is positively bursting with ideas and clearly has the makings of an exciting book. Just the kind of thing I like. I have only one criticism . . . a matter of definition. What exactly is a nomad? It gets a little confusing at times as I read his chapter summaries . . . It seems to me that there is a fundamental psychological difference between wandering away and then back to a fixed base, on the one hand, and wandering from place to place without a fixed base, on the other. As I said in
The Naked Ape
, the moment man became a hunter, he had to have somewhere to come back to after the hunt was over. So a fixed base became natural for the species and we lost our old ape-like nomadism. Maybe the answer is to get rid of the word nomad altogether and think in initially vaguer terms of “HUMAN WANDERLUST”. Then he can relate man's urge to be mobile to its different causes and functions without implying that he is dealing with the same basic phenomenon in each case.'

Christopher Rundell.

Guy Hannon, managing director of Christie's. Chatwin had agreed to work for Christie's on an annual retainer of £1,250. On 7 June, on his way to Kabul, he flew with Hannon to Cairo on an abortive mission to secure the sale of the contents of the Cairo Museum.

E.C.: ‘I flew straight to Kabul. Can you imagine me driving all that way by myself?'

Peace Corps.

John Semple, Arabist with antique shop in Lower Sloane Street.

Helene C. Seiferheld, New York dealer. She had rented Grosvenor Crescent Mews off Bruce.

Illegible.

American actress (1943 – 69) m. 1967 to film director Roman Polanski; she was murdered when eight months pregnant by followers of Charles Manson.

In April Chatwin had signed a short lease on 9 Kynance Mews.

Peter Straker, a 19-year-old Jamaican, played the part of Hud in
Hair
. Chatwin believed that he resembled the Pharaoh Akenaten. The outline for Chatwin's musical is lost, although Straker remembers its drift: the sun-worshipping and hermaphroditic Pharaoh uproots his court from Thebes to the desert, getting away from old conventions.

At Sotheby's on 1 December.

The Arctic Tern was one of few works of art he kept, along with the Peruvian feathered cape.

Mughal painter (1550-1610).

John Kasmin (
b
.1934), British art dealer.

The Asiatics
(1935), picaresque novel featuring a nameless 22-year-old American who walked, hitchhiked and sometimes travelled in luxury from Beirut to Damascus and across India to China.

For the opening of the Asia House Exhibition.

Noel Coward had been awarded a knighthood.

To Oliver Hoare, the carpet expert at Christie's, on the stipulation that Bruce and Elizabeth had squatting rights once a week.

E.C.: ‘I had a horse at Holwell Farm and I was approached by someone saying “Because you have a horse, you'll be able to get around. Will you help?” There was a doom atmosphere, as if everything was going to collapse.'

The Making of the President – 1960
by Theodore H. White, about the 1960 presidential race between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.