Under the Sun (82 page)

Canadian historian, author and politician (
b
.1947) who lived in Britain 1978-2000. He interviewed Chatwin for
Granta 21
, Spring 1987.

M.B. to B.C. 18 February 1985: ‘Shirley H. has given the Boyer Lectures (Reith) on the ABC. Telling us where we've gone wrong. I didn't hear them, will read them instead. Good people here have called them sanctimonious. Woe is me! I fear they might be right.'

Rushdie had left his first wife for Robyn Davidson. E.C.: ‘It was a very public, violent love affair, throwing each other out in the street and shouting, and then a reconciliation here at Homer End.'

Jane and Grace, his father's spinster aunts. Jane had lived as a young woman on Capri and was still painting at 84, not very good watercolours of turbaned Indians, churches, sailing boats and almost naked men with exiguous turquoise slips.

Mrs Henderson and Other Stories
(1985).

Philip Sherrard (1922-95), British translator of modern Greek literature and ‘astute observer of Athonite affairs' who converted to Orthodoxy.

‘Flight into Blackness,'
The Age
, Melbourne. The Northern Land Council had banned Naipaul from the territories under its control, following his remark ‘that the Aborigines could not be considered to have created a culture as sophisticated – say – as the Chinese or Greeks or Indians or Egyptians had done.'

Bail was a trustee of the National Gallery in Canberra.

The Welches shared a house on Spetsai with Clem and Jessie Wood.

E.C.: ‘We never did.'

Chatwin was born on the evening of 13 May 1940.

Joice NanKivell Loch (1887-1982), Australian journalist (and Australia's most decorated woman) who worked with refugees and lived with her husband, Scots novelist Sydney Loch, in a Byzantine tower on a beach overlooking the Athos peninsula.

Martha Handschin was actually Swiss; she assisted Loch in dyeing woollen rugs, extracting colours from onion skins and almond leaves, and selling them to raise money for earthquake victims.

In April 1984 Chatwin had stayed with Pam and her mother Eileen at ‘Aroo', outside Boonah south of Brisbane.

A carpet factory in Kidderminster.

The village south of Birmingham where Charles and Margharita lived after their marriage.

In 1703 the Milward family started a needle and fish-hook factory at Washford Mills in Redditch.

Elizabeth Powell, mother of Emma Tennant; m. 1935 Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner.

Charles Way (
b
.1955). Playwright, who wished to adapt
On the Black Hill
for the stage.

Directed by Andrew Grieve, who wrote the screenplay; released in 1988.

Way was writing
Bread and Roses
for Gwent Theatre, about Welsh miners who walked to Spain to fight in the Civil War.

Tarikh-i Jahangushay-i Juvaini, Persian historian (
d
.1283)
. The History of the World Conqueror
describes the conquest of Persia by the Mongols.

Rudi Fischer, an editor on
Hungarian Quarterly
and friend of Leigh Fermor.

Lisa Van Gruisen.

Patagonia Revisited
, based on the ‘combined talk' given by Chatwin and Paul Theroux at the Royal Geographical Society in November 1979, had been published by Michael Russell.

Way met Chatwin in the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny.

Hon. N. C. J. Rothschild (
b
.1936), succeeded father as 4th Baron Rothschild (1990), had become Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery.

E.C.: ‘The passport had slipped under the seat of his 2CV and Bruce never looked properly. I had to take a later flight.'

Formerly Lord Oxmanton; succeeded father as 7th Earl of Rosse in 1979 when he inherited Birr Castle, County Offaly.

Dutton's husband having married again, she was contemplating selling her home in the hills near Williamstown and moving to Adelaide.

Dutton was not the only prospective guest. Chatwin had also invited his parents to Nepal for Christmas, plus Kasmin.

Welsh Rural Life in Photographs,
by Elfyn Scourfield (Stuart Williams, Barry, 1979). C.W.: ‘He told me that rather than say to someone “What do you remember?” he'd show them a photograph of a particular landscape. One picture of Hay Harvest 1930, with a little girl and two boys in caps, looks uncannily like Louis and Benjamin.'

Li Po, or Li Bai (701-762), along with Tu Fu (712-770), the most prominent poets of the Tang Dynasty.

Doctor Ho in the village of Baisha, where Joseph Rock had lived, was holding a feast for his new-born grandson. E.C.: ‘This is the place where Bruce ate a black “1,000 year old egg”. It was a ritual course, and none of us ate the eggs except Bruce. He said, “We have to make an effort, we've got to be polite.” He ate one and was sick almost as soon as he left the house.'

John Pawson (
b
.1949), architect and designer, whom Chatwin had hired to redo up his flat in Eaton Place. Pawson had been using the flat as an office. Chatwin wrote in a monograph on him: ‘About five years ago, without the least forewarning of what to expect, I was taken to a flat in an ornate, but slightly down-at-heel Victorian terrace, and shown into a room in which, so it seemed to me, the notes were perfect. The flat was the first work of John Pawson, yet the product of fifteen years' hard thinking as to how such a room could be. Here, at last, I felt was someone who understood that a room – any room anywhere – should be a space in which to dream. I found myself walking around it watching its planes and shadows in a state of trance.' Chatwin would be Pawson's first private client.

E.C.: ‘There was also a big grey langur monkey which took against Bruce. He was in this fig tree and he threw fruit and shat on Bruce, who was outraged.'

Chatwin and Bail sat at card tables under the trees and Chatwin would read aloud dialogue for correction. M.B.: ‘He'd call out, “Does this sound right to you?” and I'd say, “No, no, no, not crude enough.”'

Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), Italian author of
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
. M.B.: ‘It's about a detective who becomes the victim. I was amazed he liked it. Most of his other favourite texts are very traditional and lean.'

Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby (
b
.1930), British politician and academic.

E.C.: ‘He gets worse and worse in the recounting of it. But all of this is ME, not him. We had to move because
I
was ill. I had to go to the American Clinic where the doctor said: “I've seen five people like you this morning. This is the capital city for respiratory diseases.” Bruce never went to any doctor. He was fine.'

The former brothel in Birmingham where the Chatwins lived after the War. The rooms lacked central heating and Chatwin caught bronchitis, for two winters coughing up green phlegm.

E.C.: ‘I suddenly realised the driver couldn't read signs and I had to sit in the front seat and read them. I told Kasmin he couldn't smoke more than one cigarette every fifteen minutes.'

E.C.: ‘Babji even had diamond eyelashes. He joked to Bruce: “Shall I wear my eyelashes?” I had to borrow Margaret Bail's pearls.'

Sir Robert Wade-Gery (
b
.1929), High Commissioner.

Actually
thakurs
.

The Leigh Fermors were being encroached on at Kardamyli. ‘We have spent the winter together at Kardamyli – now being very much wrecked by Teutonic Hordes,' Chatwin wrote in a postcard to David Mason, the American whom he had met at the busstop there. ‘A hard-rock disco in Kalamitsi Bay!'

The Chatwins' permanent caravan in Gassin, near St Tropez.

Chatwin had the memory of Pascal in Grosvenor Crescent Mews; also, of lending his flat in Royal Avenue to some Haitians. E.C.: ‘They literally stripped it, every sheet, every pillow case; they stole pictures that were mine, including one of India by Thomas Daniell; they stole everything.' His fears were well founded – everything disappeared also from Eaton Place when he lent it to some people.

Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French philosopher: ‘I had imagined that all man's unhappiness stemmed from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room.'

The Memoirs of Robina by Herself; being the Memoirs of a Debutante at the Court of Queen Elizabeth
II (1986).

E.C.: ‘I had brought out Proust to read.'

Gregor von Rezzori had suffered a stroke at Donnini.

An essay for
Vanity Fair
, ‘A Stranger in Lolitaland'.

E.C.: ‘He'd learned Sanskrit for two years at Edinburgh, so it's not a boast.'

Sacred scripture of Hinduism, composed between 5th and 2nd century BC.

While in Katmandhu, Kasmin had bought a number of tantric concentration rugs with tiger patterns.

Novel by Italian diplomat Curzio Malaparte (1898-1955). Kasmin was contemplating starting a press to make reprints of forgotten books.

Nondescript mining town on the Namibian coast which Chatwin and Kasmin had visited in February 1984 after the
Observer
commissioned Chatwin to write ‘My Kind of Town'.

Calasso's
The Ruin of Kasch
(1983), dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, examined the rise of the modern state.

Alida Chanler m. Dan Dierker on 10 May 1986.

The firm started by Pawson and three young designers: Crispin Osborne, Claudio Silvestrin and John Andrews. Chatwin's monograph on Pawson appeared in
John Pawson
(Spain: Gustavo Gili, 1992).

Robert Venturi (
b
.1925), American architect whose Philadelphia company had won a closed competition to build the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. The Prince of Wales had compared the previous design, by Richard Rogers, to ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an elegant and much-loved friend'.

‘The Chinese Geomancer', published in
Hong Kong – An Illustrated Guide
(Odyssey); reprinted in
What Am I Doing Here.

S.S.: ‘V. S. Naipaul was an object of derision for Bruce: he irritated him, was part of the carping tone.' Chatwin's notebook, 23 May 1979: ‘Read V. S. Naipaul's
A Bend in the River
. Old gloomy-jaws again. The inevitable result of not having a glimmer of humour is to portray all Africans, except possibly the slave class, as monkeys. Simplistic message: back to the primeval forest for Africans.'

EC: ‘He used to wash himself in the lake and had built a house that became a shrine where he grew hemp plants as tall as the ceiling.'

Between the Woods and the Water,
the second volume of Leigh Fermor's travels. The first,
A Time of Gifts
(1977), had come out the same time as
In Patagonia
. E.C.: ‘Paddy said to me: “It's very good, but he ought to let himself rip.” Bruce said to me, almost simultaneously, of Paddy's book: “Its very good, but it's too baroque and overflowing; he should tone it down.”'

Savages
, the Merchant-Ivory film, was shown in May 1972.

The Retreat at Bhimtal, near Nainital.

Dutton did not move from Piers Hill until the late 1990s.

On the Black Hill
opened on 4 February 1986 at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff. ‘It is something quite special, a work of intensity, compassion, humour and tragedy,' David Adams wrote in the
Guardian
.

The Kolyma Tales
(1980), by Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) short stories about a labour camp in the Soviet Union.

Raymond Carver (1938-88); his first collection was
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
(1976). After finishing it, the American writer David Plante wrote to Chatwin: ‘As I read them I thought of you – in the same way, I'm pleased to know, you thought of me as you read them. Do you think we are having a kind of literary love affair – filled of course with jealousies and competitiveness but admiration and devotion? That would be nice. So often, reading a book, I wonder; what would Bruce think of this? And if I decide, well, really, Bruce wouldn't think much of it, I don't think much of it.'