Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  Meanwhile I have to stay in London a bit to supervise the doing up of my minuscule flat. It resembles the bridge of a second-class cruise ship of the 1930’s. The building was a famous call-girl warren before and after the war, and the whores are still there, mainly Hungarian, who drop their handbags in the lift and ask you ‘Zahling, plis . . .’ to pick them up. I am on the 9th floor with a panoramic view over London, which at that height doesn’t remind me of London, so that’s all right.

  The Batey story. I think it is good. And my feelings are now totally numb and dispassionate. Quite good to start off on the ‘France’ or some such liner with the seduction – for the hell of it – by a young ravishing American of an older less ravishing Englishman (young don?) on his way to get married and the subsequent chaos363.

  Where are you going to be in the summer. I have a rather less than defined longing to go to the US.

  much love, in haste

  B

  To Cary Welch

  Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 8 April 1972

  Dear C

  England is gradually closing in on me again, and the moments of euphoria become rarer and rarer as one gets paler and paler and fatter and fatter and the backbiting conversations grow bitchier and bitchier, and everyone thinks and talks of selling something to somebody else. Mrs Chatwin and Mrs Kasmin are thinking of going into partnership in their idea of gathering together the folk arts of the world in a single emporium for taste-ridden, guilt-laden semi-intellectuals to browse among the indigo stuffs of Africa, the gauze saris of Rajastan, the basketry of Indo-China. It’ll be a fine business.364

  I have been making art works. The first a green fetish container called the God Box,365 then a night blue affair called the Skinner Box, and I am presently cutting out Mainland Chinese literature to make a vivid red collage called The Colour of Immortality.

  I rather liked your friend David Becker. Everyone here who met him couldn’t understand why you were going round with ‘an impossible zombie’. He wasn’t really a zombie at all. Very tortured about something. That ashen quality. But he kept on making intelligent, if unsure remarks. This in contrast to oneself, who makes cocksure, but unintelligent remarks. My filum is not at all too bad. I was quite amazed, considering my extreme irritation at the whole process. They say they’ll be able to cut it into a picture of about twenty-five minutes and sell it to European television.366 Now I want to do another one.

  My African artworks are so much appreciated that Mr [Sandy] Martin wants me to go back to Africa at once and buy the things I didn’t buy. I am tempted, but feel it’s tempting fate. Remember what nearly happened last time. Nemesis building up? Warning signals? Don’t touch the ju-jus, massa. Dont want no buy carved stick, massa. Carved stick he have bad medicine, massa. And talking of bad medicine I appear to have a jigger in my foot. Elizabeth expressed the hope that I wouldn’t have elephantiasis. Last week she thought I might have sleeping sickness. Incidentally we would not know of the existence, let alone the symptoms, of these dread complaints were it not for a Little Red Book put out by the Royal Geographical Society called the Traveller’s Guide to Health.

  It is written in the most beautiful military prose and concentrates on the prevention of disease rather than its cure, with such admonitions as ‘The Tse-tse fly is the vector of Sleeping-Sickness, which usually proves fatal to the European. If the traveller must penetrate Tse-tse fly regions, he must be sure to clear the forest to within a quarter of a mile radius of his camp.’

  Must now stop and pay bills,

  much love Bruce

  In the summer of 1972 Chatwin had a call from Francis Wyndham ‘who master-minded the Sunday Times colour supplement’ – and was offered a position, which he accepted, as adviser on Art. ‘The job, as I understood it, was to commission articles from people who knew about art. I was at my wit’s end.All my schemes to work had come to nothing. My confidence was at zero. I was in debt. ’The job would start in November. On 25 July he abandoned London for America, where Ivory had lent him a clapboard cabin in Oregon. Here, goaded by the publication of Peter Levi’s account of their journey to Afghanistan, Chatwin determined to finish his nomad book once and for all.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 28 August 1972

  Dear E.,

  We’ve had a succession of brilliant days here, and I must say it’s quite pleasant. The house is a bit gloomy because it’s under vast pine trees and doesn’t get much sun till about 11-30. But there’s a dock you can sit on which juts out into the water. And now everyone’s going home for labour day and the noise of the motor boats will happily cease for weekends. There’s a mountain called Mount Pitt at the end of the lake, and endless trails through the forests. I wandered along the Brown Mountain trail STARK NAKED for fifteen miles without coming across a soul367 but deer and birds and that made me very happy.

  The Book is coming on well. Not fast. But I have now found myself with it and I know what I’m doing instead of flailing around in a disorganised way with marvellous material and no sense of direction. When I went to Geneseo I bought a beige Volkswagen with a loan of 700 dollars from your mother. I thought it better to buy a good one rather than some rattle-trap that will collapse. Jim [Ivory] got your cheque before he left NY but now we have a note saying it isn’t payable in Continental USA. What can be done? I cannot imagine what happened . . . Can you correct the same? Because I find it rather embarrassing. Failing that can the Mellon send it direct?

  God this country’s so expensive. I don’t know how anyone lives here at all. I’m down to 300 bucks and will have to borrow more from Jim to get back. So that’s why I’m anxious about the other. He is leaving in a week and I will drive him down the Northern California coast route just to San Francisco for two days and then return here for the whole of the rest of the month. What do you intend to do? I will have to be back in England I suppose for the wretched Sunday Times by October 15th at the latest. The idea of a job horrifies me. I am more doubtful about the thing than ever before.

  I think they’d like you to come over at Geneseo. It was very pleasant when I was there. I suppose before there have always been too many people swamping me whenever I’ve been. Lonely for them too now that everyone’s gone.

  Of course what I should really like to do would be to go and sit in a little house in Yucatan and watch sharks and fiddle about in the ruins of Tulum.

  Much love Bruce.

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 30 August 1972

  Hello!

  I’m sorry I left in such a precipitous hurry, but there we are. I usually do and I did. I was getting totally exasperated a. by the weather which had given me the worst chest and lung combination I have ever had. London in July and one was literally coughing up grey slime. b. that film company was driving me nearly desperate. I always think I’m pretty disorganised but they are something else. I’d go in each day prepared to work on it and there’d be some hold up. I couldn’t use the cutting room or my assistant was needed to play court on some movie mogul. It’s a terrible business. At least if you write, you are your own master. The only way to get my little film out of the way was to announce my departure. Then it happened. At least I hope it did, because there’s not been a single word. And I must finish the book before I begin with the Sunday Times. Otherwise it’ll never be done.

  Of course I’ve completely unscrambled it. In fact I’m completely rewriting it. It’ll be about half as long and instead of six whopping chapters with an argument linking them all in a continuous flow (which not even I could understand let alone the poor reader), we now have about thirty chapters, each one I hope intelligible by itself.

  Oregon is simply beautiful. The house I have borrowed is a little log cabin on a lake called Lake of the Woods, surrounded by tall pines. There is a canoe and I can paddle up a river to look at beavers making dams and it’s very warm f
or swimming. The nights are cold because we’re five thousand feet up. The nearest town is thirty-five miles away so I’ve bought an old Volkswagen for the summer. I’m staying here till about September 10th; then I’m going to take a short break and go up to Puget Sound and Vancouver. It’s only a day’s drive from here to Seattle, your old stamping ground368, though I bet it’s changed. I’d very much like to see all that rain forest they’ve preserved as a national park on the Olympic Peninsula. Elizabeth may come and join me but since she’s been away we haven’t been in touch. It is an awful hassle to get out all this way, and one really feels like completing the circuit having got thus far.

  Nearby there’s a Shakespeare Festival of all things, the oldest in North America founded in the early twenties. The town Ashland is full of banks and hamburger joints got up to look like Ann Hathaway’s cottage. Teenage girls float around with syllabub trays and if you want to eat there’s always an English tart. ‘It’s sort of like a pecan pie, but we call it English tart . . .’ The performance was horrendous. The women were like the daughters of the American revolution at a bridge party and the men all came from Texas and gassed about on phoney hobby horses waving silk handkerchiefs at each other, shouting ‘Hi . . . yeee . . .’ I have refused an invitation to go to the Taming of the Shrew.

  I don’t know how long it will take. I am simply going to sit here and finish it. I refuse to be budged. My book, whatever anyone may say, is far the most important thing I’ve ever attempted. This place is quite conducive to work. So there we are.

  Much love, XXX

  Bruce

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 14 September 1972

  c/o Charles Van

  Dear Hurrubureth,

  Charles Van is the caretaker here and as all the post is directed through him it’s best to put his name on letters because the main supplies of post have gone, the summer people having flown and I seem to be left entirely alone with the beavers.

  So we went to San Francisco which is so unlike anything else in the US it doesn’t really bear thinking about. It’s utterly light-weight and sugary with no sense of purpose or depth. The people are overcome with an incurable frivolity whenever they set foot in it. This doesn’t mean that one couldn’t live here. In fact I think one could easily, preferably with something equally frivolous to do. I stayed with the Oppens369 and they were lovely. They have no money. He is very Jewish of the muscular outdoors type and they sail all round Maine in an open 16ft dingy with a light plastic awning. Imagine. He considers every word meticulously and makes one feel slightly foolish. I think his poetry is some of the best in America. She is sort of homespun with one of those little girl-straight-from-the-ranch simplicity faces, even though she’s nearing seventy. We went one night to the grand San Francisco poet Robert Duncan370 who is famous with the young for his grandiloquent and skillful outbursts on the Vietnam war. I on the other hand thought him one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met, with a waxen witch-like face, hair tied in a pigtail and a pair of ludicrous white sideburns. He gassed on and on in a flat monotone and it was impossible to decide if the tone was hysterical or dead pan. The house was a creepy-crawly nightmare, and betrayed la moralité des choses, all art nouveau of the worst kind. Bloodless fingers fingering the objects as he spoke, and I suspect that if he weren’t fingering art nouveau objects he could just as easily be pressing buttons or ordering napalm, so sinister and obsessed with the demonic alternative he was.

  There’s a beautiful little town on the north coast of S.F. called Mendocino with marvellous clapboard buildings and water towers and sculpture of the latter-day Greek revival and if it gets too cold here I might try and find a room down there on the coast for a week. So beautiful there with sheer cliffs going down to the sea and wind-blown pines and sea-lions on the rocks, and redwood in the mountains behind. The northern section of the road is utterly deserted, then one meets the real estate signs, then the developments in varying degrees of artyness, then the funeral parlours. The one thing I feel about S.F. is that it doesn’t reek of death, whereas almost everywhere else does. I intend to stay here or nearby until October 5th or so and should have a great hunk of this done by then. I am writing fast, then hitching the things up for the finer points of style later. I had terrible trouble with my back at one stage. It hurt all down my right side, not the left as was usual. It was sitting down to type that did it, plus the most horrible bed that meant one was floating in an oily sea. Plus I imagine the diet. So I went to health shop in S.F. and spent 50 bucks on emetic food. Needless to say I ran into the dreaded Linda who was buying her molasses and brown rice at the same time. Grown enormously fat she had, and she was with the Sufis.

  Yes I should like to go to Africa this winter and preferably to Dahomey, and would certainly be prepared to go THERE with the Kasmins. We could take a car perfectly easily from Cadiz or Barcelona or wherever to Abijan in Ivory Coast. It gets there in three days and there’s no earthly problem and it means one doesn’t have to have something that crosses the Sahara. But to be comfortable one must go in January at the very latest. Otherwise the heat and the rain start to set in. Preferably of course before. Like November. God knows how to finance. Means I must work like a black. The more I cogitate it the more I dread the Sunday Times business as being something I don’t want to do. I have sent a host of letters from here about this and that, none of which gets a reply. I’m exasperated without having begun. One’s independence is so fragile a thing and I hardly think the money matters. Frankly, I prefer to flog the flat or long-let it rather than have to work in London. I find it fine for three weeks, but thereafter, WHAT IS THERE TO DO? I hate the theatre and the weather kills me. I seriously contemplate a cabana near Hiram [Wintherbotham]. What do you think? Or the Pyrenees. What do you think of the Kasmins’,371 a bit like Holwell for scenery?

  Not one bit surprised by P[eter] Levi’s expulsion from Greece372 and frankly and being rather cruel I think he richly deserved it. Though naturally he wanted it to happen, being such a publicity seeker. He courted the police to make them think he was suspicious. I found it immensely irritating, though less so than the Afghan book373 which drove me wild with rage and I think I’d better not read it or I shall become apopleptic. I hope HIS book won’t mean we are expelled from Afghanistan. What he really seems to enjoy is implicating other people in his own mess. All that harum-scarum Scarlet Pimpernelery only implicates his other English friends like Paddy and Joan [Leigh Fermor] and he can waltz about calling them crypto-fascists when they disassociate themselves from him. That’s about the level of his political carry-on. O what a subject for a novel. I really think I must write one. P.L. is really about on the level of Major Willey when it comes to that sort of thing. The thing that really infuriates me about the Afghan book is that all my remarks and observations are repeated verbatim as an integral part of his text. Much love B

  Have found 18th Cent Hawaiian food bowl.

  To James Ivory

  P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 14 September 1972

  Forgotten what day of the week it is.

  Dear Jim,

  All well here. Fine but cold. This is the last letter. Hope it’s not a declaration of total war from your sister. Cary [Welch] writes me that he hasn’t yet gone to England and will do so before the end of the month and will then be in the flat. You’ll have to arrange it between you who has it, and there’s not room for two, UNLESS OF COURSE . . . But that is impossible.

  Off to Ashland to shop.

  love B

  P.S. Elizabeth says it’s YOUR BANK’S STUPID FAULT. There was No reason why that cheque wasn’t payable in the US. They simply don’t use their eyes. Anyhow the money’s been cabled.

  When Chatwin left Oregon in late September he carried with him a manuscript that he believed to be virtually finished. In Los Angeles he called on the writer Christopher Isherwood and poured out to him its essence. On 28 September 1972 I
sherwood wrote in his diary: ‘Yesterday, we had a visit from Bruce Chatwin, a blond, blue-eyed but somehow not really attractive friend of Peter Schlesinger. He is an anthropologist – and has spent time with native groups of hunters in the lands south of the Sahara; Mali, Niger and Chad. He maintains that hunting-groups aren’t religious; religion only begins when people settle down and have individual possessions. (I didn’t want to get into semantics so didn’t challenge this, because it was obvious that Chatwin attached a different meaning to the word “religion”.) But he was extremely interesting, describing how the boys between thirteen and sixteen wear a sort of drag and are regarded as girls. The whole huntinggroup is perfectly adjusted to its environment; even the young children know what stars are rising and setting and when the migrations of birds take place and what habits the various animals have. As Chatwin put it, they differ from us in that they never try to interfere with Nature in any way. They also think that our preoccupation with possessions is crazy; according to their way of thinking, you share everything you have, so they “steal” from tourists, only it isn’t really stealing because they don’t want to keep what they take.’

  On 30 September, Isherwood wrote again: ‘I had some more talk with Chatwin yesterday morning on the phone – I think he has now left Los Angeles, on his way to see some of the pueblos of New Mexico. He repeated some of the things he told me when he came to the house – that he regards the hunting-groups as being fundamentally unaggressive; that “much of what passes for aggression is a response to confinement” and that where there is no confinement giving replaces aggression – when two groups are in the same territory they don’t fight over it, they exchange gifts, one group leaving its gift at a certain place and the other accepting it only when the gift seems sufficient; if the gift is not accepted, the giver adds to it until the recipient thinks it adequate and takes it away, leaving another gift in its place. Chatwin is very scornful about Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression and says that his philosophy is derived from the same sources as that of the Nazis.’