Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Page 26
Otherwise Brazil is rather lowering. People in Rio cowed and lacking in personality.
As always, B
To Elizabeth Chatwin
Juazeiro | Rio Sao Francisco | Brazil | 11 March 1977
Dear E,
The last letter was posted in a rush. I am now on my longdelayed tour of the north-east. The arid cactus and thornbush country that stretches from Bahia to the Amazon. I am making for San Luis de Marañón which is almost up to Belem, and is where Queen Agontimé of Dahomey was sold into slavery and brought back by de Souza. I know exactly what to do with the book: write it in one long stretch without even the favour of chapters. Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present. I am beginning with the family celebrating their annual commemorative mass in the Church in Ouidah and retiring for the dinner in Simbodji which means the Big House or Casa Grande in Fon. None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa. The scene is then set for his life and what a life! Cattle drover turned man drover who ends up the prisoner of the King of D[ahomey] and dies of rage at being trapped when all he wants to do is get out of Africa and retire to Bahia. I hadn’t quite realised we had got as far as March 11. However, I’ll ring up as planned on the 26th probably from Recife. But I may want to try and get an interview with the Bishop Hélder Camara for the old Times (if they’ll have it).441 He is the greatest world expert on the problems of the urban poor and the nearest thing to being a saint. He and Sister Cecilia of Calcutta are in fact the 2 who are up for immediate canonisation.
Re Spain: I don’t think I can make Rio before say April 8-10. Don’t want to stay more than a day or so and there are flights every day to Lisbon and Madrid. The best thing might be for you to ring Margaret Mee442 again and say where you are.
All this depends on what happens here.
Lots of love
B
PS Please have my typewriter repaired xxx B
This is the only letter that Chatwin wrote to his father independently of Margharita; an apology for having caused him great pain. Hugh says: ‘I remember Charles speaking to Margharita and me in his drawing-room: “This all happened a very long time ago and it was quite wrong of Bruce to drag the matter up, upsetting our elderly relatives, again.” ’
To Charles Chatwin
8 Gloucester Gate | London | 20 September 1977
Dear Charles,
Of course, the footnote about Robert Harding443 can be cut out of the paperback.
I had attached a lot of importance to it at the time, but now see that it is rather superfluous. It’s terribly difficult to get such things in perspective when you’re close to them.
The trouble is that he, your grandfather, became one of my childhood obsessions, ever since I discovered that court suit (and dressed up in it), in the red spotted trunk at Brown’s Green. I felt that his vertical rise and fall somehow offset Charley’s horizontal wandering.
Anyway I am sorry.
as always,
B
After their times together in France and Oregon, Chatwin saw less of James Ivory. ‘I went down one time to Holwell Farm,’ Ivory remembers. ‘Strolling about with him in a long upstairs hall with polished floorboards he privately told me that he had given up homosexuality – that he didn’t have those feelings anymore.’ Ho wever, at a wedding in Long Hanborough in June 1977 Chatwin met Donald Richards, a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker who had arrived with the artist Keith Milow. ‘I introduced brown-eyed Donald to blue-eyed Bruce and their eyes met,’ says Milow. ‘Something seemed to click which I was not prepared for.’ Before, Chatwin had had passing affairs with men. ‘This was the first time he’d committed his life to a man,’ said Teddy Millington-Drake. ‘Bruce was infatuated with him.’ No correspondence survives of their relationship, which lasted five years, save for a postcard from Richards two months after their meeting: ‘I long to see you, so I can relax, and tell you everything. Rest assured I do look forward to that. Meanwhile take care, and keep writing, with my love XXXX D.’
In October 1977 Chatwin drove with Elizabeth through Switzerland and Austria (‘bought the inevitable loden coats and had two thrilling days in the Ost-Ture romping round in the snow’) to Siena, where he had rented from Millington-Drake the annexe at Poggio al Pozzo in order to begin writing The Viceroy of Ouidah. ‘When he came to stay,’ wrote Millington-Drake, ‘he settled in and made his nest in whatever part of the house he had been assigned; then when it suited him, he would move on to another nest in someone else’s house. He expected to be fed: “What’s for lunch?” he would cry as he breezed in at half-past twelve. Occasionally he would contribute a couple of bottles of champagne or, as a great treat, some wild rice. Then there was the telephone bill. He telephoned continually to his agent, his friends, to a young man he’d fallen in love with in Brazil. At the end of the visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about £4), saying he hadn’t used the ’phone much. But his friends didn’t mind because we were so fond of him, though he was selfish and self-centred like most artists are.’
To David King444
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]
Dear King,
On leaving England we moved to Geneva and stayed with my friend George Ortiz. I played with his little girl Graziella aged 5 and now the only trace of her is a chloroform soaked rag left in a falsely registered car abandoned near the French border. The real nightmare of being rich is that even if you gave away every cent, no one would believe you and you’d then have nothing to protect yourself with. G[eorge] O[rtiz] is innocence at large and that this should happen to him monstrous.445
Otherwise we didn’t have too bad a time in Austria and I am quite well installed here. In Florence yesterday we met the Director of the Karlsruhe Museum who said that anti-Hitler jokes during the war were exceedingly funny. An example: Hitler, as everyone knew, would sometimes grovel on the floor in a rage and bite the carpet. The story: Hitler goes to a big store in Berlin and buys a new carpet with a very thick pile. The salesgirl says: Mein Fuhrer, will you take it away or eat it now?
Drop me a line to say how it goes with T[om]M[aschler]
as always, Bruce
In Patagonia was published in England on 14 October 1977 with an initial print run of 4, 000 copies. Paul Theroux was one of the first enthusiastic reviewers, writing in The Times. ‘He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and strange and seldom visited like the Land where the Jumblies live.’
To Francis Wyndham
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | about the 20th Oct. [1977]
Dear Francis,
This is better than the Welsh mountains. Bare hills, bright light and most of the English gone back for the winter. I cycle to Siena for groceries and speak to shopkeepers in an incoherent mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin; they smile breezily and ask if I want peanuts.
[John] Stefanidis is here and says the doctors have taken Violet446 off some drug and that she’s much better – and going out to lunch! I am so glad. It would be wonderful if she could go on as she was.
The two of them have gone for lunch at Lord Lambton’s447 new papal villa, bristling with statues. I have stayed behind to write the bit about the Dahomean coup, have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line. So it goes. I am also holding the fort for the arrival of guests: Mme Lillaz and Mme Picasso,448 no less.
So far I have seen the reviews in The Times and Observer. Not at all bad. Gratifying, in fact. Neither quite got the hang of it – or what the brontosaurus stands for. Who is Nicholas Wollaston?449
I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you . . .
As always, Bruce
To Elizabeth Chatwin
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 24 October 1977
Dear E.,
The whole of last summer is like a bad dream to me.451
love,
B
P.S. Can you ask Pat Trevor-Roper to send 3 Betnesol N eye drops. Winter’s supply. B
On 17 October Chatwin’s father posted a batch of reviews. ‘My reaction to them – worthy recognition of a lot of endeavour & hard work put in by you, and a full appreciation that the book is, to my mind, completely free of any padding . . . Thank you for your very understanding note before you left in reply to my letter.’
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]
Many thanks for the enclosures. Tom Maschler sent others with the news that we have an enthusiastic American publisher and several offers for foreign translations. Eh! Hiu! Bruce
To John [Michell]
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 29 October 1977
Dear John,
Many thanks for your card.
The pianist! Ah! The pianist!
E. Hemingway, who knew a thing of two though it’s fashionable to put him down, said if you take something OUT of a piece of writing it always shows. What I took OUT of that story was the head falling backwards at the end of the mazurka, automatically with no hint of it before, and lifting him off the piano stool into the bedroom.
But that is off the record and should be torn up.
Reviews rather good, the ones I’ve seen so far. All rather missing the point, but gratifying all the same. Nightmare interview with the Guardian. He had somewhere done his homework on my Sotheby period, which I was more than anxious to suppress. I suppose it can’t be helped. But I will never give an interview again, nor will I interview anybody. (He says!).
Much love,
Bruce.
On 19 October Welch wrote praising In Patagonia. ‘Perhaps I particularly like it because it has the qualities I find in Mughal pictures: extraordinary portraiture, very deep and psychological, superb technically, with all sorts of enrichments.’
To Cary Welch
Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 5 November 1977
Dear C.,
What a welcome letter! I hadn’t thought of In Patagonia in terms of Mughal Art but the connection exists. The Babur-Nama452 has influenced me greatly in what I write. With the possible exception of Isaac Babel,453 I know of no writer capable of such economic portraits of people. What I love is the clear, staccato line with a fantastical flourish at the end.
I must fish out my first piece of ‘writing’. It was on the masterfully described descent of Omar Sheikh Mirza (is that what Babur’s father was called?) from his pigeon loft.454
Such directness in Babur, Such awesome GAPS. I haven’t got my Miss Beveridge here, otherwise there would be quotations. So there you are!
Is there anything else in Indian literature as good? I once bought Abu’l Faz’l455 but sold it; it didn’t have the same effect. Perhaps it’s to do with their having being in Turki. I have often suspected the Turkish languages of having wonderful reserves of expression. It comes out in a lot of Russian literature.
So far the critics have been very complimentary, but the FORM of the book seems to have puzzled them (as I suspect it did the publisher). There’s a lot of talk of ‘unclassifiable prose’, ‘a mosaic’, ‘a tapestry’, a ‘jigsaw’, a ‘collage’ etc. but no one has seen that it is a modern WONDER VOYAGE: the Piece of Brontosaurus is the essential ingredient of the quest. Patagonia, as the farthest place to which Man walked from his origins on foot, is a symbol as well as a country. I think the photographs were a mistake. If it gets reprinted I’m going to have them out.456
Tom Maschler writes today that we have at last found a ‘really enthusiastic American publisher’457 but doesn’t say who. I suppose it’s the agent’s business to tell me.
The days pass with the landscape of Southern Tuscany spread out before me. In human terms it’s all rather dreary. I don’t speak Italian: for every one word I master in Italian, I feel I’m massacring twenty in Spanish.
Unfortunately the book I’m writing has to be a novel: the story is wonderful, but the facts are too few and contradictory to permit any other form. I had thought of giving it up when I was kicked out of Benin last winter. Then thought that was weak-kneed and so I go on. I am in no position to judge how it will turn out.
I haven’t rung up the Tiz [George Ortiz] yet. When I did so there was a recorded announcement; so I imagined they didn’t want callers. We were in the house a week before, and presumably being watched. It does seem uncanny that I said there were no kidnappings in Switzerland yet, and she gave me a look of despair and said YET.458
I can’t think the H[oward]H[odgkin]459 situation is all that painful. The trouble is that it got out of hand. In the English ‘art world’ his became the most publicised private life of the century, and he didn’t know how to handle it. When everyone else overdramatises your life, it inevitably becomes more dramatic.
What are your plans? I have said I will go to Afghanistan to watch horse-games on the Oxus Plain in March-April. Will you let me know if you are ever contemplating an Indian visit alone? I do want to go to India, but I want to find it for myself or be helped by really expert hands such as yours.
What’s Jungle Jim’s filum?
as always B
To Deborah Rogers
Draft letter, Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 1 December 1977
Dear Deborah,
I am delighted by the news. From all you tell me I would much prefer someone like Jim Silberman to handle it than be pressed through the mangle of Harper and Row et al. Especially with this peculiarly dotty book. The 5000 bucks sound fine to me: the dollar just would have to go down, now of all times. I don’t think I shall come over. The cost by air is horrendous and I can’t face the train or bus in this weather. The best thing is that Kasmin brings out the contract on December 23rd.
I would like to [write to] Silberman myself, because I have certain minor changes that could, if he thinks fit, be included in an American edition. The thing that most concerns me is the blurb: Don’t repeat this to T[om] M[aschler] but I thought Cape’s blurb a. rather over the top b. downright misleading.
There were certain things I flatly refused to say in the text for fear of sounding pretentious, but as none of the reviews picked up agreed that the book had, despite the collage effect, a pattern, a form even, but no one quite picked out what the form was, I wonder if it would help to do a bit of explaining.
Lots of other things have been said about Patagonia. I saw and did lots of other things in Patagonia, but cut them out for a specific [reason].
A. The book is the narrative of an actual journey and a symbolic one, admittedly using very concrete symbols.
B. Patagonia is the furthest point to which Man walked from his origins on foot: therefore it is a symbol of his restlessness. Maurice Richardson described it as a ‘springboard to the Void’.
C. From the moment of its discovery, the southernmost tip had a tremendous effect on the literary imagination, especially writers obsessed with The Voyage in this world and the Voyage out of it. Hence in the text: the Baudelaire, Coleridge, Poe, Donne, Cendrars, even Shakespeare, are never chosen at random.
D. The form of In Patagonia described in the Daily Telegraph as wildly unorthodox is in fact as old as literature itself. It is supposed to fall into the category or be a spoof of Wonder Voyage: the narrator goes to a far country in search of a strange animal: on his way he lands in strange situations, people or other books tell him strange s
tories which add up to form a message. [Is not the Gilgamesh epic nor the Argonautics nor Beowulf.]
E. All the stories and characters were chosen because they illustrate some particular aspect of wandering and/or exile – all the reasons for emigration are there: political, criminal, pressure of family, the lure of the sea, or the passion, simply, to move. Cain, Abel, Moses, Aaron etc
I am of the view that the photographs even perhaps the map don’t help.
I had in mind to write in another text beside the one of Blaise Cendrars which I love. Which should give the game away a bit more:
The most important from Chapter 1 Moby Dick.
‘Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his bulk; the unbelievable, nameless perils of the whale: these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped sway me to my wish.’
I did not put this in because George Gaylord Simpson, doyen of American palaeontologists, has used it already for his 1930’s travel book Attending Marvels. And a very good book too!
In Lima Chatwin had learned from Monica that her mother Isabelle had been raped by her employer when hired as a governess to a Scots family in Patagonia. On 28 November 1977 Monica wrote to Chatwin expressing her ‘pain and shocked horror – yes, horror’ over a paragraph in In Patagonia which dealt with this ‘pitiful experience’. (‘One night the whisky-soaked proprietor went for her and laid her down. She ran from the house, saddled a horse and rode through the snow to Punta Arenas.’) She sent the letter via Chatwin’s father, to whom she wrote the following day: ‘Bruce came to me knowing some of this story – I told him the truth and begged him – literally begged him, in your home that night, not to print anything of my Mother’s story . . . But I am asking you now, if you can, because you are a lawyer, to urge Bruce to change the text of page 173.’ On 3 December she also wrote to Cape: ‘This paragraph is full of conjecture and half truths and quite clearly impugns the honour of both my parents.’ Chatwin had given an impression of Isabelle – ‘never Bella!’ – as a ‘rather cheap adventuress’ preying on the soft heart of a lonely old man when, in fact, she was ‘respected by all who knew her’. Another objection was to the footnote in Chapter 72 concerning the bankruptcy and imprisonment of Chatwin’s great-grandfather, Robert Harding Milward. And there was a question of copyright. ‘While I gave Mr Chatwin access to my father’s “Journal” and a letterbook covering the years 1912-16, I certainly did not give him my permission to photocopy my father’s Journal.’ To Chatwin, she wrote: ‘I understand now why you insisted on staying on, shut up in your room upstairs while we were in the process of moving house.’ She accused him of having ‘lifted’ sections ‘word for word from my father’s Journal – ‘which is our one inheritance from him.’