Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  Next week, however, I am clearing out of town with my rucksack, and will be more or less incommunicado for a month. I want to go to some of the Aboriginal reservations in the heart of the country; and if possible to Broome, the pearling town in the far North West. I am hoping that the concept of the new book will begin to germinate, however blank I feel about it at present. With so many ‘cooked-up’ books knocking around, I don’t really believe in writing unless one has to.

  I’m gearing up to the point when I tackle ringing up all six of the J.J. James’s584 in the phone book.

  Much love

  B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  c/o Penelope Tree | 19a Eastbourne Rd | Darling Point | Sydney | Australia | 12 January 1983

  Dear E,

  This, I must say, is the country to settle in. You’ve no idea how beautiful the land is, and the climate, just on the fringe of the arid and wet zones. Rolling farm land, forests, vines, and none of that terrible property-mad usurpation you find in the U.S. The Hunter valley is like Provence or Tuscany but Anglo-Saxon. Wine and food delicious. And the trees! The Australian section of the Sydney Botanical garden is incredible, not just for the gums and banksias but hundreds and hundreds of other species. Also all the great flowering trees of temperate China seem to grow here as well. Of course, on one level, it’s a complete Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, really very far away from the rest of the world; and it’s going through a recession; but if anywhere has an underlying optimism this is it. I think really a combination of things like the Malvinas (as I now persist in calling them) and Paul Bailey’s snarky review585 have made me feel so irreversibly un-English that I really had better start doing something about it.

  On the Black Hill is apparently going great guns in the U.S. The reviews such as I’ve seen are not simply favourable; they understand what’s going on. Robert Towers on the front page of the New York Times Supplement completely got the hang, but the one that pleased me most was the man in Time, and the concept of the ‘still centre’. Anyway, all this makes very little impact on my tremendous difficulty dreaming up what to do next. I have an idea – yes. A relatively outlandish one, that will take me to Broome in the Far North West, or rather to a place called Beagle Bay. I have a card index of the old nomad book to plunder – but God knows what’ll happen.

  In the meantime, we surf, sunbathe, windsurf, and go to an aerobics class in the gym. Am vastly recovered but after such an infection am bound to feel a bit crotchety for a while. xxx B

  Penelope will take messages or Benny Gannon’s586 secretary at 02-357-XXXX

  To Deborah Rogers

  c/o Ben Gannon | 11 Gaerloch Avenue | Bondi | Sydney | Australia | 23 January 1983

  Dear Deborah,

  The sky is so blue, the sea is so blue, and the surfers so unbelievably elegant that the room in which I have been trying to write has not seen much actual writing . . . for the next month or so I shall be in the Outback and really quite unavailable. I think I’m on the trail of something.

  The ‘something’ had been gestating in his system a long while, and stemmed from a conversation Bruce had had, back in 1970, with the Australian archaeologist John Mulvaney at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. Chatwin – then curating his exhibition of nomadic art – had sought out Mulvaney in the hope he might be able to shed light on the nature of human restlessness. In particular, ‘I wanted to know about the “walkabout”, but you can hardly find it in the literature.’ Mulvaney, apparently – he has no recollection of the meeting – had pointed Chatwin in the direction of the anthropologist Theodor Strehlow, who had lived and worked with Aboriginals in Central Australia. ‘He is the man who really knows. You ought to come and see him.’

  Strehlow had died in 1978, but his widow Kath lived in Adelaide. On 28 January Chatwin turned up at her house wishing to purchase a copy of Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia, a difficult book, long-ignored and virtually impossible to get hold of.

  ‘When Bruce introduced himself on the phone, my words to him were: “Let me say hello to the first man in the world who’s read it.”’

  Kath sold him an unbound proof. ‘I put a map in the back so he could see where the songlines were.’ She also produced her husband’s daybooks and diaries for him to read. The next couple of hours defined Chatwin’s next three years. ‘I sat down, only for a morning,’ he said, ‘and I suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just were.’

  Revitalised, Chatwin flew to Alice Springs to study Strehlow’s book in situ and test his theory. ‘I wanted to find how it worked.’

  To Elisabeth Sifton

  Alice Springs | Australia | 7 February 1983

  My dear Elisabeth,

  I wonder if you could ask Altie587 to help. Iris Harvey who runs a magnificent bookshop in Alice Springs has been trying without success to buy copies of a book republished by the Johnson reprint Co. but cannot get a reply to her letters. The book is by the late Prof T. G. H. Strehlow,588 Aranda Traditions and is an essential work for the study of Australian anthropology – indeed perhaps the reason for my being here in Australia. Mrs Harvey believes that Johnson have a remnant stock of about 500; and if so she’d like to buy up as many as possible. Could Altie, therefore, find out a. the address and phone no. of Johnson b. the name of the person in charge to whom Mrs Harvey could communicate. I believe that the reprint houses who xerox the original edition have a system of being able to reorder copies of course at extra cost. I don’t know if that is still done.

  Much love

  B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Haasts Bluff Aboriginal Reservation | Alice Springs | Australia | 7 February 1983

  The Aboriginals though infinitely fascinating are also infinitely sad: so sad, in fact, that I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that to write a book about them would be impossible. And as for the arid outback, it would be another In Patagonia minus the poetic dimension. Should be back mid to late March. XXX B

  To David Thomas589

  Alice Springs | Australia | 20 February 1983

  At first I was dumbstruck with horror. Alice is a hornet’s nest – of drunks, Pommie-bashers, earnest Lutheran missionaries, and apocalyptically-minded do-gooders. Gradually, however, I’m learning to live with it. A day or two in town . . . five or more out bush. The complexity of the Aboriginal Dreaming Tracks (bad expression) is so staggeringly complex, and on such a colossal scale, intellectually, that they make the Pyramids seem like sand castles. But how to write about them – without spending 20 years here?

  Always

  Bruce

  To Diana Melly

  c/o Ben Gannon | 11 Gaerloch Avenue | Bondi | Sydney | Australia | 1 March [1983]

  Dearest Di,

  Last night I got back to Sydney and we sat up watching Bob Hawke become the new Prime Minister. Secretly, although one can’t say so, I think they’ll regret it: not because he’s LEFT or Republican etc but because he has the meanest mouth imaginable and terribly shifty eyes. However . . .

  I have been on a marathon, extremely expensive zig-zag across the continent from Adelaide, rip through Alice Springs, over to Broome and the Kimberleys, down to Perth and back: Georgie590 will probably have told you how I tracked him down to a sort of rustic amphitheatre in the forest.

  You fry in the Centre of Australia: but I can’t complain. I never once FELL for the country, except perhaps in the most abstract way with the landscape. The Aboriginal situation is too disheartening, the whites so disjointed, or plainly disagreeable, but I did, often enough, light on a situation that grabbed my attention. Also, I do have what I was looking for: the ‘Australia’ peg on which to hang my ‘nomadic’ material. The title is to be ‘A Monk by the Sea’ – where, indeed, I found him: a Cistercian ascetic591 who had lived in London, entered this most severe monastic order, worked on an Aboriginal mission, and then had returned to a hermitage of corrugated sheet (the cross was made by a pair of crossed oars, washed up by a cyclone) on the most abstract
beach in N. Australia. He also happened to be obsessed by the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert, by Sufism, Taoism etc. Anyway, I have begun to sketch . . .

  I intend to do a trilogy of 3 tiny novels which can all be bound together. 1. The Monk (affairs of the spirit) 2. A new story I’ve been told of a black woman and a Scandinavian diplomat 3. The old tale of the man with porcelains in Prague.

  We shall see . . .

  The news of Donald [Richards] is that he’s landed himself – after weeks of angst – with a wonderful job – as Deputy Director of the ‘Future’ Brisbane Festival. It was absolutely impossible to have him moping around, penniless and frustrated, and he’s already become a creature transformed. As far as readjusting to Australia, it couldn’t be better. He seemed excessively nervous here in Sydney, and has now returned to his own.592 So, as usual, I seem to have been sprung back to my usual condition . . . THE ROAD . . .

  As for the US reception of On the B.H. Well! Review after review with endless comparisons . . . How they love comparisons! Hardy, Spencer, D.H. Lawrence, Vermeer. The review I most liked was in the Houston Globe: ‘If you really want to sit by the fireside, going grey with a cameo tied round your neck, listening to a two-piece orchestra banging out the same old tune, good for you. As for me, I’m off to find my own excitement in the West Loop . . .’ After a 10 minute read with Penelope Tree the whole lot enjoyed the hospitality of her garbage can . . .

  I do hope Candy’s593 all right. How terribly worrying for you. I have to say that although she’s very sweet, touching etc I could also BRAIN that Sophia594. Though I never met Marco I remember the whole thing starting. I took her to dinner one winter night in Siena, and she told me all about him. I remember having forebodings at the time – because, though they can’t help it, those upper-class girls can be terribly and wantonly destructive. The Jasper Guinness595 set in Tuscany has really a lot to answer for.

  Plans? I can’t begin to say. I want to go and hide and write. But can’t decide whether to stay here or come back in April. Am feeling very pushed and pulled.

  I really do have a mountain of mail – so here’s all my dearest love. B

  To Paul Theroux

  Postcard of ‘The Breakaway’ by Tom Roberts (Australian artist, 1856-1931) | Sydney | Australia | 7 March 1983

  All going well down-under – with a new Republican Prime Minister poised to cut the umbilical cord from the Mutterland. Have become interested in a very extreme situation – of Spanish monks in an Aboriginal Mission and am about to start sketching an outline. Anyway, the crisis of the ‘shall-never-write-another-line ’ sort is now over. As always Bruce

  In mid-March Chatwin flew to Jakarta to meet Jasper Conran, the young couturier to whom he had been introduced the previous summer at a restaurant in Greece. Twenty years younger than Chatwin, Jasper was more intellectually matched to him than was Donald Richards, whose relationship with Chatwin had petered out over the New Year. ‘I was in love,’ says Jasper. ‘It was very much my first love. There was nobody like him. He was gorgeous and he knew it. To be clever, witty and bright is a devastating combination.’ In Indonesia, the two of them swam out over the reefs, looked for Indian textiles and, in Java, visited the ninth-century Buddhist temple of Borobudur, parking outside a bat cave. On 6 April Chatwin returned to Sydney running a high fever.

  To Deborah Rogers

  c/o Ben Gannon | Sydney | Australia | 18 April 1983

  Dearest Deborah,

  I shall be back soon . . . Australia, I’m afraid, has been a bit of a flop. I feel a bit the same way as Lawrence in Kangaroo.596 Flat, dried out, alienated. None of the rich vein of fantasy you can tap by simply landing in S. America.

  Oh Well! I have at least got one thing of inordinate fascination which can be worked into an essay. Then I’m rearing to go into more fiction. Sorry for this negative note: perhaps conditioned by the hideous food poisoning I got in Java last week.

  To Lydia Livingstone597

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 4 June 1983

  Darling Lydia,

  Over a rather gloomy pre-election lunch (all the vegetables, in the middle of summer, were canned!) both Mr [James] Fox and I agreed that the best thing in Australia is Lydia Livingstone. His drama continues slowly: but I’m sure that, in his slow and thoughtful way, he’s going to find a solution. Anyway, this is just to say how infuriating it is to think you’re so far away BUT I am coming back. I had Mr H598 on the phone for half an hour this morning from Melbourne. The money is there; the Aboriginal half of the cast is being ‘rounded up’ – or is that expression too strong? – and shooting is supposed to start on August 15th. I’ll fly probably direct to Melbourne around the 5th. What I long for is that you should come to Coober Pedy in some nebulous but alluring capacity. You with your finely-tuned sense of the ridiculous would, I think, also enjoy it.

  I’m sorry this is the shortest possible communication. I have myself ONE day to grapple with a mountain of turgid mail. I bought 40 air-letter forms and am now down to five. So I know you’ll understand – this is not the best moment for enlightened correspondence. I feel quite awful about B[en] G[annon]. Two American cheques I gave him bounced because of the immense complications of my American account. Anyway it should be sorted out by now.

  All my love to you.

  XXXXX Bruce

  On their visit to Ayer’s Rock a year later, Chatwin would tell Salman Rushdie: ‘I’ve been very unhappy lately and for a long time I couldn’t work out why, and then I suddenly realised it was because I missed my wife. I sent her a telegram to meet me in Kathmandu and she sent a telegram back to say she would.’ The way Chatwin and Elizabeth got back together did not in fact begin with a judicious exchange of telegrams but with a telephone call from Sydney. When Esquire magazine offered Chatwin a commission ‘to go anywhere I want’, he telephoned Elizabeth at Homer End and asked her to suggest a place. ‘He said he’d like to go to the South Sea Islands or to Nepal. So I said Nepal. I’d never been there.’ He paid for his airfare to Kathmandu by reading In Patagonia in six instalments for ABC radio. In the middle of April the Australian novelist Murray Bail drove Chatwin to the Blue Mountains outside Sydney.‘I stepped back for him to admire the view, as you do up there. He looked at it for a second and then turned to me:“What’s the date today? Next week I’ll be at the base camp of Everest.” ’ One year younger than Chatwin, the dry-witted and well-read Bail – he had worked on the Times Literary Supplement – was to become one of his most regular correspondents.

  To Murray Bail

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 4 June 1983

  Dear Murray,

  This is a very short communication. Before settling down to write, or at least to set down on paper, some of my Australian thoughts, I’ve set myself one day to grapple with a mountain of mail. I bought from the Sloane Square Post office 40 air-mail letters at 9am and at 7pm I am down to three. That says nothing about the English side.

  I loved our drive in the country.599 It should be the first of many more. I have in mind to rent a house in the Vaucluse for next winter, and if I do I’m going to try and tempt you over to Cézanne and Van Gogh country.

  England, as usual, is in a soupy pre-Fascist condition. The weather has been vile. But I have been hardened and burnished by a month of trekking around the base of Mount Everest, so I’m up to it, for a bit.

  Also I seem to be coming back to Australia in August, for five weeks, in connection with Werner Herzog’s film,600 and this will give me the opportunity to make another foray into the centre, at a less blistering time of year. Why don’t you come?

  In haste, and best to Margaret601

  as always

  Bruce

  To Lisa Van Gruisen602

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 13 June 1983

  Sunday

  My darling Lisa,

  It’s hard to write this letter because I have deep physical ache to be back in Nepal. Gradually, over the past couple of weeks, I already
feel my knuckles whitening with impotent rage, and my guts twisting into knots. I had to write 75 letters. I had to cope with VAT. I watched the appalling spectacle of the election.603 I was subjected to bullying demands to do this and that. Esquire Magazine wanted me to rewrite the piece in terms of a Yeti-hunt604 – which as one damn well knows it wasn’t. Altogether I feel shredded and sliced. Now to cap everything, I’ve lost somewhere between my flat and E’s house my principal Australian notebook, without which I am truly sunk SUNK . . . SUNK . . . SUNK . . .

  I am sorry to gripe on: but you do see the contrast with one’s unalloyed happiness in Nepal, where I never for a second felt mildly annoyed. I’ll write again soon, hopefully in a better frame of mind. If you want the flat for a week or so, let me know and I’ll see if it works out. In the meantime there’s a vague warning: it is JUST conceivable that my American bank which of course is completely computerised and therefore not amenable to the human will, will bounce the cheque. I have, in fact, in the account about 20,000 dollars, but I’ve been juggling the accounts round, and it may be that, despite instructions to honour all cheques, they will reject one on my old cheque book – without of course having provided me with a new one. If so, tell them not to be alarmed, because I’ll fix it at once.