Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  All last summer, I experimented, wrote, tore up, wriggled this way and that. Then on Patmos, I had the brainwave – revelation if such it was – that the way to do it was to hold an imaginary dialogue with Anatoly (who would, of course, become a fictional character!). Now you see what I’ve landed myself in for. I’ve done eighty passable pages; but as for the rest, a long, long tunnel ahead.

  To give the whole thing greater veracity, I decided to go back to the Centre, and reconstruct our journey amid those scenes of hopeless desolation. Yet I have found, as I write, that there is something immensely moving about the dried-up continent, a place which has far from yielded its secrets and may yet surprise us. Anyway, when I got the invitation to go to the Adelaide Festival, I was mighty pleased.

  As for the year of disgrazia ’84 that, too, may surprise us – in that it does seem to have made people aware of the hollowness of the doommongers. For my own part, I am going to try, this year, to do my meagre share to add a small voice of dissent.

  Fifteen years ago, with Vietnam in swing, I became aware of how the politicians were using some so-called ‘facts’ of our evolutionary past to justify their own squalor. Among these ‘facts’ was the idea that the human species had begun its career in cannibalism and bloodlust. The evidence for this was supposed to come from the Cave of Peking Man (since destroyed) and some caves in the Transvaal, which their excavator, an Australian called Raymond Dart633, interpreted as the Original Human Bloodbath. Recently, a man called Brain, now Director of the Transvaal Museum, has reinterpreted the evidence, and has found that all the damage to the bones was the work of one particular (now extinct) carnivore, known to science as Dinofelis. There is, he suggests, the possibility that this creature was a professional Man-eater: in other words, by becoming human, we had to live and defend ourselves from this beast. The fact that we did so successfully is perhaps a measure of the Original Threat to our existence. Since then, it seems to me at least, the story of humanity has been the invention of monsters that do not exist. I put this rather schematically, because – please remember – it is very late at night. Anyway. I am sufficiently fascinated to fly to South Africa next week to try and make sense of the evidence for myself. Hopefully, I may be able to incorporate it into the final, imaginary discussion with Anatoly, under a gum tree.

  Incidentally, our discussions took place at Neutral Station, N.T. I’m not sure that I can’t play with ‘Neutral Station’ as a title . . .

  If you need a billet in London, you’re welcome to the above, providing no one’s there. I suggest you call Jasper Conran at work 01-437-XXXX. He could arrange for you to have a key.

  I’m thinking of quitting London for a bit, and of finding some kind of billet in Tuscany. One can work so much better there.

  Much love, Bruce

  ‘Australia is Hell’ Chatwin wrote in a lost postcard to his Italian publisher Roberto Calasso. In another lost postcard from Australia, to Paul Theroux, he wrote: ‘You must come here. The men are awful, like bits of cardboard, but the women are splendid.’ One woman he had met on his visit to Alice Springs in February 1983 was Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist of Dutch descent who had worked on Walbiri land claims. They had a genuine rapport; on Chatwin’s part, amounting almost to an infatuation. ‘He made it clear he found me attractive,’ she says. He would rework Vaarzon-Morel into the idealised characters of Marian and Wendy in The Songlines. ‘The moment I set eyes on Wendy I could hear myself saying, “Not another one!”Not another of these astonishing women. She was tall, calm, serious yet amused, with golden hair done up in braids.’

  To Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

  Donnini | Florence | Italy | 8 January 1984

  My dear Pet,

  I am terribly sorry for sloping off without warning and not coming back – as I fully intended. The truth was I got hideously ill in Java, with amoebas and all that – so ill, in fact, that for a moment they thought I had cholera. And though I did go back to Sydney for a week or two, I was in a considerably lowered condition.

  But I’m coming back. By a stroke of luck the Adelaide Festival offered to pay the fare out: so on March 7 or thereabouts I’ll have to sing for my supper, and then I’ll be sure to come again to Alice.

  I’m writing something very odd – which although set under a gum tree somewhere in the MacDonnells has nothing much to do with Central Australia. No, that is wrong, it has everything and nothing to do with Central Australia and I need desperately to know certain things.

  What do you think the chances of being able to arrange a trip up to Kintore?634 I missed the chance of going out of sheer stupidity and regret it. I’ll probably be coming to Alice with a friend, Salman Rushdie,635 who wants to go on a short jaunt before going back to England.

  As for me, I want to stay in Australia for months and months. I imagine I will stay at the dreaded Melanka Lodge636 . . . I do hope you’re THERE! Never have I caught a bus in such a DIZZYING way.637

  Give love to Toly,638

  Bruce

  To Tom Maschler

  Kardamyli | Messenia | Greece | 29 January 1984

  Dear Tom,

  A quick note to tell you that I’ve gone to ground in Greece for the winter. I had thought of going to your old stamping-ground, Chania. But the only flat available was the top of the Stavroudakis/Haldeman639 set-up, and I thought it really too sinister and depressing in its implications – to say nothing of the street noise below – and instead have found an ideal spot on the Mani, a few hundred yards from Paddy and Joan Leigh-Fermor.

  I won’t say anything about the work in hand, except that I work at it at least six hours a day and am pressing forwards rather than procrastinating – at least, I hope so!

  The grape-vine tells me you’re in fine fettle.

  To Lydia Livingstone

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [January 1984]

  Thinking of you often if not always. And now, next week, I take the first leg of my return journey towards you – if somewhat obliquely – just to Johannesburg and the Kalahari desert – then on March 2 to Sydney xxxx Bruce

  On 1 February 1984 Chatwin stayed with Bob Brain in Pretoria. ‘B. quiet, meditative, self-effacing with impeccable manners,’ Chatwin wrote in his notebook. The next morning he accompanied him to the cave at Swartkrans in the Sterkfontein valley near Johannesburg. Brain’s classic text on early human behaviour was based on his excavations here.

  What happened on that day, 2 February, would reverberate in Chatwin’s mind for the remainder of his life. ‘Around 3.30 Bob came back from the dig with a piece of bone which he said was “highly suggestive” .Antelope long bone: which layered beige white on the exterior and black on the inside, broken in 2. With it were some flecked fragments – speckled with manganese staining. He had, he said, so often searched for use of fire. It had been found by George [Moenda, Brain’s foreman] lying alongside an arrangement of 3 stones 6-7” across and was slightly cracked. The question is whether this could conceivably be the hearth . . . He had tried so often, had so many false alarms, that one must always expect the worst. At the same time he was visibly excited.’

  To Bob Brain

  Le Thalonet | Johannesburg | South Africa | [February 1984]

  Dear Bob,

  I found the following in the Muquaddimah of Ib’n Khaldun (the Father of modern history) ca. 1400 AD. ‘The animal desire of attacking others and destroying them or being their master confronts man with the need to defend himself against wild animals which would destroy him if he lived alone. Man can protect himself only through organised communal defence. Instead of physical power, of which he possesses less than many other animals, he has to utilise the power in which he excels, namely the power of thought and practical reason. These faculties help him to become dexterous in the shaping of tools and to organise communities for producing them.’

  If I remember the passage correctly (for all I have found is an extract) it goes on something like that ‘in conditions of surplus, when the needs bo
th of the individual and of the community have been surpassed, the war of all against all breaks out with the weapons devised to protect man from the beasts.’640

  I had a wonderful day at Swartkrans: and, as luck would have it, I met Alun Hughes641 at the tea-party who took me today to Sterkfontein. Yes, indeed! Quite another style! But most instructive. I’ll hope to see you, if I may, around the 24th of the month. In any case I’d like very much to come again to Pretoria to see the museum at great length. I’d be most grateful, too, to have a copy of the photo of the juvenile skull and leopard canines . . .

  I stupidly left a pair of shoes in the house. But please don’t worry as they were extremely uncomfortable. I could perhaps get them on my return.

  My very best wishes and thanks to your wife. As always, Bruce.

  To Francis Wyndham

  Holiday Inn | Botswana | 15 February 1984

  This trip has proved really abortive – except for the S. African archaeologist /zoologist who should be given a Nobel Prize on the spot. Otherwise, in Botswana – heat, dust, spiders – and NO Bushmen.

  Much love, Bruce

  Staying beside the Zambezi river with Kasmin, who had joined him in Botswana, Chatwin continued to dwell on the conversations he had had with Brain. About Birmingham, where Chatwin had grown up and from where Brain’s father, finding England restrictive, had departed for the Cape. About Brain’s son Ted, who died at 14 months when he choked on a piece of apple, teaching Brain – painfully – to live his life as though each day might be his last. Moved to review his own life, Chatwin wrote in his notebook: ‘And in the morning while the car was in dock we sat on a fallen tree with a mat of weeds, looking out across the Zambezi which appeared to be being blown back upstream. The District Commissioner’s House/mine recruiting camp with its mosquito screens and terraced gardens gone to seed. To think that I, in my schoolboy dreams, pictured such a place as the place in which I would spend my life, in khaki shorts, with Shakespeare and Shelley, dreaming of a leafy Warwickshire which no longer existed. I would go out in a hat . . . Had a dream of my parents, Margharita in her blue dress with the orange and green cummerbund, and Charles in tails, dancing in the moonlight. I felt that, in their way, they’re the most romantic couple on the earth.’

  To Gertrude Chanler

  South Africa | as from: 30 Victoria Street | Pott’s Point | Sydney | Australia | 2 March 1984

  My Dear Gertrude,

  For the first day in a month of feverish coming and going I’ve got the time to sit down and write a letter or two. I was a little bit apprehensive about going to South Africa in the first place: but I must say things there are not at all what gets reported in the international press: some better, some worse, but never bland. As Lib may have told you, I came to talk to a man who wrote a book about the Earliest Man, and I’ve had perhaps the most stimulating discussions in my life. Prof. Brain has, for the past 20 years, been excavating a cave near Johannesburg in which you find at the lower level (Date: around 2 million years) a situation in which the ancestors of Man were literally dragged there and eaten by an extinct giant cat called Dinofelis. Then in the upper level, Man (the First) suddenly takes control and the Beast is banished.

  The only way to inhabit a cave, which is also inhabited by predators, is to deter them with fire. And though archaeologists have been hunting for fire in Prehistoric Africa for thirty years now, the earliest hearth they could find was only 70,000 years old. On the one day I visited Brain’s cave, at Swartkrans, I remembered how nice it would be to discover the human use of fire in the cave. Half an hour later, we excavated a bit of blackened bone. Brain, who is a most undemonstrative man, said: ‘That bone is remarkably suggestive!’ – which indeed it was. It turns out I was present at the uncovering of a human hearth, probably dated around 1,200,000 years old. The earliest by 700,000 years.

  I’m off to Australia in the morning, where I have to give a talk at the Adelaide Festival next week (on what Lord knows!) and then I’m off into the Outback again for four weeks or so. My new book is a very slow operation, but if it comes off I think it could be very unusual.

  I gather from Lib that we’re coming over in the summer, and look forward immensely: but I certainly didn’t want to wait to thank you for those two magnificent French goblets, in which we drank your health!

  I hope to have something substantial to show to my publishers by then. There have been fearful upheavals at Viking Press, though I hope they all simmer down.

  All my love to you, Bruce

  Another Australian woman whom Chatwin admired was Ninette Dutton (1923-2007), an enameller and short-story writer, and one of the organisers of the Adelaide Festival. He had met her in Adelaide the previous January, after which he wrote in his notebook: ‘Dined last night with Geoffrey Dutton and his wife Nina – a glamorous late middle aged couple – she particularly stylish in the manner of the 40’s reminded me a little of Magouche. Grey hair and dangly earrings. Used to own a big station – Anlaby – which seems to have gone the way of all great landowners. He described by Bob Hughes as “mildly rebellious scion of old grazing stock” . . . We discussed the whole Falklands affair with sorrow and disgust. A lot of booze. Gave me names of a variety of things and people to see in the North.’ One year on, with her husband having walked out on her, Ninette was planning a thousand-mile drive to Queensland for a book on the wildflowers of Australia. She offered to take Chatwin along, so that he could see something of the back country, once he had finished his Aboriginal research at Kintore in late March. Elizabeth says: ‘She became a muse to Bruce.’

  Also at the Adelaide Festival, Chatwin met Anne-Marie Mykyta, whose 16-year old daughter Juliet was one of eight women murdered by two serial killers, James Miller and Christopher Worrell in what became known as the Truro murders. On 21 January 1977 Juliet was waiting at a bus stop when Worrell offered her a lift home. Instead, he drove her to Port Wakefield where he tied her up and strangled her. Mykyta had told the story in It’s a Long Way to Truro (1981). Chatwin was introduced to her because he wanted to speak to Ukrainians in Australia. ‘My husband’s family is Ukrainian so I invited Bruce to our house to meet my husband and his brother and his wife. The evening turned out very differently.’ A television programme, 60 Minutes,had recently interviewed Miller and Mykyta concerning a book that Miller had written while in prison. ‘During the evening a number of people rang begging/ ordering me to stop Miller’s book from being published. I had already taken legal advice and knew there was nothing I could do, but in the end when Betty Ann Kelvin (whose son was murdered) started screaming at me, I started screaming back. My husband took the phone from me, I walked out of the room and Bruce followed me.

  ‘“You promised me a copy of your book,” he said.

  ‘I signed a copy of It’s a Long Way to Truro (which is about the impact on us of Juliet’s death) and he signed a copy of On the Black Hill.

  ‘Over the few days left we spent time together every day, just very quietly, and planned to meet when he got back from Central Australia. We liked each other very much.’

  To Anne-Marie Mykyta

  Alice Springs | Australia | 14 March 1984

  My dear Anne-Marie,

  A quick note from the middle of nowhere to thank you for your beautifully conceived and, in the end, heartening book. Your courage is unsurpassed. Salman and I are having an enjoyable time in the Centre, but, needless to say, wherever I go in the desert, I always nearly get washed away. Love Bruce

  After the Adelaide Festival Chatwin and Rushdie flew to Alice Springs where Chatwin introduced Rushdie to the characters who would reappear, without much disguise, in The Songlines; he also introduced Rushdie (by telephone) to Robyn Davidson, author of Tracks,an introduction that was to have far-reaching consequences. They hired a four-wheel-drive Toyota and drove to Ayer’s Rock. Rushdie went on to Sydney to meet Davidson; Chatwin to the Aboriginal settlement at Kintore. At the end of March, he joined Ninette Dutton for a five-day drive from Adelaide to Boona wh
ere they stayed with the poet Pam Bell, who became yet one more in the line of Australian women who admired Chatwin as much as he them. Bell listened to Chatwin talk about his experience with the Aborigines.‘He was desperately trying to go to the centre. It was the most important thing for him and he realised half way through he wasn’t going to be able to do it, he was excluded. You have to earn mystery. It’s only lovers who get there.’

  To Shirley Hazzard

  Postcard, The New Moree Hotel | Newell Highway | Moree | Australia | 5 April 1984

  I hope your aesthetic sensibilities will be OUTRAGED by this card – but this is, after all, the heart of New South Wales . . . [Ninette Dutton’s handwriting] We are thinking and talking of you very much as we career across vast areas of this country while I search for the smallest of wild flowers. We hope to reach Cape York and see some Aboriginal painting. Much love, Nin, Bruce

  To Shirley Hazzard

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [May 1984]

  My dear Shirley,

  Just back from Sydney to find your wonderful letter of January. I discovered the use of sleeping pills for a long distance flight, and considering the fact that I failed to notice Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or Abu Dhabi, they must have worked. I am only feeling slightly hazy the day after. I enjoyed Oz far more this time than the last. The Adelaide Festival was a little like going to a clinic for a week, in that there were always young, encouraging, nurse-like figures at one’s elbow, with gentle words to say it was time to do this or that. I had never been to such an occasion; hope never to go again; but found that to have done it once was all right. I still maintain what I thought last year: that it is the interior of Australia which determines what goes on around the periphery. At a dinner in Sydney, a very intelligent man picked a quarrel with me; said he never met Aborigines; implied that Aborigines were irrelevant to the Australian situation. I then found voice and said that the Aborigines, or their destruction, were as important as the Penal Colony in the Australian consciousness. The enormous riches of Australia are generated by the heartland; and by the same token that your Sydney intellectual has never met an Aborigine, he has never seen the iron-ore trains approaching Port Headland – without which, of course, the cities of the fringe would not, in their prosperity, exist. But as a place, it is immensely intractable to the pen. How few writers really get the texture of, say, a small town in the Outback! Randolph Stow,642 for Western Australia, is the exception. Why also am I moved, almost to tears, by the women, and indifferent to the men? Except, I may add, by the drunk truckie at a pub famous for its red-neck attitudes, who, when taunted for having abused his Aboriginal wife, tried to explain to his tormentors the immense elaboration of Aboriginal society and when completely lost for words, shouted, ‘I tell you, it’s so com . . . fuckin’ . . . plex!’