Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  There is no more wilderness in the Med: so one just has to make a compromise. Any house built there must turn in on itself.

  You said ‘at last a building in the round’. Do you mind my saying that you haven’t – or strike me as not having – done enough to apply your unbelievable gifts for coping with interior space to the articulation of facades of buildings. I cannot quite imagine how a building by you would be.

  You also list a catalogue of complaints about your partners: but I’m afraid you’ll have to face the fact, with your sense of style and fastidiousness, that you’ll have to be a one-man band. In order to do what you have to do, you have to be the tyrant who directs, not the partner who cajoles – and, in fact, many people would prefer working for you as an assistant rather than having a slice of the cake.

  The only way to run a business these days is to keep a very tight ship – and not to sacrifice control. When scribbling off that article, I couldn’t help having misgivings about POSA:743 it struck me as a silly name, but that’s beside the point: the work on the flat was yours. Others may contribute very valuable bits here and there, but they are not stylists – or if they are, not in the same sense as you. They are, however, bound to be fractious if they are all supposed to be on one level.

  I hate submarines – I’ve been down in one once – from Plymouth. Hate the claustrophobia: the same as the clum-pf of an aircraft door closing.

  We had a wild dust storm this morning, but that has now cleared and the birds are chirruping again. I want to go on a tour of Rajput and Mughal architecture. The place we’re in is fairly marvellous, but it is ironic that my book which is a passionate defence of movement should involve its author in years of limpet like existence. as always, Bruce

  PS I suppose, thinking about it, the choice of Venturi744 was almost a foregone conclusion. As I said, they were after something ‘Neo-classical’ and, I’m afraid, hell bent on an American – who are supposed to know so much more about Museums than Europeans – though with the exception of the Gardner Museum in Boston, I don’t think I’ve ever been in an American Museum whose pictures didn’t cry to be released from it.

  I’ve written a very irreverent piece on the Norman Foster Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.745 As you may know it went over budget four times over – and is, I think, absurd: a maintenance nightmare, not a vision of the future at all, but a backward, thoroughly retrograde glance back to Soviet Constructivism plus a sort of nostalgia for the glorious days of the Royal Navy. I managed to find the ‘feng-shui’ man: that is to say, the traditional Chinese geomancer whose advice the Bank took – and ignored – before commissioning the architect – and you should hear some of the things he said about the cross-braces!

  To Sunil Sethi

  c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 5 March [1986]

  Dearest Sunil,

  We’re coming to Delhi by train from Jodhpur, arriving on the morning of the 12th. E. leaves for London the night of the 13th, and I thought I’d see her off. Is that OK vis-à-vis the room for a few nights? If not we can easily stay – and after a most abstemious two months in whatever hotel. But unless I hear to the contrary, may we assume it is on? Could you, if not too terrible a bore, do something for me. Inquire how – and the quickest way possible – for me to extend my Indian visa? It runs out on April 6th and I will want to stay at least another month – preferably without having to nip up to Nepal and back. I rather dread the bureaucracy of the immigration dept, so maybe there’s a travel agent who can expedite it.

  Anyhow, I’ve decided to come back here after Delhi, immediately after getting the visa, for another spell of work: at least until the end of the month. I have a vague sense that, in that time, I can get the whole thing between covers – which would mean I was free to pack up my notes and books etc., and be free to toy about with the manuscript. I can’t see any point in moving from here – even in the heat (there are some cool, almost subterranean rooms) – and one is so well looked after, and above all, CALM. A new place might disrupt things. After that, I thought I’d take to the hills for a bit, and then maybe fly direct to America, to my favourite sister-in-law’s wedding in mid May. Who can tell?

  I wanted to write to you anyway to say how much I approve of the Indian Mail. No waffle! Clear, sensible English – such has not been seen in an English newspaper for the past 20 years – and none of the carping tone. You were absolutely right to leave India Today: re-reading it critically over three issues, I find the tone there both gloomy and trite: an unpleasant combination. It’s about time people realised just how wonderful India is – not in the exotic sense – but day to day realities. Watching Manvendra here coping with the drought is the kind of thing that Mr Naipaul746 would never ‘see’.

  We are still without post from Europe, but tant pis.

  Much love, B

  To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]

  Dearest Paddy and Joan,

  . . . We’ve managed to install ourselves in the wing of a Rajput Fort about 30 miles from Jodhpur, belonging to one of the old zamindar families: the grandfather, who is still omnipresent in the memory of the retainers, was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and one of the best polo players in the world. The suite of rooms we occupy is where he’d entertain his English friends. The walls are blue; there are punkah hooks, old dhurry carpets, chintz curtains, prints of the Quorn or Pytchley, others of Norwegian fjords and wolves: 18th century miniatures of the family, enthroned or on shikar [hunting] and replaced, gradually, by the same subjects taken by the Rajputana Photo studio. My study leads out onto a terrace along the battlements, about the size of Montaigne’s, from which there is a view of the lake, a Shiva temple on an island, the family memorials (in Mughal style) onshore and a rest house for visiting sadhus. There was an old rogue who arrived a few days ago, in saffron, with a hennaed beard747 down to his ankles: a scion apparently of a great Rajput house who had quarrelled irrevocably with his wife and taken to the road. After a puff or two of his ganja I found myself reciting in Sanskrit the opening stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita.

  The food is delicious and brought by delicious girls on solid mahogany trays. Last week, for example, we had for lunch a light Little Bustard curry, a purée of peas, another of aubergines and coriander, and bread rolls, the size of potatoes, baked in ashes. The lake is seething with duck – shovellers, scaup, pintail, pochard – awaiting the call to fly back to Siberia. Herds of black buck come down to drink with the camels. There are spoonbills, storks, cranes and ibis; and yet I long for walks in the Mani.

  The temptation to take a siesta instead of a walk is irresistible. I’ve never been so immobile in my life. The afternoon sun is very strong; and the plain beyond, having missed last season’s monsoon, is an ashen wilderness with willy-willies blowing across it.

  The book is by no means done; I’ve decided the only thing to do is to let it run its own course and shove everything in. I’ve been casting back over my old notebooks, and have managed to find a place for things like this:

  Djang, Cameroon

  There are two hotels in Djang: the Hotel Windsor and, on the opposite side of the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor

  Or:

  Goree, Senegal

  On the terrace of the restaurant a fat French bourgeois couple are guzzling their fruits-de-mer. Their dachshund, leashed to the woman’s chair, keeps jumping up in the hope of being fed.

  – Taisez-vous, Romeo! C’est l’entracte

  Don’t bother to reply to this except, perhaps, a post-card to say when the book748 is coming out; and whether, if I broke my journey in late April or May, you’d be there. Elizabeth has to go to her sister’s wedding in the middle of May; and if I had something to show the other Elisabeth [Sifton] I should be tempted to go too. But that’s all too early to decide. I might even stay here, and take to the hills. I’ll be going to Delhi to prolong my visa and pick up mail around March 15th.


  Much love, as always

  Bruce (and Elizabeth!)

  To Ninette Dutton

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extentsion | New Delhi | India | 5 March 1986

  Dearest Nin,

  I am sorry for the prolonged silence. At the beginning of the winter (northern hemisphere) things got terribly out of hand. As I think I jotted on a card, we had this house all fixed up in the countryside outside Kathmandu, with wonderful views of the mountains etc. But then the Englishman to whom it belonged (Perfide Albion!) welshed out on the deal and we were left with a kind of cottage orné in the heart of the city: pretty enough superficially, but terribly damp and with the most fragrant smells of the city sewer. Nepal really is one of the great unhealthies. Much more so than India, and both E and I were really quite ill, before deciding to flee to India. Nothing makes me in a worse temper than having set aside X number of months in which to work, then to find one is junketing round from hotel to hotel, looking for a place to settle. We did, however, meet up with Murray and Margaret Bail in Delhi. They had been in Simla for Christmas – against our advice! – in a freezing hotel three feet deep in snow. Anyway, we all went to Jodhpur whose Maharajah is an old friend of mine: we share a part of some really riotous times at the Cannes Film Festival of 1969.749 Although he has no political power he has now become a most magnificent ruler and also owns the biggest palace in India. At his 40th birthday party, we were introduced to all his courtiers, mostly polo playing types; thakurs that is landed gentry. Among them a total charmer (not a polo player) called Manvendra Singh, whose grandfather was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and fought in Flanders etc.

  I did my usual spiel about being desperate for somewhere to write, and he said ‘Why not write in my fort?’ We’ve been here now for 2 months: a 17th century Rajput fort, on a lake, with a Shiva temple on an island, every kind of birds: ducks, flamingoes, spoonbills, pelicans. A burble of life going on in the courtyard below: the buffalo to be milked, the laughter of children, the howling of peacocks – at seven as alarm call! I never left. I hardly even went to Jodhpur, only 20 miles away except to get typing paper. I won’t say I’ve finished the book: that would be going too far – but I do have the sense of an ending. The book is not just an ‘Australian’ enterprise, but sets down a lot of crackpot ideas that have been going round my head for twenty years. So this is not three years work but 20. We shall see. The terrifying moment will come when I dare to re-read what I’ve done.

  We are, in fact, leaving tomorrow. Elizabeth has to get back to her lambing. The past week has really been too hot. It would be fine if I didn’t have something critical to do. But it’s too hot to take exercise, and the mind starts to go soggy too. So I’m taking her to Delhi and then going for the rest of the month and most of April to a guest-house750 we’ve heard of not far from Simla. Spring in the hills should be lovely, I hope! My aim is to get a rough first draft, and then take it to America. In the editing stages, I think I will have to come to Oz: when going through some of it with Murray, I realised just how easy it is for a Pom to slip up on the tiniest mistakes.

  I’ll get the post from my pal Sunil in Delhi. It’d be lovely to get a scrap of news. Goodness I hope every thing’s gone OK vis-à-vis Piers Hill.751

  All my love to you, dearest. E sends hers.

  Bruce

  PS We have to leave! They’re all hotting up for the Holi festival. This means grinding accordion music all night!

  To Charles Way

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 9 March 1986

  Dear Charlie,

  I had – feeling rather guilty – at one moment thought of getting on a plane and coming back again. But one of my (? unconscious) calculations was that the first productions of On the B.H. were by no means going to be the last. I had an immediate sense, on meeting you and the Made in Wales people, of the rightness of the enterprise: and obviously I was right!752 Many congratulations! I long to hear, and see more. But don’t bother to reply to this, unless there’s something urgent. I shall be here: the above is a better contact for mail – until April 25th, when I’m coming back.

  I had no idea, when I set out to do the current book, what an enormous enterprise I’d let myself in for. I, who liked to think of myself as a kind of miniaturist, am now faced with hundreds and hundreds of chaotic pages. But I think that’s the way it has to be. Every book – though of course not a play – seems to have its length predicated by the opening paragraphs, and one simply has to go on to the bitter end and then take stock of the matter. I do like being out of touch, though. Yours was the first – and welcome! – letter I’ve had in a month or so. I suspect the local P.O. of monkeying with the mail, but we have vaguely kept in touch with the weather in Britain etc . . .

  As always, and again a thousand congratulations and thanks, Bruce

  To Murray Bail

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 11 March 1986

  Dear Murray,

  Hello there! The Fort at Rohet has proved a resounding success. The rooms were cool. I shed my cold. The desk was at the right height. Coffee – real – came at the right moment. There were bicycles to take some exercise. The timeless scenes of Indian life went on from day to day. The arrival of a new species of Siberian duck on the lake and, one morning, flamingoes were about as much as we got in the way of excitement. We went to Jaipur in the car for two days: Jodhpur twice, for the afternoon. Otherwise, a hard slog. I won’t say I’m finished: but the experiment I was dreading so much, and have been putting off for months, is done – and there’s now a lot of book. I’m only capable of functioning away from all the hullaballoo – although I sometimes find myself envying your very calm house in the middle of all that hullaballoo. Considering I now hardly ever set foot in a bookstore, or read literary journals, it’s quite amazing how you and I pick up on the same things. I thought Kolyma Tales753 very wonderful; what I would love to try and get down someday is the rightmindedness of Russians in extreme adversity. Also Ray Carver754 has been a favourite of mine since the first collection came out and a girl who, herself, came from Washington State advised me to get them. He really does make most other American writers look like so much junk. He’s the only one who knows that there is such a thing as prose rhythm, and he has to be the most sensitive observer of the American scene. He’s apparently spawned a troop of imitators, none of them any good. I’m told he’s at work on a big novel, and it’ll be interesting to see.

  [Mario Vargas] Llosa’s quite something, if you get a chance to meet him. Robbe-Grillet755 is something I’ve never taken in.

  I’m off this evening to the hills: a guesthouse with separate chalets in a nature reserve at Bhimtal, owned and run by ancient refugee Czechs.756 E returns to England and her lambs. We shall see.

  Forgive this chaotic note. Hot evening outside. Whirling with mosquitoes. Rohet, alas, has been unbearable for the past week with temperatures in the hundreds.

  Write to England sometime but don’t bother here unless urgent. We are still without our backlog of three months post, and chasing letters round India is not a pastime for me.

  Love from E. Love to Margaret and from me to you both.

  Bruce

  Magnus Bartlett (b.1943) had been the photographer on Bruce and Elizabeth’s trip to Yunnan. Based in Hong Kong, he was the publisher of a series of guides to or around China, including Tibet by Elizabeth Booz. He had persuaded Chatwin to contribute a short piece to a forthcoming illustrated guide to Hong Kong, ‘on a Feng Shui man “doing” the just-finished Norman Foster HSBC building’.

  To Magnus Bartlett

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 12 March 1986

  New Delhi but as from: Homer End, Ipsden, Oxford

  Dear Mag,

  . . . I have, in the past, had requests for just one page of manuscript from well-wishers in the United States. At Rohet, where we were staying, I was often appalled by the way in which our servant would empty the conten
ts of my waste paper basket from the rampart, littering a patch of ground in front of the lake with a kind of papierarie.

  This is not a complaint – and not to be broadcast around – but I don’t think you have any idea of my intense loathing of magazines and magazine editors: there are, of course, individual exceptions, but each case must be judged on its merits. I would like to think that I never have to work for one again.

  I want you to get Ducas757 to get my piece back from the Connoisseur – though they must pay me (to England) the kill fee. And I want the original copy, too. I’m not interested in publishing it, and certainly don’t want him touting it round the New York magazines, thank you. If anyone’s going to do that, I will or my agent will – but I don’t want to get any crossed wires . . .

  Otherwise, nothing dims the memory of Yunnan – and nothing would have been better than my 2 months in Rajasthan – in that I’ve got a terrific lot done. I’m now going to the hills till the end of April – hoping, at last, to break the back of it. All contact had better be through E. in Oxfordshire. She leaves first week in May for the US.

  All the best to you and Paddy, Johnson and Prof Tea.758 The Tibet guide is first rate. I’ve read Elizabeth Booz’s introduction – a masterpiece of tact and common sense. Pictures A1 etc. E. would like to know more of what’s involved vis-à-vis the Silk Road project.759

  B

  To Magnus Bartlett

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]