Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  Dear Magnus,

  Postscript to last screed. I’m told by people here who’ve worked for them, that the editorial staff of the Connoisseur (the word is enough to make one squirm) are deeply bonkers: and that to do anything for them, even at a long distance, is to drive oneself into the looneybin with them. So please get the text back!

  B

  To John Kasmin

  The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | March 1986

  Have moved up into the hills. Old English tea plantation now run as a hotel guest house by Czech adventurer type, ex inhabitant of Punta Arenas in Chile, refugee from Germany in the 30’s for having thrown a knife at Hitler. B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  c/o Smetacek | The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | 27 March 1986

  Dearest E,

  Quick note because some U.S. Embassy people are going down to Delhi and will post it, a saving of five days or so. Yes. It’s very nice here: not too cold. I have a house to myself, with a verandah and Banks’s rose clambering over it, a view of wheatfields etc. On the mountain above lives a charming sadhu, the father of the Forest, whose business it is to protect the trees. Old Smetacek has gone to Germany for four months. Sounds an incredible character. Hounded from Germany for throwing a knife at Hitler;760 Chilean citizen (resident of Punta Arenas, where else?). Ended up in Calcutta during the war, and married a Muslim girl through correspondence column in the newspaper. I think I’ll stay on as long as possible. There’s no point in lumping oneself to Manali, or even Nepal, when the Kumaon is obviously very fascinating. Badrinath is a two-day bus ride: besides this is Jim Corbett761 country – and as I’m writing about man-eaters I appear to have landed in the right spot. Below the sadhu’s cave there is a leopard lair, but the animal is supposed to be very friendly. The Smetacek dogs though, if you take them on a walk, are inclined at certain places to get jittery.762

  xxx B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  c/o Smetacek | The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | 10 April 1986

  Dear E.,

  Well, it’s still very nice here but the heat increases each day with hot dusty winds coming from the plain. I’ve done some very good work. The cut-up method does actually solve the problem. I’ve just been writing the tramp and the Arctic tern. I’m not going to finish needless to say, but I’ve done all the back-writing i.e. there are now few gaps in the narrative.

  I’m not quite sure what to do. I’d like to go on a trek before returning and in a week or so I’ll be in the mood to pack the book in for a bit. I can go north of here into the Kumaon Himalaya with Peter S[metacek], youngest of the sons, or, I suppose I could go up to Nepal. But Peter has been ill with measles and the after-effects are slow. Manali, I gather, is out of the question. Chandigarh is cut off by the army: you can’t get to Simla, and they anticipate that no one will go to Kashmir the whole year. The situation is apparently quite dreadful, much worse than anyone anticipated. I certainly intend to be back by May 1st or so . . .

  Will you tell [John] Pawson I do want to be able to use the flat in May and June. None of that hanging round waiting for them to finish.

  Nice birds here on my terrace. A Himalayan magpie, blue and white with a tail 2 feet long. The scarlet minivet, the Himalayan barbet and the funniest whistling thrushes that look like Barbara Cartland.763 Then pheasants . . .

  The V & A story764 . . . just shows you. Things are both tough and vulnerable but no safer in a museum than in some old Rajasthan fort.

  This letter is going to be posted in England by some friends of S[unil] who are flying to London tomorrow night. Apparently the cheapest ticket now is Air France, but with a 6-hour stopover in Paris. I shall try and get Vayadoot765 down to Delhi because that Trunk Road is a nightmare to travel down, to say nothing of the cost . . .

  My Dad has given us 6000 quid each from family capital: useful for paying off the mortgage: but I told them I’ll only accept it providing they can call for it back if needed.

  Must stop because they’re going.

  xxx with love B

  PS I have an idea. I should like to go on holiday in Turkey in September with the car and windsurfer. So don’t make too many plans.

  ‘We’ve just had bad news from India.’ Back at Homer End Elizabeth was telephoned in April by Dinah Swayne, who ran the office for Penelope Betjeman’s trekking tours in the Western Himalayas. ‘I thought of Bruce immediately. Why do they know? But it was Penelope.’ Penelope Betjeman had died on 11 April while leading a tour in the Kulu valley. Soon afterwards, Chatwin telephoned from India.‘It was the only time I’d known him in tears,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He was shattered.’ In Wales, during his separation from Elizabeth, Penelope had become, he said, ‘a sort of mother to me’.

  To Candida Lycett Greene766

  Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | [April 1986]

  PENELOPE DIED SITTING UPRIGHT LAUGHING AT HER PONY WHICH HAD STRAYED INTO A WHEATFIELD STOP IN ACCORDANCE WITH INDIAN CUSTOM HER ASHES WERE DIVIDED INTO TWO PARTS STOP ONE PART WAS SCATTERED AT KHANAG WHERE SHE DIED STOP THE SECOND PART INTO THE BEAS RIVER THIS MORNING TEN DAYS AFTER HER DEATH

  To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

  Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | 24 April 1986

  My dear Paddy and Joan,

  I got your card at the same moment as news of Penelope’s death – and decided to go up to Kulu at once. Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carried her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the R[iver] Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with Om mani padme hum767. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oakleaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.

  The doctor, who was with her on the trek, gave ‘heart-attack’ as the cause of death: but the word ‘attack’ is far too strong for what happened. If ever there was a ‘natural death’, this was it. All morning she was in the best of spirits – although people in the party said she was already beginning to dread going back to England, to pack up her house etc. Around 10, she called in on her favourite Pahari temple. The priest, who knows her, welcomed her to join in the puja.768 She received the blessing and then rode on towards a place called Khanag. There she dismounted to rest, laughed (and scolded) at her pony which had strayed into a wheat field, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.

  Although it’s nowhere finished, I had – only two days before – been writing the final chapters of the book: of how Aborigines, when they feel death close, will make a kind of pilgrimage (sometimes a distance of thousands of miles) back to their ‘conception site’, their ‘centre’, the place where they belong. In the middle of nowhere in the desert I was taken to see three very old Aborigines, happily waiting to die on three metal bedsteads, side by side in the shade of an ironwood tree.

  Penelope, as I’m sure you know, would cheerfully discuss the pros and cons of going back to India to die: she could never quite work out how to arrange it. Over the past year or so, she would discuss, quite rationally, the building of her new ‘Anglo-Indian’ bungalow in Llandrindod Wells;769 I don’t think she ever believed in it. She had sworn never, ever to head another trek to Kulu, but when the offer came, her instinct must have told her to accept.

  I’m writing this in a smoking tea-house waiting for the bus to take me and the Tibetan porters on a Penelope Memorial Walk.

  Over the years I’ve heard so much about Kulu from her. On my first night, in the village behind Kranti’s house, there was a dance of young boys in pleated white skirts (like evzones)770 with cockades of monal pheasant feathers. The silver trumpets looked entirely Celtic, and the village houses with their dragon finials and mica-glinting roofs could easily be the Heorot771 in Beowulf.

  I said, months ago, that I’d go to Elizabeth’s sister’s wedding in Upstate New York on May 10. Since Delhi is about half
way round the world, I’m going to slip off to Japan for a week (I have a Japanese publisher!). Then to England – at last! I do hope this catches you before you leave and that I’ll find you both in London around 20 May.

  Much love

  Bruce

  To John Pawson

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 30 May 1986

  1. Part of my anxiety about the shower stems from a previous experience. For my (or rather Christopher Gibbs’) cubby-hole in Albany, John Prizeman772 installed just such a shower with a zinc tray underneath. That, however, did not prevent it leaking and, over 10 years or so, causing dry rot damage to the tune of some thirty thousand quid – for which we were mercifully insured, but it did cause a very unpleasant scene.

  2. [Can you ask] your people to rip out the existing shower as soon as possible or at least to make sure there are no drips. I also, as you may remember, have had an altercation with a dreadful woman downstairs over a leak when the plumbing was being put in.

  3. We have used, very successfully, in the big room here an off-white which is Sanderson’s 7-13 P, and I would like to repeat the same in the flat.

  Otherwise all is well. I’m sorry I didn’t come over: but with a lot of friends from abroad in London, I was on the run. Work on the book recommences this morning.

  All my love to Caius,773 Bruce Chatwin

  To Sunil Sethi

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 25 June 1986

  Dear Sunilito,

  I have you terribly on my conscience: the truth is, at the end of the day, when I’ve written myself into a standstill, I develop such a horror of words that to write a simple thank-you letter is worse than Tantalus rolling the stone. It absolutely goes without saying how incredibly grateful we are, to you and Shalini, for ‘the winter’, no less.

  I have not been entirely idle on your behalf, however. I have talked to Shelley Wanger at House and Garden who is very interested in the Sarabhai house774 – and positively wishes you’d write that famous letter. I have made tentative enquiries about the most discreet of ‘house photographers’ [Derry Moore] and believe he would love to do it, and work with you. So, the ball is in your court!

  I have also been to Smythsons.775 There seem to me to be two possibilities: one an elongated address book with a green leather binding and space for oodles of numbers; the other a slightly more portentous affair with marbled end papers, less space, and more gilding. The choice is yours. Either’s fine by me. But how to get it out to you?

  The book creaks on, at snail’s pace: but it is some book. I’m not too discouraged because it really is about something. E. is well, and obviously cock-a-hoop to be back among the sheep: not without the usual attendant dramas!

  Japan was the nastiest place I’ve ever been, except, of course, to where I then went, the USA. The most decadent corrupt country in the world, well on the way to ruin, if you ask me. Europe on the other hand strikes me as being rather less hopeless: certainly with the Libyan bombing,776 the scales have fallen from people’s eyes. Paris without Americans was unbelievably charming – and the French, to my surprise, were revelling in their absence.

  No possibility, I suppose, of your visit here!

  Much love, to you and Shalini

  Bruce

  To Ninette Dutton

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 26 June 1986

  Dearest Nin,

  I’m sorry for the apparently endless delay in writing. The fact is that I’ve been straining to get the first draft finished: and by the end of the day, the nausea for words – even words to one’s dearest! – becomes positively stifling. Coupled with the hideous complications of our post – I may have told you, three or four months’ worth, presumably scattered somewhere on the streets of Kathmandu.

  The news – no longer new – was that our best of all possible friends Penelope Betjeman, dismounted her horse while leading a trek in the Western Himalaya, sat down to rest on a mossy bank covered with violets and wild strawberries, hooted with laughter at her pony as the Tibetan boy tried to lead it up the path and, then, as he looked up, he was in the nick of time to see her curl up like a child going to sleep. Perhaps half a second and that was that. I was starting out on a trek of my own. We had saddled up, brought the provisions, when I bought The Times of India and found a perfectly beautiful third leader describing the death of the daughter of the Founder of the Modern Indian Army, Lord Chetwode. It was called ‘Journey to the beginning’. She had been there with her mother in 1933 and couldn’t really think of anywhere else as home. Her ashes, in accordance with Hindu custom, were half saved in a brass pot: so ten days later, I and her friend Kranti Singh stood on a rock in the river Beas, her favourite river in the world, and tipped her in. The ashes, I have to say, were not like the Western world’s idea of ashes. They were bits of skull and bouquets of budding English oak from the ex-Resident’s garden, the pheasant-eye narcissus and Tulipa cashmeriana. Anyway they all went into the rushing snow-water and we let out a loud Penelope-ish ‘ha! ha!’ – and that was that!

  After leaving Kulu, I went down to Delhi by plane with a vague idea in my head that since, in a week’s time, I had to be at my sister-in-law’s wedding, it might be possible to make a stopover in Japan. Which it was, and which I’m afraid I hated. Such a treadmill, and so poisonously ingrown, that after the exhilarating breezes currently coming out of China, I profess myself a Sinophile and a Japanophobe (if that’s a word!). Not that rather wonderful things didn’t keep happening to me: but the $96 to the airport with no cheaper way, struck this mean old bastard with horror.

  Then the USA where as you’ll know the really pleasant surprise was seeing Tisi [Dutton] about the only one too! What a madhouse! I was completely put off kilter by a friend of mine777 for whom I had said, three years ago and in a moment of extreme weakness, that I’d write an article on her Tuscan tower, where I sometimes write. She needless to say wanted it in House and Garden so she could rent it to the rich. I was left holding the can, with an ultimatum that it had to be done by the end of the week: so all my days and quite a lot of the nights was consumed writing this wretched piece, which because it was so wretched was inordinately difficult to do. Alas! our planned lunch with T[isi] fell through. I hope she does get going with Bob and Victoria Hughes.778 They were here last weekend, reading the book too, with snorts and guffaws, so that was also quite encouraging. Robyn D[avidson] and Salman are in a split-up situation of high oriental drama. The passions of the Thousand and One nights have been generated and it’ll take quite a long time for the episode to simmer down . . . must end.

  Elizabeth sends fondest love and I, B. When’s the American lap?

  PS Invitation to the Perth Festival in Feb. Think I’ll miss. We may have a bit of time then: and if so will come anyway.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HOMER END: 1986-8

  When in India in April Chatwin had visited Penelope Betjeman’s pyre in a bushy glade below Khanag. As he sat, pausing for breath, at the top of the Jalori pass, an old sadhu sitting outside a shrine had asked to tell his fortune. ‘The old man looked at his palm and blanched,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Bruce got a terrible intimation of mortality.’

  Since his return to Homer End in May he had suffered from night sweats and asthma. Over the summer, he developed a hoarse voice and noticed ‘some vague skin lumps’. Looking tired and drawn, he worked hard on his book, determined to finish it before finding out what his illness was.

  One hot day early in August 1986 Elizabeth drove Chatwin to Reading. She wrote to her mother: ‘On the way back B had a horrible attack when he started to go blue & was just gasping. He can only go for little slow walks & is always cold & sits wrapped up with a heater on all the time. He’s very weak & looks awful & sleeps a lot. He’s only got a tiny bit more of the book to do & most of it is at two typists, one seems to be fast and the other very slow. Maybe by the end of this week he’ll be able to go away. We think Switzerland wd be the best place.’

  He finished The Songlines ten days
later, 17 years and 3 months after signing the initial contract.

  To Jean-Claude Fasquelle779

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 16 August 1986

  Dear Jean-Claude, Many thanks for your letter. Yes. A new manuscript exists. There’ll probably be some teething problems with it, but the moment a clear copy is available, you shall have it. French title, Les Voies-Chansons. This is an idea I’ve been mulling over for about 20 years and, now it’s done, I feel completely done in. My next plan is to come and learn Russian at the Confrérie Jésuite Orthodoxe à Meudon! When and as I feel a bit stronger.

  As always, Bruce

  Too weak to work with Elisabeth Sifton on the manuscript in New York, Chatwin arranged to meet her in Zurich where he flew on 17 August. The next day he was admitted to a clinic in Muhleba chs trasse ‘constantly coughing up and with acute diarrhoea’, according to the report of Dr Keller, the Swiss doctor who treated him. By the time Sifton arrived, Chatwin was back in the Hotel Opera where he had booked her a room. They worked on The Songlines every morning for five days, and then he said: ‘Now I must get well. You can go now.’ Sifton refused to leave until he had telephoned Elizabeth. When Elizabeth turned up on 1 September, he was unable to move, although he did manage, two days later, to write a note to Deborah Rogers: ‘As for the cover there is a black and white engraving of an aboriginal family by – God bless and trust him to see – William Blake.’