Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  His parents were already on the Continent in a camper-van, motoring south to their holiday home in Provence, when, says Hugh, ‘Margharita had another of her psychic “There’s something the matter with . . .” moments – this time with Bruce. She stopped and telephoned Elizabeth. The outcome was, they changed their itinerary. “We cancelled our holiday and turned left for Zurich.” ’

  On 12 September, hugely dehydrated and coughing up sputum, Chatwin was helped onto a plane by Elizabeth, Charles and Margharita. ‘He came very near to dying on the flight,’ says Elizabeth who accompanied him back to Heathrow. There, an ambulance waited to drive him to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford.

  At 3.34 p.m. Chatwin was admitted to the John Warin emergency ward for infectious diseases. He was identified simply as ‘an HIV positive 46-year-old travel writer’. Two days later, the ward registrar Dr Richard Bull wrote in his medical notes: ‘Patient told he is seropositive, has pre-AIDS but true AIDS not yet certain.’ Chatwin would cling to that uncertainty.

  On 26 September, from a biopsy, the Radcliffe laboratory identified as Penicillium Marneffei a mould fungus that is a natural pathogen of the bamboo rat in South Asia. It was then known only, as Dr Bull wrote in his report ‘in Thai and Chinese farmers’. Not long from those parts, this discovery cheered Chatwin, who metabolised his illness into something rich and strange.

  His Evaluation Sheet reveals that while doctors did discuss with Chatwin ‘that he may have AIDS’ – and made Elizabeth aware ‘he has not a good prognosis ’ – the exact nature of his illness was concealed from Charles, Margharita and Hugh: ‘Family to be told he has pneumonia.’

  ‘To me it was all very simple,’ says Hugh Chatwin, who, in common with Charles and Margharita, would remain in ignorance of Chatwin’s illness and sexuality until his last months. ‘He would not let down his father.’

  In Zurich, when he first received his diagnosis, Chatwin had asked Elizabeth to keep the news from his family. ‘He minded terribly,’ she says. ‘He always thought he could tell his mother but not his father. “I don’t want him to think badly of me.” He hoped he could hold out until they had found a cure.’

  At this stage, the doctors preferred not to make known the result of the brain scan. This revealed no deleterious effect upon the left side of his brain, the generative side; but some damage to the right side could be expected to impair his ability to reason.

  To Gertrude Chanler

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | ‘but still in hospital’ | [13 October 1986]

  My dear Gertrude,

  So very many thanks for your sweet letter: this is the first one I have written since ‘the collapse’.

  Trust me to pick up a disease never recorded among Europeans. The fungus that has attacked my bone marrow has been recorded among 10 Chinese peasants (China is presumably where I got it), a few Thais and a killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia. The great test comes when we find out whether I can go on producing red blood cells on my own.

  That is the worst of the news! Otherwise things are very cheery. Your eldest daughter has become a real nurse. I am very well looked after: really, our National Health Service for all its faults is a wonder. Where else can you get the benefit of the first rank research brains for free?

  I cannot tell you how grateful I am for your support when I was in Zurich. It meant so much to me because I was beginning to panic. I went to Zurich thinking I’d picked up some Indian amoeba. Concentrating so hard on the book I had no idea how ill I was, but I never expected this! I bought a lot of watercolours and was intending to go up into the mountains to paint, but one day I could walk, the next not.

  By the time this reaches you, you’ll be out of the eye operation.780 As you say, one does steadily fall to bits, but you are so wonderfully brave and seem to take everything in your stride as I must learn to do.

  With all my love and a thousand thanks.

  Bruce

  To Ninette Dutton

  In an Oxford hospital but as from Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 17 October 1986

  Dearest Nin,

  Lovely to get your letter, Cheered me up a lot. Tisi told me, very discreetly that there was someone in your life – and so it should be. I’m delighted for you. This is a scribble written flat on my back – because O misery – I have caught in China an extremely rare (i.e no white man has had it) fungus of the bone marrow which as you know produces red corpuscles. I was in Switzerland trying to recuperate from having finished and delivered the book when the thing struck like a whirlwind. E. came out and we flew home just in time. The hospital staff thought it a wonder I lived through the night. But after 5 weeks of drugs, blood transfusion and expert care, there is talk of my going home. But alas, no wintering in Australia! because my blood has to be monitored constantly. So that is the news from this end. Something I never dreamed of, but will survive. E. is being marvellous. Much love, Bruce

  To Charles Way

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 25 October 1986

  Dear Charlie,

  Good for you! Of course in your hands I thoroughly approve of the BBC adaptation.781 The one thing I slightly dread is that they choose readers who are unaware of what a Welsh – and more particularly what a Border accent is. They should be sat down for an hour or so in a pub in Hay-on-Wye and then they’d know for sure. The radio Book at Bedtime for In Patagonia was so horrible that I threw my portable radio away and refused to listen to any more instalments. All faked-up, Englishjoking South America. Really chilling!

  I’m thrilled to think that I may, after all, see the play. Apparently, in Hereford at least it was sold out . . .782

  As always B

  To Murray Bail

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 3 November 1986

  Dear Murray,

  Where am I? you ask. The fact is I very nearly croaked. In China I have to have caught a very rare fungus of the bone marrow: so rare that it is not described in medical literature and only known to 10 peasants in Western China (now dead) and a single killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia. I am, therefore, an A1 medical curiosity. I’d been feeling rather low all summer, but not that low and thought, naively, that it was probably some Indian amoeba from the drinking water at Rohet. I finished the book – title The Songlines – which, to all the publishers distaste, I insist on calling a novel. I handed in the manuscript and left the very next day for Switzerland, thinking that a combination of mountain air and walks would revive me, and that first rate medicine was always at hand. Fat chance! The next thing I knew, on my first day in Zurich was that I could hardly walk along the street. I found by a miracle the great expert in tropical diseases783 and the moment he looked at my blood, he exclaimed ‘I cannot understand why you’re alive.’ Then the fun started. E. flew out and flew me home, to an Oxford hospital, where I was not expected to live through the night. It was not unpleasant. I was hallucinating like mad and was convinced that the view from my window – a car park, a wall and the tops of some trees – were an enormous painting by Paolo Veronese.784 Can we ever escape ‘Art’? Then roughly six weeks of blood transfusions, and a drug that had to be administered intravenously and made me feel terrible. I’m out now; spend most of the day in bed. But the doctors are pleased with me – so far! – and although my legs are still numb from the knees down I can totter about half a mile. But no Australian visit. They want to monitor my blood count once a week for at least a year (they may relent, depending on my ‘progress’). The real test comes when they take off the second anti-fungal drug (a pill, Thank God!). Then we shall really see. Sorry to weary you with this doleful and ego-centric tale, but the self is all I can think of. Reading early tales of Gogol in new edition of the Garnett translation, Chicago Univ press (2 vols). But this morning I’ve employed a researcher to begin a new work.

  Love to M[argaret]. E is wonderful at coping.

  As ever B

  To Nicholas Shakespeare

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [November 1986]

  My
dear Nick,

  Yes. Quite a drama! A fungus of the bone marrow that destroyed all my red blood corpuscles. Known only among 10 Chinese peasants and the corpse of a killer whale cast up on the shores of Arabia. Obviously , therefore, I caught it in China last winter. I’d no idea I was so ill: because I was finishing the book (now in proof) I blocked it out almost completely and went straight off to Switzerland. The ‘thing’ struck 2 days later and, within five I couldn’t walk. However, the right drug was found. Be lovely to see you sometime. Do give a call one evening.

  Bruce

  To Jonathan Miller785

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [November 1986]

  I am very serious about Bajazet.786 I believe there’s some way that Racine can be made to work for a non-French audience through being declaimed/intoned in the bravura passages with the help of music. Having just finished a new book, I’m relaxing. So you call me, Bruce

  To Ninette Dutton

  9am | Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 13 November 1986

  Dearest Nin,

  An hour ago E. and I were complaining that the Greek (Mount Hymettus, my eye!) honey we had bought at vast expense tasted of precisely nothing, when the postman arrived with your package.787 We had a piece of toast each, in my bedroom, at home – and finished our breakfast with something quite delicious. Thank you and bless you. It hardly leaked at all: all we got were sticky fingers when opening it.

  I’m at home feeling quite normal and, though I tire quite easily, I had yesterday an eight-hour working day with the copy editor from Cape’s. We had a fearful struggle changing back to the original the changes made by the Americans to the copy. They refuse, for example, to admit use of the pronoun ‘which’, replacing it invariably by ‘that’ – which as we know makes prose so flat. Anyway despite my slightly numb and wobbly legs – apparently inevitable when one’s legs were reduced to spindles – we went for a short holiday in Cornwall788 – a change for E. who, after bringing me an extra hot meal to the hospital every day for six weeks, was, to say the least, exhausted.

  I have got to the stage when I’m fed up with reading and longing to start some new work. I’ve read Bob H[ughes]’s blockbuster The Fatal Shore: it has a kind of Tolstoyan sweep to it. What a tale! As fascinating about the mentality of the English in the 18/19th centuries as of the origins of Oz. Other news is that Werner Herzog intends to start filming the Viceroy of Ouidah (title change to Cobra Verde) in Feb. The script deviates wildly from the book: but so what! Precisely as it should be to make a good film.789

  With much love from E. and I, Bruce

  To Charles Way

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 14 November 1986

  The BBC would want L[ouis] and B[enjamin]’s intimate thoughts – and how corny they must want them to be. The point being that the writer, if he is not brought up in that milieu, cannot write about what he cannot know – or occasionally guess at. I don’t envy you the task. Am out of hospital and proposing to work today for a couple of hours, as ever Bruce

  To Derek Hill

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 18 November 1986

  My dearest Derek,

  I’m terribly upset for you about your brother. One’s hold on life is so extremely tenuous; but when the blow comes, nothing, it seems, can lessen its effect.

  I feel fairly normal: and was up to cooking blinis last night for a huge pot of caviare that someone brought to the hospital at a time when I was being fed intravenously. We decided to save it for Elizabeth’s birthday. The only trouble is my legs which don’t function as they should: not surprising in that they were spindles attached to knobbly knees for 2½ months.

  To Cary and Edith Welch

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 12 December 1986

  My dear Dahlinks,

  What a lovely surprise! Your letter which has come this morning is about half as long as the telex I got from Simon and Schuster four years back in which my present publisher, Elizabeth Sifton, was accused of enticing yours truly away from their incompetent clutches. I also have to report that when, in the summer, obviously a prey to my malady, I turned arsonist and destroyed heaps of old notebooks, card indexes, correspondence, I also found a whole boxful of your letters going back to the early 60’s, and now doubtless a treasure to be hoarded.

  Tell me, did J. J. Klejeman790 really dump all those antiquities in the East River? I’d like to know if, and under what circumstances, he did so. I’m at present at work on a tale – a Hoffmann-like tale set in Prague – in which a collector of Meissen porcelain (a man I met there in 1967)791 systematically destroys his collection on his deathbed, so that it will not pass into the hands of the National Museum.

  My illness was a dramatic episode. I have always known – from a fortune-teller or from my own instinctive promptings? – that I would be terribly ill in middle-age, and would recover. All summer, while I was putting the final touches to the book, I was obviously sickening, but preferred to put it out of my mind – even though, on a sweltering summer day, I’d be wrapped in shawls beside the Aga scribbling onto a yellow pad. I imagined I’d recover if only I could reach some mountain pastures, and so gaily set off for Switzerland: only to find, next morning, that I couldn’t drag myself a hundred yards down the sidewalk. Obviously, something was seriously wrong. Thinking I was prey to some Indian amoeba, I consulted a specialist in tropical medicine, who took one look at my blood count, and, next day, said amiably: ‘I cannot understand why you’re alive. You have no red blood corpuscles left.’ He failed to make a diagnosis,792 having run through a complete set of tests; and Elizabeth came to fetch me home in a definitely dying condition. I have a vague recollection of being wheeled to the plane; another, of the ambulance at London airport and then a blank. By the time I got to Oxford I was not expected to last the night. I did incidentally have the ‘dark night experience’, followed by the Pearly Gates. In my delirium I had visions of being in a colourful and vaguely medieval court where women offered me grapes on tazzas. At one point I called to Elizabeth, ‘Where’s King Arthur? He was here a minute ago.’

  Anyway, although I was on life support, they still couldn’t find the cause until, on the fourth day, the young immunologist rushed into my room and said ‘Have you, in the past five years, been in a bats’ cave? We think you’ve got a fungus of the bone marrow, which starts off growing on bat shit.’ Yes. I had been in bat caves, in Java and in Australia. But when they grew the fungus, as one grows a culture for yoghurt, it was not mine after all. The most expert mycologists were consulted: samples were flown to the U.S., and the answer, which finally emerged, was that I had, indeed, a fungus of the marrow, but one which was known only from the corpse of a killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia and from ten healthy Chinese peasants, all of whom had died. Had I been consorting with killer-whales? Or with Chinese peasants? ‘Peasants,’ I said decisively. Indeed, we had. Last December we were in Western Yunnan, following the traces of the Austro-American botanist, Joseph Rock, whose book The Kingdom of the Na-Khi was admired by Ezra Pound.793 We went to peasant feasts, slept in peasant houses794, inhaled the dust of peasant winnowing; and it must be in Yunnan that I inhaled the particles of fungal dust, which set the malady in motion. I lost half my weight; came out in lumps and scabs, and looked entirely like the miniature of Akbar’s courtier in the Bodleian whose name I’ve forgotten.795 I had a fearsome drug administered on the drip constantly for six weeks. I had blood transfusions, and in the end I made a rather startling recovery: at least, one which my doctors did not expect. It’ll mean a change in one’s life, though. Apparently, one can’t ever quite get rid of a fungus like this, so I shall be on pills indefinitely; will have to report from time to time, and not alas go travelling into dangerously exotic places. The last stipulation I fully intend to ignore. In the meantime, rather than face the sodden gloom of an English winter, we are setting out for Grasse where we have borrowed a flat and where I hope to bash out my tale of the Czechoslovakian porcelain collector.

  I must stop
now. We have to go to London, and have a date with Leigh Bruce,796 who is collecting the keys of my flat for Clem and Jessie [Wood] to stay in over Christmas. Talked to H[oward H[odgkin] for the first time in ages last night, and may see him this afternoon. Things turn full circle.

  Will write again from Grasse with address.

  much love Bruce

  E. sends hers, too, to you and E[dith]

  Nice to hear news of your Knellingtons, and also of the Tizzerets. I was intending to call on the Tizzer [George Ortiz] but for reasons described above failed to do so. Now I shall go down to the library where your scroll will join its brothers.

  To Pam Bell

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 15 December 1986

  Dearest Pam,

  This is an interim p/c to thank you for your letter and to confirm that I am much, much better. Quite a turn, though. I was flown from Switzerland in a state of collapse; was not expected to last the night – and got a definite glimpse of the Pearly Gates. My best to your Ma. Much love, Bruce XXX

  The ‘flat’ near Grasse where Chatwin and Elizabeth now went to stay was in fact the Chateau de Seillans, an eleventh – century fort at the edge of a 60-foot cliff, belonging to Shirley Conran, the best-selling author and mother of Jasper. Chatwin had known Shirley since the late 1970s, first meeting her at a Hatchards Author-of-the-Year party. ‘Suddenly this fair-headed chap was at my elbow and I said “What do you think is the best way to see a country?”“By boot.” My first impression was that he was a Yorkshireman and he’d said “By boat.” “Suppose it’s a place like Switzerland . . .?” ’ She described Chatwin, to whom she bore a resemblance, as ‘the older brother I never dreamed of having’, and invited him to convalesce at her house in the south of France. From December 1986 he based himself when abroad at the Chateau de Seillans.