Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  262 Barbara (‘Llama’) Hutchinson (1911 – 89) m. 1st 3rd Baron Rothschild, 2nd Rex Warner, 3rd Nico Hadjikyriakou-Ghika, painter and sculptor; mother of Miranda Rothschild.

  263 Ferdy Mayne (1916-98) owner of Kyance Mews studio leased by Chatwin; MI5 informant and German actor, famous for playing Count von Krolock in Roman Polanski’s 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers.

  264 A bargeboard from a Polynesian hut that had belonged to the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who used it as a bedhead. On 30 June 1968 E.C. wrote to her mother: ‘Bruce has swapped the Greek head for a fantastic piece of Maori sculpture, for which he has already been offered more than twice what he paid. It belonged to Sarah Bernhardt: she brought it back in 1902 when she made a tour of New Zealand & she bought it from an already old collection then.’

  265 London antiquities dealer, sentenced in January 2005 to two years in prison; he served seven months.

  266 Framer.

  267 Nomadic shepherds inhabiting the northern Greek mountains and central Balkans.

  268 Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and her younger sister Lee Radzwill. E.C.: ‘Derek knew everybody.’

  269 Monica, the dressmaker, had married a policeman.

  270 To cover running costs, the Chatwins had loaned Holwell Farm to Linda Wroth, a girlfriend of John Michell. Chatwin had walked with her in Wales; on 13 December 1969 he described Linda in his diary as having ‘the wide staring intense eyes of the American intellectual initiate’.

  271 Desmond Fitzgerald married Olda Willes in 1970.

  272 Sandy Martin, dealer and one-time partner with John Hewett.

  273 Union des Transports Aériens, French airline.

  274 Silk from Afghanistan.

  275 Margharita had made Chatwin a tweed overcoat. E.C.: ‘She did eventually make him one that fitted.’

  276 Sally Perry (1911-91), m. 1945 Gerald Grosvenor, 4th Duke of Westminster (1907 – 67); and companion of Henry Somerset, 10th Duke of Beaufort (1900-84), Master of Queen’s Hounds; neighbour of Chatwins at Wickwar Manor.

  277 Lenny Ballinger, the Chatwins’ tenant farmer.

  278 ‘It’s a Nomad Nomad Nomad NOMAD world’ appeared in Vogue, December 1970.

  279 Mr Ball, known as Canon Ball.

  280 William and Rosalie Fergusson, neighbours at Holwell.

  281 John Michell (1933-2009), English author. The View Over Atlantis (1969) popularised ley-lines, ‘referring to ancient stone circles, menhirs and graveyards which are laid out in lines across Britain,’ as Chatwin wrote in The Songlines. Chatwin walked with him in Cornwall and Wales.

  282 Keith Steadman, horticulturalist neighbour at Wickwar.

  283 Hercules Seghers (1589-1638), Dutch painter. Cary Welch owned a Seghers oil painting of a skull.

  284 Miniature drawing of a sikh grandee.

  285 Giant hogweed. E.C.: ‘Bruce thought you’d get poisoned if you stood next to it.’

  286 Maori shell.

  287 E.C.: ‘He really didn’t know anything about animals.’ Chatwin’s notebook: ‘Hell is a house – house dog is Cerberus.’

  288 E.C.: ‘I didn’t.’

  289 Fred Mewis, the Chatwins’ gardener.

  290 Anthony and Doe Bowlby lived at the Old Rectory in Ozleworth.

  291 Elizabeth’s trust at the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh.

  292 16 November.

  293 Willow plantation.

  294 Polly Devlin, journalist, married to Andy Garnett, entrepreneur, neighbours at Bradley Court near Alderley.

  295 Independent American publishing house, founded 1936.

  296 A stoneware firelighter soaked in kerosene.

  297 ‘I love her dearly but she is impossible to be with for longer than two hours at a stretch.’ James Lees-Milne diary, 5 September 1972.

  298 E.C.: ‘I still have it.’

  299 Ajit Mukherjee’s The Art of Tantra (1970) generated an interest in Tantric Art.

  300 Elms & Sons, the Chatwins’ builders.

  301 E.C.: ‘The water was perfectly all right. The Etheridges, who owned the Lodge after us, had it tested.’

  302 E.C.: ‘I went back to Bombay twice to meet Bruce because he said he was coming. I traipsed back, driving hundreds of miles, and he didn’t come, ever.’

  303 E.C.: ‘A half-Siamese ginger cat completely focussed on me. When I left, he went mad and never recovered.’

  304 E.C.: ‘The sherbet spoon was mine.’

  305 Valerian (b.15 December 1970), 3rd Baron Freyberg; ‘my godson and perennial favourite’, Chatwin described him in an inscription to On the Black Hill.

  306 Lady Dorothy (‘Coote’) Lygon (1912 – 2000); 4th d. of 7th Earl Beauchamp: ‘I was working at Christie’s in Old Masters, making a card index based on early picture sales. I was on the second floor at Blomfield Road, Bruce on the first. He had a beautiful brown silk robe which he said he had bought from nomads in Central Africa. I was very jealous of it. It had voluminous, big sleeves, so he’d put his hands up the opposite sleeve and keep himself warm.’

  307 Pale blue silk in geometrical squares and triangles; it had belonged to the Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

  308 Arthur Bamber Gascoigne (b.1935), author and broadcaster; m. 1963 Christina Ditchburn. The Great Moghuls is still in print.

  309 Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 – 1970), Italian modernist poet.

  310 Neighbours on spur of the valley.

  311 Alun Gwynne-Jones (b.1919), Minister in Foreign Office 1964-70; Baron Chalfont from 1964.

  312 Dealer. E.C.: ‘We lost the boomerang when we moved.’

  313 Keeper of Indian and South-East Asian art at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

  314 E.C.: ‘Penelope had lost her camera. The reason we went so slowly is because she would say, “I want the evening light” and spend two nights in every place.’

  315 E.C.: ‘An Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 that I found in Hyderabad. It had quite a lot of holes from silverfish.’

  316 Made of wood and bone and lacquer. E.C.: ‘I bought them.’

  317 Susanna Chancellor m. 1958 Nicholas Johnston (b.1929) architect.

  318 On 20 January 1971, 200,000 British postal workers began a seven-week strike.

  319 Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross (1904-76), author, broadcaster, specialist in the Ottoman Empire. ‘The dearest old thing in the world,’ according to James Lees-Milne.

  320 Her wrist.

  321 Chatwin’s article on Lorenz did not appear in the New York Review of Books until December 1979. He was to interview Lorenz in July 1974 for the Sunday Times magazine at his home in Altenberg outside Vienna.

  322 Gloria El-Fadil el Mahdi, Chatwin’s former girlfriend; her son Sedig (Chatwin’s godson); and Da’ad Boumaza, Miranda’s daughter.

  323 Arshile Gorky (1904 – 48), Armenian-born painter and Magouche’s first husband.

  324 Introductory commission.

  325 Michel Straus had worked at Sotheby’s with Chatwin in the Impressionist Department.

  326 Miranda Rothschild. She and Akbar became lovers.

  327 Décoration océanienne, André Portier and François Poncetton (1931).

  328 John Elliott, New York dealer.

  329 Jeremy Fry (1924 – 2005), artist, inventor, philanthropist.

  330 Natasha Litvin (b.1919), pianist, m. 1941 poet Stephen Spender; had a house at Les Baux. From Chatwin’s notebook: ‘A description of the Stephen Spenders. Il y aura chez lui des personnes qui vous connaissez parait-il trés bien, la femme joue au piano et écrit un livre sur les sensations auditives. L’homme est peintre. J’ai oublié le nom . . . J-Claude-Roché.’

  331 Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959), Dadaist whose semi-autobiographical novel Jules et Jim was filmed in 1962 by François Truffaut.

  332 ‘Rotting Fruit’ exists in rough draft, but not the letters. Edward Lucie-Smith heard it several times over ‘and laughed till I was nearly sick each time I heard it . . . There was going to be a mausoleum in which this rich American was going to be buried with his Mom
, with a “bronze dog” reposing at their feet.’

  333 Hiram Winterbotham (1908-90), Glos textile manufacturer, who changed his name to inherit the business of Hunt & Winterbotham in Old Bond Street; had moved to France, near Apt, with his ex-guardsman servant.

  334 Roché recorded birdsong that he sold commercially on cassettes. Requiring someone to say the names in English, he asked Chatwin – whose voice enunciates the names of 406 separate species.

  335 Noam Chomsky (b.1928), American linguist and political activist.

  336 Douglas Cooper (1911 – 84), heir to Australian sheep-dip fortune and Cubist art collector who lived at Château de Castille.

  337 Chatwin is probably referring here to Lorenz, not Chomsky. His long 1971 article ‘Excavating Lorenz’ was never published; although he reworked many of its ideas into his 1979 review of Lorenz’s The Year of the Greylag Goose for the New York Review of Books.

  338 Thilo von Watzdorf, whose mother owned L’Annunziata in Porto Ercole.

  339 Ivory wrote to Chatwin on 6 September 1971: ‘A young man asked me more or less out of the blue what place I would choose to live in for a year (you couldn’t leave) and comprising an acre. I said in the south of France, thinking of Aubenas and its environs . . . you can see from this reply how fondly I recall my week with you in that perfect countryside.’

  340 Peter Willey, Castles of the Assassins (1962).

  341 Actually, Colonel Patrick Montgomery. The Anti-Slavery Society published Willey’s report Drugs and Slavery in July 1971.

  342 Felicity Chanler was marrying Steve Young.

  343 Chatwin never sold the cape.

  344 From the Miami collector (see p. 193).

  345 E.C.: ‘He was a wonderful guest, but a terrible host. He forgot to pass the bread around, he got the people he wanted to sit next to him and never bothered with anyone else, he never helped – and then he’d disappear and someone would say “Where’s Bruce?” and he’d gone to write.’

  346 J.I.: ‘Perhaps I was too stupid to understand that Bruce was serious about his film ideas, while seeming to play them down or making a joke of them. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t just being entertaining in his letters, in the same way that Cary [Welch] always was, with preposterous plots and characters. When I read all his letters together, I see – too late – that Bruce might have been in earnest. I must have seemed like a poor friend, letting him down all the time.’

  347 St James’s Club, 106 Piccadilly, also home of Dilettanti Society, with separate room devoted solely to backgammon. Chatwin never did join the Traveller’s Club.

  348 M.R.: ‘Suddenly l get a letter from Bruce – blue paper, blue ink, Mont Blanc pen, very permeable: My dear M, I want to see you more than anything else in the world. I want you to forgive me more than anything else in the world. Yours B.’ Blaming himself for bringing Akbar into her life – resulting in Miranda and Iain Watson divorcing, with Akbar’s letters being read out in court – Chatwin went to see her in Paris. ‘He gives me a Mesopotamian duck-weight made of haematite. He’d affected my life to a tremendous extent. He owed me one.’

  349 Brion Gysin (1916-86), English painter, poet, and inventor of cut-up technique used by William Burroughs (1914-97), American novelist and prominent member of the Beat Generation.

  350 Chatwin had found a flat off the King’s Road, 8 Sloane Avenue Mansions.

  351 Nigel Greenwood (1941-2004), dealer.

  352 Character in 1924 novel by P. C. Wren who leaves Britain to join the French Foreign Legion.

  353 ‘The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions,’ History Today, 22 May 1972.

  354 ‘Milk’ was published in the London Magazine, August 1977.

  355 Notebooks: ‘Barmou, Niger. A Hausa boy, after listing the attractions of his village

  – You have seen the “grand omosexuel?”

  – No

  – You want to?

  – Absolutely not!

  This person turns out to be a tough, moustachioed Frenchman from Lyon, ex-Foreign Legion, a borer of artesian wells, builder of police-posts and village schools, who travels around in a Land Rover with eight spindly black boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty.

  These all take turns to sleep with him.– And when I need a white one, he says, there’s always the Peace Corps.’

  356 E.C.: ‘I thought his moustache was fine, but everyone hated it.’

  357 Ronald Colman (1891-1958) actor, known as ‘the English Valentino’.

  358 E.C.: ‘I was telephoned by customs. “What do you think is in here? It says CLOTHES.” I said my husband had left here in winter clothes and obviously didn’t need them. They never opened it. They’d have had a fit if they’d seen the lion’s eardrum.’

  359 Chatwin was Ivory’s guest in Cannes on 8 May 1972 for the opening of Savages.

  360 J.I. to B.C. 12 January 1972: ‘I told a friend of mine . . . that story of your friend Andrew Batey, as best I could recall it, and he was fascinated and also thought it was potentially wonderful material for a film.’

  361 Ultra Violet (b.1935), convent-educated French actress, notorious for wearing torn vintage mauve dresses and colouring her hair with cranberry juice.

  362 Ivory’s 54-minute documentary, broadcast on the BBC on 1 April 1972, about Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) who four years after independence dedicated his first book to the British. J.I. to B.C., 12 January 1972: ‘He’s quite incomprehensible, but that, I firmly believe, is half the film’s charm.’

  363 A.B.: ‘I just imagine a Merchant-Ivory re-make of Death in Venice – my Tadzio (they found the real one – he died in Warsaw in 1986) to Bruce’s Aschenbach – in German with English Subtitles.’

  364 E.C.: ‘A lovely idea, but a complete fantasy.’

  365 The glass-fronted God Box was the only one of the three that he kept. E.C.:’He never talked about it, never explained. It was completely personal. I honestly don’t know what it meant. Magic, I suppose.’

  366 The 25-minute documentary for Vaughan Films, with Erskine’s voiceover, was lost while being hawked around European film companies.

  367 Chatwin did once come across the caretaker at Lake of the Woods, Charlie Van, who reported back to Ivory: ‘I saw this guy back in the woods a ways, hiking. And this son-of-a-bitch was stark naked, except for his big hiking boots, going along like he was in a nudist colony and owned the place. I shouted Hey you! and he turned around . . . And you won’t believe this, but he’d tied some flowers round his pecker.’

  368 In 1943, Lieutenant-Commander Charles Chatwin RNVR had crossed North America by Canadian Pacific Railway to pick up a large new mine-sweeper at the naval base, under Britain’s ‘Lend-Lease’ arrangement with the USA.

  369 George Oppen (1908-84), American Objectivist poet, married to Mary Colby.

  370 Robert Duncan (1919-88), American San Francisco Renaissance poet.

  371 Kasmin had a house in the Dordogne.

  372 P.L.: ‘My name was on a list. I was at the British School of Archaeology in Athens and had been helping to get Greek citizens out who wanted to escape. I was arrested in Corfu and sent out.’

  373 The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan (1972).

  374 Chatwin never wrote the profile, but something else came of his interview. In Gray’s salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache. ‘“I’ve always wanted to go there,” I said. “So have I,” she added. “Go there for me.”’ From ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia – The Making of a Writer,’ New York Times Book Review, 2 August 1983.

  375 Alan Irvine, curator of an exhibition of Gray’s work, Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design, staged at the Heinz Gallery of the RIBA, 8 January-23 March 1973.

  376 When Gray died, Chatwin tried and failed to persuade the Victoria & Albert to buy her room intact. In March 2009 a 24-inch tall wooden and leather chair that she designed was sold at auction for £22 million.

  377 David Rogers. Paul Getty and Ralph Dutton were Valerian’
s other godparents.

  378 Stella Astor (b.1949) m. 1974 Martin Wilkinson. They lived at The Cwm in Shropshire.

  379 Janetta Woolley (b.1922) m. to Dr Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit; Robert Kee 1948-50; Derek Jackson 1951-6; 1971 to Jaime Parladé, Marques de Apesteguia, Spanish architect; lived at Tramores on the lower slopes of the Ronda mountains. She had worked for Horizon.

  380 The banner carried in battle by Muhammad Ahmad (1844-85), Sudanese leader who in 1881 proclaimed himself the Mahdi, leading an uprising that culminated with the fall of Khartoum. Gloria Taylor had married his grandson, Tahir.