Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  682 Italian novelist (1861-1928).

  683 Canadian historian, author and politician (b.1947) who lived in Britain 1978-2000. He interviewed Chatwin for Granta 21, Spring 1987.

  684 M.B. to B.C. 18 February 1985: ‘Shirley H. has given the Boyer Lectures (Reith) on the ABC. Telling us where we’ve gone wrong. I didn’t hear them, will read them instead. Good people here have called them sanctimonious. Woe is me! I fear they might be right.’

  685 Rushdie had left his first wife for Robyn Davidson. E.C.: ‘It was a very public, violent love affair, throwing each other out in the street and shouting, and then a reconciliation here at Homer End.’

  686 Jane and Grace, his father’s spinster aunts. Jane had lived as a young woman on Capri and was still painting at 84, not very good watercolours of turbaned Indians, churches, sailing boats and almost naked men with exiguous turquoise slips.

  687 Mrs Henderson and Other Stories (1985).

  688 Philip Sherrard (1922-95), British translator of modern Greek literature and ‘astute observer of Athonite affairs’ who converted to Orthodoxy.

  689 ‘Flight into Blackness,’ The Age, Melbourne. The Northern Land Council had banned Naipaul from the territories under its control, following his remark ‘that the Aborigines could not be considered to have created a culture as sophisticated – say – as the Chinese or Greeks or Indians or Egyptians had done.’

  690 Bail was a trustee of the National Gallery in Canberra.

  691 The Welches shared a house on Spetsai with Clem and Jessie Wood.

  692 E.C.: ‘We never did.’

  693 Chatwin was born on the evening of 13 May 1940.

  694 Joice NanKivell Loch (1887-1982), Australian journalist (and Australia’s most decorated woman) who worked with refugees and lived with her husband, Scots novelist Sydney Loch, in a Byzantine tower on a beach overlooking the Athos peninsula.

  695 Martha Handschin was actually Swiss; she assisted Loch in dyeing woollen rugs, extracting colours from onion skins and almond leaves, and selling them to raise money for earthquake victims.

  696 In April 1984 Chatwin had stayed with Pam and her mother Eileen at ‘Aroo’, outside Boonah south of Brisbane.

  697 A carpet factory in Kidderminster.

  698 The village south of Birmingham where Charles and Margharita lived after their marriage.

  699 In 1703 the Milward family started a needle and fish-hook factory at Washford Mills in Redditch.

  700 Elizabeth Powell, mother of Emma Tennant; m. 1935 Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner.

  701 Charles Way (b.1955). Playwright, who wished to adapt On the Black Hill for the stage.

  702 Directed by Andrew Grieve, who wrote the screenplay; released in 1988.

  703 Way was writing Bread and Roses for Gwent Theatre, about Welsh miners who walked to Spain to fight in the Civil War.

  704 Tarikh-i Jahangushay-i Juvaini, Persian historian (d.1283). The History of the World Conqueror describes the conquest of Persia by the Mongols.

  705 Rudi Fischer, an editor on Hungarian Quarterly and friend of Leigh Fermor.

  706 Lisa Van Gruisen.

  707 Patagonia Revisited, based on the ‘combined talk’ given by Chatwin and Paul Theroux at the Royal Geographical Society in November 1979, had been published by Michael Russell.

  708 Way met Chatwin in the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny.

  709 Hon. N. C. J. Rothschild (b.1936), succeeded father as 4th Baron Rothschild (1990), had become Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery.

  710 E.C.: ‘The passport had slipped under the seat of his 2CV and Bruce never looked properly. I had to take a later flight.’

  711 Formerly Lord Oxmanton; succeeded father as 7th Earl of Rosse in 1979 when he inherited Birr Castle, County Offaly.

  712 Dutton’s husband having married again, she was contemplating selling her home in the hills near Williamstown and moving to Adelaide.

  713 Dutton was not the only prospective guest. Chatwin had also invited his parents to Nepal for Christmas, plus Kasmin.

  714 Welsh Rural Life in Photographs, by Elfyn Scourfield (Stuart Williams, Barry, 1979). C.W.: ‘He told me that rather than say to someone “What do you remember?” he’d show them a photograph of a particular landscape. One picture of Hay Harvest 1930, with a little girl and two boys in caps, looks uncannily like Louis and Benjamin.’

  715 Li Po, or Li Bai (701-762), along with Tu Fu (712-770), the most prominent poets of the Tang Dynasty.

  716 Doctor Ho in the village of Baisha, where Joseph Rock had lived, was holding a feast for his new-born grandson. E.C.: ‘This is the place where Bruce ate a black “1,000 year old egg”. It was a ritual course, and none of us ate the eggs except Bruce. He said, “We have to make an effort, we’ve got to be polite.” He ate one and was sick almost as soon as he left the house.’

  717 John Pawson (b.1949), architect and designer, whom Chatwin had hired to redo up his flat in Eaton Place. Pawson had been using the flat as an office. Chatwin wrote in a monograph on him: ‘About five years ago, without the least forewarning of what to expect, I was taken to a flat in an ornate, but slightly down-at-heel Victorian terrace, and shown into a room in which, so it seemed to me, the notes were perfect. The flat was the first work of John Pawson, yet the product of fifteen years’ hard thinking as to how such a room could be. Here, at last, I felt was someone who understood that a room – any room anywhere – should be a space in which to dream. I found myself walking around it watching its planes and shadows in a state of trance.’ Chatwin would be Pawson’s first private client.

  718 E.C.: ‘There was also a big grey langur monkey which took against Bruce. He was in this fig tree and he threw fruit and shat on Bruce, who was outraged.’

  719 Chatwin and Bail sat at card tables under the trees and Chatwin would read aloud dialogue for correction. M.B.: ‘He’d call out, “Does this sound right to you?” and I’d say, “No, no, no, not crude enough.”’

  720 Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), Italian author of That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana . M.B.: ‘It’s about a detective who becomes the victim. I was amazed he liked it. Most of his other favourite texts are very traditional and lean.’

  721 Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby (b.1930), British politician and academic.

  722 E.C.: ‘He gets worse and worse in the recounting of it. But all of this is ME, not him. We had to move because I was ill. I had to go to the American Clinic where the doctor said: “I’ve seen five people like you this morning. This is the capital city for respiratory diseases.” Bruce never went to any doctor. He was fine.’

  723 The former brothel in Birmingham where the Chatwins lived after the War. The rooms lacked central heating and Chatwin caught bronchitis, for two winters coughing up green phlegm.

  724 E.C.: ‘I suddenly realised the driver couldn’t read signs and I had to sit in the front seat and read them. I told Kasmin he couldn’t smoke more than one cigarette every fifteen minutes.’

  725 E.C.: ‘Babji even had diamond eyelashes. He joked to Bruce: “Shall I wear my eyelashes?” I had to borrow Margaret Bail’s pearls.’

  726 Sir Robert Wade-Gery (b.1929), High Commissioner.

  727 Actually thakurs.

  728 The Leigh Fermors were being encroached on at Kardamyli. ‘We have spent the winter together at Kardamyli – now being very much wrecked by Teutonic Hordes,’ Chatwin wrote in a postcard to David Mason, the American whom he had met at the busstop there. ‘A hard-rock disco in Kalamitsi Bay!’

  729 The Chatwins’ permanent caravan in Gassin, near St Tropez.

  730 Chatwin had the memory of Pascal in Grosvenor Crescent Mews; also, of lending his flat in Royal Avenue to some Haitians. E.C.: ‘They literally stripped it, every sheet, every pillow case; they stole pictures that were mine, including one of India by Thomas Daniell; they stole everything.’ His fears were well founded – everything disappeared also from Eaton Place when he lent it to some people.

&n
bsp; 731 Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French philosopher: ‘I had imagined that all man’s unhappiness stemmed from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room.’

  732 The Memoirs of Robina by Herself; being the Memoirs of a Debutante at the Court of Queen Elizabeth II (1986).

  733 E.C.: ‘I had brought out Proust to read.’

  734 Gregor von Rezzori had suffered a stroke at Donnini.

  735 An essay for Vanity Fair, ‘A Stranger in Lolitaland’.

  736 E.C.: ‘He’d learned Sanskrit for two years at Edinburgh, so it’s not a boast.’

  737 Sacred scripture of Hinduism, composed between 5th and 2nd century BC.

  738 While in Katmandhu, Kasmin had bought a number of tantric concentration rugs with tiger patterns.

  739 Novel by Italian diplomat Curzio Malaparte (1898-1955). Kasmin was contemplating starting a press to make reprints of forgotten books.

  740 Nondescript mining town on the Namibian coast which Chatwin and Kasmin had visited in February 1984 after the Observer commissioned Chatwin to write ‘My Kind of Town’.

  741 Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch (1983), dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, examined the rise of the modern state.

  742 Alida Chanler m. Dan Dierker on 10 May 1986.

  743 The firm started by Pawson and three young designers: Crispin Osborne, Claudio Silvestrin and John Andrews. Chatwin’s monograph on Pawson appeared in John Pawson (Spain: Gustavo Gili, 1992).

  744 Robert Venturi (b.1925), American architect whose Philadelphia company had won a closed competition to build the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. The Prince of Wales had compared the previous design, by Richard Rogers, to ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an elegant and much-loved friend’.

  745 ‘The Chinese Geomancer’, published in Hong Kong – An Illustrated Guide (Odyssey); reprinted in What Am I Doing Here.

  746 S.S.: ‘V. S. Naipaul was an object of derision for Bruce: he irritated him, was part of the carping tone.’ Chatwin’s notebook, 23 May 1979: ‘Read V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Old gloomy-jaws again. The inevitable result of not having a glimmer of humour is to portray all Africans, except possibly the slave class, as monkeys. Simplistic message: back to the primeval forest for Africans.’

  747 EC: ‘He used to wash himself in the lake and had built a house that became a shrine where he grew hemp plants as tall as the ceiling.’

  748 Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of Leigh Fermor’s travels. The first, A Time of Gifts (1977), had come out the same time as In Patagonia. E.C.: ‘Paddy said to me: “It’s very good, but he ought to let himself rip.” Bruce said to me, almost simultaneously, of Paddy’s book: “Its very good, but it’s too baroque and overflowing; he should tone it down.”’

  749 Savages, the Merchant-Ivory film, was shown in May 1972.

  750 The Retreat at Bhimtal, near Nainital.

  751 Dutton did not move from Piers Hill until the late 1990s.

  752 On the Black Hill opened on 4 February 1986 at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff. ‘It is something quite special, a work of intensity, compassion, humour and tragedy,’ David Adams wrote in the Guardian.

  753 The Kolyma Tales (1980), by Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) short stories about a labour camp in the Soviet Union.

  754 Raymond Carver (1938-88); his first collection was Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). After finishing it, the American writer David Plante wrote to Chatwin: ‘As I read them I thought of you – in the same way, I’m pleased to know, you thought of me as you read them. Do you think we are having a kind of literary love affair – filled of course with jealousies and competitiveness but admiration and devotion? That would be nice. So often, reading a book, I wonder; what would Bruce think of this? And if I decide, well, really, Bruce wouldn’t think much of it, I don’t think much of it.’

  755 Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) French filmmaker and writer, associated with the Nouveau Roman.

  756 Fred Smetacek and his son Peter. E.C.: ‘Smetacek was a Czech national who had lobbed a knife at Hitler and escaped, went to India, which he liked, and was interned by the British for the duration of the war. He met a moghul princess through an ad in the marriage columns and they married. They swapped nationalities so he could buy the resort.’

  757 Robert Ducas, Bartlett’s New York-based agent, had submitted ‘The Chinese Geomancer’ – which Chatwin had written for Bartlett – to the Connoisseur magazine in London.

  758 Paddy Booz, son of Elizabeth Booz; Johnson Chang, Chatwin’s translator in Yunnan; Professor Tea, the title bestowed on Michael Ng of Wing Kee Tea Merchants, a real connoisseur of Chinese tea whom Chatwin had met in Hong Kong, ‘who only specialises in the finest possible Oolong special leaf’, as he wrote to Derek Hill, enclosing a gift of a tiny amount of high altitude white tea.

  759 Bartlett had discussed with Elizabeth the possibility of her doing a guide to Gujarat.

  760 In another version, Fred Smetacek was involved in a plot, discovered by the Gestapo, to dynamite a railway tunnel in the Sudetenland.

  761 Jim Corbett (1875-1955), Indian-born British hunter and author of The Man Eaters of Kumaon (1944).

  762 E.C.: ‘A leopard’s favourite thing is dog. People lost their pets very, very quickly.’

  763 Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), prolific English author of 723 romances; her brother, the Conservative MP Ronald Cartland, had briefly employed Chatwin’s mother.

  764 On the night of 21 March a joint on a temporary water main at the Victoria and Albert Museum failed, causing serious flooding of the basement area.

  765 Local independent airline.

  766 Author (b.1942) and daughter of Penelope and John Betjeman.

  767 ‘O the flower of the lotus,’ Buddhist mantra.

  768 Worship.

  769 E.C.: ‘She was going to get a Swedish ready-made house on a plot next to the Catholic Church so that she could pop in any time.’

  770 Greek soldiers.

  771 A great mead hall described in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf as ‘the foremost of halls under heaven’.

  772 John Prizeman (1930-92), English architect.

  773 Pawson’s new baby son. Elizabeth and Bruce were joint godparents.

  774 S.S.: ‘The story was about an original house designed by Le Corbusier for Mani Sarabhai, a young widow with two sons. She belonged to a famous family of textile magnates in Ahmedabad, known for their patronage of the arts. She asked the boys what features they would like in the house; one wanted a slide and the other a swimming pool. So the architect designed a house incorporating a slide that dips from an upper storey into the swimming pool in the garden below.’ The house featured in Sethi’s book Indian Interiors (1990).

  775 Bond Street stationers. S.S.: ‘We chose the leather-bound address book, and still have it.’

  776 On 15 April 1986 the United States had bombed Libya in operation ‘El Dorado Canyon’.

  777 Beatrice von Rezzori. ‘A Tower in Tuscany,’ House & Garden, January 1987.

  778 Robert Hughes (b.1938), Australian-born art critic and friend of Ninette Dutton; m. 2nd 1981-96 Victoria Whistler.

  779 Chatwin’s editor at Grasset.

  780 For a cataract.

  781 The BBC radio play of On the Black Hill, directed by Adrian Mourby, went out on Radio 4, 2 March 1987.

  782 Bruce would see the play the following year, in Brentford.

  783 Dr Robert Keller at Allgemeine Medizin, 17 Muhlebachstrasse.

  784 Venetian painter (1528-88) celebrated for large works like The Feast at the House of Levi. In Looking Back, Somerset Maugham describes sitting down to view this painting on one of his last visits to Venice; and how, as he gazed at it, he suddenly saw Jesus turn and look him full in the face.

  785 British theatre and opera director, author, physician (b.1934).

  786 E.C.: ‘Bruce was crazy about this play, its claustrophobia and “prison atmosphere”; he and Jonathan Miller used to have long
conversations. Bruce longed for someone to do it and then after he died Peter Eyre directed it at the Almeida Theatre.’ Notebooks: ‘Racine: note the astonishing swift reversals of fortune. The outcome of Andromache is fated from the start . . . There is no way out for the players. Yet in act II scene iii Orestes is buoyant with hope for the future: only to be dashed 2 stepped stanzas in the next scene.’

  787 Dutton had sent some leatherwood honey from Tasmania.

  788 E.C.: ‘We went to see Land’s End and the wind nearly tore the door off the car. We stayed in The Abbey Hotel, Penzance, owned by Jean Shrimpton, “the Shrimp”. When we lived in Mount Street, she was having an affair with Terence Stamp who lived on the same landing, and we used to see her running up and down.’