Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  789 In August 1985 the singer David Bowie had also offered for the film rights.

  790 John J. Klejman owned a gallery on Madison Avenue devoted to antiquities, or what Welch called ‘tickwiddies’; upon his death, his gallery was rumoured to have been discovered empty.

  791 Rudolph Just (1895-1972), Prague lawyer, cavalry officer and manager of the Bata shoe company, which financed his travels and art-collecting. Chatwin had met him for four hours in 1967. The maid was peeling potatoes on a plate made for Frederick the Great and after a walk through the town Just said to Chatwin: ‘I’m going to a brothel.’ On 11 December 2003, Sotheby’s auctioned the remains of Just’s collection for more than £1 million.

  792 E.C.: ‘Dr Keller tested him positive for HIV. That’s when I rang our surgery in Nettlebed and they said “Where do you want to go?” and I said “Oxford.”’

  793 Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet, discovered Rock’s The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China (1948) when he was locked up as a lunatic in St Elizabeth’s hospital, in Washington, in 1956.

  794 E.C.: ‘We didn’t sleep in peasant houses – we were in a hotel in Lijiang. You weren’t allowed to stay anywhere else. It was still very strict.’

  795 E.C.: ‘A miniature of someone skeletal in bed, dead white and dying.’

  796 Son of Jessie Wood.

  797 Teddy Millington-Drake, Gregor and Beatrice Von Rezzori, Matthew and Maro Spender, Roberto Calasso.

  798 Unfinished Cistercian monastery near Draguignan. He urged Murray Bail to visit. For Bail, the austerity and elegance summed up Chatwin’s aesthetic: ‘Everything has been removed. It was plain, immaterial and resonant because of the emptiness.’

  799 The registrar at the John Warin ward at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford.

  800 E.C.: ‘We picked a doctor with an Alsatian name out of the yellow pages.’

  801 Restaurant la Chicane, near Lyons.

  802 Chatwin had recently bought a first edition of Madame Bovary. Monsieur Homais, the apothecary in Flaubert’s novel, is the embodiment of a pompous bourgeois.

  803 American artist (b.1930) in whose house in the Caribbean Chatwin had stayed with Katz.

  804 Russian poet (1940-96) and 1987 Nobel Laureate.

  805 American mythologist (1904-87).

  806 American satirical novelist (b.1934).

  807 New York sculptor – ‘he had once been a surfer and was a student of Zen’ – off whom Chatwin had bought ‘a fibreglass wallpiece the colour of watermelon’.

  808 Among the Thugs (1990) documented football hooliganism in Britain. Bill Buford (b.1954) edited the then Cambridge-based magazine Granta, for which Chatwin had written.

  809 Kranti Singh later died of kidney failure.

  810 On 7 April 1987 Peter Taylor was awarded the $50,000 prize for his novel A Summons to Memphis, set in Tennessee. E.C.: ‘The next year Bruce ganged up with the other judges and said none of the books were worth anything, and they agreed.’

  811 Author, former editor of the Melbourne Age and journalist (1924-2005). His interview with Chatwin had appeared in the Observer on 21 June; he lived four miles from Homer End.

  812 English travel writer and novelist (b.1939); Thubron’s interview with Chatwin had appeared in the Daily Telegraph, 27 June 1987.

  813 Chatwin later telephoned Thubron: ‘If the condition of man is to be walking through a howling wilderness . . . if, for example, the sources of aggression are directed against not other human beings but against the wild beast etc, then our condition is OK. This is the moment to talk. If hostility is against forces which are outside our control . . . if language is the medium of diplomacy (of uniting v. the beast etc) then we can see how it came into being. It was thus through language that the earliest hominids saved themselves. If man’s underlying core of instinct is like theirs, then he’s moral . . .’

  814 Brain’s article was the cover story of Nature magazine, December 1988.

  815 On 20 July The Songlines reached Number 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. In October Tom Maschler wrote to Chatwin’s new agent Gillon Aitken: ‘You will not be surprised to hear that SL is, for me, one of the most wonderful books I have ever published and for it to have been at number one (ahead of the newly published Douglas Adams) is a high point in my publishing career.’

  816 E.C.: ‘No, a guide to Gujarat. I never did it because I didn’t know how to work a computer.’

  817 Short stories by Ninette Dutton (1987).

  818 Jiří Mucha, son of the artist Alfonse Mucha, was married to a Scot. His mistress lived in a house opposite.

  819 Georges and Anne Borchardt, co-founders of the New York-based literary agency which had looked after Chatwin’s American rights.

  820 On 15 September, at the invitation of the organiser Greg Gatenby, Chatwin had appeared in Toronto at the Harbou.rfront Festival. Just before going on stage, he vomited in the dressing room and asked to be rushed back to his hotel. E.C.: ‘He was suddenly awfully tired; I stamped my foot and said: “He’s too tired. If you want to see him, come to the hotel.”’

  821 Gatenby had discussed with Chatwin the possibility of him starting a Writer in Residence Programme on Baffin Island.

  822 Gillon Aitken (b.1938) had met Chatwin in New York in 1974 when setting up a literary agency with Anthony Sheil and Lois Wallace. In a draft introduction for What Am I Doing Here, Chatwin wrote: ‘Two days before I flew to Buenos Aires I met Gillon Aitken at a party. He asked me what I did. I said I was a journalist. He said he was a literary agent. I asked him whether, when I came back, he could place an article with an American magazine. The title would be “Letter from the End of the World.”

  ‘He invited me to his office. I told him what I knew of Patagonia – and what I hoped to find. He took notes and said:

  ‘“This is a book and you must write it.”’ G.A.: ‘He regarded his connection to Deborah as evanescent and appointed me his agent in New York. He kept talking about Patagonia and he talked so much about it I said: “You must stop talking about it, you must go. Go, go, go.” I got him to do an outline and on the basis of his letter sold the book to Harper and Row for $12,500. I rang Bruce to tell him and he’d gone. Two years later I was again in New York and looked across the room and there he was and he with his hands covered his face as a gesture of apology. I went up and said: “What happened?” He’d gone back to Deborah – or never left her.’

  823 Probably Paul Theroux.

  824 Editor at Random House.

  825 Sonny Mehta had published Chatwin in paperback at Picador in London, before moving to New York as Editor-in-chief at Knopf.

  826 CEO of Viking Penguin.

  827 Chatwin’s new agent in New York; Wylie (b.1948), known as ‘the Jackal’ ever since this episode, was in negotiation with Georges Borchardt, Chatwin’s previous American agent, in regard to his release from Summit Books and transfer to Penguin.

  828 His rift with Rogers continued to preoccupy Chatwin after he and Elizabeth returned to Homer End. On 24 October his sister-in-law Sheila Chanler arrived for a Sunday lunch at which were also present Michael Ignatieff, Salman Rushdie and Murray Bail. Chanler wrote in her diary: ‘Murray an Australian, dry subtle man v likeable. Lunch noisy and confusing. Lots of cross-fire conversations on hot literary topics, one situation in particular concerning B’s former agent now involved in some sinister plot and all v disturbing to B.’ Bail wrote in his notebook: ‘B. told with a certain relish of a Russian he’d met in Prague, a dark ex-monk who, after being harsh with women, would slash his face with a razor, his face criss-crossed multiplying the torment.’

  829 Head of Literature at the British Council (b.1934). ‘I’d asked him to come to our Contemporary Writers Seminar which we had every year in Cambridge. We got together a team of about 20 British writers, young and old, known and unknown, together with a group of about 50 people from overseas who had anything to do with contemporary writing, laid on industrial quantities of food and drink, especially drink,
and hoped something would happen. Usually it did.’

  830 Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b.1929) German polymath, author and editor.

  831 On 13 October 1986 Tom Maschler had written to Chatwin looking forward ‘to more extraordinary things. No doubt totally different from what you would have written otherwise. Perhaps this will be in the direction of fiction, and perhaps will also be the “international” novel (Russian, France, etc) you have spoken of. If you recall, that is the book which I told you would be an enormous commercial breakthrough in addition to being great literature.’ On 11 February 1988 Maschler would write again to Chatwin: ‘I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.’

  832 Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China, by Colin Thubron (1987).

  833 American novelist and playwright (b.1933). Woolmer, a dealer in rare books, had met Chatwin at a gallery opening in London. ‘We discussed several writers, primarily Cormac McCarthy, Bruce hadn’t read McCarthy at the time so I sent him copies of The Orchard Keeper and Suttree.’

  834 Clapp had edited In Patagonia and The Viceroy of Ouidah for Cape.

  835 Diana Sternberg (b.1936) to whom he dedicated Utz; m. 1957 Henry Ogden Phipps (1931-62).

  836 Deborah Rogers continues to be Chatwin’s agent of record.

  837 EC: ‘We were staying at a hotel at the end of Les Saintes and on a long walk through the forest passed a sign saying “Attention!” but we didn’t think what it was for. Bruce went for a shit and squatted down and within minutes he was in agony. From church, he went straight to the doctor.’

  838 Robert Musil (1880-1947), Austrian author of the unfinished modernist novel A Man Without Qualities.

  839 On 12 February 1988 Gillon Aitken had written to Georges Borchardt: ‘Bruce wishes to make a charitable donation to the Commissioner for Refugees of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan and Ethiopian Aid of $3,000 from the first payment accruing to him following the sale of paperback rights in In Patagonia and Viceroy of Ouidah and a similar donation of $3,000 from the second payment.’

  840 Down the Road, Worlds Away, by Rahila Khan. Virago published the book in June 1987, but pulped it when the author was discovered to be not a shy girl in her twenties, married with two children and living on a south London housing estate, but a white clergyman based in Brighton.

  841 Under the Eye of the Clock, by Christopher Nolan.

  842 Ian McEwan (b.1948), English novelist and screenwriter, shortlisted for The Child in Time.

  843 In Charles Chatwin’s last words of admiration for his son’s work, he pointed out to Hugh ‘Bruce’s stamina at having delivered three books to publishers – half of his output – during the last three years of his life, when ill.’

  844 Kevin Volans (b.1949) had studied under Stockhausen in Cologne and was composer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast. His compositions blend the music of Europe and his native South Africa. Cover Him With Grass: In Memoriam Bruce Chatwin was recorded in 1989. His opera about Rimbaud, based on an idea by Chatwin, The Man Who Strides the Wind, premiered in London at the Almeida in 1993, with a libretto by Roger Clarke.

  845 Welch was special consultant (1979-87) for the department of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  846 One of Chatwin’s hallucinations, following his collapse in Zurich, was of the Christos Pantokrator. According to Kallistos Ware, a titular Metropolitan Bishop of the Greek Orthodox faith living in Oxford: ‘He felt he was lying in the middle of the church in the Serbian monastery of Chilandari during a vigil service.’ Chatwin came to see Ware several times over the summer, to discuss the possibility of becoming Orthodox. ‘What he wanted was to be received by baptism on the Holy Mountain since the Holy Mountain had played such a decisive part in his conversion. I was quite convinced by the firmness of his purpose, although I realised his illness was beginning to affect him. I asked Elizabeth: “Does he understand?” There was no doubt, she said: he understood very clearly what it was he was doing.’ But Chatwin’s second trip to Athos, though arranged for September, during which he hoped also to attend the 900th anniversary celebrations for the founding of St John’s monastery on Patmos, never took place. ‘Unfortunately, his health deteriorated rapidly and he could not go,’ says Ware. ‘I offered to receive him myself, but we were overtaken by events.’

  847 E.C.: ‘It took weeks to diagnose what was wrong. It was a return of the fungus, in fact. It got so bad, he went back to the Churchill Hospital.’

  848 Bail had edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories (1988).

  849 E.C.: ‘Where she was raped. She went immediately to the police.’

  850 E.C.: ‘Bruce had been very well coached by the Jesuit Father Murray. Then, two days before our marriage, the parish priest in Geneseo, Father Carron, gave me a nasty little pamphlet spelling out 32 reasons why I should not marry a non-Catholic. Bruce felt it was a slap in the face. He was furious.’

  851 E.C.: ‘He was by this time putting noughts onto his sums.’

  852 E.C: ‘True. The Iselins are dyed-in-the-wool Swiss bankers with a Puritan work ethic.’

  853 E.C: ‘He always said I didn’t spend enough money. He was used to living on his wits and not having any. I couldn’t live on my wits and I didn’t have very much.’

  854 E.C.: ‘I didn’t have any home for it. I’d given up horses when I moved to Homer End – a horse is much more work and money than sheep. Bruce was ringing up Arab breeders and finding out how much they cost.’

  855 Chatwin’s medical report of 13 June read: ‘Still convinced that he is making a unique recovery.’

  856 E.C.: ‘It was real: a little nude of wax, from the antique dealer Blumka on Madison Avenue. It was lost in storage. Bruce added umpteen noughts to the insurance statement and someone saw and it was stolen, along with an Indian bracelet.’

  857 E.C.: ‘A drawing for a carved box, of wild men and women in a tangle of leaves and owls.’

  858 Chatwin had met Marshall, a young documentary-maker, on 17 July 1987. H.M.: ‘We were going to make a film together and planned to go to Russia and look at the roots of modern Russian art in icons.’ The following day Chatwin signed a copy of The Songlines. ‘To Harry, a sequence of non-sequiturs’.

  859 In The Songlines Chatwin writes of his uncle Geoffrey Milward – a friend of Emir Feisal and who had fought with Lawrence – ‘who died, chanting the suras of the Glorious Koran, in a hospital for holy men in Cairo’.

  860 John Chanler’s son.

  861 The collection of French eighteenth-century drawings made by Gertrude’s father, Irwin Laughlin (half of which is now in the National Gallery in Washington), on which Chatwin drew the idea to form The Homer Collection. He planned to leave it to Elizabeth.

  862 Bail divorced in 1991; he m. 2nd Helen Garner.

  863 In March 1988 Rebecca Hossack opened a gallery in Windmill Street, the first in Europe to exhibit Australian Aboriginal painting.

  864 David Miller (b.1966), an undergraduate at Cambridge reading theology. His mother June MacLellan had worked with Chatwin at Sotheby’s. She moved after her marriage to Edinburgh, where Chatwin visited her and saw Miller in his cot.

  865 C.W.: ‘I had a thought that Bruce would like the poetry of Alun Lewis [1915 – 44] who died at the very early age of 28, in Burma, it is generally agreed by his own hand. The poem I could always quote was a romantic one which describes the last time Alun ever saw his newly-wedded wife Gweno in a boarding house in Liverpool the night before he left for India. It’s called “Goodbye”. Verse 5 reads: Everything we renounce except ourselves;/Selfishness is the last of all to go;/Our sighs are exhalations of the earth,/Our footprints leave a track across the snow.’

  866 Chatwin’s secretary at Sotheby’s, Sarah Inglis-Jones (b.1943) m. 1971 John Bennett.

  867 Philip Chatwin.

  868 Shakespeare’s novel The Vision of Elena Silves was
published in September 1989 and dedicated to Chatwin.