Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

The événements of May 1968 passed him by. “What amused me was his tunnel vision,” says George Melly. “He knew everything there was to know about Persian miniatures, but he’d never heard of the Muppets.” While students erected barricades in Paris, Cambridge and Ohio, Bruce concentrated on the Asia House exhibition. “The prehistoric Animal Style of Central Asia now obsessed him,” wrote Hugh Honour, who was then a series editor at Allen Lane, “and so well did he talk about it that Penguin was easily persuaded to commission him to write a book on the subject. Everyone who met him at that time was struck by him. He seemed a twentieth-century version of Robert Browning’s Waring. And like Waring he would quietly slip away to no one knew where.”

  “I think he’s probably going to spend the whole of Spring vacation-travelling,” wrote Elizabeth. On 16 March, he departed for Helsinki’s Kansallismuseo, “probably to be birched in the sauna at the expense of Asia House,” he wrote to Welch. “I’ve never been able to make up my mind if I like the idea or not. Wouldn’t it be awful if one suddenly found one was a physical masochist as well as everything else?” He had bought a bellows to take with him for what he conceived as “my Asia House tour”. Also, “the largest coco-de-mer I have ever seen. Beautiful and obscene. We take it to bed.”

  In April, he was in France, Switzerland and Italy. He skied for four days with Ortiz in St Moritz, and afterwards drove with Elizabeth to Geneva to pick out some Siberian plaques from the Ortiz collection. They then embarked on a circuit of museums in Basle, Munich, Trento, Mantua, Ravenna and Turin.

  Bruce consulted Tamara Talbot Rice at the embryonic stage. She confirmed what he suspected: by far the best stuff was in Leningrad. In 1930, Tamara had assisted with an exhibition of Persian art at Burlington House and its most striking exhibits had come from the Hermitage. “I told Bruce his exhibition couldn’t be done without many important loans from Russia. He wanted me to come and help, but the money didn’t materialise.”

  On 26 April, Elizabeth wrote: “Bruce’s plans are still terribly vague; he only knows he wants to go to Russia and is waiting for the money to appear from somewhere.” Piggott now came to the rescue. He invited Bruce to join him and Ruth Tringham on an official tour of archaeological museums in the Soviet Union.

  It was a curious little group: Piggott, Ortiz, who had never dug in his life (described in Piggott’s diary as “an odd young Bolivian millionaire”) and Ruth Tringham, who had spent a year arranging the official invitation. “I did it all by letter. Bruce was not going to be part of it. Then before I knew it, Stuart included Bruce. And Bruce invited George Ortiz.”

  Relations between Bruce and Tringham, whom he described as “a lady Marxist archaeological student from Hampstead”, were already stretched. It grated on her to find Bruce and Stuart Piggott so close. “I thought: ‘What is this person doing here?’ He knows nothing about European archaeology. He was treated as a post-graduate without any basis at all. I had a feeling he wanted an academic grounding to give him legitimacy. It got on my nerves.” Moreover, the Chatwin van was causing Tringham problems. Its bottom dropped out before she had had it a year.

  Piggott, too, was apprehensive about the group’s composition, their different motives for wanting to visit Russia and the threats posed to his palate by a Soviet cuisine. “I now dread [the visit] and wake in the night thinking what hell it will be.”

  On 30 June, Piggott went to drinks at Robert Erskine’s where he found Bruce and Andrew Batey. At eight the following morning, Batey drove them to Dover. At Ostend, they boarded a train for Warsaw, there intending to meet up with Ortiz and Tringham.

  It seemed to Piggott that foreign travel was an escape for Bruce, “who is running away from himself by travelling.” On 5 July, Piggott glimpsed the origins of Bruce’s volatility. “Bruce talked a lot last night on the necessity of constant escape from Elizabeth’s possessiveness, etc., etc. I can’t make it out. ‘Of course, she’s sweet,’ he said perfunctorily and then discussed how he could get a one-room flat on his own, somewhere to go and work. His travel passion is slightly maniac & could become actually so. And while he’s highly intelligent he’s not really a scholar and I would think won’t make any real academic contribution to archaeology. But he might go crackers.”

  Bruce might have complained about Elizabeth’s possessiveness, but he then sat down in his hotel room and dashed off a letter to his wife urging her to join him in Romania.

  “Could you try and bring with you my compass which is somewhere in my room I think, and failing that can you buy a fairly good one? Can you also bring my copy of Parvan’s Dacia, a small green book in my shelves and a map of Romania. I only hope you’ll be able to come on the Transylvanian jaunt. Also remember to put the tent in the car + a small billycan for gas in case you run out . . . I think the best thing is to miss out Hungary if this is going to be difficult by taking the Yugoslav autobahn from Belgrade to Ljubljana.”

  His wife would get used to Bruce’s hopelessly grandiose plans. “Usually he had these ideas halfway through a trip and decided he would like to have me along,” says Elizabeth, who in this instance was expected to traipse across Eastern Europe at the drop of a hat, having taken care of visas and insurance. “I didn’t get too worked up. The ideas were always amazingly impractical.”

  The following day Bruce changed his mind. He could be contacted in Athens.

  On 9 July, one month before the Russian invasion of neighbouring Czechoslovakia, the party stood assembled in Warsaw. Tringham had come from an excavation near Prague, Ortiz from Paris. Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “[Ortiz] may well be collected from the airport in a Rolls Royce . . . How can one explain his Bolivian nationality – as a fellow of Che Guevara?”

  The trip was not an outstanding success. They spent a week in Leningrad seeing museums and drinking vodka with aggressive Russian archaeologists. Bruce wrote to Peter Levi: “Every plan was frustrated, and I’m afraid that most traditional Russian hospitality is a deep-seated desire to see foreigners drank.”

  Bruce hated to lose possession of himself. Once at a restaurant he told Hodgkin: “I would never get drunk: it would be so awful not to be in control.” This fear reflected itself in the short, clipped sentences of his prose. “Of all the talented brilliant writers,” says Welch, “Bruce wrote the shortest sentences I’ve ever read. On one level he had great confidence; on another, he didn’t.” The play of these tensions, observed Francis Wyndham, gave his prose its power: “Reading Chatwin one is acutely conscious of authorial control – and therefore, simultaneously and intoxicatingly, of the alluring danger of loss of control, of things getting out of hand.”

  In Leningrad, things got out of hand. On II July, they attended what Piggott described as “an awful interminable evening” at the home of Vladimir Masson, head of the Leningrad Archaeological Institute. Tringham was sick in the bathroom while Bruce, with Masson slumped under it, stood on the table “reciting a Shakespeare sonnet for the benefit of his wife”. He was crippled with a liver attack for days afterwards. “Liver pains and Animal Style are intertwined in my consciousness,” he wrote to Joan Leigh Fermor.

  Piggott regarded Bruce’s version in What Am I Doing Here as “an incredibly variant text”. (Bruce, for instance, shifts his recitation to Moscow, lengthens it from a sonnet to Orsino’s opening speech from Twelth Night, and directs it at Masson’s sister.) “I think he lived in a fantasy world and was quite genuinely incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction. It wasn’t a pretence.”

  In Leningrad the 58-year-old professor was at his most morose, loathing the food and unable to keep up with the three younger members. “Although Ruth is invaluable as an archaeological interpreter & Bruce very congenial & good about making arrangements etc., one has to remember they’re both only 28 and don’t tire and want to rest and really don’t mind about food and comfort.” He had also a financial concern. “Bruce is just so airy-fairy about finances that he lives on perpetual loans. Thank God I brought a lot!”

  Leningrad disappointed
Piggott on all levels. “I got very depressed and said so.” The food was disgusting, the people dreary, frowsy and inefficient and the museums a letdown. At the Ethnographic Museum, “Bruce & George went all enthusiastic about objects of ethnographic art –. very boring.” After viewing the Scythian gold at the Hermitage, he wrote: “Nearly half way through the trip, hooray.”

  Ortiz, on the other hand, was swept off his feet by the Hermitage. He decided then and there that he wanted to be its Director. He offered to leave to the museum his collection of Greek bronzes if this could be effected. This sort of gesture was to the utilitarian Tringham an example of their ideological differences. “I thought of Bruce and George Ortiz as symbols of capitalist decadence.” She disagreed with their interpretation of art in terms of beauty. “I argued that artefacts are things which have meaning only in context: they don’t have any value for themselves.” Bruce was angered by her refusal to allow something to be beautiful. “When one speculated on the character and beliefs of their makers, such inferences were frowned on as speculative, emotional and not scientific.” Their arguments followed them on the Red Arrow to Moscow.

  The Russian capital reinforced Piggott’s disappointment. “Moscow is an incredibly dreary, fly-blown dump of a place – no wonder Leningrad is thought so marvellous.” The museums were no better, nor the cuisine. “An unusually revolting snack in a crowded, shitty restaurant & to see the over-praised vulgarities of the Kremlin.” On 20 July, after two days in Kiev, the tour was at an end.

  “My summer was disastrous,” Bruce wrote to Levi, without making mention of a mutual suicide pact proposed by Piggott.

  Piggott had grumbled to Charles Thomas about his horror of growing old, his wish to be buried in a megalith. “There’s nothing left to live for. I’ll cut my throat and He in Long Barrow.” In Russia, he was tired, outpaced by three young people, disappointed. Confronted by the gruesome Scythian burial displays, Piggott’s natural melancholy expressed itself in suicidal thoughts. He had already spoken to Tringham about committing suicide. “I was appalled,” she says. Mindful of his predecessor’s fate (Gordon Childe had taken a taxi to a sandstone cliff south of Sydney and simply walked off the edge) Piggott indulged in similar black fantasies.

  He even wondered if Bruce and Elizabeth might want to join him. Bruce told her: “Stuart keeps wanting to have a suicide pact. ‘Why don’t we all three of us jump off a cliff or take pills or sniff gas?’” Elizabeth thought it was a joke. “We hadn’t been married that long. Commit suicide – for what?” But Bruce was horrified. “He began to think that archaeology was something suicidal.”

  Bruce chose to take the proposal seriously. Piggott, he said, had suggested the idea more than once. Suicide lodged in Bruce’s mind as a metaphor for Piggott’s profession. He began to collect stories about archaeologists who had died in their own trenches, the result of a secret desire to be buried. “Most archaeologists interpret the things of the remote past in terms of their own projected suicide,” he wrote in his notebook. And: “If an archaeologist has faith in his method he must use that method to its logical conclusion – and bury himself.” By the time he returned to Edinburgh in October, he had built up in his mind the same contempt for archaeology as for the art world. “I began to feel with a certain amount of irreverence that I was entering a similar trap. All evidence had to be taken from inanimate objects. I decided what interested me most were those people who’d escaped the archaeological record, the nomads who’d trod lightly on the earth and didn’t build pyramids.” He had decided, in other words, to identify himself with the subjects of the Animal Style exhibition.

  In September, Bruce went to New York to discuss the exhibition with “two supermale ladies”. These were his Asia House collaborators, Emma Bunker and Ann Farkas. “Emmy is fine but listens to not one word. Ann Farkas severe academic, but not unsympathetic.” After “many parties”, among them Andrew Batey’s wedding in California, he arrived home on 10 October.

  “He is dreading going back to Edinburgh,” wrote Elizabeth, “but he really must.”

  Bruce had given up his Canongate flat in the summer. He moved into the Abercromby Hotel in the New Town. He plodded on, stuck in the rut of Ancient Britain. On 6 November, Elizabeth wrote: “Bruce gets more depressed every minute with Edinburgh.” A fortnight later she drove up to collect him for Thanksgiving, not knowing that he had made up his mind to quit.

  Just as Darwin at Edinburgh had shown no aptitude to be a doctor, so Chatwin discovered that his kind of intelligence was too manic for archaeology. He described his experience in the world of academics as his “saison en enfer”. His friend Christopher Gibbs wrote, “His mounting contempt for their lack of humility, their rigidity, the vulgarity of their deductions and their fear of intuition, blew him away from academe and the Athens of the North, and sent him into a nomad spin that was to last for a decade.”

  “Bruce’s mind was as complex as an early civilisation,” says Maurizio Tosi. “The earlier you go back, the larger the number of options.” Had Wilson given him a full directorship, Bruce might have stayed at Sotheby’s; had he arrived in Edinburgh two years later he might have become an archaeologist. It is Tosi’s view that Bruce came into archaeology at just the wrong moment. It was bad luck he had lost Charles Thomas. It was even less fortunate that he started as a student before a new wind roared through the departments. “The environment he moved in then was very conservative.” When, one year later, Tosi arrived in London to complete his MA, he could feel the changes which had started in America, where Archaeology was based in the Anthropology departments. By then, Thomas was injecting fresh ideas into the syllabus at Leicester. David Clarke had published the seminal Analytical Archaeology, inaugurating a new era at Cambridge, and in December 1969 there was a conference in London on the domestication and exploitation of plants and animals. “It was a grand opening to anthropology, working on both the dead and the living,” says Tosi. “You could breathe the changes.”

  One of the embarrassed reasons Bruce cited for abandoning his degree was Piggott’s refusal to let him complete it in three years instead of four. The sense was conveyed that Piggott did not wish to relinquish a brilliant student. This estimation Piggott confirmed to Penelope Betjeman, telling her that he counted Bruce as one of his best pupils and that the light went out of his life after Bruce had left. To Nash, Bruce hinted that his relationship with Piggott had begun to stifle him in the same way as had Wilson. Nash believed he had made this problem up. Ruth Tringham did not. “My impression is that both were much fonder of each other than they were of any women. In as much as either could have loved another person, they loved each other. My impression is that Stuart was in love with him.”

  Piggott died on 23 September 1996, aged 86. His diaries throw an invaluable light on Bruce’s brief university career. They show that Piggott found Bruce to be an interesting and extraordinary young man utterly unlike the normal run of student, but that he felt sorry for Bruce rather than attracted to him.

  22 October 1968: “I had Bruce to dinner on Saturday, but got bored over the avocado pears and felt so tired. B now staying at Abercromby Hotel up the road; madder I think. He and/or his marriage will crack up before long.”

  9 January 1969: “Absolutely no news of Bruce Chatwin. He came to me in a great state last term saying he was £6,000 in debt owing to buying the Glos. house, wouldn’t take money from Elizabeth’s family & simply had to take a job – offered one at £1,000 a year, one day a week, from Christie’s. Shot off to London to investigate and hasn’t been heard of since. I rang Holwell last night, but no reply. I suspect they are in America. Of course, he’s mad – embarking on this degree without facing up to what his financial position over 4 years would be, and not realising that Elizabeth would not live in Edinburgh and is clearly opposed to the whole thing. I think he’ll have to chuck the lot. ‘Aye, folks are queer,’ once again, and in both senses!”

  29 April and Piggott had still not heard a word. “Really, wha
t an odd young man. So bloody rude anyway to walk out without any proper explanation and not a word of thanks for all the considerable trouble I’d taken. I think the most charitable view is that he really is mentally unbalanced. A pity.”

  Finally, 26 May 1969: “Letter from Bruce admitting the idea of his becoming an academic archaeologist was a mistake and formally withdrawing. An odd but amusing episode, but clearly he would never settle down to anything approaching a sober routine life. What will happen vis-à-vis Elizabeth is anyone’s guess. All very strange.”

  XVIII

  That Wretched Book

  Wild horses couldn’t drag him back to Edinburgh, so that’s that.

  —Elizabeth to her mother

  AT HOLWELL FARM, ELIZABETH GREW CONCERNED. AS SOON AS Bruce came home, he lost himself in the garden. “Bruce went mad and ordered about 20 things the other day: lots of trees and things like bamboo and gunnera.” She had never seen him so unmoored. “He moved all the furniture around about ten times this weekend.” He talked of buying a tiny flat in London.

  With no degree to work for, he deflected his intellectual energies into the Asia House exhibition. For his $1,000 honorarium, he was expected to produce an essay on the Animal Style for the catalogue. He now immersed himself in this – despite provocation from Elizabeth’s cats. Kittypuss had given birth to five kittens. The most annoying was Tigger. Elizabeth wrote, “If he can’t get attention he does something bad like pushing all the books and newspapers off the table, or trying to extract the ribbon from the typewriter etc., etc.”

  Only breaking for Christmas in Geneseo, Bruce spent the winter in the downstairs study absorbed in his first sustained commissioned work. The essay became a vessel for the ideas that his two years at Edinburgh had stirred up. What he needed most at this stage he would not articulate until he had written several books. “What you really want,” he told an Australian radio interviewer in 1983, “is someone who sees the point.”