Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  One of Bruce’s selling points was that nowhere else did there exist as at Jam such outstanding and visible examples of Islamic architecture. “Afghanistan is perhaps the last country where important Islamic monuments conspicuous above the ground can still elude the attention of scholars.”

  He had experienced the high points. From now on, the trip frustrated him. “I am in a mood of insufferable depression,” he wrote in his notebook while waiting for permission to travel to Nuristan. “I feel I have achieved virtually nothing on this journey. No sense of a path travelled, just an aimless flailing around, a pointless dispiriting succession of visits to Kabul punctuated by occasional relief journeys into the hinterland. The peaks beyond seem far more exciting. Search for a Paradise which is elusive. Major Willey omnipresent . . . He has now been told [by the authorities] that he is suspicious.”

  In fact, the Willey Expedition had begun to inform the spirit of his own expedition with Peter Levi. When Levi was expelled from Greece three years later, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “PL is really about on the level of Major Willey.”*2

  The hashed-out Nigel had proved to be one of Bruce’s follies, useless both as interpreter and travelling companion. Bruce grew fed up when he was late for aeroplanes, and wanted nothing more to do with him. His anonymous photograph, taken by Bruce, appeared on the cover of Levi’s book, but all mention of him is rinsed from the contents.

  In this mood, Bruce started to miss Elizabeth. “There comes a point when this aggressive masculinity becomes a bore. One longs for the female.” On the day he was belted at the Bala Hisar his mind had travelled back to his honeymoon. “I think of the New England coast, lobsters, pines, fog, clams and cranberry swamps.” He wrote in his notebook: “The lone wandering man feels a definite need for his wife on his wandering.”

  On 21 July, he wrote to her: “So what I suggest is this . . . that we meet somewhere in Western rather than Central Asia on or around Aug 25.” As always when he found himself “festering away in exotic climates I have a longing for CIVILIZATION with a capital C.” He added: “I have realised several things on this trip. You know – they are very good for me. They act as purgatives. I am nearly 30 and instead of being fretted by it and imagining it not the case, I am pleased about it and have decided to act upon it.” The trip had made him realise that above the rest:

  “I am going to be a serious and systematic writer.”

  And: “I love you.”

  Elizabeth arrived in early August. Bruce collected her from Kabul and they joined Levi at the Spinzar Hotel in Kunduz. “Anyone who thinks of bringing his wife on a journey like this should be warned that Elizabeth has unusual qualities,” wrote Levi. The rugged conditions did not daunt her, not even when she had to be pulled by rope up a scree at 16,500 feet during a snow fall.

  By the Kokcha River she immediately rescued a bedraggled quail which some children were pestering in a lane. She bought it for a shilling and carried it home in a hat. The bird, caught in the mountains, would eat only the tiniest crumbs. “Pinioned. Motionless. Lacking wing feathers and the feathers of the crown,” noted Bruce. Elizabeth absorbed herself in the quail’s recovery, taking it on the bus. “‘How are you?’ I call to Elizabeth as we crash over the rocky road. ‘The bird is drinking,’ she calls back.” The quail prompted memories of a pet chicken she kept as a child. “Look out!” Gertrude would cry as it swooped at the lunch table across the pedimented porch. When Levi suggested Elizabeth might let the bird go, Bruce warned: “Better a quail now than a lion-cub later.”

  In Kunduz, there was a brief parting of the ways. Peter Levi pressed on to Kabul while Bruce took Elizabeth and the quail on a lightning tour. Near Faizabad they heard the sound of camel bells. The Kuchi nomads were packing up their tents to go down to Sind for the winter. “The women and babies sat on camels at the rear,” says Elizabeth. “There were men on nice horses shouting at goats and mastiffs to keep the leopards at bay.”

  In Herat, they stopped for a few days at the same hotel where Bruce had stayed with Erskine in 1963. “Elizabeth and I sat in the corner at dinner. Elizabeth said it’s like being in disgrace at school. She laughed her infectious laugh. I laughed. The waiter laughed, though he couldn’t understand what we found so funny.” In its bell-shaped cage, the quail’s calls sounded like clear water.

  It was the first time since their honeymoon that they had been on an expedition in this close way together. As darkness fell one night beside the River Pech they lost their porters, but fires on the mountain indicated a village high up in the pines. In the dark, Elizabeth put a yellow hollyhock in her hair and kissed him. “She was so tired and exhausted and could hardly move.”

  Bruce was filled with admiration for his wife’s physical courage. He took pleasure in her observations. Elizabeth, wearing a poncho and an Uzbek hat and carrying a fly whisk, was always pointing out things on their path. “Look, there’s a tree toad, I think I saw his lip . . . Look, a nut! Look, there’s a tiny, pretty fern in those rocks.”

  In Herat, they left an impression that remained fresh ten years later. On 25 March 1978, Elizabeth and Julia Hodgkin entered the shop of Hababullah, a turbaned dealer in a padded coat. Hodgkin recorded the incident in her diary.

  “Ah! Chatwin, yes!” he exclaimed. “Incredibly enthusiastic to know, ‘How is Chatwin?’”

  XIX

  Distractions

  HOME IS A PERVERSION

  —BC, notebooks

  “THAT WAS WHEN OUR MARRIAGE REALLY WORKED,” BRUCE said of the Afghan journey. Bruce and Elizabeth travelled well together, and indeed he would tell many of his friends that he preferred to travel with Elizabeth than with anyone else. But they could not replicate this equilibrium at home. “He hates this place,” she wrote to Gertrude.

  The Chatwins came home to Holwell in October after staying a month with Millington-Drake on Patmos, “the most beautiful island in the Aegean”. Bruce had smuggled out an Afghan bronze to finance the trip, while Elizabeth concealed in her bra a round Buddhist reliquary made of grey schist the size of a tennis ball.

  The quail, which Elizabeth also carried home to Gloucestershire, was frightened by a dog and died. As consolation, Bruce bought Elizabeth a pair of painted quail, and for her birthday a grumpy grey African parrot which screeched whenever he approached. More animals arrived throughout the autumn. Elizabeth accepted from John Stefanidis a dog given to him by Peggy Guggenheim and recently recovered from meningitis. “Solomon Guggenheim” had never been in the country and scampered about like a wild thing, biting daisies. In November, Elizabeth also agreed to look after Penelope Betjeman’s Arab gelding for a few months. Having no children, she channelled her energies into her animals and her husband.

  Bruce was at the centre of this menagerie. Despite his farm upbringing, he had no real sympathy for animals. In a diary he started at this time, he records how he took Solly – as he had become – to Wales with John Michell. “Lunch in Llandovery café. Proprietor enraged that I fed ham sandwich to dog. J. M. called it Marie-Antoinettish behaviour on my part.” He left Solly in his room and when it was pointed out that it had no water, he said: “Well, he had a drink yesterday.” Elizabeth’s dogs sometimes drove him to fury. “He liked Io, but she disappeared down a hole when he was having his veins done.” When one dog chewed a volume of Hart Crane’s poetry, he told Tomlinson, whose book it was: “I could have slit its throat.” He was most petulant about Elizabeth’s cats – who repaid him in kind. Pumpkin, a furry ginger, loathed him. “He’d go around spraying everywhere when Bruce arrived, and used to stare at him,” says Elizabeth.

  The animals bore the brunt of Bruce’s frustration at Holwell. “I hate cats, that’s why Elizabeth has cats,” he told the French journalist Jean-François Fogel. “Maybe she is fond of them,” suggested Fogel. “No! She has them because she knows I hate them.” The hero of The Viceroy of Ouidah also hates his wife’s orange cat: “When it miaowed he felt as if a scalpel were scouring the inside of his skull.” Perhaps ena
cting Bruce’s fantasy, da Silva kills it.

  “I know that our marriage is not typical and seems odd, but it works for us,” Elizabeth told John Chanler. She rarely talked about her personal struggles. Once, driving to Greece with her younger brother Ollie, she said: “Bruce and I never discuss our relationship.”

  “Never?”

  “No, we never do.”

  Ollie detected no animosity, “but I always felt it was a relationship I didn’t envy”.

  Neither did the community in Ozleworth, which was united in thinking that Bruce treated his wife badly. Among them was the historian James Lees-Milne, who often walked with Bruce. “As Byron was hated by Lady Byron’s friends, plenty of people would take up cudgels on Elizabeth’s behalf without her encouraging them. She would never betray by a flicker of an eyelid that she thought she was being treated horribly, so we never presumed to treat her with sympathy.”

  The Chatwins’ closest neighbours were Charles and Brenda Tomlinson. “When Elizabeth or Bruce were away, each one would come here to find out where the other was,” says Brenda.

  Many neighbours disliked Bruce and the feeling was mutual. The country set got up his nose much as Elizabeth’s animals did. At one dinner party, a man asked him: “‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m writing a book. What do you do?’ ‘Do? What do ye mean Do? I hunt four times a week. How d’ye expect me to do anything?’”

  He preferred to import his company from London, which could be exhausting for Elizabeth. “He was a marvellous guest but a terrible host. He was much too engrossed in talking. It wasn’t much good telling stories to me. I was too sceptical. He needed another audience.

  “He would never do placements. He’d get all his favourite people next to him, and then he’d simply leave the table and disappear because he had thought of something he wanted to write. He had awful manners in lots of ways. He’d push his plate away when he’d finished and he had a complete aversion to washing up.” He did not wash up in 23 years of marriage. “Never, never, never.”

  He quickly became bored even by his own guests. “Last night we had Stephanidis and the Johnstons here for dinner, and Miranda and I got frantic with boredom half way through,” he wrote to Elizabeth in India. “They arrived an hour late after the dinner was spoiled, and then batted on remorselessly about what Jeremy and Antonia, or Annabel and Clive were or were not doing with each other, stayed yacking till 1.30. God, the English are a bore. I have never felt such a yearning to be something else.”

  By Sunday, he had often sickened of whomever he had invited down for the weekend. He would take them for tea at the Tomlinsons and leave them there. “Every so often he’d appear out of the undergrowth with a guest,” says Charles Tomlinson. “The most unexpected people turned up.” Andrew Batey, James Ivory, an Afghan who needed a roof, the great-great-grandson of Wagner’s mistress, the heir to a Dukedom who was a policeman . . .

  “I can’t stand those people,” he told Tomlinson once.

  “But, Bruce, you brought them down here.”

  “Well, I can’t stand them.”

  Eventually, Bruce settled down to write his book, dividing his time between Holwell and Kynance Mews with frequent dashes to Oxford. “I’ve never seen him so continuously cheerful before,” wrote Elizabeth. “He reads piles and piles of books and writes away like mad . . . During the week he spends all day in the Bodleian or one of the other libraries in Oxford and says he’s accomplishing a lot.”

  He was determined to finish his book by the end of his thirtieth year. “One’s thirtieth year, you know, is make or break year,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “I’m rather superstitious about it. Must be over by May or something awful might happen.” In 1980, he told an interviewer: “Some fatuous person who had better be nameless said . . . you’ve got to publish your first book by the age of 30 if you’re going to be a writer. That totally put me into a complex.” But he was plagued by the restlessness he was trying to examine. “He liked either the tents of nomads or London drawing rooms,” says Michell. “What he followed was spirit, and he found it in both places.”

  As if to mark his new life as a writer, Bruce began a diary: “12 Dec 1969 There’s nothing like beginning a diary with an event.” The event was a lunch party hosted by Ann Fleming (“faintly Ruritanian in appearance”) for Noel Coward on the eve of his 70th birthday. “Coward was very senile in appearance and had bleary eyes, a puffy face and discoloured teeth. Dandruff on his coat in small scabs. But the brilliant smile was kind – and the mind undimmed. As I’ve had a major fixation about him since first hearing a squeaky record of “Stately Homes of England” in 1951, when I was eleven, I have waited exactly 18 years for today. It would have been terrible if I was too late. Happily not. Ann Fleming’s partridge was coming down my nose, and my eyes watered with pleasure.”

  Coward aimed many of his remarks at his godson, Caspar Fleming. “Caspar was, as a child, indulged in the nose-picking his mother disapproved of. ‘Why should you deprive the poor child of one of the greatest pleasures in life? I’ve been raking away since the cot and it’s quite delicious afterwards. Messrs Fortnum & Mason could not provide . . .’ as we went into lunch.” Another of Coward’s remarks, Bruce took to be directed at himself. “The best bit of theatrical advice I ever had – never let anything artistic stand in your way.”

  “I have always acted on this advice,” Bruce wrote at the end of his life when he was secure in his identity as a writer and his style was, in his own words, “bleak” and “chiselled”. But at the point of recording Coward’s words he was still researching his first book. Not only was he open to artifice, but he was attracted to anything artistic, which perhaps explains why it was so hard for him to sit down and write.

  That autumn he bought at Sotheby’s a 1630 Mogul miniature of an Arctic tern, “the bird that has the longest migration of any species”. As someone who preferred the image to live things, the austere painting transfixed him. He believed it to be the work of the great court painter Mansur from the menagerie of Emperor Jahanghir. After bidding for it in the Kervorkian sale in November, he walked to the London Library to read an account of the tern’s migration patterns. On leaving the library, he was accosted by an elderly tramp who out of the blue likened himself to the bird then in Bruce’s thoughts. In The Songlines, Bruce describes how he took the tramp out to lunch and questioned him about his involuntary compulsion to wander. He recalled his “immense surprise” at the tramp’s reply: “It’s like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic tern, guv’nor. That’s a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.”

  Bruce’s poles from now on consisted of the road and the writing desk.

  Bruce’s attempt at the conventional diary form lasted two months:

  Dec 12

  John Michell and his girlfriend here. We talked of megaliths and the earliest astronomy. Elizabeth is off to Paris in the morning to see Hester Pickman on her way to India. We are going to the Prescelly mountains.

  Hashish before going to bed. Light-headed.

  Dec 15

  Worked during the morning with interruptions on the book. Fluency is elusive. Reached an impasse with the first chapter. I think I have bitten off far more than I can chew. Elizabeth returned from Paris. Read some of Tom Wolfe’s Mid-Atlantic Man which recalled vividly the suffocation of New York. Fine high clouds in the sky. Lurid sunset.

  Dec 16

  I have finally rearranged the first chapter and hope for God’s sake that, third time lucky, it is final.

  Dec 17

  Worked in the morning and then drove to London in the snow. Went to Deborah’s and met Robert Allen, very amiable boyish anthropological type writing a book called The Useful Savage. Party at Sheridan and Lindy’s [Lord and Lady Dufferin] – everyone there. Twiggy, Justin de Villeneuve, Hockney, Peter Schlesinger, H. H. [Howard Hodgkin], the Knight and Olda [Desmond Fitz-Gerald, then married to Loulou de la Falaise], Gibbsie and Don McCul
lin the photographer, with whom I had a very instructive conversation; also Bob Silvers, Ed of N. Y. Review of Books here on a talent spotting tour, it seemed. Talked of Konrad Lorenz and the nonsense of ethnologists. Jessica D-Home down here at Christmas. Cara Denman. G. O. [George Ortiz] very excitable but on good form.

  Dec 18

  Went to stay at Susanna and Nicky. To Patrick Woodcock, then shopping. Then to Vogue. Jill Weldon and B. Miller all very strange. I think they’ll publish my photographs. Then to R. Allen, Peter Schlesinger to pick up a book. Huge and I’m afraid very bad canvasses. Then to Peter Levi on very good form. Very giggly. Back to dinner with the Duchess [Sally Westminster], her sister Diana, and Charles and Brenda.

  Dec 19

  Spent the morning clearing and organising my study and the latter part of the afternoon fiddling with the book. Less unhappy now than I was.

  Dec 20–27

  Blank over Christmas. Not my favourite time of the year. Drinks at Sally’s on the Sunday. David Somerset smoother than ever – and very pleasant Gascoignes from Alderley. Spent the beginning of the week finishing – at last – the first chapter of the nomads. Arrival of my parents. CLC looking tired and in need of a holiday again – why he can’t retire and treat his whole life as a holiday I can’t imagine. Let him write a book, sail around the Horn – anything except to eke out his last active decade in a Birmingham solicitor’s office. Adrian Chanler here and Hugh and we sat about in a lethargic state – drinking too much without enjoyment – eating too much with ill effects after.

  Long walks alone up the valley which was cold and beautiful. Mist passing over a silvery sun. I am again feeling the pangs of restlessness, and am planning to go to Mauritania. The only country that nobody seems to have heard of. I know where it is, said Penelope [Betjeman]. It’s in Eastern Europe and we all used to see it in ‘20s films. They wear white uniforms. “You’re thinking of Ruritania” – and she was.