Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The diary, little more than a catalogue of dinner parties, lasted only another month. “Hate confessional mode,” he wrote in his notebooks.

  Bruce reached Mauritania in February, having come by way of New York where he had been to the opening of the Asia House exhibition. He travelled to Oualata to see the Nemadi tribe. “They are the greatest storytellers and they make a virtue of their sudden departures for the unknown,” he wrote. It was one of three journeys he made specifically to investigate nomads on their migration routes. In April 1971, he stayed in Teheran with the Oxmantowns, who had been posted to Iran from Dahomey. In a borrowed Embassy Land Rover, he spent five days with the Qashgais on their spring migration. In January 1972, he returned to West Africa, travelling through Niger to Dahomey to see the Bororo Peuls, “a people obsessed by the horizons and their own beauty”.

  These trips were “cavalier raids”. Most of this period was spent not in the saddle with nomads, but in libraries, writing about them. There was hardly time to merge with his subject, in each case little more than a week. Nor did he necessarily see nomads in their natural surrounds. The group of Nemadi had been forbidden to hunt their traditional wild oryx because of a drought. Bruce came upon them camped outside a town.

  It was through Alison Oxmantown in Teheran that Bruce met a British expert on nomads. Jeremy Swift was an economic anthropologist who had lived with nomad tribes in Africa, the Middle East and Mongolia. Where Bruce spent six days with the Qashgai and Bakhtiari, Swift spent six months – and another six months with the Tuareg in Mali.

  Swift found Bruce extremely clever, funny, with “an enormous amount of knowledge about lots of arcane things”, and well travelled. “Even then in the early 1970s he’d been to places that most people had never heard of.” But he considered Bruce an artist, not an ethnographer. “I was studying nomads as a job. He was a wild romantic. Whenever he was near a nomad his imagination worked in overtime, jostling with Herodotus and Ibn Khaldun. He didn’t spend much time with them. He wasn’t a nomad in the sense that nomads would talk about being nomads. A real nomad would move to places that he or she knew about, would understand the space involved, would not go in search of sensations.”

  Bruce asked Swift odd and intelligent questions, but never tested his thesis, perhaps anticipating Swift’s reaction. “Bruce’s theory about people moving because movement is a natural condition is wrong. I’ve spent lots and lots of time with lots of groups. All say it’s nice to move on: you don’t have the quarrels you get in villages or cities, you go to pretty places, you get up in the cool mountains in summer and the plains in winter. But it’s hell on wheels doing it, taking all your possessions and children. I remember the Bakhtiari women on the last bit of their migration, a high mountain pass through snow and a woman crying, sobbing with pain: ‘Why do we have to do this?’ The prospect of Bruce offering a lift in his Land Rover would have delighted them. It meant they did not have to walk.”

  Like Desmond Morris, Swift objected to Bruce’s definition of a nomad. “Nomads of today”, Bruce wrote in his book, “are truck drivers, gauchos, vaqueros, mafiosi, commercial salesmen, shifting migrants, and those possessed of the samurai spirit, mercenaries and guerrilla heroes.” Swift says, “He lumps together hunters, herders, gypsies. Everyone who moves is a nomad. In fact, what separates them is greater. Nomads move because their animals require fresh pasturing, not because of an innate neurosis. It doesn’t mean movement is unimportant: it’s enshrined in their way of life and they write songs about it – but it’s secondary, something you do because your dependence on animals requires it. So many of them have said to me: ‘If there was more pasture for our animals we would move less.’ All over the world nomads are moving less and are not notably unhappy about it. Nomads have a strong sense of home and place. The notion of them moving around randomly is completely false.”

  Bruce’s preference for classical authors over important nomad texts meant that his knowledge was tangential, says Swift. “Bruce knew a lot about nomad jewellery, but he didn’t know a lot about nomad ethnography. He was much more widely read than me in a Victorian gentleman way, yet he doesn’t seem to have read things central to his task – or to use them if he’s read them. He talks about the Bororo – a good ethnographer would call them Wodaabe. Marguerite Dupire wrote two volumes on the Wodaabe, Derek Stenning another. Nomads are among the most studied people in the world. There is a huge corpus of ethnography. He doesn’t cite any of it, apart from Fredrik Barth.”

  Swift likened Bruce’s enterprise, the crux of which survived in The Songlines, to a brilliant attempt at an out-of-date form, a grand synthesis by an extraordinarily well-read amateur in the tradition of Francis Bacon, Gilbert White and Arnold Toynbee. “He wasn’t cautious. That was one of the wonderful things about him. He would dramatically be plotting out several moves ahead, and you can’t do that if you are a researcher. His method was not scientific. He was irritated by the caveats which scientists put around things. Scientists try to marshal evidence that disproves their hunch. Bruce fixes on a beautiful idea, a poetic idea, and marshals evidence to support his hunch. Sadly, that doesn’t work. His canvas is too vast. He is trying to write something that is much closer to the history of mankind, but not having looked at the crucial literature he chases his tail. If you think of the eventually published result as a serious synthesis, it’s futile. If you think of it as poetry, none of this matters.”

  Bruce’s will to realise himself in his nomad book is reminiscent of Balzac: “If I’m not a genius I’m done for.” One of his favourite stories was Balzac’s “Le chef d’œuvre d’un inconnu”, about an unknown painter at work for a long time on a great masterpiece. When the canvas is finally revealed, it consists of a few lines and one perfectly painted foot in the corner. “It’s a very great story indeed,” said Bruce.

  In confident moments he thought of himself as Balzac’s painter, an undiscovered artist engaged on a significant project. “I want it to glitter like a diamond,” he wrote to Elizabeth in December 1970, and a month later: “As you know, to me this book is really important . . . There are parts I am pleased with and parts that are a mess. One cannot hurry something that can’t be hurried. Am lurching through the last section quite rapidly now, next week will come to the Hero and the road of trials, followed by anarchists and modern revolutionaries, and then a concluding chapter where all the heavy guns are fired. Nerve required. I am quite unaware at the moment if I have gone off my head or whether the ideas are so novel, so outrageous, so shattering that no one will be able to put the book down . . . We shall see. The Book must be done.”

  But whenever the end was in sight he wanted to start again. “Oh God, when will I get it done?” he wrote to her at the same period. “I’ve worked and worked for example 8 a.m. to 12 midnight yesterday . . . it is an endless drama of shuffling and reshuffling the component parts, turning passive verbs into active verbs etc.” As Swift divined, what burdened him was the freedom with which he lavished the term “nomad”. He wrote to Peter Levi: “Very interesting the use of the word ‘nomad’ as a term of abuse in the Sharon Tate murder case. ‘A band of hate-oriented twentieth-century nomads’ is about as bad a condemnation as one can get. I have written two chapters of my book. Then I decided they were too boring. So they will have to be rewritten. If only I didn’t have an argument to follow. One always forgets what they’re about.”

  In this way he picked at the book. Each journey resulted in another chunk of disparate material to incorporate. He grew thoroughly sick of it, until the day came when he confessed in his journal: “I must write that bloody book of mine in a sensible clear way. I opened the first page this afternoon rather like someone disposing of a letter bomb. It was horrible. Pretentious. But I still like ‘The best travellers are illiterate and they do not bore us with reminiscences’.”

  This was the beginning.

  Bruce’s preoccupation with “that wretched book”, as she came to call it, meant Elizabeth had to forge her
own life. “Bruce never likes to plan anything at all, but I can’t always sit around waiting to see what will happen,” she wrote to Gertrude. “Besides, a lot of times he likes to go off by himself and I never know until after he’s left whether he wants me to come too.”

  In September 1970, Elizabeth set off for India in a converted yellow grocery delivery van for which Margharita had made cushions and curtains. Her passengers were Beth Cuthbert, a schoolteacher, and the artist John Nankivell. Elizabeth’s journey lasted eight months, taking in India, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, and was made at the instigation of Penelope Betjeman, who wished to investigate pagoda temples in the western Himalayas. Betjeman drove in a second Morris van with another artist, Elizabeth Simson.

  Bruce was originally to be part of the group, but reneged. He needed, he said, to spend the summer in Greece working on his book. He also had misgivings about Betjeman, a close friend of Stuart Piggott. “Penelope seems to be very demanding and I’m afraid that eccentricity has an uncommon tendency to develop into egomania. This is perfectly all right as long as you don’t have to travel with it.”

  As a compromise he agreed to meet Elizabeth in Istanbul and show her the city before the next stage of her journey, through Turkey in the footsteps of the Seljuks. From the Leigh Fermors’ house in Kardamyli, he asked her to bring one winter suit, some cold weather clothes, gloves, rucksack, boots, new laces and socks. “Also you’d better bring my camera en route. I don’t quite know what to do about money, but I believe I do get £1,000 on delivery of the manuscript.”

  In late September, Bruce was standing in Haghia Sophia when he heard a familiar voice: “Oh my dear, we’ve been raped.” It was Betjeman – and Bruce was more or less the first person to whom she related an experience that thrilled her so much that her husband, the poet John Betjeman, sent her account of it out as a Christmas card.

  Betjeman gave Bruce a graphic description of how she had lost contact with Elizabeth outside Trieste. Once over the Turkish border she had parked for the night in a cornfield near Edirne. She and Simson cooked dinner and then sat side by side in the front seat to read their books by the overhead light. Betjeman was engrossed in Robert Byron when the door was wrenched open by a Turkish soldier. He tried to drag Simson outside, but she grabbed the steering wheel. Betjeman, appalled, dropped The Road to Oxiana and shouted: “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I will go. I’m too old to have a baby.” In her beige tweeds she extricated herself from the van and moved to interpose herself, stroking the man’s wrist and caressing his head. “Offer finally accepted as rescue came,” wrote Bruce in his account to Paddy Leigh Fermor. “Not before the soldier had offered five Turkish lire, his week’s pay, for the younger specimen.” Left behind in the front seat, Simson started the engine. The soldier, eschewing Betjeman, hared off after the departing vehicle, but failed to catch up. Simson meanwhile flagged down a carload of Americans and they returned to the site to find Betjeman sitting in the cornfield, laughing hysterically. She had headed off into the field and, knowing a white face would show in the dark, had hidden with her head down in the corn. The Turkish infantryman had fled.

  Bruce and Elizabeth stayed in the home of his old friend Guler Tunca. After five days, he decided to return to Holwell, complaining of toothache. He agreed to meet up with Elizabeth again in India once he had finished the book. “I make no promises as to the date.” He would prevaricate throughout the autumn, making and breaking several more plans, to the annoyance of John Nankivell: “We spent our trip in a sense doomed by Bruce Chatwin because everywhere we were supposed to meet him he was never there.”

  Bruce recalled his winter at Ozleworth in On the Black Hill. “The winter was hard. From January to April the snow never melted off the hill and the frozen leaves of foxgloves drooped like dead donkey’s ears.” He identified Amos’s “gloomy house below the hill” with Holwell Farm. “It lay on a sunless slope and, at the snowmelt, streams of icy water came pouring through the cottage.”

  An American poet, Loretta Anawalt, who visited Holwell at this time, came away feeling that she had been living “in a wet head of lettuce. Everything seemed damp and the air was redolent with the smell of wild onion.”

  To his chagrin, Bruce did not have Holwell to himself. Elizabeth, to cover running costs and to ensure that someone would look after her animals, had rented the farm to an American friend of Michell whom she had bumped into in a health food shop in Bath. Bruce described Linda Wroth as having “the wide staring intense eyes of the American intellectual initiate.” They shared the house unhappily until the New Year. “Frankly, I thought she’d leave when I came,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “She said ‘I suppose it’s your house isn’t it?’, but now she seems to have got used to the idea of my presence.” He found her presence disconcerting. Brenda Tomlinson says: “She cooked an enormous bowl of brown rice and put it under her bed so that she could eat in her room without Bruce having to share her meal . . . Bruce would leave the washing up and she’d scream at him. Then Bruce would come down here. ‘That woman has just screamed at me!’ Then Linda would come down. ‘That Bruce thinks I’m just going to wash up and clean for him!’”

  As Elizabeth motored towards India, Bruce reported on life at Holwell in weekly bulletins to a chain of embassies. His teeth were better, a biopsy on the gums confirming the problem was not cancer. He had met some neighbours with horses. “I am going to exercise their hunters once or twice a week in Cirencester Park and have become quite horsey, stamping around the house in riding boots.” In November, he celebrated Elizabeth’s birthday in the garden. “The anniversary of your birth has been marked by a ceremonial planting – Holwell farm now has a Salicetrium and you can guess what that is till you return.” One day he slipped his disc while lugging soil to the back of the house. “It has caught the nerve which leads to one’s crutch and balls and I felt someone had given me the most almighty boot where it hurts most.”

  He exaggerated his injury to stay at home. He admitted to Elizabeth that her letters from Teheran and Kabul gave him “a slightly guilty complex”. On 24 November, he wrote: “You must realise if I don’t do this thing now it’ll sit here for ever as I have a million other plans as well. I’m very sorry but there it is. I am going on and on until the first draft is available for Tom Maschler and have his opinion. Then I’ll decide. I know the whole thing is very irritating for you especially with your companions – and incidentally Penelope is the last person I want to show me round Delhi and would put me off for ever.” He cancelled one plan to meet her in Bombay for Christmas, another to meet in Delhi. “I don’t know what I can say about coming. I wish I did. I can’t tell you how much I long to get away. But if I break the threads of concentration now, I’m honestly afraid that the whole thing will go down the drain.” He knew himself: “The thing with me is that if I break the continuity it always goes to pot.”

  At Holwell, work on the book ground on with remorseless slowness. The house buzzed with legions of flies and a new addition: “long-eared bats that mysteriously secrete themselves into the bedroom and hover around at night after the flies. It’s a curious sensation the noise of fluttering air, more mechanical than animal, and I could even hear the high-pitched screech.”

  By December, living with Linda Wroth became impossible. He thought her rude, disliked her boyfriends, “professional snivellers” who devoured his food and drink. “She really is quite awful. I can’t stand her, and she’s been making such a fearful scene because I’m here at all. When I suggested she GO and I STAY, there was no question of it.” He did not know for how long they could endure under the same roof.

  But there seemed no easy solution. He had given up Kynance Mews and his money situation was “terrible”. Christie’s had stopped paying him a retainer and by January he was overdrawn by £1,250. “We simply cannot go on asking my parents to fork up, as there will come a limit.” He decided to sell his Greek kouros and Sarah Bernhardt’s Maori sculpture. And he attempted some journalism, earning £200 from Vog
ue for an article on nomads. “Imagine my horror when Vogue proofs came back with the title changed to IT’S A NOMAD NOMAD NOMAD WORLD. Jesus, what horrors editors are.” He complained to the magazine. “Either the title is changed or it’s coming out, Thank you.” But he lost the argument. “In spite of my screamings or I suppose because of them the Vogue article appeared with title . . . Lesson learned. Never write an article for the fashionable press after a hangover in two hours.”

  Hugh Chatwin remembers Bruce’s agony when he came down to Stratford to discuss the article with their mother. All the notes he had made, all his travels, had petered out prematurely in an embarrassing piece of journalism. The book was “very nearly finished”, he reported to Elizabeth, “but is in the most unholy mess. What do I do?” He began to feel ill: “I have caught worms and a terrific resurgence of ringworm, which must be from the cats.” He developed a pain in his right intestine accompanied by a constant urge to pee. “I couldn’t sit at the typewriter because of the agony in my stomach, coupled with really terrible nervous depressions.” He worried if he was being poisoned. “Linda and I both have Holwell Farm stomach ache and we wonder if it could be anything to do with the well.” He was having the water tested. “I am quite decided it isn’t my fertile imaginations. It is quite definitely something biological in the water, local virus etc. God knows! But we really must find out.” And he was fairly persuaded that the house was haunted. “Doors slam for no reason.” He wrote to Elizabeth: “this is the nadir of our fortunes.”

  In December, Bruce left Holwell. He cited Linda as the reason. “I am afraid I simply couldn’t stand the atmosphere here one minute longer and one day filled up the car and fled. She infuriates me to the point of no return and has mercifully gone to Bath for the night which is why I have come today. However, she does look after the house well despite everything, though a sinister crack has appeared in the beam in the dining-room due to the jolting of her constant intercourse.”