Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Unfortunately, the only copy of Bruce’s film vanished in the course of being hawked around European television companies. Erskine, who recorded the voice-over, remembered the result as “a bit wobbly”, and Bruce told Ivory that “it’s far too amateurish to be of any use”.

  By April, he was lapsing into gloom. “I have been mouldering as usual in the country. It all seems so prissy after Africa,” he wrote to Ivory. “England is now little England with a vengeance, the world of boutiques and bitchery and little else.” He was working again on “the bloody book” and “firmly believed it to be a load of humourless, egotistic, sententious rubbish”.

  On 25 July, Bruce abandoned London for America. “I’m sorry I left in such a precipitous hurry, but there we are. I usually do and I did,” he wrote to his parents. “I was getting totally exasperated a. by the weather which had given me the worst chest and lung combination I have ever had . . . b. that film company was driving me nearly desperate.” Before he left, Bruce had an interview at the Sunday Times and was made an offer, which he accepted, to work as arts consultant on the Sunday magazine. The job would start in November. Meantime he moved into Ivory’s clapboard cabin in Oregon and began the formidable task of unscrambling his book. “In fact, I’m completely rewriting it,” he told his parents. He had looked at the central argument and decided that “not even I could understand [it] let alone the poor reader.” He had no idea how long the task would take. “I am simply going to sit here and finish it. I refuse to be budged. My book, whatever anyone may say, is far the most important thing I’ve ever attempted . . . So there we are.”

  Those who saw him during his American summer observed someone going against their own grain. He seemed to Loretta Anawalt a solitary, anti-social person “working very hard at creating an identity for himself”. Before driving to his cabin, Bruce had agreed to meet Ivory at the Anawalts’ home in Pullman, a small town in the wheat fields of Washington State in the Pacific Northwest. Bruce Anawalt, Loretta’s husband, was a self-possessed Shakespearean scholar and an opposite to Bruce in every respect. His equanimity and his scepticism – “Bruce was weird” – made him a disconcerting presence.

  “We were taking an outing to the town of Moscow,” says Loretta. “We got to the highway and Bruce Chatwin said he wanted to get out and walk. ‘But it’s 8 miles!’ we told him.”

  It was a hot day. The three watched “open-mouthed in astonishment” as Bruce, dressed in shorts and huge hiking boots, strode into the wheat fields and headed towards the railway tracks of the Union Pacific. “He was escaping us, just getting away, getting free of what was haunting him, impelled onto the tracks. I tell you, the man was spooked. He hadn’t assembled himself from where he’d been, like his atoms were scattered.”

  Ivory tracked the figure of his friend thrashing in the most self-willed way through the wheat and over the irrigation ditches. “You felt this relentless pushing of himself to do this, some act of physical defiance, but it was unattractive. You felt sorry for him. You felt he was doing something wrong. Nobody would want to walk through that.”

  The wheat fields rose into hills, the landscape resembling the bottom of the ocean as if formed by the movement of water. “The hills are much loved by painters,” says Anawalt. “They’re like a sensuous feminine torso, rolling into hips and breasts, but Bruce walking into all that femininity seemed lost in it somehow.”

  To his three spectators, here was a person who wanted to be more than he was. Ivory felt Bruce brought this dislocated energy to bear on his nomad book. He was striving for gravity against his natural inclination to take flight. “It wasn’t coming naturally to him. He had to work hard in certain areas. He created himself in a way. Maybe just to be taken seriously, that’s what success was for him.”

  After driving for two days, they reached Ivory’s cabin: a modest, comfortable house in the pine woods, next to a glorious lake. Bruce wrote to his parents, “There is a canoe and I can paddle up a river to look at beavers making dams and it’s very warm for swimming.” The place should have been conducive to work.

  “The Book is coming on well,” he assured Elizabeth. “I know what I’m doing instead of flailing around in a disorganised way with marvellous material and no sense of direction.” Unconvinced, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “I hope he’ll get that wretched book done before he comes back. I’m sure it’ll be very good, if only he could be satisfied with it himself.” But in Oregon his diminishing confidence made it impossible to write. “He’d go off on these treks into the woods for hours and hours,” says Ivory.

  After ten days, they drove to San Francisco, staying on the way in Grant’s Pass, where Bruce came face to face with Rod Calvert, a college friend of Ivory and a failed poet. Ivory had told Bruce stories about Calvert: how he had travelled, lived in France, New York, where he supported himself in odd jobs, but always The Writer. “He never got anything published,” says Ivory. “He covered his walls with words like MATISSE because he liked their sound. That was as far as he got with a presentation of words in an artistic manner. Everything about him was pretence and mental laziness, but he was a very funny man up to a point.” The three of them spent the morning together. Ivory noticed that Bruce found it a gruesome experience to be confronted by Rod, who had been good-looking once in a similar way – blond, lithe, and rosy-cheeked – and was now dishevelled. “A young friend, spotty, about 16 came round so we could have a joint. They sat, this dull pathetic boy and Rod on the sofa and Bruce and I sat with them. Bruce was struck by the grotesqueness of the situation. Bruce could turn into Rod.” Some years later Calvert was found dead in his rented apartment in Palm Springs, California, still unpublished.

  After Ivory left him in San Francisco, Bruce stayed with another poet, Robert Duncan, “one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met, with a waxen witch-like face, hair tied in a pigtail and a pair of ludicrous white sideburns. He gassed on and on in a flat monotone and it was impossible to decide if the tone was hysterical or dead-pan”. In a health food shop, where Bruce spent $50 on emetic food, he ran into a familiar face: “the dreaded Linda, who was buying her molasses and brown rice at the same time. Grown enormously fat she had, and she was with the Sufis.” He found San Francisco “so unlike anything else in the US, it doesn’t really bear thinking about. It’s utterly lightweight and sugary with no sense of purpose or depth . . . This doesn’t mean that one couldn’t live here. In fact I think one could easily, preferably with something equally frivolous to do.” Frivolity was not an option. Saying goodbye to Ivory, Bruce returned alone to the Lake of the Wood. For Ivory that was the end of their intimacy.

  On 14 September, Bruce wrote to his wife, addressing her as “Dear Hurrubureth”. He had been writing solidly, intended to stay until October when “a great hunk” would be done. He sounded cheerful. “I am writing fast, and then hitching the things up for the finer points of style later.” In the course of his letter, he enthused about his forest walks. He might have been in the Forest of Arden or on the riverbanks in Stratford, playing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I wandered along the Brown Mountain trail STARK NAKED for 15 miles without coming across a soul but deer and birds and that made me very happy.”

  Charlie Van, caretaker at Lake of the Woods, related to Ivory his encounter with a strange figure by Low Echo Camp. Van could not have been more surprised had he come face to face with a nudist off the stage of Hair.

  “I saw this guy back in the woods a ways, hiking. And this son-of-a bitch was stark naked, except for his big hiking boots, going along like he was in a nudist colony and owned the place. I shouted Hey you! and he turned around. Most people, if you caught them like that, would have lit out, or maybe put their pants back on. Not him. He came over to me with this sort of sneer and asked me if he was on the right trail to Rainbow Lake. And you won’t believe this, but he’d tied some flowers round his pecker.

  “I figured he was a hippie except most of them can’t talk, just grunt, but this one had a hoity-toity wa
y of speaking. I told him if he didn’t put his pants on I’d take him in and then he said, Oh he was a guest of Jimmy Ivory. I said, ‘You still have to put your pants back on.’ He fished them out of a little bag he was carrying and got into them. Good looking fella but sort of crazy look in his eyes just then; he reminded me of a little kid, when you say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ gritting his teeth. I didn’t want to seem to be exceeding my authority, so I said, ‘It’s a hot one’.”

  Viewed through one lens, his nakedness was comic. Through another, disturbing – as if a drama begun in a typical vein of theatre was careening towards a breakdown. He had walked away from Sotheby’s and Edinburgh claiming they were not what he wanted. He could not make the same claim for this book. In the image of him striding naked through the pine woods one senses the burden of his failed ambitions and those of his publisher. “I am convinced it will be an important book,” Maschler had predicted. “Important in the way The Naked Ape was important.” Bruce had not written The Naked Ape, but to even the most casual observer like Charlie Van he was coming disturbingly close to enacting it.

  In The Songlines, which it became 15 years later, Bruce claimed he burned his nomad book. He did not. He threw it away and without his knowledge Margharita rescued the manuscript from the dustbin.

  In one of the boxes containing the notebooks and texts which Bruce left in his will to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, there is the untitled green folder which contains the The Nomadic Alternative.

  It is easy to imagine the excitement with which Bruce’s agent and publisher must have received this manuscript and how great their disappointment. It began:

  “The best travellers are illiterate. Narratives of travel are pale compensations for the journey itself, and merely proclaim the traveller’s inadequacy as a traveller. The best travellers do not pause to record their second-rate impressions, to be read third-hand. Their experience is primal. Their minds are uncongealed by the written word.

  “What follows is even more perverse than a written narrative of journey – a provisional account of an ill-advised and ill-prepared expedition to discover the source of The Journey itself. Such an undertaking is a contraction in terms and foredoomed to disaster . . .

  “And yet, in one sense, writing is a therapeutic exercise – a projection of unfulfilled desires, a substitute for life unlived and actions not performed. And for inspiration I fall back on Baudelaire’s proposal in the Intimate Journals for a ‘study of the great malady, horror of one’s home’. Few are secure from the fury of this infection, this compulsion that beckons us towards the unknown. To move exhilarates, to stay cripples. For in the symbol of the Journey lies our principle dilemma. Where does happiness lie? Why is Here so unbearable? Why is There so inviting? But why is There more unbearable than Here? ‘What is this strange madness,’ Petrarch complained to his young secretary, ‘this mania to sleep each night in a different bed’ . . .”

  Bruce’s text is a dense conglomerate of portentous generalisations and abstract theories. He throws into his thesis ideas about shamans, Che Guevara, the tramp in St James’s Square, the pyramids, the Qashgai, the Nemadi, the gypsies, the Beast, culminating after 268 pages in a soaring hymn to the spirit of the primitive nomad:

  “The question is, ‘Do you belong to MAN or the MACHINE?’ With each day more and more reply, ‘We belong to MAN, and there’s nothing wrong with him.’ There is no possibility for creating a New Man. To tamper with his genetics will not produce a New Man, but an adjunct of the machine, and ally of the Devil. Man is an infant beside the Iguana and his career a fleeting moment of evolutionary time. Yet he is an old man. His nature does not significantly change. And he is kicking hard, greeting the brutality of the machine with the sullen hostility of the pariah. The driving forces of history are the ways of the wandering savage.”

  As Bruce wrote of Raymond Dart: “The style alone suggests that something is seriously wrong.” Everything he wrote afterwards would be a reaction against prose like this.

  XXI

  The Journalist

  PHONE HOPELESS COME ALGIERS 9 OCT STOP BRING DESERT SHOES ONE DRESS AND NOT LESS THAN 250 POUNDS WILL REPAY WILL GO CENTRAL SAHARA BRUCE

  —Telegram to Elizabeth, 1973

  AT EDINBURGH, BRUCE HAD TURNED DOWN AN OFFER FROM Mark Boxer to join the Sunday Times. The thought of going back to a world he had left behind, pigeonholed as an art expert, made him anxious. At the end of August he wrote to Elizabeth: “The idea of a job horrifies me. I am more doubtful about the thing than ever before.” By 14 September, his reservations had intensified. “The more I cogitate it, the more I dread the Sunday Times business as being something I don’t want to do. I have sent a host of letters from here about this and that, none of which gets a reply. I’m exasperated without having begun. One’s independence is so fragile a thing.”

  In the spring of 1972, David Sylvester had resigned from the Sunday Times and the magazine began casting around for a new arts consultant. Francis Wyndham, a senior editor, said: “What about Bruce Chatwin?”

  Wyndham – whom Bruce described as “a colossal inspiration to a whole generation of writers in England” – telephoned Holwell. He caught a dispirited Bruce bundling his manuscript into a suitcase about to depart for America. Bruce looked back on himself at this time as “penniless, depressed, a total failure . . . I felt that for writing creatively I’d somehow missed the boat.”

  The telephone call had nothing to do with his writing, rather with his photographs of Mauritanian roofs, doors and robes which Bruce had shown Sylvester. “Would I, he asked, like a small job as an adviser on the arts?”

  Bruce met Wyndham to explore ideas with the magazine’s new editor, Magnus Linklater. The 30-year-old Linklater thought Bruce’s Mauritanian pictures “arty-farty”.

  Linklater had been appointed editor weeks before with a brief to curb the excesses of the colour supplement and to bring it within the orbit of the main paper. Under instructions from the editor, Harry Evans, “to go in and sort that lot out”, he was alarmed to discover £70,000 of commissioned pieces and an art department running the roost. “The epitome of that was an eclipse of the moon which could only be photographed from a certain peak in Kenya. The photographer returned with an image completely black except for a sliver in the top right hand corner. David King ran it for two pages. The ad manager came up and said: ‘I could have sold those pages for £5,000 and you ran two blank pages.’ I suddenly thought: ‘What the hell is this all about?”’

  Linklater was wary, but he listened to Bruce whose journalism amounted to two articles for Vogue, another in the pipeline for History Today and a film on a market in Niger not yet transmitted. “Bruce talked brilliantly,” says Wyndham, “but not journalistically and not like someone being interviewed for a job.” He had no shortage of ideas: Madame Vionnet, the inventor of the bias cut; Eileen Gray, the designer of the chromium chair; Theodor Strehlow, an Australian anthropologist who had grown up with the Aborigines; a Greek who had amassed a priceless collection of Leftist art in Russia. “I rather feebly said, ‘OK’,” says Linklater. He hired him on a retainer of £2,000 a year.

  Whatever Bruce’s qualms as he entered the hessian and black leather vestibule in Gray’s Inn Road and rose to the fourth floor, they soon vanished. Days later Elizabeth was writing to Gertrude: “The Sunday Times things look as though they’re going to be just for him.”

  Bruce’s three years on the paper were the final stage of his apprenticeship as a writer. Sotheby’s had introduced him to a network of contacts and taught him to see and to remember. Edinburgh had provided a measure of academic base. After three years of tussling with his nomad book, the magazine gave him a deadline and an audience. “Journalism does help you a lot in the opening stages, as long as you set your own journalist standards and don’t kow-tow to the fashion of editors,” Bruce said. “Examine the great journalists of the past, like Stephen Crane. If you’re thinking about a wide readership you have to have clarity at all co
sts. It’s a very, very good training.”

  Bruce joined the magazine when it was still at its height. Dubbed “Thomson’s Folly” on its launch, the colour supplement had become, in the words of Philip Norman, “Fleet Street’s most profitable as well as its most fashionable publication”, with a readership of one and a half million. For a while there was nothing like it.

  Fiercely independent from the main paper, the small editorial team considered no subject too ambitious or too trivial. They did what they wanted and held themselves accountable to no one. “What I liked about journalism is that you studied for an exam you never took,” says Roger Law, who worked in the art department. “We were quite cliquey and utterly irresponsible.” Norman, a young reporter, recalled that anything was allowed, except the word “shit” and pubic hair in photographs. “The feeling as one sat in that fourth floor office,” wrote Norman, “was of appraising and evaluating all Mankind.” In his 1995 novel, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon, Norman parodies a typical edition. The cover features a flat-chested model with legs like “articulated pipe-cleaners”, while inside pictures of starving famine victims mix with advertisements for double cream interspersed by long articles printed in “lovely chaste type” in book-length paragraphs: “Anthony Burgess on Mickey Mouse . . . V. S. Naipaul on the hard-up princes of Rajasthan . . . Cartier-Bresson in Bali . . .” There are theme issues on such topics as “What did Christ really look like?” or “the Steins” (based on a theory held by David Sylvester that every important person in civilisation has or had a name ending in Stein). In Norman’s novel, the magazine’s editor describes the Stein idea as “us at our adventurous eclectic best”. He sums up the magazine’s philosophy: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to absolute bloody excess.”