Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The magazine was best regarded for its photojournalism. Bruce was much impressed by a profile of General Giap, photographed by Don McCullin and written by James Fox. He took the author to lunch and swore him to secrecy: “I don’t want anyone to know this. The reason I went into journalism is that I wanted to compete with you.”

  Fox and McCullin comprised one of half a dozen photographer-writer teams who globe-trotted for weeks at a time. Fox once spent three months in Zaire at the Sunday Times’ expense. Instead of returning at the appointed date, he sent word that he wanted to go to the Ituri forests, there spending six more weeks.

  Bruce had sympathy for this attitude. One of his first suggestions was a round-the-world trip. In the next three years he would file from Paris, New York, Moscow, Marseille, Algeria, Peru.

  There was a saying at the Sunday Times: “Whoever runs the flat-plan runs the magazine.” Wyndham’s imprimatur was important, but so was the approbation of Michael Rand, the silent art director, who together with King and his assistant Roger Law laid out the pages. This trio were a law unto themselves and naturally suspicious of writers. “It was like belonging to a Masonic lodge,” says King, at the time a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Law remembers the moment when Bruce won over all three. “I was introduced to what looked like an upper class toff with strange blue eyes. He had this travel essay by Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, and he read it aloud to the art department. That was it: we were in love with Bruce. I ended up reading poems by Mandelstam.”

  Bruce’s Russian taste coincided with David King’s, the arts editor. King was a talented designer and collector of Russian photomontage posters “which pack onto a sheet of paper all the enthusiasm of the Red Revolution”. Trained by the Central-European George Lois, King designed covers that combined a Russian constructivism with American nous: a tiny button mushroom to illustrate the post-war era, with the headline, “Every day from now on is a kind of bonus.”

  King had an eye to crop a photograph so as to transform it. “The reason we all stuck to David,” says Law, “is because he’d take your picture, crop it and it would look good on the page. Bruce was interested in the visual side more than other writers. They hit it off like a house on fire.”

  King was responsible for laying out Bruce’s posthumous book of photographs in 1993. “Bruce was one of the most visually aware people I’ve met. With a professional photographer, you decide what you want to photograph and normally you shoot around it, using 100-odd photographs of one image. Bruce never did that: he shot one picture, then another. You never got a sequence, or a choice.” Bruce’s images, shot with a Leica, a separate light-meter and only one lens, were, to King, “unbearably inquisitive” of their subject. “He loved wood and corrugated tin – art without artists. And he wasn’t afraid to shoot pictures in the sun.”

  When he arrived in November, Bruce did not expect to have to write anything. He envisaged a sedentary job in the mould of Sylvester, his magisterial predecessor, who advised on whether, say, the new Alma Tadema exhibition was worth covering. In this role, his first responsibility was to organise “One Million Years of Art”, a six-part pictorial series encompassing nothing less than the history of art and the latest of several projects which its creators self-mockingly code-named “the wankers”. Conceived in the bath by the magazine’s former editor, Godfrey Smith, the debut “wanker” – “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century” – had attracted 60,000 new readers. Pressure was put on Linklater to suggest like-minded schemes for boosting circulation.

  Bruce’s project, hurriedly assembled in the spring of 1973, was inspired by the 1937 book of a little-known Ohio professor and discovered by Michael Rand on his shelves at home: An Illustrated Handbook of Art History by Frank J. Roos Junior. Rand floated the idea of expanding this into a visual dictionary. Linklater agreed. “I desperately needed another promotable series. I envisaged a prosaic guide, leading the readers through artistic masterpieces from the Renaissance onwards.” This is not what he got.

  Linklater was on holiday when Bruce buckled down in Holwell to compile the illustrations. He asked Lucie-Smith to assist him. “I was there to provide the bread and butter, and to remind him he had to have Giotto,” says Lucie-Smith. In the event, Bruce seized the project as an opportunity to make a manifesto. “One Million Years of Art” was a display case for his own taste, uniting the collector of curiosities, the Sotheby’s expert, the journalist.

  The series ran for six weeks during the summer of 1973. It opened with a photograph of stone implements used by African nomads and incorporated many favourite Chatwin objects. Dotted among the “thousand examples of man’s art from primitive times to the 1970s” were stamp-sized photographs of a felt appliqué saddle-bag from the Altai, a Seghers landscape and a photograph, taken by Bruce, of an Afghan lorry. “Bruce injected his own distinction into the choice, heavily influenced by Ludwig Goldscheider’s Art without Epoch,” says Lucie-Smith. “The Afghan lorry is pure Goldscheider.” This lorry, carrying the Japanese contraceptives, was one of four images Bruce supplied to challenge our idea of what constituted art. (“We have frequently by-passed the obvious masterpieces in favour of curiosities – and even the obviously bad,” he warned readers.) Relying on provocative juxtapositions, he managed to squeeze into the series his own photographs of a tray laden with fish, and of a Mauritanian door (later the hardback cover for What Am I Doing Here). At Holwell, the gardener was surprised to recognise Exhibit 417: the Peruvian papagayo feathers. Bruce elucidated for Sunday Times readers how ancient Peruvians had discovered long before Rothko that “blocks of pure colour floating one above the other produced a mood of anxious calm”.

  On 26 August, he explained in a short post-script the philosophy behind his selection: “Our aim has been to break down the compartments of period and place into which art history is too often divided and if this series has encouraged even a few people to widen their visual horizons then it will have achieved its aims.”

  Linklater, hugely embarrassed, fielded the wrath of the marketing department. “It was completely not what I had in mind. A million years! I just wanted it from 1342. It was a typical example of the hijacking of the magazine by the nexus. It did not put on a single extra copy.”

  The Chatwin series confirmed Harry Evans’s judgement that the magazine was self-indulgent, mired in triviality, out of touch. “They’ve lost all regard for what the ordinary reader wants,” rants the editor in Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. The editor was a Northerner, like Evans, who thought Alma Tadema was a woman and Leni Riefenstahl a man (“like Lenny Bruce”) and whose ideal series was a look at the seeding of readers’ window-boxes. Linklater had placed himself in a dangerous position. By promoting a series like “One Million Years of Art”, he was not carrying out his editor’s express wishes.

  Bruce was ideal for the role of arts consultant, but thanks to Wyndham this was not the role he fulfilled. With Wyndham’s encouragement, he went to Paris to investigate a pair of grandes dames, relics of the 1920s fashion world. Madeleine Vionnet had freed women, including Bruce’s Aunts Jane and Gracey, from the tyranny of the corset (“le corset, c’est une chose orthopédique”). She had designed her dresses to be worn as “a second, more seductive skin”. Bruce met Vionnet – “96-years-old but alert and mischievous” – in her salon in the Place Antoine-Arnauld, unchanged since she decorated it in 1929. He responded to the aluminium grilles and mirror glass. “The interior is as clean-cut and unsentimental as Mme Vionnet herself . . . Like a Vionnet dress, this is spareness achieved expensively.”

  Sonia Delaunay came to Paris from Russia in 1905 and lived “in a bedroom which is something between a room in an expensive clinic and a monk’s cell”. Accepted as a leading abstract painter before the Great War, she was preferred by Bruce for her clothes and literary acquaintances. She had designed patchwork dresses with bright geometric shapes to be worn in Bugattis and was a friend of the globe-trotting poet Blaise Cendrars. “The greatest poet of our age,�
� she flatly told Bruce, who quoted Cendrars for his epigraph in In Patagonia.

  Bruce enthused to Wyndham about these two elderly pioneers on his return to Gray’s Inn Road. “There was never any mention that I was going to have to write anything. I said, ‘Now we must find a writer,’ and he looked at me and said: ‘But you’re writing this’.” Bruce’s eyes lit up, says Wyndham. “He wasn’t confident – he didn’t see himself as a journalist. But he reacted with great excitement.”

  * * *

  Bruce was fortunate to have Wyndham and not someone younger and competitive as his immediate boss. Wyndham had first heard of Bruce as the boy with the golden eye from Sotheby’s. Millington-Drake, referring to him as “Chatwina”, had warned Wyndham how “some people think he’s too big for his boots”. Christopher Gibbs made him appear even less enticing. When Bruce looked at a painting, said Gibbs, it was quite different from the way anyone else looked at a painting. “I said: ‘What happens when Bruce looks at a painting?’ Gibbs said, ‘It sort of falls off the wall.’ If anything I didn’t want to meet him.”

  Bruce’s life had followed a cycle in which he set out in one direction after another to discover his talent, only to go to pieces. Under Wyndham’s guidance, he found his métier. “Words – I didn’t feel about them till the Sunday Times,” he told Colin Thubron. “I think it was something bashed out of me in my education.” Wyndham became the most enduring of Bruce’s mentors. On 20 October 1977, almost five years after joining the magazine, Bruce wrote to him from Italy: “I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you.”

  In Everyone’s Gone to the Moon, Wyndham is caricatured as the brilliant journalist Evelyn Strachey: “a man of about 40 with a large balding head and the close-set eyes and drooping mouth of some inbred minor prince . . . He wore unfashionable charcoal trousers, pulled high around his bulky waist, and a white, short-sleeved shirt of some archaic porous Aertex-like material. His right hand was turned palm downwards, holding a lit cigarette. His left rested on his hip.” Strachey on form was “the best there is”.

  In his profiles of the singer P. J. Proby or of the broadcaster and presenter of This is Your Life, Eamon Andrews, Wyndham elevated trivia to high art. The effect of his deadpan prose was lethal. Lax about his own writing talent, he was not lazy at editing. He liked to match serious writers with apparently frivolous subjects and to cause tension by playing disparate pieces one against another – Don McCullin’s war photographs, for example, with Bruce’s article on Paris couture. Trained on Queen magazine, he sought in every edition “a good mix”. This, the antithesis of a theme issue like “One Million Years of Art”, ideally consisted of “something serious, something shocking, something hysterically funny, something beautiful”. Bruce’s books are extensions of this formula, juxtaposing Insight-style investigation with profiles, art, fashion – all written under the influence of what Norman describes as Wyndham’s “barbed observation and limpidly cool technique”.

  * * *

  On 14 November, a fortnight after Bruce started work, Elizabeth reported to her mother: “He seems quite happy at the moment, but one never knows how long that will last.” He had spent the previous three years engaged with abstract theories. It unblocked him to step on a plane to Paris with a photographer and then to spend only two hours with someone during which time everything took on significance. Required to deliver 2,000 words by a fixed date, he told Simon Sainsbury: “It suddenly gave me the discipline.” Since 1969, he had been locked in to what he thought writing should be, engaging himself with the origins of mankind. The exercise of profiling two elderly French ladies he found comparatively easy. “It was no more difficult than writing papers in Edinburgh,” says Elizabeth. Oliver Hoare, complimenting him on one of his articles, was impressed at the modesty of his reaction. “His basic attitude was: if he could do it, anyone could.” He told Hoare: “It’s simple to write. You just get down to it.”

  Wyndham pronounced Bruce’s pieces on Vionnet and Delaunay exemplary. “If I did advise, it was against a certain preciousness and for crispness. Also, it’s so important to get how the person speaks, rather than what he says, the way they talk.” But Bruce required the minimum of editing. “It happens to so many people. They misunderstand their own talent: they slave away at something that is a mistake and suddenly they find through chance that they have a talent and it really is easy. That’s why his pieces were so fresh. They were very accomplished, didn’t need changing and they weren’t imitative of other journalists. I didn’t ever have to teach him how to write. What I felt I did do, which was not difficult, was to encourage him.”

  Given the green light to suggest stories, Bruce did not stop. “Little did he know what we were used to,” says Wyndham. “No one had an idea. He came in and had rows of ideas.” Rarely was he more ebullient than when coming back to tell Wyndham about a story he had researched. “I thought he was marvellous, a great big treat.”

  The fashion editor Meriel McCooey shared an office with Wyndham. Bruce would walk straight across to Wyndham’s desk emitting high-pitched shrieks. “It was always an entrance. You could have put a proscenium arch in front of him.” He dressed in a blue shirt to match his eyes, dark navy blue jackets and a Little Lord Fauntleroy coat. “He had a thing about little boy clothes.” But when he laughed out of control, she wondered, sometimes, if there was not a touch of insanity. “At times he looked like the cover of Mad.”

  The photographer Eve Arnold accompanied Bruce on two assignments. “There are people who are camera-loved and people whom the camera couldn’t care about. He was one of the camera-loved. He was always on and he loved the attention. If you took the features apart, there was not one great feature: he was too boyish-looking for real elegance or style. His attraction lay in the mobility of his face, the absolute rubber quality as it moved back and forth.”

  Roger Law left the magazine to create the puppets for the satirical television series Spitting Image. This is how he would have satirised Bruce in the autumn of 1972: “You’d have starey blue eyes and floppy fair hair and the manic animation of a storyteller and it would fit into the category of our ‘Talk Bollocks’ slot – like Jonathan Miller as a cabbie breaking off to lecture you on The State of Man. It was a very intense, frenetic performance. You had to keep out of spittle’s way. You never retaliated because you knew how vulnerable he was. When he wanted to tell you about Butch Cassidy and what you really wanted was a beer and it’s nine degrees below and you’re on the corner of a Manhattan street, you still listened. He always came up with something – an image, a story, which you wouldn’t forget for a while. Making images that stop people so they remember is what we’re all about.”

  After his initial guardedness, Linklater warmed to Bruce. “Editors have few pleasures. One of them is hearing the stories journalists bring back. Viscerally, Bruce was a real journalist. He didn’t play fast and loose with the facts and he had an instinct for what made a story: something that no one has written about which is new and intriguing but not completely out of touch. All Bruce’s stories had a recognition factor: Butch Cassidy, The Wolf Boy, like Mowgli; the Woman in the Desert, in the line of Thor Heyerdahl. But you got the impression that what mattered to him, more than writing itself, was sitting down and telling you about the story he was doing or about to do or had done. The bushfire of his imagination leapt over unproductive ground and inconvenient bits of territory to the next bit. That was the reason he was such good company – he was so stimulated by his own stories.”

  As highly as Linklater rated Bruce the feature – writer, he never altogether relaxed in his company. “There was a slight one-upmanship in the way he talked, a sort of snobbery in the names he dropped. You always felt with Bruce he’d produce things which revealed he had a greater depth of awareness than you in the things you knew about.”

  Bruce became one of the magazine’s star reporters. “We soon forgot about the arts and under Francis’s guidance I took on every kind of article.”
He wrote a dozen features over the next three years and in his last months gathered together most of these, with some tampering, in What Am I Doing Here. With two exceptions, they were articles he suggested himself – discussed and commissioned at lunches with Wyndham and the art department in the Progessive Working Men’s Club, a café in Farringdon Road.

  Bruce mostly pitched ideas to take him abroad. “The Sunday Times still hasn’t decided whether his round-the-world scheme is too expensive or not,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude at the end of December 1972. But in January he was sent to Russia.

  David King’s preoccupation with Soviet political art resulted in Bruce flying to Moscow to meet a collector of banned Leftist art who worked as a minor functionary at the Canadian Embassy. Bruce’s Sotheby’s friend Tilo von Watzdorf, who had spent a week in Russia seeking Constractivist works to auction, was responsible for the idea. Watzdorf had met the 61-year-old George Costakis, known as “the mad Greek who buys hideous pictures”. For 26 years Costakis had stubbornly tracked down abstract canvases by artists like Tatlin and Malevich, officially ignored since 1932. Watzdorf described the extraordinary collection to his friend – “who went off like a shot”.

  Bruce was attracted to characters like Costakis, who reflected facets of himself and to whom, through his contacts, he had access. Nor were they necessarily talented, eccentric or famous. One of his best articles was motivated by sympathy for a young outsider who had suffered a nervous breakdown. In August 1973, Bruce read of an immigrant Algerian, a 36-year-old sewage worker called Salah Bougrine who had without warning gone berserk in Marseille and fatally stabbed a bus-driver. With Don McCullin, Bruce travelled to France to understand the pressures that had driven Bougrine to leave behind wife and family and, finally, go mad. He visited a squalid bidonville and crossed into Algeria to meet Bougrine’s father, a shepherd in a yellow headcloth on a chalk-white hillside. Bruce’s sympathy for Bougrine, the demented exile, and his undisguised contempt for the fleshy-nosed protagonists of French racism received a warm welcome from Algeria’s ambassador in London. “I was deeply moved by the compassion and great understanding with which you have written on this subject,” wrote Lakhdar Brahimi, after the article was published in January 1974. Inviting him to dinner, he told Bruce how much his conclusions had dismayed the French Embassy. “I fear I intended that,” Bruce wrote in his notebook. “But then I did come back from Marseille angry.”