Then there were the Americans: Edmund Wilson’s travel journals, Black Brown Red and Olive, Gaylord Simpson’s Attending Marvels, and, of course, Hemingway’s short stories. Along with Journey to Armenia, Bruce had carried In Our Time in his rucksack.
Martha Gellhorn, to her infinite regret, was once married to Ernest Hemingway. Possibly because of this connection, Bruce sought her out on the pretext of gathering information about Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda, whom he wanted to meet in Moscow. (Gellhorn recommended Bruce take her marmalade, cheap pens, writing paper, scent, American thrillers and pills for an ulcer that she only suffered each spring.) “I think he wanted to survey the landscape,” she said. “I was very surprised by this fey creature bouncing in and chatting. He promised to take me to a rugby game and never did.”
Apart from the structure of their sentences, their careful repetitions, Bruce shared with Hemingway the same “wonderful memory”. Also, said Gellhorn, a vision of themselves as adventurers. “When you’re daydreaming as a child you’re always Joan of Arc or Richard Coeur de Lion: that’s one of the pleasures of childhood. But it’s supposed to change.” She felt that Bruce had not grown up. “If you and I go on a journey it’s hell and we get dysentery and it’s misery. If he goes, because he’s an adventurer to himself first, these amazing things happen.” She contrasted him with Paul Theroux. “Anything Theroux wrote about, he did. He doesn’t make it heroic. He made it the way it was – which you’d pay money not to do.”
Both Bruce and Hemingway were “mythomanes”, said Gellhorn. “They are not conscious liars. They invent to increase everything about themselves and their lives and believe it. They believe everything they say.”
Bruce in an early draft had opened In Patagonia with the description of the “mythomane” Louis de Rougemont, a visionary charlatan who first met Captain Milward at a banquet in New Zealand, successfully predicted Milward’s shipwreck, and ended his days on stage leading a show called The Greatest Liar on Earth.
In his journal Milward describes his surprise at meeting de Rougemont again in London: “He spent many hours a day, for a long time, studying in the British Museum and reading all manner of interesting adventures there. I once asked him how he dared to annex an albatross story and make it into a pelican story, to which he replied: ‘Well, you see, zer vas no albatross zer and zer vas pelican.’ ‘But it’s not true,’ I said. ‘No,’ was his only excuse, ‘but it does come in so very well just zer’.”
The temptation to seek comparisons between Bruce and de Rougement, a star who was “booed off the stage in Brisbane”, is not frustrated by the author. “I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia,” he told Michael Ignatieff. “It wasn’t, in fact, too bad: there weren’t too many.” The book did, however, ruffle feathers in Patagonia.
First there was a confusion over the mix of genres. Just as Patagonia is not a place with an exact border so Bruce’s book did not fall into an easy category. Was it travel writing? Was it historical fiction? Was it reportage? And was it true?
Though he changed most names, Bruce left a trail of offended people in the Welsh community. Unused to scrutiny, they judged what he wrote with a nineteenth-century Methodist eye. They found it hard to conceive that their characters were so transparent that they could be reduced to a few vivid details by a stranger they had met for an hour. He had pinned them down as specimens, like Ernst Jünger skewering his beetles. In Gaiman, Geralt Williams compares the shock of reading about himself to the first time he heard his voice: “When someone tape-records your voice, you don’t recognise it as yours.”
Unlike the subjects of Cartier-Bresson’s Tete-à-Tete portraits, Bruce had not sought Geralt’s permission. As a result Geralt felt diminished. He had not had an easy life in the desert. Bruce had described his difficulties with a twentieth-century eye, passing swiftly through his life and refusing to dwell on it. He had snatched the intimacy Borges writes of: “that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow”.
“He wrote in a manera sobradera, an English way of looking at things when they were the Empire,” says Luned Roberts de Gonzalez. “Condescending would be the word.” He was too slick, too sharp, made people more interesting than they were, did not catch the spirit, says Albina Zampini. She prefers a book like Wilfrid Blunt’s Of Flowers and a Village. “Now that I enjoyed immensely.”
The problem is exacerbated by the world-wide success of In Patagonia. Few complete histories exist of the region. Most books concentrate on one aspect: the Welsh, the Anarchists, the early travellers. Bruce cherry-picked the lot and with his connecting gaze integrated them into a single narrative that has become, for foreign visitors, their favourite guide-book. “We should write something on the English who come here with In Patagonia,” says Luned’s son, Fabio. “It’s their bible.”
This popularity fuels the resentment of local historians. Best-known is the Argentine Oswaldo Beyer. In Buenos Aires, Bruce consulted the left-wing Beyer about the Anarchist uprising in the 1920s. He had read Beyer’s La Patagonia Tragica which, “on a cursory glance” he wrote in his diary, “seemed to me to be the hysterical, doubtless justified, ravings of a poor lawyer, driven to dementia by the greed and drunkenness that surrounded him – the work of a man with a persecution mania”.
In February 1994, Beyer published a ringing attack on Bruce. In Patagonia, he wrote, was the key to understanding Europe’s arrogance, always treating Beyer’s part of the world with a colonial attitude. He felt guilty whenever he saw a copy in a window. He had furnished Bruce with a bibliography and photocopies of various articles, while at the same time wondering “how he was going to read these because it seemed to me his knowledge of Spanish was very deficient”. This explained to Beyer various, unspecified “errors of interpretation”. And he accused Bruce, who had only spent “three weeks in Santa Cruz and Chubut”, of passing off other people’s material on the anarchist Antonio Soto “as if it was the product of his own investigation”.
Most deeply upsetting to Beyer was the wealth he imagined Bruce had accrued. “He made a fortune from this book,” he declared. “He sold the rights in Germany for $300,000 dollars, in America for double that, the same as in England, without counting the rest of the world.”
Beyer’s reaction explains why it was impossible for many years to find In Patagonia in Buenos Aires. As Bruce wrote to Jorge Torre Zavaleta, who reviewed it in La Nacion: “I have always been a bit mystified about the book’s reception in the Argentine, particularly since the Spanish translation seems to have sunk without trace.”
In Punta Arenas, Bruce had also consulted the Chilean historian Mateo Martinic, author of 23 books on Patagonia, “for the moment”. Bruce found Martinic to be a chauvinistic patriot with a mechanical intellect, “a politician tooth and nail, but one whose attitudes do not lead him to the extremes of either party”. Martinic, who admits to a “strict” historical vision, dislikes In Patagonia for its sensationalism. He takes Bruce to task for exaggerating the killing of Indians and for reducing Patagonia to five or six precious stories without reflecting “in the best way” the contribution made by the British. But the author was not, he concedes, writing a history. “The problem is not Chatwin,” he says, “but those who read Chatwin and think it is the bible.”
The book Martinic most recommends is A Patagonian Panorama by Tom Jones, the one-time British Consul in Punta Arenas. Jones’s daughter, Daphne Hobbs, is Bruce’s most vociferous critic.
She does not possess a copy of In Patagonia. “I would not sully my shelves,” she says. But she still, 20 years later, writes regular letters to the Buenos Aires Herald against a book which “whilst containing some elements of truth was much exaggerated and in some instances pure lies”. One section angered her sister so much that she consulted a lawyer, only to be advised that you cannot libel the dead.
In Chapter 85, Bruce adapted a story from Captain Milward’s journal about Daphne Hobbs’s father-in-law. In the journal, Mi
lward describes how he visited his friend Ernest Hobbs on his estancia on Tierra del Fuego and noticed a human skull “set up on the wall of the pigsty”. The skull belonged to an Ona Indian, part of a group who had fled after killing two Chilean sailors. This Ona had been shot by “tame” Indians working for Hobbs. Milward writes: “Hobbs, of course, took no part in the killing and he simply reported that his tame Indians had got foul of some wild ones and that the wild ones had got the worst of it.”
Bruce ratchets this encounter up a notch. He recasts it in direct speech, makes Hobbs reluctant to tell Milward what really happened and invents a second meeting in which Hobbs effectively admits to instigating the attack. This tampering understandably incenses Daphne Hobbs. “That conversation never took place. It was a pure lie.” Speaking without proof but with conviction, she would “put my hand in the fire” to defend her father-in-law from a charge of Indian killing.
Bruce obviously embroidered the scene. But one must question why he did not change Hobbs’s name as he protected identities elsewhere – unless he was persuaded that Hobbs had connived at the murder. This is a hard claim to verify. British farmers did have a hand in Indian killing in Tierra del Fuego, as Jones acknowledges in A Patagonian Panorama. “Many were murdered and a bad page of Patagonian history was recorded when one or two farmers paid one pound per head to Indian killers, a few of them British, for those liquidated; proof of accomplishment was the production of the Indian’s ears.” This does not mean Hobbs was among the Indian killers. Neither does it mean he was not. Bridges worked with Hobbs for many years on Estancia Baker and does not consider it impossible. “I’m quite sure that Ernest possibly did most of the things that are attributed to him – good and bad. Unfortunately, that is the way life works.”
Bruce had no scruples about rattling family skeletons, or about reshaping even his own cousins’ lives and natures, their names or their appearances. Charles Chatwin, who all his life had suppressed mention of his grandfather’s embezzlement, was mortified to read, in the book’s sole footnote, an account of the scandal surrounding Robert Harding Milward’s imprisonment. Charles asked his son to remove the paragraph in future editions. After Bruce agreed to this, he wrote to say that he felt the rest of the book “a worthy recognition of a lot of endeavour & hard work put in by you, and . . . to my mind, completely free of any padding”.
More distressed were Charles Milward’s daughters, Monica and Lala. They had looked forward to the book’s publication, but “feelings ran high” after it appeared. According to Monica’s husband, John Barnett, “they were spitting tin-tacks!”
On 28 November 1977, Monica wrote to Bruce expressing her “shocked horror – yes, horror” over a paragraph “full of conjecture and half-truths” which she felt had impugned the honour of both her parents. The paragraph dealt with her mother’s rape. (“One night the whisky-soaked proprietor went for her and laid her down. She ran from the house, saddled a horse and rode through the snow to Punta Arenas.”) By “raking up her bitter shame”, Bruce had given an impression of Isabelle, “never Bella!”, as a “rather cheap adventuress” preying on the soft heart of a lonely old man.
Lala objected deeply to his depiction of their father. “One of the things that drove me out of my mind was that he called my father ‘Charley’. He was never called that. He was ‘Charles’ or ‘Captain Milward’. He described my father as tall, having startling blue eyes and black mutton chops, with sailor’s hat at a rakish angle. He was short and red-headed and bald by the time he was 30, and always wore a black tie. And he was not this sickly old man. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.”
Monica could not understand her cousin’s motives. “Surely it cannot be resentment of us?” she wrote to Bruce. “To my knowledge, not one of my Mother’s family, children or grandchildren has ever harmed you in any way. We had never even heard of you until you turned up on our doorsteps. You were received with great kindness by my sister and her husband and later by my husband and myself. We welcomed you in our home, first alone and later with your wife and mother-in-law, who were with us over a period of several weeks. I allowed you free access to my Father’s papers, although I never dreamed that you were copying portions of my father’s ‘Journal’ with the intention of inserting them in full in your book . . . but I understand now why you insisted on staying on, shut up in your room upstairs while we were in the process of moving house.”
She accused Bruce of embezzling the material she had hoped to use in her own book. “Maybe your memory is hazy, but when I gave you access to my Father’s papers, I never gave you permission to photograph the ‘Journal’ – quite the contrary, I sought to make sure that it didn’t leave the house.” She asked him to imagine her surprise on finding “a receipt for 197 pages of photocopying dated 30 April”. He had, she wrote, “lifted” sections “virtually word for word from my Father’s ‘Journal’ – which is our one inheritance from him”.
Bruce apologised at once. “If I am in the wrong, then I am deeply in the wrong. But I recall the matter differently.” He agreed to remove the offending paragraph, change “Bella” to “Belle” and to credit Monica fulsomely in future. But Monica and Lala never forgave him. He became in Lala’s words: “the cousin of whom I am not proud.”
* * *
There are errors of fact in the book which had he known about he would have corrected. Several may be attributed to his poor Spanish. (In the Salesian Museum in Punta Arenas, for instance, he writes down the wrong name for the murdered priest: Father Pistone instead of Father Juan Silvestro.) Other mistakes seem the result of his haste. (Patagonia is generally understood to begin not at the banks of the Rio Negro, but 120 kilometres north at the Rio Colorado.) But there are strikingly few cases of mere invention. Bruce told the Argentinian critic Christian Kupchik: “Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Michael Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes Señora Eberhard’s ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” or makes the Ukrainian nurse in Rio Pico a devotee of his beloved Osip Mandelstam instead of Agatha Christie. These are tiny artisitic devices. “He is not writing a government report,” says Wyndham. Nor a tourist brochure.
Jean-François Fogel says of In Patagonia: “No one goes on such a journey.” People who read it wanting to find out something about Patagonia are left behind. The uniqueness of the landscape hardly comes into view. The book is largely about interiors which are elsewheres. “With little exaggeration,” wrote the German critic Manfred Pfister, “there are no Patagonian Patagonians, at least not in Chatwin’s Patagonia.” The structure is of a journey constantly interrupted, zigzagging among texts and through time. As a master fabulist Bruce has absorbed the rules and contrived something original out of them. He mixes and plays with literary forms, entering Drake’s cabin with the same flamboyant ease as he enters an estancia, or the mind of a guanaco. “Once you read his interpretations you can’t forget easily,” says Guillermo Alvarez, for 20 years a geologist in Patagonia. “I always saw guanacos and they followed me. I thought they were guanacos, nothing more. Then I read Chatwin and I saw guanacos in a different way. Now I wonder: ‘What does the guanaco think of me?’ He motivates me to think, to want to know more, to be more observant. This is his power. Once you read him, you want to know: ‘Is this true?’”
Generally speaking, Bruce does not subtract from the truth so much as add to it. He tells not a half-truth, but a truth-and-a-half. His achievement is not to depict Patagonia as it is, but to create a landscape called Patagonia – a new way of looking, a new aspect of the world. And in the process he reinvented himself.
XXIV
“Kicked by Amazon”
“How much did it [In Patagonia] change you?”
“It enabled me to go on writing books.”
—BC, Australia, 1984
BRUCE DEVOTED A CHAPTER OF IN PATAGONIA TO THE STORY of a 33-year-old French lawyer, Orélie-A
ntoine de Tounens, who came to be first constitutional monarch of the Araucanian Indians. Bruce traced the present claimant, Philippe Boiry, to a public relations firm in the rue Poissonnière in Paris. Other pseudo-royals in his address book were the claimant to the Aztec throne and the King of Crete. He would also be amused by a musician, Melvin Lyman, who in 1969 declared that he was God.
Bruce was told about Lyman by an excited Welch who had visited “the divinity” in a fortress of six dilapidated houses in the Fort Hill district of Boston. In January 1970, Welch’s intriguing report of the drug-taking Sufi guitar-player (“the music was mostly Hank Williamsish”) attracted Bruce to Boston. He came upon Lyman’s followers noisily eating popcorn and watching the Super Bowl. Lyman, or “Christ” as Bruce called him, sat like a movie mogul in the plushest armchair. “He operated several remote control switches, and while an enterprising insurance company proposes life policies for Hippies at special rates (higher), he turns round so that I can see his face . . . He is a mixture of boyishness and decrepitude. He has lost his teeth.”
The interview was very short.
“‘What’s your name?’
“‘Bruce.’
“‘What’s your sign, Bruce?’
“‘Taurus.’
“’You’re a liar, Bruce. He’s Taurus. Look at him!’
“The bodyguard stood close by. He was small and dark and hairy. ‘You’re not the same as him, Bruce’.”
In his own words, Bruce took “a clinical interest in Messiahs”. The story of a man who rose from humble origins to assume superhuman powers would be the subject of his second book.
On 21 September 1976, Bruce wrote to the writer Gerald Brenan outlining a fresh project. “Some years ago I went to a place called Ouidah on the slave coast of Dahomey and met members of a family called de Souza, now totally black. The original de Souza was a Portuguese peasant, who went to Bahia, became captain of the Portuguese fort on the slave coast and successively the leading slave-dealer, the Viceroy of the King, and one of the richest men in Africa. At one point he had 83 slave ships and two frigates built in the Philadelphia dockyard, but he could never leave his slave barracoon and his hundred odd black women in Ouidah. The family went mulatto and are now feticheurs [sic]. A de Souza is high priest of the Python Fetish, which Richard Burton saw on his Embassy to Dahomey in the 1860s. At that time it was in decline but, since independence, has taken a new lease of life. Tom Maschler of Cape’s says I should go and try and chronicle the gradual blackening of the family.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 43
