Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Bruce was unforthcoming with Richardson as with everyone else about his sex life. “I never felt he was nearly as much a cruiser or sexually-obsessed person as most of my gang. But I think Bruce had a lot to hide. I think he liked danger. I always assumed he liked being violated in some way and preferably by brigands, gypsies, South American cowboys. It was part of his nomad pattern, to go off into the desert and get raped by Afghan brigands. It’s something Lady Hester Stanhope-ish. It wasn’t so much the sex as the sauce it came in, some Afghan chieftain draped in a cartridge belt.”

  One of Bruce’s notes for his Viceroy reads: “As if to purge himself in blood, he worked in the abattoir.” He told Ben Gannon, an Australian television producer: “You know Donald experimented with everything in New York and so did I.” Donald, certainly, participated. He was the relatively anonymous subject of a Mapplethorpe study in which two black hands are photographed gripping an erect penis. Likewise, the hero of Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine “experiences a sensual pleasure in plunging at last into the most anonymous abyss of human poverty. Nothing discouraged or disgusted him, not even the enervating promiscuity of the poor folks who took [him] in.”

  The author Gita Mehta saw Bruce in London and New York and New Delhi over this period. “The whole point of promiscuity is that you avoid big emotions, you don’t trail any weed.” In India, Mehta was with a gay friend when Bruce dropped in. “‘Have we met?’ he asked my friend, who replied, ‘Oh, we had a raging affair five years ago.’ Bruce’s promiscuity probably was escapist,” she says. “He found his danger in his solitariness. In Patagonia was about the danger of travelling alone.”

  Bruce’s tendency to view himself as a separate self gave him enormous freedom to misbehave. Promiscuity provided release for a streak of masochism. Bruce’s notebooks make frequent mention of “the pleasures of pain”. David Sulzberger once drove with him and Elizabeth to Clouds Hill, T. E. Lawrence’s cottage in Dorset. “Bruce was aware that comparisons were being made. He was very silent. He loved it. I found it very sinister: tiny, faux-monastic, sadomasochistic.” Bruce later gave the National Trust pamphlet on Clouds Hill to Loulou de la Falaise’s husband, Thadée. “He was fascinated by this lodging, thought it quite wonderful,” says Thadée. “He pointed to the leather couch in the photograph: ‘That’s where he was whipped!’ He wasn’t interested enough in people to have a proper sexual relationship. He had this masochistic fantasy of being overpowered and abused by bandits.” The Australian novelist Murray Bail, who would become one of Bruce’s most intimate correspondents, was conscious of this strain when he visited Bruce in England. On 24 October 1987, Bail wrote in his notebook: “He told of a Russian he’d met in Prague. Dark ex-monk who after being harsh with women would slash his face with a razor, his face criss-crossed multiplying the torment.”

  As Ivory observed, a part of Bruce responded to the idea of being violated. “Always with Bruce there was this playing-with-fire thing, seeing how far you could go. He did all these things which are dangerous: he did literally go to the edge in various treks he made to remote villages. That also was a testing of himself.” Sometimes he trekked too far. “Bruce was doll-like,” says Magouche Fielding, “also devilish. I was worried he’d get murdered.”

  One night in July 1978, the collector Paul Walter, another of Mapplethorpe’s subjects, was walking with a friend through the gay quarter of Barcelona when he came upon a dazed Bruce in a rough area near the port. He was alone and dishevelled, wearing a white linen suit and a white shirt practically unbuttoned. “He was all in white,” says Walter, “except there was a trail of blood on his shirt.” Walter’s first thought was that Bruce had been beaten up. “He didn’t look like he was in trouble, but he looked like he may have been.” Walter waited for Bruce to recognise him, give a signal. But he walked on.

  In conversation with Arkady in The Songlines, Bruce described a visit to the Nemadi in Mauritania with the authority of one who has lived among the tribe. In fact, he was with the Nemadi only two or three days. One of the tribe was an old woman who smiled at him. He told Arkady: “I live with that old woman’s smile.” The sentiment may be honest, but one cannot help feeling a little duped. It is the same with Bruce’s nightlife. It would be more in character for him not to participate – and then to turn the story into something fantastic, suggesting the reverse.

  He told Muensterberger just how much he enjoyed playing the role of voyeur. In becoming a writer, he had legitimised that impulse. At a party in London in the early 1980s the photographer Russell Dexter was screwing Nureyev, who was leaning out of the window, when suddenly both men became aware of someone standing behind them in the doorway, watching. It was Bruce.

  Bruce’s sexual awakening through Donald Richards coincided with the emergence of his literary fame.

  In June 1978, the 38-year-old Bruce was working unhappily in Spain on The Viceroy of Ouidah. “On Monday, stuck in bed at 10 a.m. on a bright sunny morning, Tom Maschler my publisher rang to say that In Patagonia had won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (previous winners include Evelyn Waugh and Dom Moraes!). So I stopped mooning and pulled myself together.”

  In England, the book had sold nearly 6,000 copies in hardback. But its publication in America one month after winning the Hawthornden eclipsed even Maschler’s expectations. Bruce’s editor at Summit Press, Jim Silberman, had bought American rights for $5,000 after reading Theroux’s review in The Times.

  One after another the critics stood up.

  “In Patagonia takes travelling back to its magic roots,” wrote Alasdair Reid in the New Yorker. “We must look with enormous anticipation to wherever Mr Chatwin goes for us next.” In the Detroit News James Vesely wrote that Bruce was “the kind of fellow Noel Coward had in mind when he wrote his song about mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun.” In the New York Review of Books, Sybille Bedford began her review: “In Patagonia is one of the most exhilarating travel books I have read. Chatwin has a young and individual voice and yet writes in the tradition of the traveler scholar or the traveler poet – one of the vrais voyageurs of Baudelaire’s lines, ceux-la seuls qui partent / Pour partir, coeurs legers semblables aux ballons.” The New York Times Book Review carried two reviews within a fortnight. The first, by Ted Morgan, believed Bruce’s book the equal of Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps; Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour and Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Hilton Kramer, in the same newspaper, judged In Patagonia “a little masterpiece of travel, history and adventure”. Kramer was not the first critic to be left “most curious” about the author.

  Bruce had rented a house near Ronda. “Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out,” he wrote to Elizabeth in Holwell. “Doesn’t mean to say they won’t come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant, Kipling’s Letters of Travel etc. People lose all sense of proportion.” There was even a Rolling Stone cartoon showing the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat. “The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (Boston Globe): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his madeleine’ – ENFIN somebody’s got the point.”

  He said to his mother: “Who knows? I might even make some money.”

  Most astonishing was the response of Elizabeth’s cousin, Chanler Chapman. Writing from his hospital bed in Rhineback, New York, Chanler warned Gertrude: “my mother’s namesake, your concupiscent, luminous, spangled daughter, Elizabeth, will have trouble with Bruce Chatwin. This electric conversational account of the greatest most terrifying wasteland in the world is a 5 alarm message from Orion’s Belt . . . It compels belief. The man writes the way he looks in the snapshot on the jacket blurb. Bruce Chatwin is suddenly & conclusively shown to be a writer on the same ultimate level of excellence as John Livingstone Lowes in Road to Xanadu.”

  The plaudits continued as the s
ales passed 20,000 in hardback. In December 1978, In Patagonia was chosen by the New York Times Book Review staff as their book of the year. And in May 1979 Bruce flew to New York to receive another prize: the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “Ushered into a colossal cocktail with the faces of every book-jacket exposed behind their martinis,” he wrote in his journal. “All the sacred cows hauled out for the lunch.” In the room were Elizabeth Hardwick, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, I. B. Singer, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut and Caroline Blackwood. “Barbara Tuchmann gave me my prize. In Patagonia apparently . . . put me ‘in company with the great travel writers’ . . . Very curious my new literary life.”

  Bruce embraced it giddily. “After In Patagonia, he became an overnight sensation,” says Eberstadt. Just how much so was signified by an interview with William Shawn at the New Yorker. “The BIG NEWS is this,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth, “when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn’s pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a New Yorker writer who had never written for the New Yorker. The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through Eastern Europe directly I finish Mr de S. plus as many thousand dollars as I need.”

  His new sense of worth revealed itself in his changing attitude towards writers previously admired, like Paul Theroux whose enthusiastic review of In Patagonia had contributed to its American publication. Two years earlier, he had praised Theroux. Now, in a letter to Sethi, he was less sure. “Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (such a cheat the title!) although it’s a success commercially is not good. He happens to be a friend of mine, though, and if I can’t quite stomach what he does, he is one of the more lively spirits around London. In November we gave a combined talk to the Royal Geographical Society, which completely bewildered types like Lord Hunt, as we took the audience breathlessly through a literary excursion to the Antipodes.”

  Theroux gave an account of that evening in Granta 44. “In it, I suggested that he was something of a mythomaniac and had a screaming laugh and bizarre conceits that provoked him to such behaviour as monologuing to the mountaineers Lord Hunt and Chris Bonington about great climbs he had made.”

  Bruce also appeared with Theroux on BBC2’s Book Programme with Jan Morris “in her/his twinset and pearls. Going back to London in the taxi she/he said: ‘I was so interested by what you said about the dangers of travel. You see, having travelled all over the world, both as a male and as a female, I can safely say it’s far safer to travel as a female’.”

  Bruce was not part of an intellectual cabal in London, but in New York he infiltrated several. “New York was important for him,” says Elisabeth Sifton, who became his American editor. “He made deep friendships and his artistic life regenerated.” He mixed with Susan Sontag, Lisa Lyon, Jasper Johns, Bill Katz, Loulou de la Falaise, Barbara Epstein, Robert Hughes, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “He seemed to know people in all sorts of spheres, from the ultra rich to the chic,” says Enzensberger who first met him with Hughes at the home of a Brooklyn heiress. “The three of us erupted in conversation. Bruce had such a lot of éclat. He was very brilliant, very good-looking, very stylish, but also something of an alien. Millionaire ladies were impressed to be his inferior in some way. He managed them very well, with a sort of hauteur. He was almost French in his stance. He had something then of the dandy which never disappeared. But when he got outside in the street, I sensed a sea-change. He was very simple, not interested in this any more. It was clear he belonged to us, he was an intellectual.”

  The critic John Russell says: “When he was in New York his presence had a real (not a sham) glitter, as if he wanted not so much to charm as to subjugate everyone he met. He also dressed down to a degree that had a dandyism in reverse – unusual at that time – and would appear at some fashionable lunch in a collar-less shirt (no tie, of course). He got away with it.”

  He enjoyed his success. “He was vulnerable to incredible wealth and aristocracy,” says Rushdie. “He was vulnerable to old ladies who were vulnerable to him. He had a wonderful array of international battle-axes. Wherever he would turn up there would be some fantastically tough old lady who would want to spend all her time with him and he with her. He multiplied himself all the time and that’s another way of saying perhaps he stretched himself too thin.” He became a walker for Diana Vreeland, the doyenne of the fashion world whose demented extravagance he understood (“Pink is the navy blue of India”). He ate with Susan Sontag in Chinatown. “He was the only person whom I could invite to eat a hakka – fried intestines and toe-nails”. And he met Jackie Onassis.

  “Called at 10.40 5th to pick up J. O.” Confirmation of Bruce’s glamorous status was his friendship with Onassis, about whom he spoke at length, alluding to shared intimacies. “He met Jackie two or three times,” says Katz, “but she did say she was charmed by him.”

  One evening in December 1978, Bruce arrived at Onassis’s apartment to escort her to a dinner party. “Was it John [her son] who came down in the lift in a vaguely bike-boy’s jacket? Thin, washed and face enigmatic – beautiful distant smile, tight hips in blue jeans on the way for forbidden pleasures.” Upstairs, he cast his eyes around the apartment: exquisite eighteenth-century French chair, straw mat on floor, lacquer table piled with magazines, an album which said “Jack 1962” on the spine. “She came in: in black gold pyjama pants, looking wonderful. The whisper is conspiratorial not affected. The whisper of a naughty child egging you on to do something mildly wicked.”

  Bruce told Kenneth Rose how “mucking out a barn in Wales he recalled that it was exactly a week since he had been having a drink with Jackie Onassis”. Her effect on him can be seen in a letter he wrote not long afterwards to Elizabeth:

  “Dear Maxine

  An impossible piece of paper to write on. Life in New York highly social. Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells, and my God she’s fly. Far more subtle than any American woman I’ve ever met. A man called Charles Rosen, who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating about the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned on him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: ‘Yes, of course, you can see it all in the Titian portrait’.”

  Old friends shrank from the new Bruce. “He had changed,” says Tilo von Watzdorf. Erskine remembered how he came back from America and said: “I’ve just met the most wonderful person in my life. She’s so wonderful, I can’t tell you how wonderful.” It struck Erskine the tone was one of snobbery. “Or had he found merit in someone previously deemed to be spurious? I was a bit sad. I felt I’d slightly lost out with Bruce. I stopped seeing him when he was much too busy being lionised by glitterati. I thought: ‘He’s in another room now and it’s not a room I terribly like being in’.”

  Erskine was not alone in feeling neglected. Welch had introduced Bruce to Onassis, but Bruce now avoided the Welchs when he came to America. Welch wrote to him, “All our encounters of the past few years have been useless: too many people about. Neither of us at his best under mob conditions.” Edith Welch felt Bruce had turned away from them in favour of Mapplethorpe’s razzle-dazzle world. His childhood and Marlborough friend Guy Norton saw him at a restaurant in London: “I said to Bruce ‘How are you?’ and he dismissed me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d heard from friends in the Midlands how he didn’t want to be reminded he belonged to that circle.”

  Peter Adam thought that Bruce had become “swamped” by his own silliness. “He was aware – how could he not be? – that he was special. It was a tragedy that he diluted his currency with this silliness, being impressed by people, running after the famous, Nureyev, Jackie Onassis. Why want to be a Truman Capote when you could be a Büchner?”

  The Bruce Chatwin of the New York years is one aspect of hi
s life that many close friends, even his wife, could hardly have anticipated. Their puzzlement runs parallel to those who worked with him at Sotheby’s and were frankly astonished to discover that he had become a writer. Having immersed himself in that world he was equally capable of rejecting, or denying it.

  James Ivory was a close friend for two years in the decade before Manhattan. In 1972, he took a photograph of Bruce on their drive through Washington State to Oregon, and in a way that image was frozen because it was not developed until 1998. When Ivory had the film processed and looked at the spirit of his friend 26 years on, and already ten years dead, he reflected that he might have misjudged Bruce.

  “Bruce loved to have people caress and fondle him (in private). I think he found sex personally very self-affirmative, and as natural and easy as eating. He seemed to be without hang-ups, or guilt. But when I study the photograph I took of him in the Oregon desert, his image springs out at me and suggests there was a man there I might not have known as well as I thought. He must have had a more dangerous, a more self-destructive kind of sex drive than I guessed. I can’t help thinking of the trip he told me about that he made to Russia in order to run down some modern paintings, and how, when he went to view this secret collection, its keeper, big and brawny, once Bruce was inside proceeded to lock the door. Not to keep the KGB out, Bruce said laughing, but in order to passionately throw him down on the floor, where he raped the daylights out of him. A true story or a heavily fantasised one, embellished for dining out? But why should it not have been true? I think he must have experienced, and not just fantasised about, such encounters in the nomad lands he loved to explore. His readiness, his eagerness, in prim Western societies to have someone unbutton his flies, must have had more violent developments in the much wilder, far-off Oriental places he trudged through – not looking very different from the rosy-faced, overgrown schoolboy in the photograph I took. He must have been a sexual magnet in those lands; he must have seemed easy prey: a male version of those romantic nineteenth-century European ladies who travelled to the East to paint watercolours and were captured by sheikhs and kept in a harem for 1001 nights. Is this possibility part of Bruce Chatwin’s image and legend?”