Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Then usually I go for a swim at the pool of a friend called Magouche [Fielding]. She is an old friend, magnificent, stylish, the daughter of a U.S. Admiral: her name was once Agnes MacGruder, that is, until she worked for Edgar Snow’s ‘Support Mao’ campaign in New York in the ‘40s, met the painter Arshile Gorky and married him.

  “She still lives off the contents of the studio, is haunted by Gorky’s suicide and quarrels frantically with all but one of her four daughters. One of these is married to the son of Stephen Spender, lives in Tuscany and is the most dangerous gossip I know (though I love her) . . .

  “So the afternoon is usually spent bellyaching about Magouche’s children. Then I look in on two peasants who keep the house, Curro and Incarna, who keep me in onions, raspberries, cucumbers. They live in a spotless white house shaded by walnut trees in the bottom of the valley. Then I try to work for another three hours, but can rarely get much done other than prepare notes for the next day.

  “After that cook dinner. Last night disgusting experiment with spices bought in Morocco. Then read Flaubert, Racine or Turgenev if I’m up to it: Maupassant or Babel if my eyes start to flutter.”

  When he got the American reviews of In Patagonia – “I have a huge batch of them” – he bounced across the valley to share his literary success with Magouche and Xan Fielding six miles away. That summer Xan was engaged in writing a book on the winds. Bruce disrupted his concentration on a more or less daily basis. “Bruce would appear, unfortunately, always as we were sitting down to lunch,” said Magouche, “with little nuggets about some female saint in medieval France who had theories on wind. You would hear him as he approached the house. He had crossed Ronda, picked up his post – this simply stuffed with prizes – and he couldn’t resist putting it on the table and reading it out. Then he would talk. Everything he was thinking, doing, being, feeling. Xan would go off to his study and pull his hair. ‘I can’t stand it. Either we’ve got to go or Bruce has got to come at a different time.’ When I asked Bruce not to turn up to lunch every day he was awfully sweet. But he wouldn’t have understood. He did see himself as a sort of present to mankind. He’d come with such nice ribbons and wrapping and heaven knows what goodies inside, yet you never did unwrap it.”

  By September, the tension was apparent even to Bruce. “Apparently when I came up with some more ‘Wind’ information, he took offence and thought I was trying to patronise him. Also resents my friendship with Magouche. I’ve tried my best to like him . . .” A week later, he was able to report: “Xannikins has gone off to climb in the Pyrenees and so everyone is much more relaxed. He is an area of LOW PRESSURE.”

  Magouche, whom he had first met with the Leigh Fermors in Greece, had introduced Bruce to Ronda in 1974. They would go on lengthy walks. “Bruce had been up every peak in the valley. When I walked with him I would say: ‘I can’t go on if you talk, I’m going to stumble.’ It was, after all, interesting.” She observed his contradictions. She knew him to be very generous – especially with his time (“I never heard him say, ‘I can’t do this’.”); also a total sponge. “He was sensitive about other people, but not in relation to himself. I was once cross with Xan and walked out of the room with some horrid quip and Bruce reprimanded me: ‘That was hard to take.’ He didn’t like arguments.”

  Sometimes on their walks they had discussions about Elizabeth. “She was very good at accepting his terms,” says Magouche. “I knew he was slightly miserable. Things were going badly. In as much as he could, he did love her. But there was a crystal core. As Beatrice Lillie said, a diamond is a cute but cold stone.”

  During the last stages of the writing of The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce stayed with David Plante, the American novelist. Plante, a painstaking diarist, lived outside Cortona. He wrote about Bruce’s visit at length:

  “Bruce came in his small car, the back seat piled with books from the London Library, to stay ten days or so and then be off with the same burst with which he arrived. Without commenting on the house, as if he had been here many times and was totally at ease, he immediately set his type-writer on a small, wooden, paint-spattered table in the midst of bags of cement and stacks of bricks in one of the downstairs, unfinished rooms and began to work on his novel about the slave trade in Dahomey. He makes corrections in brown ink, then, he said, he always types the novel over from the beginning. After a few hours, the floor was covered with sheets of paper on which he’s made his corrections, and when he left the table with the new typescript he left the pages on the floor. I picked them up. He did this day after day.

  “Stephanie was staying with me, and I at first wondered if they would get on. What they had in common, they discovered, was black women – Stephanie from her experiences in prison in America and Bruce from Africa. They talked about the feel and the taste and the smell of the skin of black women, the bigger the women the better. Bruce kept laughing, short, high-pitched, abrupt laughs and saying, ‘Wonderful, quite wonderful’.

  “I never know if I should believe Bruce or not.

  “When I am alone with him he loves men, when he is with Stephanie he loves huge black women, and when he is with others –?

  “Sometimes he went off on his own to walk through the valleys and chestnut-covered hills. He wore khaki shorts and knee socks, and asked me, standing in the doorway, if I thought he dressed all right. He in fact looked very beautiful against the green hills across the valley. I hadn’t thought that there was a right and a wrong way to dress for a walk in the Umbrian countryside. (Only later did I find out he wore knee socks to cover his varicose veins.)

  “Once, he cooked supper – walked to the hamlet of San Leo and bought a chicken and lemons, and stuffed the chicken with lemons cut in half, a dish he had learned to prepare in, I think, North Africa. While he prepared in the kitchen, talking all the while about his novel, I, trying to pay attention both to what he was doing and what he was saying, picked up whatever he dropped. He has the ability to act rapidly and to talk rapidly at the same time, as if he were two people, one all motion, the other all talk, and sometimes one distracts the other, but mostly, amazingly, they converge. At moments he would stop as if the acting and talking parts of himself suddenly divided and left him wondering what he was doing and where he was, and he’d say, ‘It’s really all too much, all too much,’ and then go on as before. The chicken stuffed with lemons was delicious.

  “He gave me the typescript of the novel to read. I suggested he cut a few metaphors and similes, one, in the middle of a paragraph jammed with them, comparing the motion an oar makes in the water to Arabic script. He said, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  “When we were alone, Stephanie out painting, I listened to Bruce talk about where he will live. I said, ‘I think you should make up your mind that you won’t live in any one place.’ He said, ‘Yes, you’re probably right. I couldn’t bear having a house of my own – as I can’t bear the house I have with Elizabeth in Gloucestershire – because of all the problems: the roof, the plumbing, the land.’

  “We talked about Flaubert . . .

  “He didn’t say where he was off to when he left – as I imagine he hadn’t to the last people with whom he was staying . . .”

  * * *

  Bruce’s deliberations about where to live touched on what, to Kasmin, was his biggest problem: “He never knew where to be. It was always somewhere else.”

  He wrote in his notebook in Brazil: “A house is only useful to me if it is somewhere I can write in.” Sulzberger had properties in Paris and London, both useful to Bruce. “He had a form of writers cramp which made it difficult for him to sit at his own desk and write. It was a lot easier to go to someone else’s space and camp there, but without someone else in it – and he was slightly resentful if you turned up. He was practically allergic to the presence of others while he was writing.”

  At the same time, he hankered after his own space. “Everyone, in some way or other, is territorial and there’s no point in having a place that isn’t one
’s own,” he wrote to John Pawson. He was ever looking to buy himself a bolt-hole in the Vaucluse or Spain (in 1976, for instance, finding a “little dream house” in Alhaurin-el-Grande: “I think we’d better buy it,” he wrote to Gerald Brenan). Smallness was a pre-requisite. “Every time I saw in the countryside a one-room house with a window,” says Sulzberger, “I thought: ‘That’s a Bruce Chatwin house’.” While walking with Loulou de la Falaise on the edge of Fontainebleau, Bruce spotted a tool shed. “This is the perfect place for writing in!” In 1986, on the brink of buying land “somewhere in the Mediterranean”, he outlined his ideal house to Pawson: “I need a courtyard, a flat roof with walls like a room open to the sky, 2 bedrooms (I a library-cum-bedroom) and a living-room-cum kitchen with an open fire. All simplicity itself like that Portuguese architecture from the Alentejo. So you can think about it.”

  He could not stay anywhere long before “the malaise of settlement” crept upon him. Even his favourite places soon bored him. In August 1970, he wrote to Elizabeth from Patmos: “As one gets older, one realises that there are some places that suit one, and others that emphatically do not. One can only find out by experience. Paris and this place are two of them.” Yet a month later he was glad to leave. “Patmos is the most enervating place – bar Edinburgh – I have ever spent any time on. One was really ready for the Revelation. Beautiful though it is – the wind howls or it blisters in the sun – those pinnacles of jagged rock finally pierce through to the subconscious. Smart English girls of brittle conversation burst into tears after a week. No food or water, but above all that terrible feeling of not being able to get off which is psychologically devastating. If I hadn’t had something to do I would have gone mad.”

  He went maddest in England.

  * * *

  The strain of living at Holwell meant that Bruce and Elizabeth were often apart. When alone, Bruce expressed his admiration for her gritty independence and was loyal to the concept of their marriage. Gillian Walker asked him on one of his numerous visits to New York: “Bruce, where’s Elizabeth?”

  “I think she’s in Afghanistan.”

  “But Bruce, there’s a war in Afghanistan.”

  “I don’t think that would bother Elizabeth!”

  Meeting Elizabeth in this period, Walker found her friend’s stoicism poignant. “She never ever said: ‘This is a really sticky wicket’.”

  Bruce still needed his wife’s unconditional love. Soon after Paul Walter saw him in distress in his white suit, he telephoned Elizabeth from Barcelona seven times in the course of one day. “He never told me what had made him frantic. It was a cry for help and attention.”

  Elizabeth dropped everything, drove out.

  As late as 1979 Bruce was defending the integrity of their relationship to Sontag. “Is this a marriage?” Sontag asked him. “Really?” He replied: “Oh, yes. Absolutely. You bet.” Sontag assumed this was true. “What was more interesting, he wanted me to think it was true.”

  On his only visit to the Welchs’ new home in New Hampshire, he held up Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. “This,” he said, “was an ideal marriage.” The model couple were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, whose unconventional marriage accommodated bi-sexual affairs.

  In Italy, Beatrice von Rezzori asked Bruce: “Who is your best friend?” He replied, “Well, I guess it’s Elizabeth. She’s my best friend.” There still existed a physical bond. The Rezzoris testified to the Chatwins’ closeness, as did Kasmin. In 1979, Fox arrived at Holwell on his Kawasaki Z900, “a very quiet motorbike”, and caught Bruce and Elizabeth kissing. “I just stopped in front of the kitchen window and saw this long and touching embrace between the couple, which was incredibly surprising because I had never conceived of such tenderness between them.”

  Hand in hand with the tenderness went a hurtful neglect. “He never told people he was married, I was the guilty secret off in the countryside,” says Elizabeth. “He projected some sort of image to these people and he didn’t want to behave differently if I was around.”

  Because they did not see much of Elizabeth, there were those among Bruce’s friends who thought she must be difficult or boring or that, like Mary in On the Black Hill, “she carried her devotion to the point of eccentricity”. He gave out several versions of his life with her. He did not know what he wanted and his frustration came out, like a child, in mean outbursts. “He could be wantonly dismissive,” says Sethi. “It was a constant whine. Sometimes he was so vicious, I’d be angry. Once I did nearly hit him.”

  Bruce pulled a lot of faces, but he never pinpointed what was wrong. Whatever it was at that moment, it would change. “There was always something wrong with Elizabeth,” says his friend Sarah Giles. “But there was always something wrong with everybody unless they were icons: Wyndham, Lisa Lyon, Sontag – they were people not on his doorstep.”

  His frustration could erupt in unnecessary cruelty. James Fox retains “a vivid image” of walking with Bruce, Elizabeth and others from the Sunday Times to a lunch haunt. Elizabeth, who had her dog with her, was not allowed to bring Solly into the pub. “Bruce turns round and tells her to go away, which shocks everyone,” says Fox. “They can’t understand the relationship.” To Francis Wyndham, the dog offered a good explanation for Bruce’s behaviour to his wife: ‘She insisted on Bruce staying with us here (it was vaguely a ‘working lunch’), while she happily took the dog home. Meriel McCooey, however, standing on the corner by the hairdresser, overheard the exchange. “I didn’t say anything, but I thought: ‘That’s horrible.’ Elizabeth went without a word. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t thump him.”

  Erskine, one of Bruce’s oldest friends, cringed to observe his petulance. After In Patagonia was published, Erskine was invited to a lunch party in the garden at Holwell. “It was such a nice day, everybody having a good time, when it was curtailed by a horrendous piece of bad temper. Suddenly, Bruce got into one of his semi-hysterical moods and made jokes about his wedding: ‘Oh, I can’t tell you what it was like!’ He dashed inside and produced the wedding pictures. ‘Look at this, look at this.’ Elizabeth kept grabbing back the precious album. Then Bruce would rip it out of her hands and find another photograph. I very much took her side. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.”

  Bruce included Elizabeth less and less in his plans when he was writing of The Viceroy of Ouidah. His letters from Spain reveal an irritable detachment. He made no claim on Elizabeth when she sought advice over whether to sell Holwell because he hated it so much. “I simply can’t begin to advise you about the farm from here, because . . . I have no idea whether you have had any conversation at all with your bone-headed family financial experts on the pros and cons . . . Financially, that is, if you want to stay in England, it would be better to have more land and less house, rather than vice versa.” He was more concerned about his own predicament. “My urgent requirement is a small base which I do not have to get into hock with mortgages.” He was furious at his inability to act. This rage found its way undigested onto the page. In a crazed fit, the Viceroy killed his wife’s cat and left her soon after: “The strain of living with her told on his nerves . . . He took to sleeping rough, hoping to recover his equilibrium under the stars.”

  Writing to Kasmin from Ronda, he confirmed the direction his life had taken: “I left England in a particularly bruised condition. I long to live there, but in a situation that doesn’t get on top of me. You are right: the answer is to live alone.”

  Bruce returned to England on 31 October 1978. He had been five months in Spain, during which time he had seen Elizabeth twice. They met at supper at Badminton where she had gone for a charity concert given by Los Paraguayos – “the ugliest little men you’ve ever seen,” she wrote to Gertrude. Bruce installed himself in Holwell, but complained of the cold. “B says we are definitely coming for Xmas. He can’t leave till he’s written a good first draft of his book, but it should be done by then. He’s working on it all the time. Basi
cally it’s finished, but parts are still rough in his opinion.”

  In November, he found a one-room “cubby-hole” in Albany, a former maid’s room which he sublet from Christopher Gibbs. No sooner had he arranged for a builder to convert it, than on 9 December he flew to America. In February, he wrote to Elizabeth from New York where he had seen Jackie Onassis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Donald Richards. “I have to say that I would like to spend about five months of the year in New York rather than London.” He was keen, he said, to go to Australia “as soon as possible”.

  Bruce’s actions would have caused most people to leave him, but Elizabeth did not. For 15 years, she had accepted his terms. “He did what he wanted to do and didn’t take her wishes into account,” says David Nash. “But he had great respect and didn’t want to hurt her.” In April 1980 she reached the end of a road.

  The occasion was the Badminton horse trials, one of the most spectacular outdoor events in England, and for Elizabeth, who had been forced to make her own life in the country, an important fixture.

  “Bruce didn’t come down very often and then he came down with David Nash,” she says. “I was really cross he’d suddenly descended on me the one weekend I was occupied and expected me to drop everything. He was completely unsympathetic about other people’s arrangements: he was never there unless it suited him and he’d turn up regardless of what plans I’d made. I said, ‘You can’t come to dinner because that would make thirteen, but come with us to lunch.’ I’d arranged to go with the Fergussons to Badminton and they left with military precision. I told him: ‘We do have to leave on the dot’.”

  Elizabeth waited. Bruce and David did not arrive. “There I was, with an extra lunch for two people, and they didn’t come. They went on their own.”

  The breaking point had its origins in a loudspeaker announcement. Nash was standing beside Bruce at a jump when over the tannoy they heard: “Lucinda Prior-Palmer has withdrawn, having refused the faggot pile for the third time.” Both men got the giggles. “Bruce was in high spirits after that,” says Nash. “We went home to Holwell and Elizabeth was cross with us because we hadn’t met up. There was lots of friction, not about horses, but to do with who wanted what kind of life.”