Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  For the first time Elizabeth took a stand. “I chucked him out.”

  Furious, she wrote a letter to The Tower, near Brecon, where Bruce had gone to stay with George and Diana Melly. “I told him: ‘You can’t take advantage like that. I don’t want to see you for a while. Make yourself scarce’.”

  Bruce told her the letter was “sententious”. On 29 April 1980, he wrote to Sethi in Delhi: “I fear that our relations are going from bad to worse. The trouble with living separate lives, as we have done for so long, is that you end up with totally different conceptions of life – to the extent that when you do try and make arrangements together, they end in disaster.

  “Last week-end I tried to show willing and put on my best tweed suit for the Badminton Horse Trials: the result was terrible. We have since had an exchange of letters that hint of separation/divorce.

  “A dreadful worry: what to do?

  “Must go now. I have to lunch with my US publisher who is the key to my present existence.”

  Two days later, on I May, a snowstorm covered the Ozleworth valley. After living there for 14 years, Elizabeth decided the time had come to sell Holwell Farm.

  XXVIII

  Border Country

  Rimbaud, like so many whose minds are occupied with cosmic visions, had no inhibitions where money was concerned and he saw no reason why he should not sponge off his friends.

  —Enid Starkie, Rimbaud

  ON THE DAY THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH CAME OUT, MASCHLER sent a telegram to Bruce at Albany: NO LIVING WRITER’S WORK MEANS MORE TO ME THAN YOURS STOP EVERY GOOD WISH ON PUBLICATION DAY TOM.

  Many years later he expressed reservations. “If he hadn’t written In Patagonia, I’d have thought it wonderful. But it’s a poor man’s In Patagonia. What he’s trying to do is to go further and in the process of attempting to be richer he’s going the other way.” Clapp, who worked with Bruce on the manuscript, felt it had been “written by someone who was having difficulty writing. I saw the panic on his face as we tried to tease it to life. It was extremely tight. Its denseness and its harshness reflected its subject matter.” A year later Bruce asked his American editor what she thought of the book. “I danced around,” Elisabeth Sifton says. “I said I thought it was beautiful, but cold and repellent.” “But it’s meant to be,” he said. Sybille Bedford thought it contained “too much excruciating leprosy”. Rushdie, too, felt “it exoticised the material in a way that isn’t successful”. Critics agreed. The novel, wrote Bruce, appeared to the “bemusement of reviewers, some of whom found its cruelties and baroque prose unstomachable”. In West Africa, King Nema of Elmina told Bruce, who was with Werner Herzog then filming the novel: “Well, sir . . . you have written a very round-about book.”

  The novel had many good reviews, but overall the reception was one of rather qualified rapture, a feeling that his fascination with the grotesque had run away with him. “I didn’t quite pull it off,” Bruce told Martin Wilkinson while loading wood into a shed in Shropshire, “but it was probably the best book I’ll write.” Final hardback sales were 4,938, fewer than for his first book, while sales in America barely exceeded 7,000, a third of the sale of In Patagonia.* Georges Borchardt, Bruce’s New York agent, articulated the American response in a letter to Rogers: “It’s very good, but I think it needs something to explain to the reader exactly what it is. Specifically, is it all fiction or how much of it is actually based on research etc.?” At Summit, Silberman had paid $20,000 for the American rights. In May 1982, he remaindered 8,980 hardback copies. “Readers,” he says, “couldn’t connect it with his first book, which made them very uncomfortable.”

  No one would ignore the novel more pointedly than the judges of the Whitbread who, as if The Viceroy of Ouidah had never been, awarded their First Novel prize to Bruce’s next book.

  The disappointing response accounted for the direction Bruce now took. Edmund White wrote: “I had the distinct impression that Bruce had been frightened by the failure of his extravagant, hyper-exotic Viceroy (after all, he lived by his pen) and rather cynically, and shrewdly retreated into the Hardy-like solidity of On the Black Hill for his next sortie.”

  Throughout 1980, as his relationship with Elizabeth continued to disintegrate, Bruce assembled material for his new book – “on a pair of Welsh hill farmers, identical twins who have slept in their mother’s bed for the past 43 years. Marvellous subject, but do I have the poetic talent for it?”

  Each of Bruce’s books is a reaction against the one before. Where The Viceroy of Ouidah luxuriates in cruelty, distance, wealth, On the Black Hill withdraws into a tender, static world and explores the unchanging grind of agricultural existence. Where the action of The Viceroy of Ouidah takes place in the real time of a Racine play, On the Black Hill unfolds over a century.

  In choosing the Welsh border, Bruce returned to the area he loved best. “No man can wander in fact without a base,” he said in 1984. “You have to have a sort of magic circle to which you belong. It’s not necessarily where you were born or where you were brought up. It’s somewhere you identify with, to which you always happen to go back. This area of the Welsh border I regard as one of the emotional centres of my life . . . It’s what Proust calls the soil on which I still may build.”

  Banished from Holwell Farm and with Elizabeth no longer there to react against, Bruce looked homewards: to a place not unlike the small-holding outside Birmingham where he had grown up. “He was in exile from everywhere,” says Elizabeth. “Except the Black Mountains. It was the only place he went back and back and back to.”

  Wales was a constant, a sanctuary from the extremes and excesses of New York. Bruce was conceived in Wales. He went there as a child. Here he had courted Elizabeth. His family’s scent was everywhere.

  There had been a tradition of holidaying in Wales going back to the time of his great-grandparents. Julius Alfred Chatwin, the architect, liked sketching in the Welsh mountains and fishing for trout in small Welsh streams and every summer he took a house for six weeks at Barmouth. Bruce’s grandparents, Leslie and Isobel, would bicycle to the Llantony Valley, the closest place to south-west Birmingham for wild walking. And in 1930, Charles Chatwin came on the first of his five visits to Llantony, that Easter taking his sister Barbara on the pillion of his motorbike. “Bruce would hear about Wales from the word go. When he was about seven and Hugh three, I took the boys to Rhyadder in a small open car and all three of us slept in the back.” Two years later, Charles drove Bruce to Mount Snowdon in the farm van. “For the first night we drove up the miners’ tracks in the lower regions of Snowdon, and slept under the mountain. The next day we walked to the top.”

  In early Marlborough days, Margharita took Bruce and Hugh for short holidays with the Anderson family. They stayed on a hill behind a sandy beach south of Criccieth Harbour. Bruce immediately took off with Gavin Anderson and walked to Black Rock, several miles away. They returned after dark to find a hue and cry. “We were confined to our room the next day,” says Anderson.

  On another day the two boys were stopped by the local police for smashing pebble-filled bottles against a wall. “Bruce was master of the situation, did all the talking.” They were taken home in the police car and received another dressing-down.

  In Bruce’s second year at Marlborough he bicycled to Llantony from school as part of a summer camp. The 95-mile ride took him over the Gospel Pass into the secluded valley that he came to think of as “my home base”.

  Marlborough had bought a farmhouse at Capel-y-ffin, four miles above Llantony Abbey. The money was supplied by an old farmer who arrived in the Bursar’s office one day, unannounced, and admitted to having charged the college “a penny a pound too much for butter” over fifty years. He presented a cheque for £869 16s 19d and walked out.

  In buying Castle Farm, the headmaster hoped to realise a wish for boys “to fend for themselves in some distant and preferably uncivilised place. Their activities should involve a good deal of sustained physical effort and th
eir comfort should depend largely on their own exertions.”

  In July 1955, Bruce bicycled to the valley with five Marlburians. After an early-morning dip in a tub on the mountain side, they worked solidly to restore the building: they made new window frames, new furniture and wove curtains, some of the material provided by Margharita. Bruce in his report is described as “quite immature, but sensible and a good worker”.

  Out of that trip is preserved Bruce’s first effort at travel writing, aged 15.

  “We set off at 9.45 for Castle Farm having been delayed somewhat by Noel [Parker] taking hours to wash his feet and climed [sic] up the hill to the pass. We charged down Hay Hill and went straight on to Glasbury where we stopped to buy some ice-cream . . . We arrived in Rhyadder and were very thirsty and so invested in ice-cream (better!) and more ‘pop’ at a café where a very heavily made-up and extremely ugly girl served us.” He slept out under canvas (“I discovered that I had been sleeping on the eggs”). “The rest of the journey was more or less uneventful except for Hay Hill, the inevitable Hay Hill, and arrived back just in time for supper.”

  Hay Hill rises out of the Black Mountains and is visible as far as Malvern. The ridge narrows along Offa’s Dyke into the escarpment known in the novel as the Black Hill.

  In December 1979, Bruce rode towards it in the back of a cart driven by Penelope Betjeman, who lived in a remote cottage above Hay-on-Wye. “I remember Penelope Betjeman – who was a sort of mother to me – saying, ‘You really ought to come here because the stories are just as good as all those things in Patagonia you write about’.”

  Betjeman, then aged 70, is the Philippa of his Welsh novel: “She was a short and very courageous woman with laugh wrinkles at the edge of her slaty eyes, and silver hair cut in a fringe. She spent several months of each year riding alone round India on a bicycle.” Born in the Cavalry barracks at Aldershot, she was the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army in India. Bruce had met her when still at Sotheby’s and he saw her intermittently at Edinburgh. She was bossy, buxom and stubborn and her honesty came without any dressing of tact. “If there was a spot on your nose, she would tell you,” says Elizabeth. Bruce venerated her eccentricities and saw the deeper spirituality. She in her turn understood Bruce and fed off his enthusiasms. “I think she was the only real loss in his life and he always missed her,” Elizabeth wrote to a friend after Betjeman’s death. “The loss”, Bruce wrote to the same person, “is hardly bearable.”

  Betjeman, like Elizabeth a practising Catholic, had learned to tolerate John Betjeman’s love affairs, but she was unable to live with him. She was a natural adviser to Elizabeth, whom she called “Chatters”. It was through Betjeman that Elizabeth had first discovered India. From the 1970s they organised trekking tours in the Western Himalayas. Bruce, always resourceful in meeting his needs, was especially good at finding all-accepting mother figures, and Betjeman cushioned him after his separation from Elizabeth.

  Betjeman had no telephone at New House (“thank God”), but kept in touch with neighbours by calling on them unannounced in a horse and trap. One afternoon, she took Bruce to meet “my boys”: Jonathan and George Howells, two bachelor brothers in their sixties, who lived on the eastern side of the Black Mountains in a white farmhouse also called New House. “The story she told of them (and which captured my imagination) was that sometime before the War their mother, seeing them to show no signs of interest in the opposite sex, had sent them to the fair at Hay-on-Wye to meet some young ladies. They came back with crestfallen faces, never having seen girls in short skirts before. This put them off forever.”

  Bruce had a natural sympathy for people cut off, nursing loss and hurt. Jonathan and George would become the Lewis and Benjamin Jones of On the Black Hill who, after one abortive venture into it, shrank from the world and went into a retreat which lasted a lifetime.

  Bruce and Betjeman arrived at a white farmhouse tucked out of sight below the Black Hill. It had a slate roof and window frames painted green.

  “Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see,” wrote the nineteenth-century American author Henry Thoreau in Walking. “A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.” They found the brothers working the blackthorn hedges with a curly, dark-haired boy in sunglasses. Their great-nephew, Vivian, “a boy of really incredible good looks”, stood to inherit the farm.

  “How are you, my boys?” cried Betjeman.

  Jonathan winked at Vivian. “She calls us ‘my boys’, but we’re older than she is.”

  Invited inside for tea, bread and jam, Bruce entered a parlour in which nothing had changed since the war. “It was a squint at the nineteenth century,” he said later. The small room was dominated by a William IV piano with broken strings. There was an oak settee with brass studs, a side of bacon hitched up to the rafters, and on the wall a photograph of their parents’ wedding in Dorstone in 1907. The room smelled of resin from the pine logs and a “musty masculine smell”. There was no bathroom and the brothers washed in a tin tub.

  Vivian, who would ride up on his motorbike from Dorstone, was suspicious of Bruce. “Bruce sat with his back to the piano and said he was a writer. He didn’t say he was going to write about them.”

  The brothers impressed Bruce. His notes say that they wore identical Wellington boots scrubbed of mud; that they both had on their father’s flannel shirts, fastened at the neck with a copper stud. Their waistcoats and jackets were woven from the same thick brown tweed, and their chocolate corduroy trousers came from a measure-yourself company in Harrogate. The only difference was in their hats. George in his “best” with trilby hat and suit looked “exactly like the picture of James Joyce in Paris”.

  George was younger by a year, and smaller. His baldness emphasised the birthmark on his forehead, and half his teeth were gone. But a serene smile gave him an “air of saintly detachment”.

  Jonathan, the boss, was the less quizzical. Straight-backed, pronounced veins in his temple, he could not breathe properly following a bicycle accident which, says Vivian, “put his nose all over the place”. The brothers talked freely, about their past. They were born in the nearby house and moved to New House in the 1920s. “They went to no school, learned everything from their mother in the house, to read and write, but did go to Sunday School in the Chapel on Sundays,” wrote Bruce. “In the days of their father they had two teams of shire horses and a cob. Their grandmother, born in the 1840s, remembered working oxen to the plough which was far slower and was liable to attacks of fly which made them mad.”

  The only person they saw day to day was their great nephew. “They wouldn’t say a bad word against anyone,” says Vivian. “But if ever they had a bad dealing they would never deal with that person again.” They were generous in other ways. Vivian sometimes turned up with his blonde girlfriend on the back of his Yamaha. “When Sue’s grandpa died, they overheard her saying she couldn’t afford a hat so they went into the kitchen and came back with 50 pound notes and put them on the table. ‘Buy a handbag as well’.” Bruce in his novel would convey the brothers’ gentleness and their father’s hardness.

  George Edgar Howells was the model for Amos in On the Black Hill. As a young man, he had rented 13 ewes. By the end of the Depression, he owned a flock of 300. He would buy sheep at the auctions in Brecon and take them back on the train to Hay and drive them up over the bluff. A cantankerous know-all, his pleasure was to sit of an evening at table and carpenter frames for his prints. Two of these, “Divided Affection” and “Wait a Minute”, were hung on the wall, their frames chiselled out of beams taken from the big hall in Glasbury. George had died in 1958. At the top of a narrow staircase his bedroom stood untouched, his boxes of shoes not opened.

  Their mother, Mary Ann, was a Radnorshire girl who had worked in London as a maid and also for a vicar in Snodhill Court, four miles away, from whom she had bought the piano. She collected silve
r and green willow china and was “honest as a dye”. She lived to be 90 and the brothers had looked after her in her failing years.

  Jonathan and George were the eldest of four children. They had always lived together, separating once, for a six-month period of convalescence, when Jonathan was 15 and his horse took off and the end of the shaft pierced his leg. “People used to say they’re an old married couple,” says Vivian. Bruce was intrigued to learn that they slept upstairs in the same bedroom, a room with two beds, a sloping roof and a window looking up to the hill.

  The farm consisted of 298 acres with 400 wool sheep and 26 cows. This was the Howells’ world and they had rarely left it. If they ventured out, it was most usually to Hay twelve miles away. Neither brother drove, but George piloted the tractor in to Hay on Fridays, parking in the Co-op yard while he did the shopping.

  On Mondays, as children, they had gone on bicycling tours dressed in blue serge suits, caps and bicycle clips. They had once been to Stow-on-the-Wold, but never abroad and never to London. “I doubt whether they had seen the sea,” says Vivian. The one obsession they had was for aeroplanes. “We never went in a bus, we never went in a train, oh, no no, but we went in a plane,” they told Bruce. “And then I discovered that in fact that they had gone for their 75th birthday in a light aircraft as a sort of joy ride and . . . had a huge scrap book which dealt with every air crash, nearly, of the twentieth century.” It was this conversation, Bruce said, “which is what really prompted me to write the book.” The novel “is about people who are forcibly settled, as it were, but yet they wander in their imagination.”