Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  * * *

  Bruce installed himself in the area. One Sunday, he walked alone across the Cefn Hill. The snow was deeper than he expected and he fell through to his knees. Inky clouds banked up behind Lord Hereford’s Knob, but as he looked back into England the fields were green. “The two brothers were mucking out the cowshed onto the dung pile. They seem incapable of doing anything apart . . . They showed me the granary and stable that they built in 1937. I had asked whether hired labour used to sleep there, but they never had a hand, only their brother and sister.” Sitting on the settee, they discussed the world. They kept in touch with events from the television on the piano and knew all about how Yugoslavia was divided.

  Bruce drew a plan of the interior in his notebook and promised to visit again. “Tacit agreement that I shall satisfy their craving for knowledge about the outside world and they will provide me with something of theirs.”

  The Howells always seemed pleased to be interrupted by Bruce. “My uncles loved talking about the past.” Vivian was not so content to have his work disrupted. “And then Bruce started turning up. He tried to haul bales, but he was a waste of time, he just didn’t know how to do it. Then he wants to learn to hedge, he says. But he’d do bugger all except talk. A hedge we’d do in a week took a month to do. He used to drive me round the bend, to tell the truth, because I couldn’t get on and do anything.”

  It surprised Vivian to learn that Bruce had grown up on a farm. “He came back in the spring and Uncle Johnny put him on a tractor, a little 414 International, and taught him to drive – but Bruce couldn’t brake. We used to keep cattle in the Pikes [a nearby farm], eight to ten months old. I’d grab the bullock by the nose and Uncle Johnny’d pour in a bottle of mineral bullets. ‘Can I have a go?’ said Bruce. He got his arm round the neck and the bullock took off, dragging him round the shed. He didn’t give no impression he’d been on a farm before.

  “I used to say to my uncles after he’d gone, ‘Why’s he asking these questions for?’”

  The Howells’ farm reminded Bruce of his own remote upbringing at Brown’s Green. In On the Black Hill he gave a version of what might have been. The novel is about two brothers who do not wander, who do not marry, who complete each other in a way Bruce himself seemed to have longed for. It explored what would have happened if he had never left home.

  Even with Elizabeth to anchor him he was, as Hodgkin observed, “terribly lonely”. “I used to think it was the loneliness of someone doing what he did and I would think it was something we had in common, but it wasn’t that. He was dead lonely and he took it with him into the desert. It was the one thing Elizabeth couldn’t do anything about.”

  Nor could Hugh. Climbing with his brother among the sheep above Casde Farm in the 1960s Bruce had said to him: “I am Abel, the shepherd, the free spirit, the keeper of high ground and birdsong. Who are you?” The question dumbfounded Hugh. “I shut up. I wasn’t supposed to say anything.” Hugh had become a surveyor for the City firm of Weatherall, Green & Smith: he was a setder. He worked in the company for 20 years. Like Bruce, Wilfred Thesiger had a brother who lives a regimented life. Brian Thesiger joined the regular army.

  On the Black Hill began as a short story about the two bachelor brothers. “I started out writing a few paragraphs and then, suddenly, I wrote that the brothers were identical twins,” he told Bragg on the South Bank Show. “I don’t know why I wrote it, but it just occurred to me that they might be. And having written that line, which is a separate paragraph to itself, I suddenly realised that this was a novel and not a short story and that what I’d done sort of predicated a book of 450 pages instead of 30.”

  He may have got the idea of twins from the Greenway family who lived a mile from Betjeman at Wernagavenny and whose telephone ensured that Bruce returned repeatedly. “I always go over to Olive to use the telephone,” said John Betjeman. Bruce likewise. “He would go for a walk in the morning to clear his head at 10 a.m. and come for coffee,” says Olive. Bustling in and out of her kitchen were Olive’s 26-year-old twin sons: Russell, a builder, and Colin, a carpenter.

  At Marlborough, Bruce had known three sets of twins. In Dahomey, he discovered that twins were not regarded like ordinary men but considered gods (when visiting the Porto Novo museum with Kasmin he saw wooden effigies to Ho Ho, the sacred deity of twins, to be carried at all times by the survivor if one dies). As a child, Bruce had told stories to his imaginary friend, Tommy. He never, one suspects, altogether abandoned Tommy. “He’d galvanise himself into the activity of writing with early-morning yells,” says Matthew Spender, one of Bruce’s hosts in Italy. “You’d hear cackles, laughs, cries of pleasure and encouragement. ‘Now, now.’ He was talking to himself as if he was outside and he had to boss himself around. ‘Now what we’re going to do is this . . . No, that’s quite wrong.’ You’d wander out of your bedroom thinking there were visitors for breakfast and no, it was Bruce getting up.”

  Out of the same compulsion, Bruce would invent an intimate, inviolable Other. “The novel is between Bruce and Bruce,” says Jonathan Hope. “He would have loved to have had an identical twin.”

  The twins Lewis and Benjamin, though the most fully realised, are not the first “doubles” to appear in Bruce’s work: in The Viceroy of Ouidah, the Viceroy becomes a blood brother of the king of Abomey, while his favourite twin daughters are sent back to Bahia, finding work as prostitutes. Bruce was attracted to the erotic possibilities of twins. He was delighted when his Finnish publishers proposed to change On the Black Hill to Erototammatomatt – “which of course was the title I’d been looking for all the time!” – and communicated this to Sontag, who wrote to him: “I look forward with the greatest impatience to ‘the novel about the incestuous brothers’ as it was referred to by John Richardson the other night.” Edmund White recorded that the first oral sketches of On the Black Hill and The Songlines “were pretty gay, whereas the final versions were dully normal”. Bruce’s notebooks contain hints – “Novel is of incest . . . Twins – one queer, the other not” – as well as this paragraph: “Though the pleasure Jonathan takes in being embraced by Lewis puts him into raptures, he prefers to follow, not to walk side by side, to tread in his footprints, to gulp of air knowing it to be the gulp he had exhaled, to sing on and in the same trajectory – to do everything in imitation – to put his head on the rumpled pillow.” Bruce toned down the incestuous element, but the device of twins allowed him to explore an intense male relationship which John Updike, in the New Yorker, would interpret as “a homosexual marriage”.

  So the short story became a novel he had to research. “I had to get all the twins literature out.” He read Musil (“a twin has 25 times less chance of being famous”) and Gogol’s “The Nose” (“to be pursued by oneself”) and he discovered Elvis Presley was a twin.

  As ever, Bruce needed to test his theories on a pre-eminent authority. “Some of the details,” he assured ABC radio, “were checked for me by the greatest expert in the world on twins.” He described to Wyndham, to whom he dedicated the novel, how “when I went on to read the psychoanalytic literature on twins, the only book that really impressed was by a Professor Zazzo, written, I think in the ’40s. Last January, I went to lunch with the translator of The Viceroy in Paris, and there, on his desk, was Météores [by Michel Tournier]. ‘Funny,’ I said, ‘I’m writing a book about twins.’ ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘my wife is a psychiatrist who works with the leading expert on twins, one Professor Zazzo.’ We rang for an appointment. The professor was in his eighties. Utterly charming! I apologized for disturbing him. My questions were those of a novelist. I wanted to make sure my story held together. ‘But Monsieur,’ he replied, ‘I have 1,200 case histories on twins, and if I had your talents, I would be Balzac.’ He then put me right on a number of points, and mentioned Tournier. It seemed that Tournier had also been obsessed by his book and had checked his plot with Zazzo, as I did mine.”

  Zazzo showed Bruce his card-indexes, his questionnaires. Some
of his findings were exciting. “For example, you have situations whereby identical twins are separated: one is brought up in Germany and is raised as a Nazi and the other one is taken to America and raised as a Jew and they both marry a red-headed girl called Betty and they have an underground workshop and they both collect ship models and have pug dogs.” This, said Bruce, implied not only a telepathetic signalling over long distance, but a strong genetic bias towards behaviour. “Much more interesting to my mind was the fact that when twins are stuck together they will resemble each other very, very little by the end.” The weaker twin, Zazzo revealed, would sometimes be given the opportunity to redress the balance and be six inches taller and shave six months before. “He told me of a story which he had encountered among French country boys in the ‘30s which was exactly the period I was dealing with. He said there was a case whereby the younger twin was first shaving on his own. And he looked in a mirror with a cut throat razor and had the sensation that he was cutting his own brother’s throat, which is of course an incredibly powerful image. It was one that I couldn’t resist using in the book.”

  Another coincidence struck Zazzo, that Bruce’s own name Chatwin ended with the syllable ‘“twin”.

  Bruce considered various titles for the novel: Two by Two, The Young Men, Mr and Mr Jones and The Vision and The Rock. If New House Farm inspired the farm which he calls The Vision, the model for the Rock was a grey stone smallholding called Coed Major reached high up on the hillside through a chaos of battered hawthorn bushes. “Before the War, the Barn (as Coed Major was called) was famous for being a place where local farmers could dump their illegitimates. It was a place of wild female energies.”

  Coed Major was owned by “a great local character” – called Joe Philips, or Joe the Barn. He lived there with a much younger woman, Jean the Barn. Unlike the situation of his first two books, where he parachuted in and out, Bruce forged genuine and empathetic connections with the people of the Black Mountains.

  He rode over to Coed Major with Betjeman shortly after their visit to the Howells brothers. On a blowy morning in January, they picked their way through the bright bracken on to the exposed saddle of land. “The dogs howled as we dismounted and a procession of geese and ducks flew off among the wreckage of red tractors and pullets.” Over a rough stone wall a lichenous figure moved through the mud in gun boots.

  Joe the Barn was a cheerful man in his eighties. He had sandy eyes in a weather-beaten face and a turned-up nose “like an imp”. A single brown incisor poked from his lower jaw and when he opened his mouth a strange smell came out of it, “the smell of something ancient”. He was a scrap merchant, rumoured to be a sheep thief. “How be you?” he asked Betjeman.

  He showed them into the house. One end of the barn had fallen down and the other end blown open. “How they survived the cold I can’t tell,” wrote Bruce. The tables and chairs were covered with the greenish white smears of fowl droppings. A woman was mucking out the first room: “the mysterious Jean”.

  Joe shared the Barn with Jean whom he treated as both his wife and daughter, and with his chickens. Jean was about 40, with flashing eyes that caught the sun. She wore a brown jumper, a greasy corduroy hat and a shirt which had been torn and patched together “like a broken spider’s web”. On the table was a bucket of chicken mash – “which I suspect she ate”.

  Jean had the Howells’ gentleness. Incredibly shy, her round and pale blue eyes were always cast down. “She would say something and flinch a look at her hands, all covered with fowl droppings but somehow purple.” Her arms, legs and even her back, she said, were covered with sores. When Penelope told her she should see a doctor, Jean replied, wringing her hands: “It’s not for we to go to the doctor.”

  She lived for Joe and for her animals. Betjeman asked if she ever ate rabbits or hares. “No, I just let ’em live, let ’em love. Let the hares live, and the rabbits live and the foxes, I won’t harm ’em.”

  Joe sat at the oilcloth-covered table and told Bruce he recognised him. “He thinks he saw me before as a little lad in Capel-y-ffin.”

  When Bruce returned to the Barn on 17 January he discovered Joe had been taken to Bronllys Hospital with a stroke.

  Jean told him how she had got up in the night to put more coal in the fire and found Joe fallen off the settee where he slept. He had caught his head on the box with the chickens in it.

  “I hope ’e comes back – we’ve been together all our lives.”

  Distraught, she offered Bruce a cup of tea. “Do please. I promised you a cup a tea when you came last week with lady what’s a’t yer call her?” The kettle was found, hung on a hook over the fire. She served Bruce watery tea.

  Without Joe, she had to look after the animals on her own. It was hard work, starting at seven to feed his dogs with meal and old bread. She didn’t know how she would manage.

  “And now I ’ope he comes back. How I hope so. We was together all our lives like – together.”

  Bruce and Betjeman visited Joe in Bronllys Hospital later the same day. They found him thin and frail and clean. “When they scrubbed him all the stuffing went out of him,” wrote Bruce. An eye opened, rolled up. Seeing Betjeman, he said simply: “And ’ows you?”

  His left leg was paralysed and he was incontinent. His one thought was for his animals. Whenever Bruce visited, he enquired how they were and added a message for Jean: “Tell ’er to keep on feeding – and you if you go there, chuck ’em a bit of hay and a fist of oats . . . the dogs won’t bite you,” and he pulled his lips so tight that they went back over the yellow incisor and a tear came over the ridges under his eyes. Bruce watched, amazed. “He started to cry whenever the animals were mentioned, but not a shred for Jean.”

  Bruce went the next day, walking up through the snow. “Again to see Jean the Barn to tell her how Joe was getting along. She thought last night he’d gone because at three in the morning all the dogs which are kept in rough corrugated iron sheds started howling. The room was so full of smoke that you could hardly see your forearm: the soot from the chimney had fallen into the grate and the fire was belching clouds of blacky-yellow smoke. Outside, a pale gold sunset as the sun went down behind the hill, but inside the filth was indescribable and I smelt all over of coke fumes for four hours or more with eyes smarting that I could hardly read.

  “I took her a 28lb bag of rolled oats which she said she needed for the ponies and after humping it on my back for three miles through the drifts was a little exhausted . . . She is determined to stay on in the Barn, even if Joe doesn’t come back [and] says that if she can get through January she can get through. I was quite impressed to find she knows the hour and the day of the month very exactly.”

  Bruce took it upon himself to watch out for Jean. He braved the howling dogs and the ammoniacal smells of the chicken droppings to help with odd jobs. He showed more practical skill than Vivian Howells would have imagined likely. A door from the kitchen led directly into a barn so full of muck that the cattle bumped their backs on the roof beams. He dug that out for Jean. He unblocked her chimney. When a ram was lost, he went out with a shovel and scooped away the impacted snow until they found him. He staggered under bundles of bracken through the snowdrifts and helped with the foddering and feeding.

  “‘All animals, no matter what it is, you got to feed ’em.’

  “‘You too, Jean,’ I said.

  “And her face creased up like an old oriental woman and she laughed and laughed.”

  Slowly, he won her confidence.

  One day after he had brought Jean a cake, Bruce walked into Olive Greenway’s kitchen. “Olive says the talk in Crasswell is that Jean has a fancy-man, ME!” Without doubt, he felt a great bond for her. Jean’s energies and innocence put him in mind of a Celtic wood spirit. She was a convincing argument against Lorenz. “Damn the Marxist interpretation of history. Damn Darwinism and the survival of the fittest.” Here was the example of a woman “who has been made to suffer any kind of indignity and who come
s across with a basic standard of behaviour which we as a species can retain.” She was, he wrote, “a heroine of our time”.

  Speaking to Bragg about Jean and Joe and the Howells brothers, he said: “I don’t see these people as strange. I wanted to take these people as the centre of a circle and see the rest of our century as somehow abnormal.”

  Bruce, in the opinion of his friend Loulou de la Falaise, was a pique-assiette, “someone who eats off another’s plate”. He lived in at least seven places while writing On the Black Hill, half of these located within miles of the brothers’ farm. His hosts along the border country included Betjeman, Maschler, the Wilkinson family near Clunton and, further south, George and Diana Melly in their tower at Scethrog, “a lovely place to work, the only distraction being a view of a white farmhouse through a slit window”. Bruce made each of his hosts feel they enjoyed a special relationship with him. When Maschler told George Melly that Bruce had written On the Black Hill at his cottage there was nearly an argument: “What do you mean?” said an indignant Melly, “he wrote it at my house!”

  How did he progress from sitting next to someone at a dinner party to moving into their house for several months? Diana Melly had first met Bruce in 1973 and not registered him. The rest of the party had gone to hear George Melly play at Ronnie Scott’s, all except Bruce. “To listen to somebody else performing was not for him” – or as Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Carole Chanler phrased it: “It was a question of hiring a band, or Bruce.” Melly came across Bruce next in 1978 when he was borrowing Maschler’s cottage to write The Viceroy of Ouidah. John Wells’s wife Teresa was staying at The Tower and telephoned Bruce, who walked over for tea. His attraction for Melly would be more than that of a charming guest who sang for his supper. “It was not just a matter of being entertained by him, or thinking that he was eccentric.” She felt connected to him. “He was very childish and needed looking after,” she says. “That appeals to people. It certainly appealed to me.” In March 1980, Melly had lost her son from an overdose. She was receptive to a letter from Bruce asking if he could come and stay (and also if she could arrange for Francis Wyndham – with whom she was editing Jean Rhys’s letters – to be there too). “For me Bruce filled a bit of the void. I became a mother-figure. He suited the bill at that moment and that’s when we became close friends. He didn’t put himself out to please or entertain. Like a child, he took everything.” One day in July he took her to Tenby. They crawled on their hands and knees to see what stepping stones would have looked like to the twins as small children.