Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He began actually writing the book in the stable flat at Cwm Hall, the home of Martin and Stella Wilkinson. Bruce turned up at the end of October 1980 in a 2CV with a mountain bike on the roof. The flat, said Stella, “was just austere enough for him to feel comfortable and comfortable enough for him to feel austere”. Above his desk, he pinned a nineteenth-century Methodist print, “The Broad and the Narrow Way”. Haunted by this image, one of the twins, Benjamin Jones, “believed, seriously, the road to Hell was the road to Hereford whereas the road to Heaven led up to the Radnor Hills”.

  One day Bruce returned, excited, from a bounding walk on a hill above the farm known also as the Black Hill. He had a title. “I’m going to call it On the Black Hill,” he told Martin.

  In his room over the stables, he fell into a routine. He came to the main house for breakfast at 8.30, made toast, scurried back. “I could hear his brain going clickety-click round the corner and him talking to himself,” says Stella. He worked hard till 9 p.m. when supper was ready. Every now and then he played the great chef. In December 1980, he celebrated the arrival of Stella’s mother Chiquita Astor (whose Argentinian family owned the Monvoisin gaucho so admired by Bruce). “He made a turkey stuffed with chocolate and peanut sauce and a mad spice no one’s ever used before or since from Jersey City. Everyone was full of admiration,” says Martin. “Next day on a high because of the success, he decided to go for a poulet à l’ail. There was a lot of talk about how the Winter Queen had had it for breakfast. But instead of putting in thirty cloves of garlic, he put in 30 whole garlic. It was completely inedible. There was rather an embarrassing silence about that and he didn’t quite admit he’d got it wrong.”

  When he put his heart into it, he had the energy to transform any non-event into an event. “He had an incredibly strong character and it penetrated the bricks and the mortar,” says Stella. He changed the atmosphere of a chill February picnic by producing a bottle of 1964 Lafite. “He was in ecstasies, holding up his glass,” says Martin. “And somehow he convinced everyone that it was a warm day and we were having a picnic in summer.”

  Much though Stella loved her guest, she deplored his manners. “He was happy to use up your chattel, but couldn’t accept responsibility for the kitchen of life. He lived two winters with me and I saw him for three meals a day and he did not once lift his plate from the kitchen table to the kitchen sink.”

  His hosts could pay dearly for his visits. There was not just the telephone bill. While staying with Matthew and Maro Spender in Tuscany, Bruce noticed a roasting spit that Spender had just bought.

  “Now I have to go and see Grischa [von Rezzori] and I have to take a present. That will do fine.”

  “OK, but you’ll have to reimburse us,” said Spender.

  “How much?”

  “70,000 lire.”

  “Well, I’m not going to give you money. I’ll send you some of our tweed. No, I’ll do better than that. I’ll have it made into a Norfolk jacket. You’ll just have to give me your measurements.” Two years later the garment arrived, woven from Elizabeth’s wool, with a huge bill. “It was three times more than I’ve ever spent on a jacket,” says Spender.

  He was needy. “I might be working in the garden and he’d shout from the tower: ‘Is there any coffee?’” says Melly. He could not bear to part with energy other than in writing and talking. “Anything was a pressure to Bruce,” says Sarah Giles, who had let him use her mews house in London when writing The Viceroy of Ouidah. “If you’d say ‘Are you going to be home to let the window cleaner in?’ he’d have a minor heart attack because that would become a commitment.” Ideas came first. “He could wake you in the middle of the night with a poem, he never knocked,” says Kasmin. Nor was he self-conscious about bodily functions: “He never shut the door when taking a shit. He’d walk in and take a crap while you were shaving.” One morning he surprised Giles in her bath at Buckingham Mews. “Bruce walked in to go to the bathroom. ‘Oh my dear, it’s absolutely appalling. I ate a filthy fish dish last night.’ And down came his trousers and plop. I’ve never met anyone who’s done that, ever.”

  His solipsism attracted comment. “When someone else at the dinner table talked about a subject other than the one Bruce was obsessed with, he might open his already half buttoned shirt and examine his chest,” wrote Plante. “He had, it appeared, an odd lack of self-consciousness that allowed him to do in public what people only do in private as if no one round him could be aware that he, in the middle of a dinner party, was probing his bare chest. If addressed, he’d look at the people sitting around the same table as if not quite sure who they were.”

  At The Cwm, Stella Wilkinson was occupied with her two children. “It was like having three small children. He demanded attention. He was heroically selfish, but not purely self-indulgent or egocentric.” His insatiable curiosity came first, his need for flattery second.

  One of Stella’s children told her: “I love Bruce, mum, except when he gets up and claps his hands and shouts.” When he imitated a camp Brazilian dwarf, Alice and Matthew thought it freaky. “He was awkward with my children,” says Martin. “They disturbed him because of their frank emotional nature. They used to send him up a lot, calling him Bruce Quack-Win.”

  Bruce worked steadily and well at The Cwm, but longed for a hot climate. “Bruce rings up once in a while and seems fine, except when it’s raining and then he can’t stand anything,” wrote Elizabeth to her mother. He decided to spend April 1981 in Yaddo, “a sort of ‘monastery’ for writers” on the edge of the racecourse at Saratoga Springs. “I went first to New York for a week of the usual round of varied pleasures – all ultimately the same,” he wrote to the Wilkinsons. “Then to an island called St Maarten, the wreck of somewhere really rather beautiful, wrecked in the sense that it was absolutely overrun by Yanks.” In St Maarten, he made a thrilling discovery: “WIND-SURFING. I have to say that I really do want to be 17 all over again, and become a professional windsurfer. I am not bad. I stay up in Force 3–4 winds. I can bounce the board a bit over the wavecrests, but I shall never be good.”

  His second discovery in St Maarten related to his Welsh novel. “It was far easier to conjure up Jean the Barn and the rest of them when separated by 5,000 miles of sea. Why, I can’t say. I think it’s because the story stands a chance of being a circular whole when you can’t get at any more material. If I am thinking, what colour are those clouds, or what are the twins up to, the story rapidly gets out of shape, becomes instead of circular – pear-shaped.”

  Bill Katz had invited Bruce to the Caribbean. On a misty day Bruce walked up a volcano. Just for a moment the fog lifted and Katz saw a figure at the top of the crater. “He was in Wales. He was acting these things out, hugging himself.” They stayed a fortnight in Jasper Johns’s house. Bruce windsurfed in the afternoons and wrote in the mornings. “It was a strange scene,” says Katz. “He’d have all his books in front of him open at special pages. He’d find a Moby Dick and look at a page until some phrase set him off and he’d type. Then he’d look for another page.” After lunch Katz would hear screams. “He was on the ‘phone to Elizabeth, like out of a horrible comedy. He liked everything to be a scene, to be important enough for a scene. Every day they’d have 40 minutes, bickering.”

  After his host departed, Bruce moved into the guesthouse. This was scheduled for demolition. He was reluctant to leave. It would take dynamite to prise him out of St Maarten.

  As Bruce’s fame grew, so did the number of people prepared to offer him a perch. At his house in Lucca, Hugh Honour began an anecdote: “When Bruce Chatwin was here last year . . .” Before he could finish, Stephen Spender interrupted with: “I wonder how many other friends of his, and in how many other different parts of the world, are saying that at this very moment.”

  A favourite hideaway was a medieval signalling tower near Florence, owned by another of Bruce’s father figures, Gregor von Rezzori. “His strategy was exquisite for a writer,” said Rezzori, author of Me
moirs of an Anti-Semite. “He would pay with anecdotes and by being there. He was a born guest, as writers should be.”

  Rezzori lived close to the tower with his elegant wife Beatrice. In Anecdotage, he recorded Bruce’s arrival: “He climbed out of a white 2CV to whose roof he’d strapped a surfboard . . . I could see his adolescent’s head before me, sharp as a new-minted coin. A stable currency. Sun-bright. BC the ‘Golden Boy’. The alert always slightly crooked smile. The piercing gaze above it. The unquenchable curiosity in the sea-blue eyes (which once had gazed themselves blind on too much art). The calculating machine behind the peasant brow . . . No one would have thought this belated youth capable of writing anything more than his own name. And yet he was virtually glowing with promise. I went to meet him . . . and I thought I was never like this. Never so all-of-a-piece.” Rezzori felt for Bruce “an indulgence tinged with tender melancholy”. Clearer than many, the older man saw through Bruce’s snobbish, irritating, shifty side. “Bruce Chatwin the writer in his glass-clear fragility was utterly vulnerable. Which explains his restlessness and his antiseptically pure poetic sense.”

  Bruce’s room on the third floor looked south-east over the oak and chestnuts towards Rezzori’s homeland, the Bukovina. It had painted striped walls, a Neapolitan inlaid chest and a French faux-bambou bed over which was hung a Lebanese mother-of-pearl relief of the Last Supper. It was, Bruce wrote, “a place where I have always worked clear-headedly and well in winter and summer by day or night and the places you work well in are the places you love most.”

  The Rezzoris had a maid, Giuliana, who reported on his progress. “One morning she went to the tower to straighten up and returned distraught. ‘How many people are staying in the tower?’ Just Signor Chatwin. Why? She had overheard an entire assortment of voices: men, women, children. It was Bruce writing. Reading aloud the many-voiced chaos at a country fair in Wales.”

  Perhaps with the excruciatingly slow writing of The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce had earned his wings. The new manuscript was completed quickly, by the end of 1981. Clapp having left Cape, Bruce required a working editor. He found one in Elisabeth Sifton, his new American publisher.

  He had decided to part company with Jim Silberman at Summit. He was unhappy at the failure of The Viceroy of Ouidah; upset, too, by what he interpreted as Silberman’s reluctance to release In Patagonia as a massmarket paperback. (“Bruce was conveniently naïve about how contracts worked,” says Rogers.) He arranged a meeting with Sifton, the editor-in-chief at the Viking Press.

  Sifton had been at Radcliffe with Elizabeth and had read both of Bruce’s books. “He came to my office. On a ledge behind the sofa was a copy of Mandelstam’s collected prose: I’d bought it ten days earlier. Bruce was explaining to me how, when he came to New York, he needed someone to talk to in publishing – and suddenly he sees the book. ‘OH! You’re reading this.’ He patted it. ‘Ah, well, then. You know the hand of the master.’ That was the magical moment,” says Sifton. “He trusted me.”

  He telephoned Rogers: “I’ve fallen in love, I’ve fallen in love and whatever you say to me I’m leaving Jim Silberman.”

  In March 1982, Bruce spent a week in Sifton’s office and they went through the text. “We sat side by side and he said it all aloud to make sure it was rhythmically and acoustically correct.” He told her how much he had ingested from Mandelstam, Hemingway, Flaubert. “You know where I got that!’ he said of the market scene. He had taken it from Madame Bovary, but changed the man’s lisp. He once told me there were two kinds of reading: for pure pleasure and for plunder. But his penetrating reading was both pleasurable and studious. He wanted to know: how did Flaubert achieve the effect, how did he set it up? He was interested in the technical problems of fiction: how, bluntly, does one crank the narrative through time.” Sifton, who later edited The Songlines, was impressed by Bruce’s intelligence and integrity. He responded to her detailed queries. “Here you had this problem. Here is my solution – or does it present new problems?” He paid immense attention to every detail, line by line, relishing the editorial process. “Not that he needed it,” says Sifton. “He was a very fierce editor of his own work. He needed the companionship.”

  Maschler marketed On the Black Hill as Bruce’s fictional debut. “I think it an outstanding first novel by one of the most talented young writers we have taken on since I joined the company in 1960,” he enthused to a Cape rep. “With this book we could win the Booker Prize for the second year running.”

  Maschler planned a first print-run of 10,000, changing the publication date so as to comply with the Booker deadline of 30 September. Excitement mounted with news that the South Bank Show intended to start their autumn season with a documentary on the novel.

  The first reader to respond to On the Black Hill was Charles Chatwin. This time he did not ask his son to remove any paragraph. “I like OTBH,” he wrote from Stratford on 11 August. “You have continued your brief style of giving a picture of a person or an occasion in the minimum of words. And, like you, I like all the characters (except the Collector!!).” He had made a couple of small notations on the proof copy which he thought Bruce “might care to consider in, say, a paperback edition”. He had not heard of a “Law Society Annual” – “The books would almost certainly, in that era, be ‘Law reports’ or ‘leather-bound law reports’.” And a bombardier would get a Military Medal.

  As publication approached, Bruce readied himself for departure. A memo alerted Cape’s publicity department: “Bruce will be in Siberia on publication day.”

  The decision to root his fiction in a chastened, familiar setting won his widest audience to date. Within five years, the novel would be an English A-level text. For Rushdie, it would be Bruce’s best: “a really beautiful book where all the energy goes into the people and the situation and not just the creation of Fabergé eggs of sentences.” James Lees-Milne confessed surprise in his diary: “Reluctantly I began Bruce Chatwin’s novel On the Black Hill; reluctantly because I did not think his first much-acclaimed book on Patagonia good. This novel is excellent. Bruce has identified himself with these strange Welsh border folk with their rough, reclusive ways. His keen observation of their manners and their landscape, and descriptions of nature & flowers are matter of fact, and yet very poetic.”

  In early October, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude about the reviews. “Some good, some raving, some not so good. He 1st pretends he doesn’t care, but he really does & wants to know everything each one says. If they were really all bad I think he’d give up & do something else.”

  There was relief that the slave coast had given way to the landscape of Hardy, Kilvert and D. H. Lawrence. In its evocation of place and season, wrote the Times critic, the novel “signals the arrival of a major novelist who has come home to find his roots here, his truth in this soil”. Auberon Waugh, while mispelling his name Chatwyn, said his was the first novel in two years of reviewing on the Daily Mail “which begins to merit the accolade of ‘masterpiece’, and it does not make the tiniest concession to anything which has happened to the English novel since Hardy”. The Sunday Telegraph approved of the vivid narrative. “The writing throughout is often a poet’s.”

  Paul Bailey, however, delivered a damning verdict in the Evening Standard, declaring it a “curiously coarse-grained book” populated by cardboard cutouts. “Bruce Chatwin is a very clever man who has decided in On the Black Hill to write about very simple people. It was not a wise decision . . . The writing is rife with cliché. ‘He was like a man possessed’ occurs twice within eight pages. Most surprising of all from this lapsed stylist is the monstrosity that first appears on page 120 when an NCO’s eyes ‘had narrowed to a pair of dangerous slits’. Eyes that narrow to slits are the property of Cartland & Co.” The author’s recourse to cliché indicated the larger failure. “At no point does he ever bring Lewis and Benjamin to imaginative life. He plods wearily through their mainly uneventful history without capturing its uniqueness. On the Black Hill has the quality of
an earnest documentary at its best. At its worst it suggests Mary Webb on a very off day.”

  Bailey’s review rankled, but it summarised a view that On the Black Hill was conventional, lightweight, carpentered to win the approval of an English literary establishment. In his book Doubles, the critic Karl Miller christened Bruce’s literary landscape, a place of deliberately strange people, Chatwinshire. He was suspicious of Bruce’s large lexicon, the “general herbaceousness” of the writing and the prevailing purple of its vegetative life (“Convolvulus continually threatens to smother the phlox”). This was “the jewelled prose of the upper-class English traveller, carried to the threshold of burlesque – and maybe across it, to produce a variety of Camp and a latter-day Wildean largesse.” The result was “a more accomplished and decorative book than it is an interesting one. It is a tour de force of doorstep exoticism which . . . fails.”

  The novel did not appear on the Booker shortlist, but there was a consolation. On 9 November, Rushdie sent a telegram of congratulation: WHITBREAD JUDGES OBVIOUSLY HAVE EXCELLENT TASTE. On the Black Hill had won the First Novel prize.

  The award eased Bruce’s anxieties over the book’s status. Since the summer, he had worried that anyone tempted to seek out the models for his characters would find them. Betjeman had given his manuscript “WITHOUT MY PERMISSION” to a friend in Cusop, “one of the local gentry, and a bluestocking to boot!” The friend, wrote Bruce, “managed to get almost everything wrong; and though she professed to have loved the book, have wept real tears etc., was full of fatuous suggestions as to how, in her view, it could be improved and was determined to identify every character in the novel with someone she knew.”