Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Bruce was sufficiently stung to produce a three-page vindication of his work to Graham C. Greene, Jonathan Cape’s managing director: “I want to make it clear at the outset that On the Black Hill is not a roman à clef, not some kind of faction, but a work of the imagination that has its own structure and operates accordingly. True, it is set in the Black Mountains or, preferably, the Radnor Hills. The town of Rhulen could be either Hay-on-Wye, or Kington, or Knighton, or Clun. There is indeed a Black Hill on the eastern scarp of the Black Mountains, but there is another one, overshadowing the house, in Shropshire, where I began the first draft of the book.

  “I have used the Border Country, (which I have known since the age of six); the eternal feud between the two farms; and the motif of twins (for whom there is no possibility of an advance) as vehicles for a sustained meditation on the concept of Cyclical, as opposed to Linear, Time. But I have done an immense amount of research, in life and from old newspapers, to root the story in actuality.”

  Anxious to defend the book as a work of fiction, he catalogued the most sensitive elements. The Howells’ farmhouse kitchen, he coolly agreed, “does in some way resemble that of The Vision (Chap I); but then it is hardly different from any border farmhouse from before the War. The Howells brothers are not twins. They were not involved in the First War. Their mother was an ordinary Welsh farmer’s daughter from Radnorshire. Both their parents survived till well after the Second World War. They have not lived in the house all their lives. They have one sister. Also a younger brother, who, in turn has a son called Vivian, a dashing dark-haired boy who stands to inherit their 300 acres, but has not to my knowledge yet done so.”

  Bruce argued that the Howells’ situation was “so tangential to the story of Lewis and Benjamin in the book that one needn’t worry about it”. He closed his letter with this reiteration: The Vision “is, I repeat, a creation”.

  As quick as he was to explain to his publishers that his novel was not based on anyone in life, further from home he felt free to tell an Australian interviewer: “There’s very, very little I’ve invented in that book, but on the other hand there’s a whole series of combinations to put it together in a continual story.”

  Bruce was, as Updike well observed, “a demon researcher”. He could never have invented his world without having first collected his characters. He tells a different kind of truth in his notebook, a thread of Herefordshire folklore about the Old Lady of Black Hill: “You meet her in the mist and she deliberately misdirects you.”

  Bruce need not have worried: he had disguised his characters well enough. Neither brother read the book and when in 1987 Vivian took Jonathan Howells to a screening of the film version in Dorstone, the elder brother refused to believe it had anything to do with him. “I said ‘That’s you, Uncle Johnny,’ but he wouldn’t have it was him,” says Vivian. “He thought it was the Gore boys down in Grosmond, ten miles away.”

  George Howells did not live to see Andrew Grieve’s film. Early one morning, four days before their wedding in 1987, Vivian’s new fiancée sat bolt up in bed and said: “He’s died.”

  Jonathan could not live at New House without his brother. He moved to a house in Michaelchurch. He died on Boxing Day, 1991.

  Joe the Barn never recovered from his stroke. Following his death, Jean left Coed Major in bitter circumstances. Bruce fought her corner, but without success. She had no title to the Barn and was forced to move across the valley into a caravan with two white fan-tailed pigeons. The twentieth century has continued to wash over and not pulverise her. She is not aware that Bruce wrote a book, nor that there exists a film. She does not watch television because it makes her head “funny”. Mrs Lewis at The Bull’s Head once offered her a drink, but she did not accept. She has been to Gloucester once, and once to Abergavenny and sometimes to Hay for the fair, “but people trod on me toes”.

  XXIX

  A Judicial Separation

  He thought Jasper was talented, adorable. He was quite besotted.

  —John Kasmin

  THREE MONTHS AFTER ELIZABETH EJECTED BRUCE FROM HOLWELL, in July 1980, they met in London. Later, on the train to Newport, he wrote in his notebook: “Lunch with Elizabeth. Poignant. Sad. We discussed our lives in the past tense.”

  “He minded terribly that everything had gone wrong,” says Wyndham.

  In Elizabeth’s words, their separation had become a fait accompli without any discussion whatever. “He thought he was permanently banned, but he didn’t tell me that’s how he had understood it.” As a Catholic, she refused to divorce him. “I didn’t want a divorce unless he wanted it and unless one had someone else in mind. Penelope was longing for me to find someone else. She kept saying: ‘If you meet anyone wonderful, you’ll go off.’ But there was no one I wanted to go off with.”

  They had met to discuss the sale of Holwell, their house since 1966. The farm was too large for Elizabeth to manage on her own. She was, she wrote to her mother, “frantically looking” for a house with enough land on which to graze her sheep. “Bruce is v. busy writing and says he has so many projects for the next 10 years that he can’t really think about it so I must just go ahead and find what suits me.” Elizabeth never spoke directly about the troubled marriage to Gertrude. Nor did Bruce tell his parents. “Father mentioned something about them being separated,” says Hugh, “but they didn’t seem more or less separated than they had been before.”

  In September 1981, she bought Homer End, a wooden schoolhouse in a valley south of Oxford. Pattie Sullivan asked why she was moving. “Because I hope it being closer to London, Bruce will spend more time there,” said Elizabeth.

  She sent Bruce a photograph of the view (“there is a gap through which you can see the Downs miles away”). At first he wanted nothing to do with the new house, or “The End” as he called it. “E. seems to think she wants to buy a ’thirties house somewhere near Henley-on-Thames,” he wrote to Martin Wilkinson. “Sounds as though one needs it like a hole in the head, but there’s no accounting for taste. As for me, I’ve got the itchy feet again, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” Despite himself, he brightened when he saw the house. Light, with wooden floors and large sliding windows, it was built in the style of the farm in Sweden where he had stayed the summer when he was 14.

  Bruce helped Elizabeth move in. He bought a picnic on the first day and spent the week stripping the wallpaper, relining the walls and painting the little sitting room. “It’s much better if something doesn’t belong to him,” wrote Elizabeth. But she found the move stressful: “I erupted in terrible boils.” Bruce wrote to his parents: “Spent a week re-papering Homer End – which, I have to say, is extremely glamorous, if something of a threat to my writing.” He, too, was tense. He feared Elizabeth might create difficulties over their belongings: she had paid for most of them. He coveted the painting of the tern that flew from one pole to another. “It was a symbol to himself, for himself,” says Elizabeth, who allowed him to take the bird. “He was so completely overwhelmed that he changed tack a bit. And then he disappeared and I hardly saw him for ages.”

  They agreed on a judicial separation, relieving him of liability for her taxes. He spelled out the virtues of the arrangement to Wilkinson seven years later: “Of course, you must do what Elizabeth and I did: go and see a lawyer and separate out les biens of a marriage. Don’t get divorced, just get a separation. It’s so lucky that’s what I did with Elizabeth, because then we found each other again.” The Birmingham solicitor in Bruce urged him to do things correctly, lending a caution to his actions which allowed him to maintain a thread, however tenuous, to Elizabeth. “He was mad about a judicial separation. He wanted everybody to have one. I wasn’t married, but he wanted me to get married so as to get a separation,” says Francis Wyndham. “It was made for him. It meant his home wasn’t his. Then he started being at home a lot, because he could do what he did with everyone else.”

  Early in September, Wyndham received their change of address card. “A
s from ioth September 1981, Mr & Mrs C. B. Chatwin will be at Homer End.”

  Elizabeth gave Bruce $50,000 from the sale of Holwell to buy his own place. Ideally, he would have stayed put at Albany, but Gibbs wanted back his cubby-hole. Bruce betrayed a compromising naïveté in pressing Albany’s secretary for an alternative flat. “Some of what you say,” wrote Col Chetwynd-Talbot, “is quite honestly, best forgotten. In telling me that Christopher Gibbs has lent you his top room for two years, you convict him of a breach of his lease . . . On page 2 you urge me to connive in others breaking their leases!”

  In November, he found a place. “I realised, battling through the traffic to the West End that the one thing I need London for is to be in walking distance of the London Library,” he wrote to his mother from the Rezzoris’ tower in Donnini. “I said to myself, ‘If I can’t have Albany, then what I want is a one-room attic in Eaton Place’; and there, in the Sunday Times next day, it was! It’s actually quite a large room, at least twice the size of the whole of Albany, but so hideously cut up, messed up, and hideously decorated that no one apparently wanted it.” The flat had three big windows facing south over the rooftops and cost £31,000 for a 53-year lease. “It represents the limit of my attachment to London, and I pray the whole thing doesn’t fall through. Much prefer one nice room to a lot of dreary ones.”

  He bought the lease on the Eaton Place attic in January, in the same month as he delivered his manuscript of On the Black Hill. At the age of 41, he was able to use the money Elizabeth had given him, plus his Cape advance of £7,500 and the prospect of a $50,000 advance from Viking in America, to buy his first home.

  While the builders renovated the flat and Elisabeth Sifton read the manuscript, Bruce flew to Kenya with Donald. For ten hot mindless days they snorkelled and windsurfed off Lamu. “The trouble with it here”, Bruce wrote to his parents, “is that either the wind blows 5 knots or 20 – and I need 10. I always seem to get catapulted forward and end up in the sea about 15 feet ahead of the board – but, one day I’m going to overtake Hugh in his ocean racer.”

  After Lamu, he hired a Land Rover and took Donald up-country to look at game. They camped in sight of Mount Kenya and in the night were woken by something munching in the long grass outside their hut. “Coughing of a leopard, scream of baboon,” Bruce wrote. One evening in Baringo, six Turkana boys with “superb torsos and fine dandified faces” entered the corrugated iron restaurant. The leader was naked to the waist, in a pink loincloth, and carried a phallic-headed acacia club. “As D. & I sat down he beckoned No 3 to sit beside him and embracing him, played a while, slapping his long-fingered hand on his arse. No 2 came across the room to the bar and flexed his buttocks standing so that the knots and pleats of his loincloth fell away from his leg. We had never seen such a display of male sexuality.”

  Donald’s enjoyment of Kenya was diminished by Bruce’s “total self-absorption” and their quarrel over the loss of one of Bruce’s notebooks. “Travelling with Bruce was hell because he forgets everything,” Donald told Patrick Woodcock. “You know what the silly cunt did? He had all these notes and he left them on top of the Land Rover and drove off and the whole thing was wasted.” By the time he saw Woodcock a week later, Bruce had whipped up a more colourful version. “Every minute was EXTRAORDINARY. There were my notes on top of the Land Rover and a family of monkeys came along and they were so beautiful and I watched them and there were too many of them for me to stop them.”

  In April, Hodgkin received a postcard from Bruce in Kenya. “He wrote something to the effect that until you’ve screwed inside a tent with lions roaring outside, you’ve never lived. I told this to a friend in New York who said: ‘Poor Bruce. Poor Donald’.” It was to be their last journey together.

  Once he had installed Elizabeth in Homer End, Bruce rarely saw her. He wrote her one letter in three years, about money. But he regularly communicated by telephone, ringing up at any hour from all over the world.

  In April, he was in New York, irritating Gertrude for the first time (“I do think he might have called me up. I kept wondering when he would arrive. Anne B said she met him on the street one day. I thought he was going to stay here”). In May, he rang from Italy, where he was promoting The Viceroy of Ouidah. He had been interviewed by Italo Calvino and appeared on television to inveigh against the Falklands War. “I suggested that no encouragement should be given to either belligerent by the Common Market Community. Next day Italy refused to renew economic sanctions – for which of course I was roundly castigated by the British Embassy. Someone even suggested I should be put in the Tower of London.” In July, he was in Millington-Drake’s house in Greece. “Bruce is in Patmos for a few weeks & I don’t know where after that,” wrote Elizabeth. “Now he has his flat he seems quite content with London and goes down to Wales the rest of the time. He can’t bear my animals so he only comes down here when he wants a book or piece of furniture for the flat.”

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, needed to earn money. She continued to lead treks to India with Betjeman and in August 1982 she began work at Toad Hall, a garden centre near Marlow. She earned £45 for a three-day week, working on the counter. “I have to man the till (which I told them I can do, but of course I never have before).” For the first time, she acknowledged to Gertrude that Bruce was not the person she had married and her situation was less than ideal. “But don’t say anything if you run into him in N.Y. He’s changed a great deal in the past year and I can’t predict what his reaction might be.”

  She could no longer conceal her pain from friends. She spent that Christmas in Suffolk with Anne Thomson, whom she had known from Sotheby’s. “I’ve got to get used to the fact my marriage is at an end,” she said. Thomson was heartbroken to see Elizabeth in such a reduced state. “You wanted to say to her: ‘Get him out of your system.’ Any other woman would have caved in or shot Bruce or shot herself.”

  A letter from a friend from before her marriage called to a spirit that seemed to have died: “I’m so sorry to hear about Bruce. I think for years you have been going through this anguish with him and I can understand how bitter you must be feeling. Listen, Elizabeth – don’t lose heart. If you really do care for him – FIGHT – but be subtle about it. I personally think (I may be wrong) that all these years he took you for granted and walked all over you and he still does. Perhaps he feels that he can have his fling and that you will still welcome him back with open arms when he needs you. You must be a little tough – I’m telling you it pays. What is all this talk about old people’s home etc!! Look – all my time in London I admired you because you were so clever and at the same time so gentle and charming. Lots of men loved you. You must look around and be a little more forthcoming (in the sense of giving something of yourself instead of being a closed book) to men around you . . . Just don’t dry up – Elizabeth. You are bright and loveable. Just exploit your qualities. No man is worth pining for when he exploits you. Let BRUCE feel what he is losing, if he loses you.”

  Donald had never seriously threatened Elizabeth. But that summer when Bruce was visiting Millington-Drake in Patmos, what she had most feared finally overtook her.

  Bruce and Jasper Conran met in a restaurant in Greece. “I was with a girlfriend,” says Conran. “We’d gone down to the port for dinner and somehow we all came round a table. It transpired Bruce knew everybody – my family, Paul Kasmin. When we got back to London he got my phone number from Paul and he rang me up.”

  Conran was 22, already a successful couturier. The son of the novelist Shirley and the designer Terence, he had studied at the Parson’s School of Design in New York where he had been taken up by Mapplethorpe’s patron, Sam Wagstaff. In London at the end of the 1970s, he had offices in Great Marlborough Street. He designed two collections of women’s clothes a year and among his clientele was the Princess of Wales. “Bruce loved that,” says Paul Kasmin, Jasper’s best friend. “Both were on the up. They knew the same people and had a lot in common. Jasper very much liked Bruce’s sty
le, his information and energy.”

  Bruce had known Paul Kasmin through childhood and corrected his essays when staying in Gloucester Terrace. On his return from Greece, he stayed with him at Kasmin’s cottage in Devon. “Before going to sleep he talked about a friend of mine he’d met. He started off timidly asking about Jasper and continued next day. ‘It would be so nice if we saw more of each other. Couldn’t you arrange a dinner with your friend from Greece?’ My father hated the whole thing. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. Jasper was like a surrogate son to him.”

  Jasper was 20 years younger than Bruce, but he was more intellectually matched to him than was Donald. “I felt in the role of Zeus to Ganymede,” Bruce told Leigh Fermor, “whirling him off like an eagle.”

  He invited Jasper to his newly refurbished flat. “Bruce was pretty straightforward. He made the lunge.”

  Sybille Bedford, a guest of Bruce’s at this time, felt the magnetism that must have overwhelmed the 22-year-old. She recalled Jasper as a small, jockey-like creature who catapulted into the room and collapsed on the floor. “Bruce didn’t turn a hair.” After dinner, Jasper drove her home in a large open Mercedes, playing Don Giovanni. “Thank you for a dazzling evening,” she wrote to Bruce. “I’m still trying to find a way of describing your habitat to myself. You have achieved an essence of simplicity, order, raffinement and security that must be Carthusian. I think of the Trois Contes, the sensuous food and the Montrachet – and there was that return in that extraordinary car drenched in Mozart. Dear Bruce, thank you indeed.”