Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “I was in love,” says Jasper. “It was very much my first love. There was nobody like him. He was gorgeous and knew it. To be clever, witty and bright is a devastating combination.”

  And Bruce responded. Fox watched Bruce in amazement standing in the drive at the Mellys’ house in Wales, anxious and jittery, waiting for Jasper to arrive. “It was the first time I’d seen this side of him.” Friends commented on the pride Bruce took in Jasper. “He was slightly fatherly: he wanted to teach him things,” says Honour. They travelled to Greece, Venice, Donnini, Bali. “They were very much a couple,” said Millington-Drake. “Before, there was never a ‘we’,” says Sarah Giles. “With Jasper it was totally ‘we’. ‘We’re going to run around the park now’.” Staying with the Rezzoris for New Year with Jasper, Bruce appeared dressed in a toga with his eyes made up. It was the first time Rezzori had seen Bruce looking like a homosexual and not a Boy Scout.

  “It was the closest thing I knew to Bruce being in love,” says Paul Kasmin, “but he was very much on to the next thing.” Barely had he started his relationship with Jasper than he took off to Australia for four months. He may have been infatuated, but it was not going to change the way he lived or worked. And there was another reason for him to go abroad. He had just come out of St Thomas’s Hospital after an operation. He convalesced with Diana Melly at her London home in St Lawrence Terrace. “It was something genital,” she says. “It was mysterious, painful and embarrassing and he did not want to talk about it.”

  XXX

  Australia

  Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs! Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through?

  —The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie

  IN HIS GRANDMOTHER’S CABINET THERE WAS A VICTORIAN WALKER’S compass and next to it a pocket sundial with the names of cities written on the rim: Boston, Easter Island, Buenos Aires, Ochotsk, Tartary, and – on the dial just below the needle – Botany Bay.

  After the success of On the Black Hill, Bruce confessed to Elizabeth “my tremendous difficulty dreaming up what to do next.” He wrote to his parents: “With so many ‘cooked-up’ books knocking around, I don’t really believe in writing unless one has to.” In December 1982, he gathered up the card index of The Nomadic Alternative and flew to Sydney. Elizabeth expressed her relief to Gertrude: “I’m glad he’s finally gone as he’s had a fixation about it for years. He’ll either love it or hate it, but he might find a vehicle for the nomads or it’ll finish him off.”

  He had long wanted to visit Australia. His cousin Bickerton Milward had worked as an engineer in the Broken Hill gold rush; Donald was Australian, as were Bruce’s friends Robyn Davidson and Pam Bell. And through the work of the Australian anthropologist Theodor Strehlow he had developed a romantic notion of Aboriginals. “I am turning towards both the idea and actuality of Australia with something like the fervour of a first love affair,” Bruce wrote to Robyn Ravlich, a producer for ABC radio.

  In the course of two visits he made in 1983 and 1984 to Central Australia he would find, at last, a people on whom he could graft his 15-year-old theory. The journeys would result in his fourth book, The Songlines.

  He landed in Sydney on 19 December, slipping effortlessly into the embrace Australians extend to outsiders. For the next month, he passed “a mindless time with lots of exercise and lots of sun”. Still fragile after the operation, he wanted to recuperate as far as possible from England.

  His time in Australia coincided with a wave of acclaim in America for On the Black Hill. John Updike in the New Yorker and John Leonard in the New York Times both reviewed it at length. “The reviews such as I’ve seen are not simply favourable; they understand what’s going on,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. “Robert Towers on the front page of the New York Times completely got the hang, but the one that pleased me most was the man in Time, and the concept of the ‘still centre’.” Wyndham cabled news of another positive notice in the New York Review of Books by V. S. Pritchett. “Good for Sir Victor!” Bruce wrote back. “On the BH is also, I may say, no 4 on the Sydney Morning Herald’s hardback best-seller list.” In April, he learned it had won the James Tait Black prize for the best novel of 1981.

  The reception encouraged Bruce to shed the inhibitions he felt in England about discussing his work. In Australia, he would agree to half a dozen radio interviews, one of them overheard by the Nobel Laureate Patrick White, who had read of the trouncing given to On the Black Hill by “the evil Pearl Barley” as he called Paul Bailey. He telephoned to request a meeting and Bruce recorded their conversation:

  “‘Can I speak to Bruce Chatwin? It’s Patrick White here.’

  “‘I’m he.’

  “‘I was thinking of you the other day. I thought of going to Patagonia – to die there. What are you doing this extended weekend?’

  “‘Going to Adelaide.’

  “‘A pity. We could have met.’

  “‘Can I call you when I get back?’

  “‘You could have done, if I could have remembered my phone number. Here try this’.”

  While their eventual meeting, at a restaurant in Sydney, was not a success, Bruce told the ABC that he was “constantly being jolted into serious and moving conversations”. As in Patagonia, his appetite was whetted at every turn by the incongruities that immigration had made possible: in a fibreboard house in the outskirts of Sydney, a former concierge to Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez (“agréable, MAIS . . . ”); or later on, a policeman on an Aboriginal reservation whose favourite book was the Ethics of Spinoza. “You wouldn’t find that in a Manchester constabulary.” He told his interviewer: “I’d like to live in Australia.”

  Bruce’s literary success did not dazzle his Australian hosts, who regarded him with a kindly, sardonic eye. “A lot of people didn’t know who he was or care or were particularly impressed,” says Ben Gannon, a television producer at whose beach house Bruce stayed in Bondi. “He quite liked that, although he did also like to perform.”

  He responded physically to the sun and the surf. Sobered by his operation, he took an excessive interest in his health and appearance. He worked out at City Gym in Williams Street. He ran along Bondi beach, swam laps at the Bondi Iceberg Pool, windsurfed. He ate healthily, mixing goat’s yoghurt and fruit in a blender. “We’ve got to get the fruits going,” he would say in the morning, wielding a knife. There was vanity in his body consciousness, also the element of “keeping Old Father Time at bay”. People in England looked like slugs, he told the ABC: in Australia, the women were “beautiful, resilient and resourceful”.

  So far as Elizabeth and his parents knew, he was staying on the waterfront at Darling Point with Penelope Tree. “She, as you may know, was once the most photographed model in the world: but has now decided that she can’t bear either England or the US and has settled here.”

  More often, Bruce lodged elsewhere. His anonymity in Sydney allowed him to live life on several levels. To Wyndham and Rogers, he gave his address as 11 Gaerloch Avenue, the tiny downstairs room in Gannon’s 1950s beach house.

  Bruce had met Gannon in London eight months before at a production of Racine’s Bérénice. As Gannon was leaving the theatre, “on the other side of the foyer Donald and Bruce were deciding whether to have dinner and you could tell the relationship was really rocky. Then Bruce came up without Donald and said ‘Let’s go out to dinner’.”

  Gannon went back to Eaton Place, sitting on a chest while Bruce produced a bottle of warm, very good champagne. “I was completely entranced by him as anyone was first meeting Bruce. He talked fanatically of Racine, the flat. He was flirtatious and sweet. I ended up staying the night in this uncomfortable broom cupboard. I have the feeling he picked me out. He was the active partner and so was I. So it was unsatisfactory, but because it was Bruce it was rather funny and it didn’t matter, which was unusual.”

  Bruce had not yet met Jasper and was still too preoccupied with Dona
ld Richards to take on anything more than a casual encounter. The relationship had ground both of them down. “Bruce by now wasn’t in love with Donald,” says Gannon, “but he felt guilty. He’d introduced him to something and Donald didn’t have any follow-through when Bruce was gone. There were a lot of arguments. ‘Donald’s being so difficult. I had to give him all this money’.” Finally kicked out by Sebastian Walker, Donald had moved into the Covent Garden flat. But he had no job and when that autumn he decided to return to Australia, it was Bruce who paid his fare. “It was absolutely impossible to have him moping around, penniless and frustrated,” he wrote to Diana Melly.

  The end was played out in Australia over that New Year. Penelope Tree joined Bruce and Donald at a house in Byron Bay on the coast north of Sydney. “We were on a roof and a huge fog descended,” says Tree. “Bruce was sitting on one deck chair and Donald was next to him in another and you thought: ‘How the hell did they get together?’” On New Year’s Day they entered the rainforest. “We spent a lot of time taking mushrooms. Everything was dripping and undulating and moving and sinister. Bruce looked up, trying to find the sky, and said: ‘God, this is the most depressing place I’ve ever been. I feel so claustrophobic.’ Suddenly, I looked around at all these writhing vines and black rocks – and he was right.”

  Tree had known Bruce since the 1970s. She had never seen him in such low spirits. “He was so curious about everything – everything except feeling,” she says. “He did feel – as in that New Year – but you could tell he put a tremendous lid on it, and that’s what made feelings so unpleasant.”

  His depression and restlessness infected everyone.

  “Jan 2, 1983 – B back from Queensland,” Gannon wrote in his diary. Bruce stayed a further three weeks in Gaerloch Avenue. After a swim and a yoghurt, he would make a stab at working. “You’d hear a constant clattering from his little Olivetti,” says Gannon. His thirst for diversion exhausted Bruce’s host. “He talked a lot and most of the time it was fascinating, but sometimes you’d want a bit of a break because generally it was all about Bruce.” There was little work done. “The sky is so blue, the sea is so blue, and the surfers so unbelievably elegant,” Bruce reported to Rogers, “that the room in which I have been trying to write has not seen much actual writing.”

  On 12 January, he wrote to his parents: “Well, I must say, I’m feeling extremely revived. I seem to have recovered totally in the sun and wide open spaces . . . But so far, I’ve really done nothing, except recuperate, read books, windsurf and go to aerobics class in the gym with Penelope Tree.”

  At night, he cruised Oxford Street. “When he was here he’d go to clubs and saunas and pick up people,” says Gannon. “It was a liberated time. Bruce was more free and easy here than he could have been in London. He didn’t bring anyone home, but he used to go out on the prowl.”

  One of the clubs he frequented was Ken’s Karate Klub. Modelled on the bath houses of New York and San Francisco, this “sex on premises venue” was designed in imitation of a fantasy Roman baths. Horned satyrs and concrete putti (from a garden supply shop) stood guard over the entrance to the steam room where, shielded by steam and bathed in marine lights, visitors reclined on a columned platform.

  “Once you’re in here the real world does not exist; you’ve no idea whether it’s morning or evening,” says the manager, a German Buddhist who came to Sydney in the early 1980s. It delighted Herr Becker to arrive from Stuttgart in this unrestricted country where no one required him to carry an identity card. Clubs like Patches, Kings’ Steam and The Roman Baths provided a respite from the world outside. “If you’re a relationship person, you wouldn’t enjoy it. There’s no courting, no getting to know you and you don’t have to see them after. It’s a very practical and unromantic approach to life.”

  Bruce never struck Gannon as being in any way embarrassed, ashamed or unhappy about his homosexuality. “Nor was he a conventional homosexual. He talked about Elizabeth all the time and she was frequently mentioned in conversation as his wife.”

  On 12 January, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “This, I must say, is the country to settle in. You’ve no idea how beautiful the land is, and the climate, just on the fringe of the arid and wet zones . . . Of course, on one level, it’s a complete Cloud-cuckoo-land, really very far away from the rest of the world; and it’s going through a recession; but if anywhere has an underlying optimism this is it. I think really a combination of things like the Malvinas (as I now persist in calling them) and Paul Bailey’s snarky review have made me feel so irreversibly un-English that I really had better start doing something about it . . . I have an idea – yes. A relatively outlandish one, that will take me to Broome in the Far North West, or rather to a place called Beagle Bay. I have a card index of the old nomad book to plunder – but God knows what’ll happen.”

  At the end of January, he cleared out of town with his rucksack to pursue his idea. “I am hoping that the concept of the new book will begin to germinate, however blank I feel about it at present,” he told his parents.

  He had in mind to write a “sustained meditation on the desert”, intending to establish himself “in the most abstract desert I could think of” and sift through his card index: “I thought I would go to the hottest part, Marble Bar, and sit in a hotel,” he said on ABC radio. “But I never got to Marble Bar.”

  His first stop was Adelaide where he intended to meet the widow of Theodor Strehlow whose work on Aborigines, he claimed, was “indeed perhaps the reason for my being here in Australia”.

  Strehlow was an embattled autodidact who had suffered a cardiac arrest at his desk in 1978, four months after selling colour photographs of secret initiation ceremonies to Stern magazine (subsequently published in Australia) and four hours before the official launching of the Strehlow Research Foundation to commemorate his life’s work. His father had been a Lutheran pastor at the Hermannsburg mission outside Alice Springs and Strehlow had grown up among the Aranda, an insider. Like Verger, he called himself inkata, or ceremonial chief. For 40 years, between 1932 and 1972, Strehlow collected from Aranda groups some 1,800 objects, many of them sacred, and so the source of the controversy which may have led to his death. He also collected, wrote down and recorded Aboriginal songs, “ancient and traditional poems, intoned according to old and customary modes,” and in 1972 he published Songs of Central Australia. It was this difficult book, long-ignored and virtually impossible to buy, which moved Bruce to contact his widow Kath Strehlow.

  “When Bruce introduced himself on the phone, my words to him were: ‘Let me say hello to the first man in the world who’s read it’.”

  A profile of Strehlow was one of the ideas Bruce had proposed to the Sunday Times magazine in 1972. Strehlow was a figure after Bruce’s heart – “he’d grown up speaking Aranda, Classical Greek, German and English – in that order”. Bruce had closely read Strehlow’s Aranda Traditions and it scandalised him to learn that this, too, was out of print. “It is a twentieth-century lynchpin: you only have to look at the work of Lévi-Strauss to realise this,” he told Kath, convinced of Strehlow’s impact on Pensée Sauvage. He confided to another friend that Strehlow “was a real homespun genius: examples of which, as we know, are in short supply. His Songs of Central Australia – wildly eccentric as it is – is not simply some kind of ethnographical tract, but perhaps the only book in the world – the only real attempt since the Poetics of Aristotle to define what song (and with song all language) is. He arrives at his conclusion in a crabby way. He must also have been impossible. But nonetheless VERY great.” He wrote to Kath: “Sometimes, when reading Songs of Central Australia, I feel I’m reading Heidegger or Wittgenstein.”

  On 28 January, Bruce arrived at Kath’s chaotic house in the Prospect suburb of Adelaide. She showed him the specially built cabinet which housed the artefacts willed by Strehlow to her for safekeeping. “Things never seen by whites before – now pasted up with brown paper,” wrote Bruce. “The horror of anyone looking. The
pricelessness of the information.” Stored in the cabinet were sacred poles covered with feathers, feather boots to disguise footprints and black engraved stones, oval in shape, which represented a man’s external soul as well as the title deed to his territory. These stones or tjuringas were wrapped up in leaves or paper bark and hidden in caves, or carried round by their owners in a bag or suitcase. They did not properly belong in a suburban house in Da Costa Avenue. Thomas Keneally says: “The great tragedy is for a human to lose his tjuringa.” Without a tjuringa, you could not attend to your ceremonial life with vigour. You were deprived of vital contact with your land, your identity, your ancestor. Kath Strehlow’s cabinet was a Pandora’s box of untended ancestral voices.

  These tjuringas were the subject of a ferocious debate. Strehlow’s enemies accused him of wrongly assuming that he was the last anthropologist to see the Aboriginals in their native habitat. At the end of his career his political focus came unstuck. He found himself in the untenable position of attacking modern Aboriginals, implying they were not Abor-i-ginal enough and not worthy of maintaining their land because their culture had degenerated. The collection, Strehlow argued, was bequeathed him by concerned Aranda elders. “The collection was his to decide what to do with,” says Gary Stoll, a Lutheran pastor whom Bruce visited at Hermannsburg. Stoll once asked Strehlow if the elders had given any instructions about what to do with the collection if he became too old. Strehlow replied: “I was told that if at the end of my life I could find a totally trustworthy white person, I was to pass it onto them.”

  “If not?”

  Strehlow hesitated. “They did say if I couldn’t find a totally trustworthy white person, I was supposed to destroy it.”