Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In The Songlines Toyne is spread over two characters: the host of a barbecue and Kidder, the gym bore: a rich city interloper, “good-looking in a sourish way”, who flies his own plane and who shames his lifelong friend Arkady into saying, behind Kidder’s back, savage and bitchy things about him. “The shrill upward note on which he ended his sentences gave each of his statements, however dogmatic, a tentative and questionable bias. He would have made an excellent policeman.”

  Bruce’s resentment grew out of a barbecue held in Toyne’s garden in Alice Springs. “He wrote spitefully of me because I was bitterly resentful of the fact he gatecrashed my party,” says Toyne. “I specifically told him it was inappropriate. He was desperate to meet Pat Dodson, who was avoiding him. He just turned up and Pat, lucky for Bruce, was too polite to leave.”

  Named Father Flynn in the book, Dodson is an important Aboriginal leader. Of mixed Aboriginal and Irish descent, he was a Catholic priest in Broome before exchanging the cloth for Land Rights. In 1983, he was Director of the Central Land Council and one of the authorities whose brains Bruce was eager to pick. Together with Strehlow and Sawenko, Dodson was pivotal to Bruce’s enterprise, someone who might articulate the songlines from an Aboriginal’s perspective.

  Toyne’s barbecue is a centrepiece in The Songlines and Bruce wrote about it as if he were a welcome guest. Not only did he gatecrash, after being advised by Toyne, twice, not to come, but he monopolised the principal guest.

  “A good deal of indignation brewed up in P. T.”, Bruce wrote in his notebook. Speaking to him by the fire, Toyne told Bruce the cautionary tale of an American anthropologist who had recorded secret songs from the western desert for a company in America specialising in ethnographic music. On behalf of two distressed Aborigines, Toyne brought an injunction against the record distributors, who returned all 300 copies. Toyne took the records back to the community, built a huge bonfire and ceremonially burnt the lot.

  Bruce tried to explain his own project, how it differed. “Lost P. T. in the process. I was extremely jittery and didn’t put my point clearly enough – but eventually did arouse the interest of Pat D. He was it seemed interested by the nomadic hypothesis.”

  Bruce had been aware of Dodson appraising him. “Could only see the bumps of his face in the firelight and a huge beard and long legs. An immensely strong brooding silent presence.” The reason Dodson had already declined to speak to Bruce, had consistently refused to see him, was that, like Pierre Verger in Ibadan, he was tired of being cornered by outsiders.

  Dodson may now be dismissive of Bruce, but that night he did speak to him. Their conversation by the fire lasted into the small hours while everyone else peeled off or fell asleep around them. “We all went to bed and still it went on and on,” says Phillip Toyne’s then wife. Gradually, skilfully, Bruce drew Dodson out until he would be able to weigh Father Flynn’s voice with all the sacred knowledge required to explain a songline.

  They discussed Christ and the Devil; they discussed the Old Testament and New; and it is apparent from Bruce’s notes that they discussed the tracks of the ancestors. “P. D. explained how if the track from A to B went across others’ land the people of point A would have to ask their permission before singing the song.” The former priest told Bruce, giving him his leitmotif: “In theory the whole of Australia resembled spaghetti.” Whether Bruce pushed Dodson to go further, to say things he should not have said, is unclear. But the spectacle of Bruce, the unwanted guest, stealing secrets at the fire is what makes his host of that night so annoyed even now. “He gives readers the impression it’s his knowledge and it’s not,” says Toyne. “The book would collapse if he didn’t have access to other people’s insights. He got his real information from Pat Dodson and Strehlow. What he wrote was not a novel, it was a barely-veiled diary. It’s a cheap escape to say: ‘it’s a work of fiction and therefore I can do what I like’.”

  The camouflage of fiction did allow Bruce to do what he liked. Asked on ABC radio whether the Bruce who narrates the book is the same Bruce who writes it, he hesitated: “Whether it happened to me there and then is another thing which I keep rather close to my chest.”

  There are moments when the two Bruces are not the same at all. Bruce the author, for instance, was terrified of snakes. Bruce the narrator is fearless, with a Hemingwayesque bravado that allows him to arrive in any country speaking the language and knowing the local customs.

  Bruce and Sawenko camped the second night at Osborne Bore. As Sawenko went off to fetch water, Bruce asked nervously: “Are there snakes?”

  “Nothing’s going to bother you,” said Toly. “Tuck your mosquito net under the swag, don’t think about it.”

  Their two Aboriginal companions sensed Bruce’s concern. If he was afraid of snakes, they said, the best thing was to tie up the corners of the swag to little sticks so it would be six inches off the ground. “They did it for him,” says Sawenko, “and then they curled up flat on the ground. Bruce said, ‘What are they doing?’ I told him: ‘They’re fine, they’re not going to think about snakes. But if you’re going to think about snakes, it’s worth everything for your peace of mind’.”

  In The Songlines, by contrast, the sight of a snake-trail in the sand plunges Bruce’s companions into hysterics. The men get twitchy, Arkady so fearful that he decides to sleep on the roof of the vehicle. But “Bruce” is unfazed.

  “For myself, I rigged up a ‘snake-proof’ groundsheet to sleep on, tying each corner to a bush, so its edges were a foot from the ground. Then I began to cook supper.”

  Upon rereading the passage, Sawenko says: “How impressed people must have been. The reader feels inadequate.”

  The Songlines is as much about nomads as it is about Bruce inventing himself as his best, most achieved character: intrepid and practical traveller, humble sage, sharp-witted inquisitor. This was Chatwin as he liked to see himself, a Hemingway hero full of deep feeling yet economical with words. But as Jenny Green says: “He murdered people with talk.”

  The same kind of reinvention takes place with Bruce’s sexuality. For the first time in his books, he is a sexually-alive observer.

  There is a curious probing heterosexuality that surfaces in The Songlines. Separated from Elizabeth, new female friendships sprang up, all of which carried the charge of romantic possibility.

  “So what was it, I wondered, about these Australian women? Why were they so strong and satisfied, and so many of the men so drained?”

  Robyn Davidson saw Bruce in Sydney on his return from Alice Springs in March. “I know he had infatuations. He thought Australian women marvellous: ‘They can do anything: fix trucks, fly aeroplanes, talk about any book you’ve ever read’.” Davidson was an archetype of this kind of strength: highly intelligent, competent, unusual. One night she and Bruce hugged each other goodnight. “It was not asexual. Having thought he was homosexual, I then revised my opinion: he simply chose to withdraw from it rather than was naturally repelled by it. He had a very complicated sexuality: he refused to be categorised or sewn up. Women weren’t cut out of it at all, but men were probably simpler for him.”

  Two of Bruce’s “infatuations” were Davidson’s friends in Alice Springs: Sawenko’s former girlfriend, Jenny Green, whom Bruce met while walking along the road at Ti-Tree (Green, he told Davidson, was “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”); and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist who had worked with Sawenko on Walbiri land claims. In the novel, Arkady’s wife Marian is a hybrid of these two women, but mostly she evolves out of Bruce’s attraction to Petronella.

  “In Alice Springs he had this frisson,” says Davidson. “He told me it was very hard to leave.”

  Bruce introduced himself to Petronella in the middle of February, at the end of his first visit to Alice Springs. He knocked on the door of her house on Winnecke Avenue while she was mowing the lawn. She was dressed in shorts, her long blonde hair in a scarf to keep the grass and dirt away. She invited him into the house that sh
e shared with the sociologist Pam Nathan, who was a twin.

  “How remarkable,” said Bruce. “I’ve just finished a book on twins.”

  Petronella was Dutch, from a family of Amsterdam artists. Her father had lived in Haiti and the South Pole. Her ex-husband had become a Sufi in Morocco after coming out as a homosexual.

  Petronella had watched her husband struggle painfully with his homosexuality. “To have this dissonance in your soul is a wretched thing. It sends off tremors which are debilitating and motivating as well. Which is not to say he didn’t give in to it and enjoy it when it happened. But all the time it was a struggle more complex than guilt, worrying each aspect of your life.”

  Bruce walked and talked with Petronella during his second week in Alice Springs. They had a genuine rapport. “It felt like a long conversation lasting days,” she says. “I felt he had a warm and generous heart. He leaned towards the goodness of people. Even though a lot of what he wrote in The Songlines was shallow, he still had the ability to touch base with things that were genuine.” She was excited by what she understood to be his spiritual quest. He spoke of his interest in nomads in terms of the great religions of the world, of prophets who disappeared into the desert to have visions. Bruce was keen to hear from Petronella of her experiences with the Walbiri and Kaytej. She had worked with Aborigines for a long time and Bruce, watching her at ease with them, found exhilarating their acceptance of this blonde-haired woman. It is possible he supposed that intimacy with her would lead to an intimacy with their culture.

  Bruce was staying at the Melenka Lodge, a back-packers’ hostel. One night he took her for dinner to the Alice Hotel, a smart 1950s establishment with a cricket pitch on the roof. “Bruce waltzed in, commanding. He was very big. He filled up spaces. He didn’t tone things down.” That night he tried to seduce her. “He made it clear he found me attractive and said he’d been writing another novel, about a romance. After dinner he said: ‘Come back with me.’ I said No, I’d walk him. He tried to persuade me. He almost pleaded. ‘This is so important to me. I need to know certain things.’ Of course, I was tempted because I was attracted to Bruce, but it was clear to me it was much more about himself. There was a sense in which he was intoxicated by the place, the things he had found out, and I was part of it.”

  Next day, Petronella saw him off on the bus to Broome. “I remember him embracing me, jumping on to the bus.” Months later, he wrote to her: “Never have I caught a bus in such a DIZZYING way.” He was coming back to Australia, hoping to see her. “I’m writing something very odd, which although set under a gum tree somewhere in the MacDonnells has nothing much to do with Central Australia. No, that is wrong, it has everything and nothing to do with Central Australia and I need desperately to know certain things.” He had used the same phrase as they walked home in Alice Springs.

  When he had no reply, he wrote again. Where was she, why hadn’t he heard from her, what was going on? Unknown to Bruce, Petronella had moved to Bloomington to take a master’s degree at Indiana University. The card did not reach her for another four years. On 17 September 1988 she sent him a letter: “I have wanted to write to you, but didn’t know if you’d remember me. I have just come in from a trip out bush, suffused by a sense of magic and life that is the gift of the desert in bloom. And on re-reading your letter I am reminded of the wonder in you, that so struck me on our first meeting.” Since that time Bruce had stood out for her “as a source of inspiration”. She ended: “I’m reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘That at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.’ I’m glad to have met you.” Bruce was too ill to reply.

  Their paths would not cross again, yet Bruce had never forgotten Petronella. After his second visit to Australia, in March 1984, Bagshaw wrote to her: “Bruce Chatwin has come and gone. He asked to be fondly remembered to you. If you ask me, I think you’ve quite taken his fancy.”

  In The Songlines Petronella is Marian, the inaccessible, idealised and elusive lover of Arkady who dresses in a skimpy, flower-printed dress and takes showers in the desert. “Then she strolled back, silhouetted against the sunlight, glistening wet all over, the wet dress flattened out over her breasts and hips and her hair hanging loose in golden snakes. It was no exaggeration to say she looked like a Piero madonna, the slight awkwardness of her movements made her that much more attractive.” At the end of the book, she marries Arkady. “They were two people made in heaven for each other. They had been helplessly in love since the day they met, yet had gradually crept into their shells, glancing away, deliberately, in despair, as if it were too good, never to be, until suddenly the reticence and the anguish had melted.”

  Bruce returned to Sydney on 5 March. A very different person knocked at Penelope Tree’s door in Darling Point. He flung his backpack onto the dining room table and said: “I don’t care what you are doing, you’re just going to sit down and listen to what happened to me.” He then launched into an account of his adventures over the previous weeks. “It was like seeing one gigantic light bulb above his head,” says Tree. “I’d never seen him so excited or turned on. He’d not only been out in the wilderness, but he’d come back with a great idea. He talked for maybe two and a half hours and for the time he was speaking he made me understand the concept of songlines. He had it; he definitely had it, and he loved Australia because of that.”

  XXXI

  The Bat Cave

  “Tous les anglais sont homosexuels.”

  “Oui, tous.”

  “Sauf que toi, mon chéri.”

  —BC notebooks, Niger 1972

  THE URGENT NEED TO MAKE DISCOVERIES ABOUT HIMSELF which he communicated on Petronella’s doorstep soon dissolved. Two weeks after leaving her in Alice Springs, he picked up a boy in King’s Cross and, according to Gannon’s diary, spent the night out. Three days later he flew to Bali to meet Jasper Conran. Bruce had not involved him in his plans and during this time appears to have been unreachable.

  Their fortnight together in Indonesia seems to have deepened Bruce’s feelings for Jasper. There were friends he had made in Australia who were shaken by how much he loved the young man. At the same time it appeared that Bruce had refused to accept that he was supposed to be having a relationship. “It must have had the feeling of being chilling to the other person,” said Wyndham, “but Bruce wouldn’t play that role.”

  It was when he was with Jasper in Bali that Bruce entered the next phase of his illness. In the Bali Hyatt, they ran into Kynaston MacShine from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “You got the feeling that Bruce was making Jasper pay the bills and at moments Jasper wasn’t too happy about that,” says MacShine, who hired a car for the three of them to tour around in. They looked for Indian textiles and in Barbadoor parked outside a bat cave. According to MacShine, Bruce did not enter the cave. “He didn’t walk in. He didn’t take a torchlight into a dark area. He didn’t get involved.” But three years later, when searching for the origin of his illness, Bruce dug up the memory of the bat cave in Barbadoor.

  On 6 April, he flew back alone to Sydney with what he described to Rogers as “hideous food poisoning”. He had a high fever, with night sweats, and was bleeding. He recovered after a week, but already he felt an inkling that his food poisoning was something more. “He had an idea he wouldn’t make old bones, a presentiment,” says Jasper. “I once asked him: ‘Why are you so intense?’ Bruce said: ‘I have to be’.”

  Bruce later told Elizabeth that on his return to Australia from Java, he picked up a copy of Time magazine. Inside, there was a photograph of him taken by Paul Kasmin and an article on the “gay plague”. He had the same response to the article as to Gertrude’s telephone call about Bobby. “His instant reaction was always right,” she says. “He knew he was in for it.”

  He wrote to Petronella’s empty home in Alice Springs, explaining his illness: “I am terribly sorry for sloping off with
out warning and not coming back – as I fully intended. The truth was I got hideously ill in Java, with amoebas and all that – so ill, in fact, that for a moment they thought I had cholera. And though I did go back to Sydney for a week or two, I was in a considerably lowered condition.”

  In this condition, feeling “flat, dried-out, alienated,” he telephoned Elizabeth.

  At a point when matters stood far from clear between him and Elizabeth, Bruce once telephoned the Levys in Long Hanborough, at whose marriage he had first met Donald. “He wanted to stay on his way to Wales,” says Paul. “He was keen to get to Penelope Betjeman, but not willing to go off into the night.” The Levys gave him pyjamas and a toothbrush and came in to his room to check all was well. Bruce, already in bed, appealed to them with a whisper. “I know this is an odd request, but could you tuck me up?”

  Just as his books were reactions to each other, so each of his personae needed to play off against themselves. Without Elizabeth, he was liberated. Liberated, he was lonely. Lonely, he was a little boy who had to be tucked up.

  On his second visit to Australia he drove to Ayer’s Rock with Salman Rushdie.

  “You know, I’ve been very unhappy lately.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’ve been very unhappy and for a long time I couldn’t work out why and then I suddenly realised it was because I’d missed my wife. I sent her a telegram to meet me in Katmandu and she sent a telegram back to say she would.”

  This was the first time Rushdie had heard Bruce talk about Elizabeth.