At the end of the week, Bruce and Rushdie flew to Alice Springs. “As the plane took off I looked down and I saw this incredibly moving landscape, like the moon with atmosphere,” says Rushdie. “By the time we landed in Alice Springs, I was really excited.” There Bruce introduced him to the characters who would reappear, without much disguise, in The Songlines: Sawenko, Jenny Green, Phillip Toyne. “One of the strange things about being introduced to Alice Springs by Bruce is that when I got to know these people a bit they drew me aside. ‘We weren’t really sure about you because you came with Chatwin.’ They were suspicious of him: they were left-wing – and Bruce was a friend of Kath Strehlow.”
Bruce also introduced Rushdie, by telephone, to the friend who had originally put him in touch with these people: Robyn Davidson. “Having never before read her book,” says Rushdie, “my view until this trip was why travel across the desert on a camel when you can fly?” He changed his mind after he found Tracks “mellowing in a rack” in an ethnic bookshop. Bruce insisted that, since Rushdie had enjoyed the book, he should meet Davidson when he went to Sydney. The introduction was to have far-reaching consequences. “He left his wife for my friend the ‘camel lady’ Robyn Davidson,” Bruce wrote to Nin Dutton. “All my fault – or so I was told!”
Bruce and Rushdie rented a four-wheel drive and drove to Ayer’s Rock. Bruce disliked cars as he disliked planes. “The spirit of generosity already threatened by the horse, evaporated entirely with the motor car,” he wrote in his Patagonia notebook. Nor was he a reliable driver. As with Kasmin in Africa, Bruce’s thoughts on the way to Ayer’s Rock concentrated anywhere but on the road ahead. “I was looking out of the window at Australia and Bruce was in Russia with Costakis,” says Rushdie. “He talked unceasingly from dawn to dusk, a relentless name-dropping.” In the middle of the red wilderness, they paused to look at a dingo on the road. “Bruce, meanwhile, was talking about the Aga Khan and Diana Phipps. I finally cracked. ‘Bruce, is there anybody you know who’s not famous?’ He got incredibly upset and began to bluster and scream: it wasn’t his fault and he wasn’t a snob, it was because he’d worked at Sotheby’s.”
There were a lot of funny stories, too. “I remember quite often the car being in some danger because of the amount of laughter around. There are people who exist through what they say and Bruce was one of those. I’ve never met anyone so much more talkative than me, so that was reassuring. I thought: ‘At least I’m not in the gold medal position of chat.’ It was a non-stop monologue with interruptions from me. There’s a poem written by some comic writer called The Rime of the Wedding Guest, which is designed to be read simultaneously with The Ancient Mariner. And this wedding guest says, ‘Oh, Mariner, oh, incredibly interesting, uh-huh, uh-huh, albatross, well, I really have to . . .’ I was like that, going uh-huh a lot while Bruce went into his non-stop spiel.”
At Ayer’s Rock, they stayed in the Inland Motel. Bruce, who claimed that it always rained when he was in the desert, woke Rushdie from a siesta, dragging him outside to see a vision: the sky black with thunder and the huge rock a waterfall, rivulets cascading down.
Ayer’s Rock was in the process of being handed back to the Aborigines, thanks in part to Phillip Toyne. Bruce climbed the peak, although he considered it blasphemous to do so. “Bruce’s degree of fitness was extraordinary,” says Rushdie. “He rocketed ahead.” Bruce was to say later: “The craziest thing I think I have ever done in my life was to take part in a race with the Swiss basketball team down Ayer’s Rock, a real running race. How I got to the bottom I do not know, but I was second.” Rushdie, evidently, lagged far behind. “I don’t remember any basketball team.”
On the drive back to Alice Springs, Bruce continued talking, using his friend as a sounding board to test his theory of the songlines. “His thesis is nutty,” says Rushdie, “but in a funny way it doesn’t matter because it has poetic truth, a mystical validation.” While he responded to the metaphor, Rushdie distrusted Bruce’s anthropological accuracy. “Bruce’s vision is that this is a continuous song disgorged while walking through a landscape whose creation it describes; if you walk at 6 m.p.h., the song will describe what you see. If you think about this for five minutes, it’s the longest song ever, much longer than The Iliad. It’s true, the song tells of the creation myth in a few verses, but it doesn’t create an exact relationship. He was trying to make it more exact than it is. I asked him, ‘What happens when the stories cross? Is there a grid?’ He didn’t have the answer.”
Three years later, Thubron detected the same uncertainty. “I asked him what happened at the point where a person’s map gave out, his tjuringa, and he met another territory and wanted to go through it? He said, ‘I don’t know,’ and something to the effect that he didn’t know too much. There was a slight inflection in his voice, a slight tickle. Bruce could get a bit angry or intolerant if you didn’t believe him.”
Rushdie warned Bruce, “They’re all going to hate it.” But Bruce insisted: “This is the book I want to write.” While dining with Jenny Green in Alice Springs, his flash temper seemed to turn on Rushdie. “S. R. kept audience spellbound with knowledge of other novels. Is he so bookish that he can’t now look on the surface of life?” Phillip Toyne had a different experience of the meal. “Rushdie was completely eclipsed by Bruce, who rendered him speechless.” There is something telling about this collision of memories. Either Bruce did not realise how much he talked; or he was dealing with his anxieties by talking. Perhaps both.
Bruce’s frustration about getting to the heart of the mystery intensified once Rushdie had departed for Sydney. “I still cannot fathom out the relation of site to track,” he wrote in his notebooks. “Still my question is not answered; always objections.” Revisiting the Hermannsburg mission outside Alice Springs, he had called on Pastor Gary Stoll, who had worked closely with Strehlow. He had met Stoll on his first visit, found him “one of the most intelligent and expert people on the Aboriginal scene”. But when Bruce asked him “the gist of my principal problem, whether or not a man could actually visit his own conceptive site,” Stoll was unable to help. “He agreed the only person who could really have sorted out the question of the ‘dreamings’ was [Strehlow] himself.” But the secret had returned to its source.
Bruce was unable to ask Petronella for help, but he was fortunate while at the Adelaide Festival to have met Rob Novak, who ran the store in Kintore. On 18 March, at Novak’s invitation, Bruce arrived at the settlement with a permit to stay two weeks.
The small, dark-haired Novak, who had heard Bruce speak at the Festival, was interested in literature. At Kintore he kept a good stock of novels by Milan Kundera, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Walser. In The Songlines, Kintore is renamed Cullen and Novak is Rolf, always to be found in his store with his head over Proust.
For a fortnight, Bruce lived in a three-room caravan. He impressed the community with his practical skills. One day he fixed a bit of flapping iron above the health-care shelter; another day he changed a flat tyre while on a kangaroo hunt. But he did not appear to Novak to communicate in a meaningful way with the Aborigines. “He had no Pintupi and their English is not very good. I didn’t see him talking at any length to any Aborigine.” This, says Novak, was an insuperable barrier. “In his book there are no Aborigines laughing. They laugh the whole time.”
In such a short time in Kintore, it was easy for Bruce to gather a wrong impression. Daphne Williams sold Aboriginal paintings at the Papunya Tula Artists co-operative in Alice Springs. Her salary was paid for by the Aboriginal community, her profits ploughed back into it. One day she turned up at Kintore to collect a painting from Tommy Lowry. Bruce followed her around. He was, she says, “highly disruptive” of her work, talking across the Aboriginal artist as he explained the dreaming. “Tommy was telling the story of two men chewing tobacco which made them pass a lot of gumpu and formed a lake. When Bruce asked me what gumpu meant, I said ‘P-I-S-S, if you must know.’ I told him off.” In The Songlines, Daphne
is caricatured as Mrs Houston, an exploitative and very determined woman: “Mrs Houston worked her lips. You could almost hear her mental calculation: a white gallery . . . a white abstraction . . . White on White . . . Malevich . . . New York.” But Bruce had got it wrong, says Novak. Williams could not in any respect be compared to the dealers of his Sotheby’s days: she had devoted many years to helping Aboriginal artists, not exploiting them.
Bruce was not an initiate like Strehlow and could never hope to be. Before he left Central Australia for the last time, he met a man who was. On his return from Kintore he agreed to a Sunday morning book-signing at the Connoisseur bookshop in Alice Springs. To drum up an audience, Carol Davies, the owner, advertised in the local press. “What she meant by advertising,” says Rushdie, “was a small ad in between a sale of fertiliser and how to get your tractor repaired.” Only one person turned up: the local historian, Dick Kimber.
Kimber asked Bruce to sign a copy of In Patagonia. “I thought he was a sad, lonely, lost man. It was as though he was playing a role.” With striking blue eyes and a light tan, Bruce reminded Kimber of Peter O’Toole. “He wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia, but to me he was never getting into the part.” They left the bookshop together, walking in the direction of Todd Mall. It was a bleak day, with grey scuddy skies. As they walked, Bruce talked of Strehlow. He admitted that he had needed “a bottle of red” to get through his book, but the answer was “all in the songs”.
Kimber, who had been through an initiation ceremony, told Bruce: “I’m not wishing to disillusion you. It’s only part of the answer.”
Bruce stopped near Flynn Church. “He said, “Surely, I’ve got it now.’ It was like I’d hit him,” says Kimber.
From Alice Springs Bruce flew to Adelaide to join Nin Dutton. They drove through Broken Hill, the mining town where Bickerton Milward had hoped to make his fortune, to Boona, staying the night with Pam Bell. She listened to Bruce talk of the Aborigines. “He knew the mystery was there and he didn’t understand it,” said Bell. “In The Songlines, he was desperately trying to go to the centre. It was the most important thing for him and he realised halfway through he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was excluded. You have to earn mystery. It’s only lovers who get there.”
XXXIII
A Sincere Fumbling
It is ironic that my book which is a passionate defence of movement should involve its author in years of limpet-like existence.
—BC to John Pawson, 1986
“I’M LONGING TO SEE YOU,” JASPER WROTE FROM MARRAKESH IN March. His postcard showed the wedding ceremony of the Ait Haddidu. He had bought a house near Regent’s Park and gutted it. He wanted Bruce to move in with him. “This is my studio,” he said, showing Diana Melly around. “And this is where Bruce could write.” Bruce’s influence was present in the bare floorboards, the white walls; and in Eileen Gray’s map of Argentinian Patagonia, the pair of the map of Chilean Patagonia that he had given to Elizabeth. Bruce was there a lot over the next two years, but he did not share Jasper’s dream.
“I do think Bruce was very happy with Jasper,” says Melly, who would have them to stay at the Tower in Scethrog. “The problem came over who was who. Bruce was much older than Jasper and you would have expected him to be more fatherly, more mature. But Bruce was never a father figure. He was always disappearing.”
“He just didn’t want to be cornered,” says Jasper. “He had these different worlds which he compartmentalised. I don’t think Bruce thought of himself as one thing or the other. The fact that he married Elizabeth knowing what a great part of his sexuality was, and with people saying ‘Ah, we know what you’re about’, made him more fundamentally non-committal. Which, at the end, is exactly what was wrong with my relationship. There was nobody like him, so witty, so sharp, so bright, but there were aspects of him, finally, I couldn’t deal with. Bruce did not treat me very nicely. I was young and along comes this glamorous creature who’s fantastic. It was very much my first love, but he would up sticks and bugger off at the drop of a hat. In Australia, he didn’t ring me and didn’t write, and ignored me. While he was there he had affairs with other people. I found out and he told me it was true and I’d had enough. It was more than I could take on a daily basis. I couldn’t structure my life. I’d just moved into a house. I wanted a proper life. I wanted him to move in with me. As far as I knew, Bruce had split up from Elizabeth. I didn’t know this was a situation that was on-going. I never knew otherwise until he was ill. And I can tell you, I was appalled. I had to come to terms with the fact that he had deceived me as well.”
One day Ivry had lunch with Bruce and Elizabeth in Oxford. “When I got him alone I said: ‘Bruce, what’s all this about you and Jasper Conran?’ Bruce said: ‘Nothing has changed, Ivry. I mean it, nothing has changed’.”
“Probably there was nobody Bruce loved more than himself,” says Jasper, who would refuse to read The Songlines because he felt Bruce had left him to go to Australia. “And nothing meant more to him than his own written word.”
Bruce’s initial idea for The Songlines was to write it in the form of a letter to his Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso. “He was tortured by the fact he had no structure. He thought of putting everything in a letter to me from a totally unknown place in the middle of nowhere.” The book was to have been called Letter from Marble Bar.
The next idea was to cast the book as a Platonic dialogue. “The novel, if such it be, consists of the narrator (myself) and a Russian immigrant to Melbourne (based loosely on someone I met) having a long, drawn-out conversation in the shade of a mulga tree.” This evolved from his 1983 journey with Toly Sawenko.
But again the book changed shape after his visit to Swartkrans with Brain. When Of the Nomads was replaced as a title by The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman, Maschler tentatively enquired, “I assume it is the book we talked about! i.e. in shorthand AFRICA.” Bruce was guarded: “Should we say it’s longer than anything I’ve attempted before. It is, I suppose, a novel: though of a very strange kind; but as I have the most unbelievable difficulty slotting all the bits in, I’d really rather not talk about it.”
His battle to structure his book lasted until July 1986. “The book is not just an ‘Australian’ enterprise,” he wrote to Nin Dutton, “but sets down a lot of crackpot ideas that have been going round my head for 20 years.”
Bruce returned from his second Australian visit in April 1984. He found Mrs Thatcher’s England in a “soupy pre-Fascist condition”. He wrote to Bail: “Without wanting to sound unpatriotic, I now find that a week in my country is as much as I can stomach. It used to be two months, but now, like the dwindling pound, it gets whittled down and down and down . . .”
That summer he lent Bail his Eaton Place attic while he tried to work in Homer End. “I’m only capable of functioning away from all the hullabaloo . . . My impulse is to sell up and go away somewhere rather primitive – or at least isolated from the literary ‘buzz’ that nags at me with the insistence of a pneumatic drill in a neighbouring street. The answer is this: that no amount of comfort, padding, recognition etc., is, in any way, a compensation for having one’s head and time free. And London is such an abominable trap!”
He was also ill. On 20 November 1984, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “Bruce is well, but has a nasty virus on his face which looks like chicken pox. He’s apparently had it for a couple of years, but it didn’t show up much. The only treatment is to have some incredibly cold nitrogen put on it which sort of burns off the spots.” In his run-down state, he developed bronchitis.
As winter approached, he did not find it any easier to concentrate at Homer End, “this promenade-deck-of-the-Queen-Mary house of ours”. The house was light, with a sweeping view, but he was easily distracted, not least by Elizabeth’s cats. “This a.m. there was an unfortunate incident,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “I usually get down 1st & check the kitchen for corpses and remains, but today missed a nasty pile of something they sicked up & Bruce sat on i
t. It was on his chair . . .”
He poured out his heart to Kasmin: “This peripatetic existence of mine must stop. I must have mon bureau, mes fauteuils, mon jardin (as Flaubert writes in a letter) – somewhere in a relatively good climate, which means the Mediterranean (pas des bêtes!), and I must have it soon. God knows how I’ll raise the cash, if it means the sale of my London flat + my art then tant pis pour eux!”
He spent Christmas at Homer End, then packed up his books, his notes, his scuba suit and his surfboard and departed by car for the Mani. He had been quite ill, Elizabeth told Gertrude, “and needed clearance from the Doctor before setting off on his long drive to Greece”.
He had found “the most beautiful place you can imagine”: a self-service flat set in an abundance of silvery-green olives within the sound of the sea at Kardamyli. He arrived at the Hotel Theano on 1 January 1985.
Bruce’s seclusion in Greece lasted seven months while he ground out a first draft. Elizabeth and Margharita would join him for several weeks in January. For the rest of the time, he worked alone. One of his few correspondents was Murray Bail. “I’ve put a block on being available from London, and that includes the post,” Bruce wrote. “I have a room with a view of olives, cypresses, a bay. I work till 3; then walk in the hills; then read; then sleep. Not bad. Costs next to nothing. I go on with the book and have reached such a stage, I simply daren’t look back.”
Bruce described Bail to Nin Dutton as “a really good egg!” They had enjoyed each other’s company immediately and he grew to depend on the younger writer for advice, especially about Australia. They became literary intimates. “What am I reading here?” wrote Bruce on 1 March 1985. “I have the Sinyavsky, in French (Bonne Nuit), but cannot finish it . . . Otherwise, three novels of Svevo, who I’d never read before; The Idiot, which I last read in the Sahara; Michel Tournier, who is obviously inventive, but I now think is far too kitsch; Dialogues of Plato, to see how you express ideas in dialogue (The answer is, ‘I don’t’) plus the usual array of technical and scientific stuff.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 59
