Drawn to Bail’s quiet wit, Bruce found himself in the unusual position of trusting another writer. In his letters to him, he entered into the equivalent of a Platonic dialogue.
Bail had visited Bruce at Homer End in August. Bruce read to him the Swartkrans section, after which Bail wrote in his notebook: “It’s ambitious, difficult. Felt it was written too smoothly, lightly.” Bail told him of his misgivings. He suggested that if something was impossible to prove then the tone had to be searching. Bruce was immediately grateful for his uncompromising reaction. “I feel I must reply at once to say how much I value your comments about not making the book so easy . . . I know exactly what you mean and have, anyway, embarked on a different track.”
It was from Bail that Bruce learned of the publication of another book on songlines, Charles Mountford’s Nomads of the Desert. “A disaster with the Australian book – in that another, by accident, had cannibalised it – temporarily,” he wrote to Penelope Tree. Bruce was alarmed at Mountford’s fate. The Aboriginals had decided that he had broken Aborigine law by reproducing secret ceremonial material. “The entire edition was pulped,” wrote Bail.
Chosen as an intimate, Bail found himself fielding Bruce’s worries and frustrations. “He spent so much time imagining himself that people do have trouble adding his parts up, and so did he,” says Bail. “It troubled and confused him. He never seemed at one. He’s a construct, a bower-bird – as is anyone who’s a good mimic. The original Cubist, all surfaces in different directions, including from behind.”
Few understood Bruce’s aesthetic better. “It was an aesthetic of removal.” It struck Bail from their discussions on art how many of the paintings and photographs Bruce admired had no people in them: Malevich’s white canvasses; the cloud scenes of Turner and Constable; the spotted bare landscapes of Fred Williams, whose work would appear on the paperback cover of The Songlines; the grey abstracts of the Australian Ian Fairweather (on whom Bail had written a monograph). “They were emptied of characters and references.” Bruce’s admiration for austerity and plainness pervaded the arts. He urged Bail to visit the unfinished Cistercian Abbey at Le Thoronet in the Var. “Everything had been removed,” says Bail. “It was plain, immaterial and resonant because of the emptiness. It summed him up.”
Bail stayed in Eaton Place during the summer of 1984: “It was like being in a space-capsule, secretive, on the top looking down, everything hidden away. If you swung a cat, you would smash its head four times, straight off.” The flat was so small that the person to occupy it before Bail, while making love to a famous model, had electrocuted himself in the single deadly light socket. “To gain extra purchase, he put his foot against a plug in the wall,” Bruce told Bail with glee.
Hugh Honour wrote of Eaton Place: “Although Bruce’s mind might seem to have been a Schatzkammer filled to bursting with a miscellany of impressions which flowed out impetuously in his conversation, his apartment in London belied this. Hardly more than a box-room converted into a tiny bed-sitting room . . . he called it ‘a place to hang a hat’. Spartan in its spareness – polished wood floor, no carpets or rugs, a built-in bunk for bed, and very little furniture apart from his Empire sofa and two plywood tables by Aalto – the surroundings he created for himself and for the objects he loved were no less rigorously pared down than was his prose.”
This spareness was a deceptive camouflage. John Pawson, the architect whom Bruce employed to convert the flat, noticed that the cupboards were stuffed with Russian gold forks and Fortnum’s Gunpowder teas. “I got into frightful trouble by saying he wasn’t living as simply as he was professing.”
Bail sat on a Napoleonic steel folding-bed. “It was elegant, but would he have bought it if he hadn’t known Marshal Ney had lugged it to Moscow? Draped over the bed was Freud’s shawl. ‘Not only that . . .’ said Bruce. I waited for the punch line. ‘This is the very shawl Freud had around his shoulder when he fled Nazi Europe and arrived in Charing Cross.’ Everything needed a myth. It made them more exclusive.” But the campaign bed had nothing to do with Ney: Bruce had bought it in Paris. As for the “shawl” – a thin, pale indigo bedspread, hand-woven with West African symbols – this had belonged to his Kynance Mews landlord. “He had some connection to Freud’s sister,” says Elizabeth. “Bruce loved it because it was African. It got more and more interesting the longer he had it. ‘Maybe Freud had laid it on his couch for people to lie on . . .”’
Into this confined space Bruce hung an eighteenth-century Swedish chandelier. “It was very handsome, but conventional,” says Hodgkin, “and he talked about it in the most marvellous way. ‘You can see it comes from the north and it’s snow and it’s ice and I’m lighting it just for you.’ The wax dropped plop, plop, plop, onto the floor. ‘Bruce, Bruce, shouldn’t we put something down?’ Bruce was totally impervious. ‘What are you talking about?”’
In the same breath as he rhapsodised about Malevich and Fairweather, Bruce singled out to Bail an unlikely canvas by a nineteenth-century Australian artist as one of his favourite examples of Australian art. In Adelaide, he had stood transported before Tom Roberts’s 1891 narrative work A Breakaway! The painting depicts a young horseman in an arid landscape stretching from his saddle to control a stampede of drought-stricken sheep. Bail saw this competing tension at work in Bruce. “He was very awkward about a number of things. He could not bring himself to be natural. He had a smooth attractive surface, but he was split, rather like his books, between fact and imagination. It was very hard to determine his true shape.”
The Cistercian emptiness he strove for was aesthetic rather than spiritual. “He was not at all a moralist,” said Rezzori. “His morality was totally aesthetic – built of the best inks, but not with blood.” He once told Hodgkin: “I want you to read this.” It was a short story, based on something by Poe. “But why?” said Hodgkin. “I think you’re quite beady about these sort of things,” replied Bruce. Hodgkin says: “It was the same expression that he used when he showed me an Indian painting – to test whether it was genuine or fake. He was very concerned about his own writing being as good as possible. He had a sort of artistic morality.”
It was a state he achieved most satisfactorily in his prose, where he could shuffle the contents and subtract and subtract until he had wrought the clarity and resonance of Le Thoronet. Naturally his impulse was towards the baroque of his conversation and storytelling. He had to labour for his simplicity, discarding the ornate by first verbally sculpting the story, word by word, version after version, often, as he admitted, to the “intense irritation” of his audience. Krüger, his German publisher, remembers how Bruce told him about On the Black Hill in Lindos, the waves coming in and Bruce talking very quickly, like a machine. “I’ve never met anyone who talked so quickly. It was psychotic, not making an end, and, whenever interrupted, zigzagging back. It was a kind of sickness.” When In Patagonia was published, Bruce told Hodgkin: “Oh, you don’t need to read it.” He had already spoken it. “He had told it word for word, telling me on walks.” It was the same with Utz. One night in New York he called on Sontag. “For an hour he told me Utz, non-stop. Then the book came out. There was virtually nothing new. Bruce didn’t relinquish control; there was no letting go. What went in is what he originally wanted it to be.”
“His instinct was always to pare down,” Bail says. “He liked a plain, firmly based simplicity of style: Turgenev, Flaubert, Edmund Wilson. He wanted to be a clean, clear writer and introduce ideas that were original. That stuffed him up as a novelist. He always researched his novels too much, except In Patagonia where he’s not presenting a theory. He has a plainness of language, which is good, but it’s a teacher’s language rather than free-floating. He stands behind the lectern, putting an extra distance between himself and the reader. He can’t tell a story without giving a lecture on twins or nomads. But he’s not a novelist: he couldn’t imagine them. And he couldn’t go the full distance of research in understanding his subject. So he could make two
readers unhappy.” This, for Bail, was the problem with The Songlines. “He took risks with it, which I admired, but the book is split between fact and imagination and the imagination part comes off second-best.”
Bruce longed for Bail to look over his text. He planned to go to India in the New Year. “It would be terrific if you were there too,” he wrote. “In fact, I cannot imagine anything in the world I’d like more.”
Bruce’s room in the Hotel Theano was a convenient five-minute walk from the home of Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor. Their low arcaded house of red-streaked limestone was perched on a steep cliff opposite the waterless island of Merope. Magouche Fielding had introduced Bruce to the Leigh Fermors in 1970. That August, Bruce had stayed with them when writing the first draft of The Nomadic Alternative. “The whole Taygetus range plunges straight down into the sea and eagles float in thermals above the house,” he had written to Elizabeth. Then he brimmed with hope for an early completion of his book. “I really do think it will/or can be ready in its first draft by November (early).” That was fifteen years before.
At the end of most days Bruce walked through the olive groves down to their house in a hollow surrounded by “pencil thin” cypresses. Leigh Fermor was Bruce’s last guru.
Leigh Fermor was a man of action and of knowledge to a degree that Bruce envied. As a child, he lived at the vicarage in Ipsden near Homer End. He was the son of an absentee father, a geologist in India. He had known Peter Wilson before the war, when Wilson lived in Maids of Honour Row (“where he played the accordion”). He had met a drunk Robert Byron in The Nest nightclub. His war career had inspired a film (based on his capture of the German commander in Crete, General Kreipe). He spoke Latin, Greek and Romanian (Bruce, he said, reminded him of the Romanian proverb: “a child with too many motivations remains with his navel string uncut”). And he knew almost as much about nomads as Bruce.
A dedicated wanderer, Leigh Fermor had written a classic book based on a walk through pre-war Europe. In 1933, at the age of 18, he had set off on foot from London to Constantinople, returning four years later. He had taken with him the canvas rucksack “weathered and faded by Macedonian suns” which Robert Byron and David Talbot Rice had carried to Mount Athos in 1927.
A Time of Gifts had come out the same year as In Patagonia. While Leigh Fermor felt Bruce should “let it rip”, Bruce believed the other should prune. “Paddy and Bruce are a very different type of creature,” says Sybille Bedford, “but they are both grandees of style and erudition. In both a toughness goes with a certain sybaritic quality.”
Leigh Fermor was then working on the second volume of his walk to Constantinople. He found Bruce “one of the most extraordinary people one has ever met. Very, very extraordinary, highly gifted, rare person.” He was impressed by his wide and accurate knowledge, by his energy and diligence. “Bruce was a very punctilious note-taker – ‘I must just make a note’ – when something cropped up in conversation. He had tremendous filing cabinets and a card system. The amount of prep he’d done was fantastic. I’d just read in Jordanes about the costumes of the court of Attila. I said to Bruce: ‘Do you know what the women of Genghis Khan wore in the evening?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. They wore the skins of fieldmice sewn together. Probably the jumping jerboa that jumped around in the Asian steppes. There was a good example of this in Katanda a few years ago where they dug up a Khan woman, a leader of Huns who’d been kept intact by preserving her in a patchwork jerkin made of these skins.’ I was dazzled. I was astonished by the idea of Huns wearing a garment of field-mice, that was quite enough for me, but he knew everything. He knew more about the Europe of Philip II than Braudel.”
Writing after Bruce’s death, Leigh Fermor described the quality of his friend’s erudition. “Abstruse art-forms and movements of thought, history, geology, anthropology and all their kindred sciences were absorbed like breathing . . . There was always John Donne or Rimbaud to think or to write about, palaeontological riddles to brood over, speculation on the influence of Simonides of Ceos on the memory techniques of counter-Reformation Jesuits in China, and the earliest whereabouts of Mankind.”
Bruce was competitive with the older man. “He did like to get things right,” says Leigh Fermor. “He was talking about elephants moving across those Central Desert prairies. I said, ‘Bruce, it’s not pronounced mahoot, it’s mahout.’ A flicker of vexation would go over his face if one corrected him. But he did occasionally cap me. About seven years before he came to stay, I couldn’t resist it, I swam across the Hellespont. It took me a long time, nearly three hours. Joan was there with a boat, shouting, ‘Come on, get a move on.’ Bruce said: ‘I haven’t swum across the Hellespont, but I have swum across the Bosphorus, which is a bit wider and the current a bit stronger.’ I said, ‘Anyone with you?’ ‘Yes, there was a very nice caique following me with three Turkish princesses’.”
Invariably, if there was an audience of four or five, Bruce would get carried away. “He loved parties, to which he contributed a great deal. In our village taverna one night there was a certain amount of drinking. Bruce got up on the table and did a dance, like a solitary dervish, with a demonic expression on his face. One thing Caspar Fleming noticed, and I saw what he meant: Bruce sometimes opened his mouth in such a way that it went, ‘clackety-clackety-clack,’ rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Sometimes he’d get so excited that he’d go into a kind of tailspin and end up with a sort of ‘pop’ in mid-air, very curious and difficult to describe.”
He was at his most rewarding when alone on a long walk with nobody else to dazzle. “He had rather a harlequin quality, very light on his feet, up and away, eyes sparkling. Wherever he went, he was off like a bullet to the horizon, learning everything at tremendous speed.” Leigh Fermor wrote of him surging across the headlands and the canyons “as though he were in seven-league boots, only stopping to identify a momentarily puzzling flower or some rare hawk flickering high overhead . . . Bruce was interested in everything.”
“Up behind Kardamyli, there is a first line of hills with little villages dotted about, and then a line of snowy mountains,” Bruce wrote to Diana Melly. “I usually break off at 2 and go walking with Paddy.”
He was a living illustration of his own “crackpot theory” that the human frame was designed for a day’s march. He once received from Redmond O’Hanlon a postcard of an emaciated, Giacometti figure with the inscription: “Après a short walk with Bruce.” He believed that walking “is not simply therapeutic for oneself, but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills”. Plante found a clue to his restlessness in Thoreau’s Walking. “To saunter, [Thoreau] thinks, could mean to be sans terre, without land or home, but to be equally at home everywhere. Bruce did have a home with his wife Elizabeth but his restlessness was such that she herself accepted his feeling that he was sans terre.” In medieval times children would shout, “There goes a Sainte Terre, a saunterer, a Holy Lander” of someone asking for charity under pretext of going to the Holy Land. Plante believed that Bruce in his wandering “was looking for the Holy Land, looking at least for the small objects that remained of its former habitation as evidence of something deep in humanity that might be humanity’s saving grace”.
One day while exploring the limestone gorges with Leigh Fermor, Bruce came across the tiny ruined church of St Nicholas in Chora. “I hadn’t seen it for donkeys’ years,” says Leigh Fermor, “a tenth-century Byzantine church on a headland two miles up a mountain, surrounded by oaks and olives and full of bats.” The dust-coloured interior, painted with blue and yellow frescoes, was no more spacious than Bruce’s London flat and contained a marble, three-legged stool from a pre-Christian shrine. Bruce said of the Greeks that they reserved all the best building sites for God. He loved the building and its views over the Messinian headland to Venetico, the Venetian isle. “We’d often go and have picnics there,” says Joan Leigh Fermor. “One always thought of it as Bruce’s place.”
On his walks he resembled the O
ld Testament scholar in On the Black Hill, “a hollow-chested figure with white hair blowing about like cotton-grass, striding over the heather and shouting to himself so loudly that he frightened off the sheep”. Bail was struck by how much he looked at the ground; also by how someone of such taste could, at the same time, be so utilitarian. “He was a fearless pisser. He’d stop and piss right in front of you while talking. He used to fart very freely, too.” Kasmin was not alone in trying to keep up. “He always walked ahead of everyone, talking to himself and to you and you could never quite hear what he was saying.” An entry in his notebook reads: “Nothing can be more irritating than walking long distances with someone who cannot keep up.”
Leigh Fermor was an exception. Wanting to learn from him, Bruce reined himself to walk side by side. On one of their walks, Leigh Fermor told him the Latin expression solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking – “and immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook. Everything was useful to him. He piled it into a great sack and when alone winnowed and used it when most apposite, which is what a writer should do.”
Bruce sewed many of their conversations into The Songlines. “Compression is what’s needed,” he wrote from India. “And when talking of compression, how’s this for the thud of nomad horsemen into one line (I mentioned it on one of our walks)? Juvaini in his History of the World Conqueror reports this unconscious hexameter from the mouth of a refugee from Bokhara after the sack of Genghis: ‘Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand’ [They came, they sapped, they burned, they slew, they trussed up their loot and were gone.] Juvaini, quoted by Yule in his edition of Marco Polo, says that the essence of all his book is contained in this one line.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 60
