Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Elizabeth did not stay the night. Neighbours came to fetch her while efforts were made to rehydrate Bruce. On 14 September, during a blood transfusion, his temperature reached 40.3°C. “Had rigours during the transfusion which ceased once it had stopped,” read the report. His urine was black and he was described as poorly. “The fact is I very nearly croaked,” he told Murray Bail. “I was not expected to live through the night. It was not unpleasant. I was hallucinating like mad and was convinced that the view from my window – a car park, a wall and the tops of some trees – were an enormous painting by Paolo Veronese. Can we ever escape ‘Art’?”

  He described a “definite glimpse of the Pearly Gates” to Matthew Spender. His vision combined features of an early Byzantine Christ Pantocrator on Mount Athos with Renaissance frescoes near Poggio a Caiano. A great number of people were engaged in some banquet or ritual festivity. “As he approached its surface, he felt an incredible excitement, as if at last he could pass through the shield of mere appearances of which paintings are made. What textures! The clothes! The velvet, the long sleeves, the pearls like little white planets, each an individual all-engrossing other world!

  “As I stretched out my hand to touch, he said, the figures began to move, to beckon me to join them. He took the hand of a man standing there and walked with him into the painting.”

  “He was a taste man to the end,” says Bail.

  Another vision was described in literary terms. “I saw green-capped schoolboys leaving school, an infinite library of books which turned into a library of primroses and a troupe of glass horses which galloped off in a shatter. It was like something from Borges’ El Aleph.”

  Less pleasant was the hallucination Bruce outlined to Colin Thubron. He was sliding down an ice tunnel, as if through a gigantic gut, “and the whole thing was cracking crkk crkk crkk as I slide rather slowly down the ice and at the bottom there were a whole series of icicles like stalactites which when I hit them ripppped me apart and I remember my whole shoulder coming off and I was dismembered . . . One’s organs absolutely scattered all over the place . . . There was definitely a feeling that this was death and I was definitely dying.”

  The John Warm ward for infectious diseases treated meningitis, pneumonia, traveller’s diarrhoea, cellulitis, amoebic liver abscesses from India: everything caused by germs.

  The first doctor to examine him was the ward registrar, Richard Bull, who understood Bruce’s name to be Charles Chatwin. Acutely confused, with “the occasional inappropriate response”, Bruce told Bull of his “sense of mortality” while dispersing Penelope Betjeman’s ashes in India. He looked, wrote Bull, “very unwell”: his voice was hoarse, his legs were numb and his face was covered in red spots and ulcerating skin lumps.

  Though not uncooperative, there was a piecemeal quality to the way Bruce offered up his medical history. Over the next two days, Bull established that he had travelled widely since 1962, including to the Middle East, Afghanistan, India, America, Haiti, South America, Australia, Dahomey, Togo, Cameroon, Kenya; that he had been “bisexual since youth”; that a possible contact for HIV was an Australian whom he had known between 1978 and 1981. There are in his answers traces of a man in despair, seeking an explanation for his illness. On 14 September, he gave an alternative explanation. The record puts it: “NB Experienced ‘gang rape’ in Benin (W Africa) in 1978”.

  He described this experience to another of his doctors, David Warrell, professor of tropical medicine and infectious diseases at Oxford University. Warrell considered the rape story implausible. In October 1988, Bruce would tell his French doctor, André Le Fesvre, that he believed he had contracted HIV from an Australian in Australia, while to Francis Wyndham he said that he had traced the lineage to Mapplethorpe’s lover in New York, Sam Wagstaff.

  On 14 September, Bull discussed the diagnosis with Bruce and Elizabeth. “She knows her own risk and is thinking about a blood test. Patient told he is seropositive, has pre-AIDS but true AIDS not yet certain.” Bruce would cling to that uncertainty.

  Over the next five weeks he was examined by a number of specialists. It confused him to have to repeat the symptoms. He was unaccustomed to reciting a reliable narrative about himself. But “the self is all I can think of,” he wrote to Bail. By 23 September he had refined his diagnosis, telling one doctor that he had “‘fungus in his blood’, which has caused ‘this wasting disease’”. On the same day, he was seen by a clinical photographer. “Quite anxious for his identity to be concealed, so we covered his eyes.”

  In 1986, AIDS was a phenomenon that had been known for barely five years. Its clinical management was in its infancy. At that time an AIDS patient was expected to live between three and five years.

  “Statistically, one would most likely at that stage in the west have caught it through homosexuals,” says David Warrell, who took over as Bruce’s doctor in November 1987. In the popular mind, AIDS was the new Black Death and perceived as a homosexual disease. In this alarmist climate rumour and misinformation proliferated. Bruce was in the throes of the disease at a time when society’s anxieties about it were at their peak. “When it became known he had died from AIDS, Margharita had friends in Stratford who wouldn’t speak to her,” says Elizabeth. “There was so much ignorance. We were all ignorant. One knew it was caught from sex, but there were also rumours that it was caught from sitting on the toilet or kissing or drinking.” In a letter he wrote to the London Review of Books, Bruce warned: “One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. An infected person must never use anyone else’s toothbrush or an electric razor.” No one was more afraid of this “gay Gotterdammerung”, as Bruce called it, than Bruce himself. “The word ‘AIDS’ is one of the cruellest and silliest neologisms of our time. ‘Aid’ means help, succour, comfort – yet with a hissing sibilant tacked onto the end it becomes a nightmare. It should never be used in front of patients.” This was the nearest he came to a public admission of his illness.

  He hated the name, and the idea of such an ugly label being applied to himself was unbearable. He had spent his life escaping from definition only to succumb to an illness that defined him and would lump him in popular conception with notorious homosexuals like Liberace, Rock Hudson and Robert Mapplethorpe. “AIDS is especially terrible for people like Bruce,” says Lucie-Smith. “It’s not merely that you know you’re going to die, but all the layers of pretence get stripped away.”

  In the months ahead, Bruce denied his HIV status to his closest relatives and most of his friends. “In hospital he talked about pythons because nobody wanted to mention the word,” says James Fox. “It was so fierce, the way he surrounded himself in a smoke of different colours, that one didn’t dare speculate.” Bruce told Sunil Sethi, after his friend Sheridan Dufferin died of AIDS: “Everyone thinks I’ve got it too, but it’s not true.” Eve Arnold heard how Bruce had appeared at a Cork Street gallery opening screaming at Kasmin, so that everyone could hear: “You son of a bitch, telling everyone I had AIDS. It’s not true, not true. You were my friend and you betrayed me!” Even Millington-Drake, who died of AIDS in 1994, was convinced until very late on that Bruce was telling him the truth: “I really didn’t believe he did have AIDS, but a tropical disease.” For Millington-Drake, the matter was easily explained: “He was afraid of admitting he was going to die. And it was a great deal to do with protecting his parents and Elizabeth’s parents.”

  “To me it was all very simple,” says Hugh Chatwin. “He would not let down his father.”

  In Zurich when he first received his diagnosis, Bruce had asked Elizabeth to keep the news from his family. “He minded terribly,” she says. “He always thought he could tell his mother, but not his father. ‘I don’t want him to think badly of me.’ He hoped he could hold out until they had found a cure.”

  Consequently, Charles, Margharita and Hugh remained in ignorance of Bruce’s illness and sexuality until his last months. “As far as his sexuality went our parents didn’t know him at all,” says Hugh. “T
hey would have recognised his tendency to be a little camp and they had pillow talk about his dressing up, but they were protected from Jasper, etc. None of his liaisons came anywhere near this household. They didn’t know because I didn’t know.”

  And there was Elizabeth to consider. “People think the reason he didn’t face up to AIDS is Elizabeth,” says Francis Wyndham. “But she didn’t care if the whole world knew. It wasn’t to save her face. The way Elizabeth played it was: ‘I’ll just do what Bruce wants’.”

  Elizabeth’s complicity was endorsed by a friend, a Thai woman who wrote from Bangkok on 30 September. “I always do admire your courage and wisdom. Now you are doing the right thing again in not telling his parents. You always sacrifice for him & we all know how much you love him. I think he appreciates it now.”

  Bruce’s concealment of the HIV virus was encouraged by the presence of an unknown fungal infection. “It was an unusual presentation,” says Dr Bent Juel-Jensen, the consultant physician in charge of the ward. “Bruce was admitted with HIV, but we were puzzled because there were none of the manifestations you would expect in somebody who was HIV. In this country, you usually have the Pneumocystic carini organism. Bruce was riddled with a rare fungus. I’d never seen a case before.” Bruce latched onto this fungus.

  On 15 September his doctors had suspected the presence of Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the commoner dermatological manifestations of AIDS. But subsequent biopsy reports failed to mention this again for another 17 months. Efforts concentrated on diagnosing the fungus that had infiltrated his liver, spleen, bone marrow, lungs and skin. On 26 September, the culture was taken and sent to the Radcliffe laboratory where it was identified as Penicillium marneffei, a mould fungus that is a natural pathogen of the bamboo rat in South Asia. This fungus is now known to be an AIDS-defining illness, but in 1986, as Bull wrote in his report to Dr Juel-Jensen, it “has previously only been reported in Thai and Chinese farmers”.

  China was the one country Bruce had forgotten to include in his list of travels. In November 1985, on his way to Nepal, he and Elizabeth had visited Yunnan in south-west China. Near the Thai border they had stayed in a village hut at 7,000 feet. He remembered, now, that he had become sick after eating a “black egg” at a peasant feast. A harvest was in progress. The air was dry and dusty and he remembered the thrashing of wheat. “He had probably breathed in the spoor,” says Juel-Jensen. “It was just bad luck that his body defences didn’t measure up. It probably wouldn’t do you or me any harm, only if you’re immune deficient.”

  Needing to feel he suffered from something special and unwilling to address the fact he had contracted a “homosexual” disease, Bruce had to understand his illness as this bone fungus. There was enough absence of information at the time to allow him to do this. The truth was he had both. He would not have attracted the fungus had he not first contracted HIV.

  Juel-Jensen put Bruce on a prophylactic anti-fungal drug, Ketoconazole. “He made a remarkable recovery for a while. For all of us it was a question of suck it and see. There is always a possibility that the patient will survive. There is a world of difference between a possibility and a probability . . . but none of us had any experience and little literature.”

  The discovery of “an extremely rare (i.e. no white man has it) fungus of the bone marrow” cheered Bruce. “For Bruce it was wonderful: he could make a story,” says Elizabeth. The fungus reinforced his sense of uniqueness: “an A1 medical curiosity,” he wrote to Bail. “It was like collecting a very great object,” says Robert Erskine. It was also treatable. “It must have been a colossal relief to pin his symptoms on an innocent curable disease,” says David Warrell. “He didn’t want to accept that the underlying HIV was the problem. It was a sort of secret. There was a great deal of denial, or at least of unwarranted optimism that he could conquer it.”

  Bruce quickly metabolised his illness into something rich and strange. “He didn’t want to be defined as homosexual; what he wanted to be was extraordinary, the odd one out,” says Jonathan Hope. “The fungus fitted into his pursuit for eclectic esoteric knowledge.” He told Matthew Spender: “My dear, it’s a very rare mushroom in the bone marrow which I got from eating a slice of raw Cantonese whale.” He told Loulou de la Falaise he had eaten a rotten thousand-year-old Chinese egg. “He told me his disease came from bat’s faeces,” says George Ortiz. By describing and redescribing the Penicillium marneffei, he constructed an illness, particular to himself, that he could live with. “None of us was allowed to say AIDS,” says Salman Rushdie. “For all those years we had to talk about funguses. He was trying to make things go away by not saying them.”

  On 13 October he wrote a letter to Gertrude, “the first one I have written since the ‘collapse’. Trust me to pick up a disease never recorded among Europeans. The fungus that has attacked my bone marrow has been recorded among ten Chinese peasants (China is presumably where I got it), a few Thais and a killer whale cast up on the shores of Arabia. The great test comes when we find out whether I can go on producing red blood cells on my own.

  “That is the worst of the news! Otherwise things are very cheery. Your eldest daughter has become a real nurse.”

  Elizabeth prepared his food at Homer End and took it to the Churchill. By the end of October he was eating well and walking unaided around the garden. He had responded well to a series of blood transfusions and the course of Ketoconazole. He was not coughing, had no headache. On 21 October, after six weeks in hospital, he was discharged.

  Charles and Margharita waited to greet him at Homer End. According to his instructions, Elizabeth had told them nothing of his HIV status. “The tensions were horrendous because we couldn’t tell them anything. It was terribly hard keeping it from them because you knew there wasn’t any hope, but you could not say that to them.” They helped Elizabeth to look after him and drove Bruce to Oxford for a weekly check-up. “Charles continues to make a good recovery,” Bull reported to Juel-Jensen on 3 December. “Weight risen to 74 kg from 62 kg and apart from Mullusculum contagiosum on his face there are no abnormal stigmata. He is keen to go to the south of France for the English winter.”

  Jasper Conran’s mother, Shirley, had offered him her house in Seillans above Cannes. Anxious to escape Homer End, the winter, his parents, Bruce accepted.

  “In the summer, obviously a prey to my malady, I turned arsonist and destroyed heaps of old notebooks, card indexes, correspondence.”

  In mid-December, on the eve of his departure with Elizabeth on the train to Nice, Bruce wrote a long letter to Cary Welch. Among the correspondence he had nearly chucked on to the fire was a bundle of letters from Welch, dating back to 1966. Rereading them, Bruce was reminded of how much the two friends had fallen out of touch. The lack of contact with someone with whom he had once been close gave Bruce the distance to simplify the harrowing past six months into a polished account of his illness, diagnosis and hopes for recovery. As long as he could tell stories about it, his illness might go away. Bruce’s letter also alerted Welch to his next project, which would take as its subject a collector very much like Welch.

  My illness was a dramatic episode. I have always known – from a fortune-teller or from my own instinctive promptings? – that I would be terribly ill in middle-age, and would recover. All summer, while I was putting the final touches to the book, I was obviously sickening, but preferred to put it out of my mind – even though, on a sweltering summer day, I’d be wrapped in shawls beside the Aga scribbling onto a yellow pad. I imagined I’d recover if only I could reach some mountain pastures, and so gaily set off for Switzerland: only to find, next morning, that I couldn’t drag myself a hundred yards down the sidewalk. Obviously, something was seriously wrong. Thinking I was prey to some Indian amoeba, I consulted a specialist in tropical medicine, who took one look at my blood count, and, next day, said amiably: ‘I cannot understand why you’re alive. You have no red blood corpuscles left.’ He failed to make a diagnosis, having run through a complete set of
tests; and Elizabeth came to fetch me home in a definitely dying condition. I have a vague recollection of being wheeled to the plane; another, of the ambulance at London airport and then a blank. By the time I got to Oxford I was not expected to last the night. I did incidentally have the ‘dark night experience’, followed by the Pearly Gates. In my delirium I had visions of being in a colourful and vaguely medieval court where women offered me grapes on tazzas. At one point I called to Elizabeth, ‘Where’s King Arthur? He was here a minute ago.’

  Anyway, although I was on life support, they still couldn’t find the cause until, on the fourth day, the young immunologist rushed into my room and said ‘Have you, in the past five years, been in a bats’ cave? We think you’ve got a fungus of the bone marrow, which starts off growing on bat shit.’ Yes. I had been in bat caves, in Java and in Australia. But when they grew the fungus, as one grows a culture for yoghurt, it was not mine after all. The most expert mycologists were consulted: samples were flown to the US, and the answer, which finally emerged, was that I had, indeed, a fungus of the marrow, but one which was known only from the corpse of a killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia and from ten healthy Chinese peasants, all of whom had died. Had I been consorting with killer-whales? Or with Chinese peasants? ‘Peasants,’ I said decisively. Indeed, we had. Last December we were in Western Yunnan, following the traces of the Austro-American botanist, Joseph Rock, whose book The Kingdom of the Na-Khi was admired by Ezra Pound. We went to peasant feasts, slept in peasant houses, inhaled the dust of peasant winnowing; and it must be in Yunnan that I inhaled the particles of fungal dust, which set the malady in motion. I lost half my weight; came out in lumps and scabs, and looked entirely like the miniature of Akbar’s courtier in the Bodleian whose name I’ve forgotten. I had a fearsome drug administered on the drip constantly for six weeks. I had blood transfusions, and in the end I made a rather startling recovery: at least, one which my doctors did not expect. It’ll mean a change in one’s life, though. Apparently, one can’t ever quite get rid of a fungus like this, so I shall be on pills indefinitely; will have to report from time to time, and not alas go travelling into dangerously exotic places. The last stipulation I fully intend to ignore. In the meantime, rather than face the sodden gloom of an English winter, we are setting out for Grasse where we have borrowed a flat and where I hope to bash out my tale of the Czechoslovakian porcelain collector.