Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  XXXVII

  The Harlequin

  Michael Ignatieff: Where in your work is the division between fiction and non-fiction?

  BC: I don’t think there is one.

  “WHY DON’T YOU WRITE A SHORT STORY ABOUT THAT MAN IN Prague?” As Bruce lay miserable in his sickbed, Elizabeth produced a letter he had sent her from Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1967, when Bruce was still an archaeology student. The letter resurrected his journey through the museums of Central Europe as he made his way to the excavation site near Prague, but most of the letter was devoted to his friend on the Zavist dig, the “self-styled great lover” Maurizio Tosi.

  Every evening for a week the two young archaeologists would take the tram into Prague. It was a year before the Russian invasion. “Prague is one of the most curious places in the world,” Bruce wrote. “The whole place is utterly bourgeois and obviously always was. Communism sits on it in a most uneasy way, and I would have said cannot last long. It is virtually impossible to meet a single Communist. Even in the trains and buses they joke about it. Some of the younger generation might be communist but would not dream of owning up to the fact. It must be one of the few places in the world where one can hear the American position in Vietnam actually defended . . . I had a long lecture from a man on the excavation who could only be described as a peasant on the merits of Eton and how England was an education to the world.”

  In love Maurizio Tosi behaved with the theatrical detachment that Bruce would later grant Utz. “A succession of Merry Widows and Countess Mitzis passed though his bed . . . The secret of his attraction to the divas was his technique – you could call it a trick – of applying the stiff bristles of the moustache to the lady’s throat . . .” What begins as a funeral in Utz is taken from one of Tosi’s finest performances: as the best man to his Moravian girlfriend.

  On their second afternoon at the site, Tosi was telephoned by Lea, a former lover. She was in Prague. Tosi made an excuse to his girlfriend at the camp and that evening climbed aboard the tram with Bruce.

  The Moravian bird [Bruce wrote] had come to Prague to get married. The bridegroom was an ineffectual young German from Magdeburg with a fall-away chin and pointed shoes. She had known him for three years. ‘And to think,’ exclaimed the outraged Maurizio, ‘that when she was making love to me on the Linear Pottery site at Bylany, she knew him all the time. It confirms my opinion of the faithlessness of women. How could she give herself to the dirty German?’ Anyway for the time being she apparently could and would and the reason for her contacting Maurizio was that he should be best man at the wedding. He at once changed tack and agreed with alacrity, and also insisted that I come too as a witness. The time of the wedding was eight-thirty in the morning on the next day at the church of St Ignatz. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he said, ‘she is only marrying him because she is pregnant. I shall play the part of the faithful and wronged friend and in two years I shall have her.’ I think that Maurizio may have miscalculated again because the two seemed absolutely devoted and stood in the foyer of the hotel kissing and fondling each other to the fury of the headwaiter, who finally told them to desist.

  So the next morning quarter past eight found Maurizio and I in archaeological clothes, carnations in our buttonholes, on the steps of the baroque church of St Ignatz in Charles Square. One old woman was desultorily cleaning the aisle and another prayed loudly and devotedly in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a real rock-cut tomb with a plastic Christ looming over the boulders which were rather unsuitably planted with gladioli and gloxinias. An untidy man appeared and was under the impression that I was the organist. When I protested, he shrugged and said he would play himself. This he did on two chords only and to this cacophony the bride arrived in a large Tatra saloon accompanied by her parents and the bridegroom’s mother, a solid German hausfrau in a crinkled pale blue suit. The bride’s mother was a good-looking woman evidently in a savage temper, and her father a mild-mannered little Czech who squinted through his spectacles. Maurizio bent double and kissed the ladies’ hands to their evident surprise. The bride must have been wearing her grandmother’s wedding dress, and the bridegroom’s shoes were more pointed than ever. And so this comic little procession made its way up the aisle to the thump-thump of the organ, and came to rest inside the pink marble altar rails where the priest was waiting. St Ignatz is a vast building, about the same size as Bath Abbey with astonishing pink and white plaster decoration and angels and saints dripping from every cornice. The grey marble pillars rippled like the waters of an oil-covered sea, and the organist thump-thumped while the ceremony proceeded in an undertone. I winked at the mother who winked back and began to look more cheerful. And finally the organ stopped while the priest gave a short address. On either side of the altar-piece St Peter exhorted and St Paul comforted while St Ignatius was wafted up to heaven in a rosy sunset and above supercilious cherubs pouted on plaster clouds, and for a moment there was peace. Then the organ thump-thumped again, and never was an aisle so long. By nine-ten the seven of us were in the Hotel Miramar in a corner of the cocktail lounge drinking the happy couple’s health with a Hungarian wine that tore to my liver. In the corner by the deserted bandstand was a stuffed bear which a cleaning woman dusted as she cleared up the squalid mess of the night before. And that was the most curious wedding I have ever been to.

  This exuberant letter would be the embryo for the novel Bruce completed in his convalescence. “I had thought I’d use that time to read and re-read all the great Russian novels,” he wrote to Cary Welch. “Instead, hardly able to hold a pen, I launched forth on my story: a tale of Marxist Czechoslovakia conceived in the spirit and style of the Rococo.” In contrast to The Songlines, Utz would be light, tight, short, decorative – about a man who collects and sits still.

  The Bruce who wrote Utz was not a Bruce in flight. From his bed in the south of France, with Elizabeth at his side, he turned back to a world he knew.

  In 1967, one year after his resignation from Sotheby’s, he asked Kate Foster, in the porcelain department, whom she could recommend to see in Prague. She suggested the name of Dr Rudolph Just, a businessman and passionate collector of glass, silver and Meissen.

  Over tea on Sotheby’s roof, Foster explained to Bruce why he might find Just interesting. A year before, Sotheby’s having agreed to give her study-leave, Foster had driven to Prague for the purpose of acquiring German, the language of most ceramics catalogues. On 30 June 1966, at 10.30am, Dr Just had led her into his two-room flat in the Jewish quarter. “He was a small man, rather colourless, thin-featured, who undeniably lived off his nerves a lot. He explained to me that when his wife died, the authorities came along and said: ‘This is two rooms and you’re on your own, you’ll have to be moved.’ They had listed his entire collection and he lived in permanent fear. The Communist Party HQ was round the corner. He was sure his flat was bugged.” In order to stay on in his apartment, Just had married his housekeeper, Lida. “He was very nice to her. She was plainly dressed and kept in the background. She was in the room when I arrived, then went off and sat in the kitchen.”

  The flat comprised the kitchen, a bedroom and a large sitting room sub-divided into an eating area and an ante-room. “He was afraid of people looking in,” says Foster. “The flat was quite dark and stultifying, yet it was vibrant because every single thing meant something to him.”

  Foster drank tea from a Meissen cup. “He wanted to know what his stuff was worth. He had a voracious appetite to know what was happening in the glass, porcelain, political and cultural world. He was starved of knowledge. I represented for him the available current information in the West.” Later, she drove Just in her white Triumph Herald to a hilly region outside the city and told him what he wanted to know. Meanwhile, she inspected his remarkable collection. “He had some money in Switzerland and this enabled him to buy.”

  The walls were hung with eighteenth-century engravings and Bohemian canvases of 1860 and in among the paintings were plates. Th
ere were glass-fronted bookcases, the shelves lined with old textiles as both setting and protection, and every surface was covered with little objects: Roman glass, Züricher gold glass, Augustus Rex vases, Augsburg and Nuremburg silver, Meissen dwarves and a few very rare Meissen figurines of the earliest possible period, c. 1720. “He had on the whole off-beat things, but it was all classy stuff: definitely a scholarly collection.”

  Just wrote to Foster: “You know that I do not collect any more . . . but a short time ago I acquired an extraordinarily interesting historical, and very early Kreussen Tankard, c.1620. I am far more interested in objects which pose not easily resolved problems than in those which everyone knows, and most wish to possess, only because they are desirable and cost a lot of money.”

  To his delight, Foster was able to confirm that Just’s collection had some of the best examples of its type she had seen. He gave her a ceremonial handle from an eighteenth-century mining officer’s staff and the following day took her to lunch with his friend Dr Hrazky, the director of the Jewish museum. “The menu said ‘crap’ instead of ‘carp’. We spoke in German, but both men knew what that meant.”

  Their farcical meal, in a fish restaurant now vanished, would find its way into Bruce’s novel. “Under the heading CRAP DISHES, the list contained ‘Crap soup with paprika’, ‘Stuffed crap’, ‘Crap cooked in beer’, ‘Fried crap’, ‘Crap balls’, ‘Crap à la juive’ . . .”

  No notebook record survives of Bruce’s “four-hour encounter” with Just: he may have burned it. According to Elizabeth, Bruce saw Just’s apartment, they walked round Prague and then Just said: “I’m going to a brothel.” And that was that.

  The novel opens with Utz’s funeral in 1974, transformed from the wedding Bruce had attended with Maurizio Tosi. The nebulous narrating “I” is a writer engaged on a work on the psychopathology of the compulsive collector. He has come to Prague to write a magazine piece on Emperor Rudolf II’s passion for collecting exotica. Exactly as Bruce had done that summer, he pauses on his journey south to see the Kunstkammer or “cabinet of curiosities” assembled by Emperor Rudolf’s uncle. The amalgam of curios is taken from collections visited on Bruce’s way to Prague, in Aix, Bonn, Nuremburg and Vienna. “Rudolf’s treasures – his mandragoras, his basilisk, his bezoar stone, his unicorn cup, his gold mounted coco-de-mer, his homunculus in alcohol, his nails from Noah’s Ark and the phial of dust from which God created Adam – had long ago vanished from Prague.”

  Knowing no one in Prague, he has asked a friend for contacts. “My friend the historian” urges him to see Kaspar Joachim Utz, “the Rudolf of our time”, and, exactly as Foster had done, gives him “an outline of the facts as he knew them”.

  They make contact, eat a fish lunch with Utz’s colleague, Dr Orlik, an expert in the woolly mammoth, and finally the narrator is led back to Utz’s flat.

  The tiny apartment was an elaborate version of 198 West Heath Road in Birmingham. Bruce converts his grandmother’s Victorian cabinet into Utz’s plate-glass shelves. “The shelves were backed with mirror, so that you had the illusion of entering an enfilade of glittering chambers, a ‘dream palace’ multiplied to infinity, through which human forms flitted like insubstantial shadows.” His father’s white christening mug, the Bruce china, are elevated into the most priceless porcelain in the world, a miscellany conjured from Bruce’s recollection of notable objects at Sotheby’s. The star of the collection (sold at Sotheby’s on 25 June 1963 for £9,000) was the masked Harlequin: “the arch improviser, the zany trickster, master of the volteface . . . Mr Chameleon himself”.

  With Cold War Prague as his backdrop, Bruce’s hero is someone who tries to accommodate an oppressive and hateful regime by retreating into a child’s world of possessions. But in the end there is no private space. This place of refuge becomes not an escape, rather the point of contact between himself and the authorities. He can enjoy his collection provided it stays where it is – and he leaves it to the State.

  Halfway through writing Utz, Bruce set out to explain its theme to Colin Thubron. “This was a man who’d ruined his life by clinging onto his enormously wonderful collection of Meissen figurines through the horrors of the Second World War and the early years of Stalinism. The whole thing had trapped him because he could never leave the collection and it ruined his life. On the other hand, as compensation he managed to shrink his horizons down to the world of commedia dell’arte figures, so he lived the life of Harlequin and Pulcinella and they were his real friends and blocked out the horrors of the Novotný and Gottwald regimes.”

  A year before his death, with the novel complete, Bruce was still trying to articulate what the story was about. Upset by a proposed blurb, he responded with a list of the ideas that had not been put across:

  “No idea of the illusionist city of Prague.

  “No idea of the ‘private’ world of Utz’s little figures as a strategy for blocking out the horrors of the 20th century; that the porcelains were real, the horrors so much flim-flam.

  “No indication of the technique which allows the reader an insight into the fictional process (and how a story-teller sets about it).

  “One of the principle themes of the book is that Old Europe survives.

  “Marta [Utz’s maid] epitomises the fact that the techniques of political indoctrination fail and are bound to fail.

  “No idea that Utz identifies himself as Harlequin, the Trickster, and runs his own private commedia – outwitting everyone until, finally, he finds his Columbine.

  “No idea of the Jewish element – Utz is 1/4 Jewish – or of the somewhat subversive notion that the collecting of images, i.e. art-collecting, is inimical to Jehovah – which is why the Jews have always been so good at it.

  “Art collecting = idol-worship = blasphemy against the created world of God.”

  In the novel, when asked whether art collecting is idolatry, Utz replies: “Ja! Ja! . . . Because it is forbidden . . . ! Because it is sinful . . . ! Because it is dangerous . . . !”

  In 1967, Rudolph Just’s contortions to build and maintain his collection reminded Bruce, then in revolt from the art world, of his friends Cary Welch and George Ortiz.

  “I am Utz,” agrees Ortiz. “I am a victim of my collection. I’ve collected with an obsession that has eaten away my innards. Here am I, a Bolivian collecting non-French art, paying in non-French money and because of French patrimony law, I cannot take my works out of France.”

  Nevertheless, the Ortiz collection of antiquities has been exhibited at the Royal Academy, in Berlin and also at the Hermitage (which Ortiz first saw with Bruce in 1968). “My whole collection was made with no preconceived intellectual approach. It was purely visceral, emotional, intuitive. My gift is to be able to appreciate, sense, perceive the ethos that great artists have put in their creations. That is why I can see a work of art and I will know nothing about it and it hits me in the guts and later on I learn it’s the essence of that culture. It’s a gift I have in the same way as a Mozart, a Bach, a Cézanne, but,” says Ortiz, “it’s also a handicap.”

  Does Ortiz agree with Bruce’s argument that works of art take the life out of those who collect them? “Completely. I can’t perceive people. I can only perceive objects.”

  His obsession is “a visceral need” for the pursuit of truth. “Great art gives lots of hope. It’s not just a collection. It’s a message. Why do people looking through vitrines have a smile on their face? Bruce knew of this search after purity and was influenced and impressed by it. The basis of our friendship was my admiration for his taste. We had the same understanding of works of art. Bruce at one point wanted me to go against collecting. He said he had liberated himself of objects, they didn’t mean anything. It was a lot of crap.”

  Bruce teased Ortiz that he had based the story of Utz on him. “I hate Meissen. He knew I hated Meissen. That’s why I hate Utz.”

  The name Utz may have derived from an American friend of Peter Levi, a poet from Baton Rouge called Stev
e Utz, pronounced like “butts”. Utz lived in Cambridge with a girlfriend whose uncle had assassinated Senator Long and whose father had driven the getaway car. Bruce had also met another Utz: Charles Tomlinson’s German translator, Joachim Utz.

  But Utz was also Bruce, who never transcended his ambivalence about the art world. It continued to haunt him. In western Patagonia, remote from any museum or gallery, he had written in his notebook, “a man’s relation to things as a surrogate for other contacts is fascinating”. In 1979, he proposed to the NewYorker a story set in Eastern Europe, “on the bourgeoisie behind the Iron Curtain”. More recently in Australia, he had brooded on the fate of Theodor Strehlow, whose collection of 1,200 Aboriginal artefacts had poisoned his life – and threatened the health of his widow. “I’m riveted by the affair of Kath Strehlow and the Aboriginal collection,” he wrote to a friend, as if – perhaps – he had lacked the courage when in Australia to take on his true subject, which was Strehlow. Kath Strehlow is in no doubt of the deep impression “the affair” left on Bruce: “I think he got the idea of Utz from the Strehlow collection. Bruce saw that these objects had a life of their own, were weighted with other people’s stories and burdens and troubles.”