His travels accelerated over the summer with the publication of The Songlines. On 4 July, he drove with Elizabeth, via Vichy, to Bayreuth to watch Herzog’s production of Lohengrin. “Then to Prague & the Tatra Mountains with our camping gear. Then he gets flown to the Edinburgh Festival for 3 days.” From Prague, Bruce wrote to George Ortiz: “I am sorry I never made it to Geneva: our arrangements in July got a bit out of hand. Now they are even worse: Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Rome, London, New York, Toronto – all in the space of a month. The Chatwin yo-yo is functioning again.” He plotted to Murray Bail the itinerary after Canada: “Then . . .? Madrid? Perhaps! . . . Vague plans may mature for an Australian winter (ours) but I’m not sure . . . We’re off on a world tour – I hope!”
As his last piece of publicity for The Songlines, Bruce had agreed to take part in the Toronto Harbourfront Reading Series. He arrived from New York on 15 September, committed to two engagements: an on-stage interview and a half-hour reading. The founder of this celebrated event was the Canadian poet Greg Gatenby. “At 2 p.m., the publicist rang to say that just before going on Chatwin had vomited in the dressing room and asked to be rushed back to his hotel, cancelling all other interviews.” Gatenby did not meet Bruce until the following night, at dinner before his reading. “We sat outside at Spinnaker’s restaurant. It was a sunny day and he looked a picture of health, like an aerobics commercial. My first instant thought was, ‘This is Stephen Spender 60 years ago,’ but my next thought was that this son of a bitch primadonna was perfectly healthy, not sick at all.
“I said to him: ‘Have you travelled much in Canada?’
“‘No.’
“‘Permit me to ask. Is there any place in the world you haven’t been to, but would like to?’
“‘No. Actually, there is one place. The Canadian Arctic’.”
Gatenby and Margaret Atwood had been approached to start a Writer-in-Residence programme in Baffin Island. “We thought it might be good publicity and talked about him going up there. Nobody goes to Baffin Island without a guide, because the polar bears there stalk people. It’s where the American astronauts went to train for the moon. It conjures up everything to do with the north: horrendous storms, three to four days’ supply of food, terrible beauty. At the idea of the north, Chatwin’s eyes lit up. ‘Are you serious?’ I then wrote to him in France: great news, I’ve got it approved, you can go any time you want. I received back a handwritten note. He was now so ill, paralysed in both legs. He could not travel.”
Bruce blamed his collapse in Toronto on a punishing publicity schedule. He apologised to Gatenby: “There’s something about a book tour – which pray God I never do again! – that stews one up into a fever.” But back in Oxford his “febrile illness” did not respond to treatment. Dr Juel-Jensen retired from the Churchill Hospital in November. He worried in his last report that Bruce’s P24 antigen was positive again. “I fear that all is not well.”
His doctor’s concern did not deter Bruce from spending a fortnight in the West Indies with Elizabeth. “We went first to an island called Ile des Saintes, off Guadeloupe, which is peopled by a very strange clan of mestizo Indian-negro-Breton fishermen,” he wrote to Bail. “Nothing happened to interrupt our days of sleeping or taking a boat to the coral reefs except for the ludicrous incident when squatting in the bush I inadvertently let my balls brush against a plant which is the toxic plant of the West Indies. And since we were on our way to Mass, the agony of standing in church was indescribable.”
He cited this incident to his new doctor, David Warrell, on his return to the Churchill in early February 1988. He had explosive diarrhoea, no appetite and complained about pains in his spleen. “A bad bout of flu”, he told Bail. But the fungicide was killing his flora and making him sicker. On 12 March, he was taken off Ketoconazole. Two weeks later, the fungus returned with new virulence, this time for good. Seventeen months after the possibility was first raised, a skin biopsy indicated that the spots on his face were “highly suspicious of Kaposi sarcoma”. On 29 April, one of the specialists in the John Warin ward described him as a “very nice 47-year-old travel writer with AIDS”. It had taken 20 months to establish once and for all what the clinic had initially suspected.
As a writer who had, metaphorically, found love not just with Elizabeth but with a readership, Bruce could not bear to risk parting with something so hard won.
“Suppose that I were now to reveal that I have AIDS, full-blown AIDS, and have been ill during most of the course of what I have related. I would lose you. I would lose you to knowledge, to fear and to metaphor. Such a revelation would result in the sacrifice of the alchemy of my art, of artistic ‘control’ over the setting as well as the content of your imagination. A double sacrifice of my elocution: to the unspeakable (death) and the overspoken (AIDS).” Gillian Rose in Love’s Work understood what it costs an artist to speak about AIDS: one runs the same risk of losing one’s reader as one would one’s lover. Writing about a terminal illness is, suggests Rose, like breaking your contract with your reader. But Rose, a philosopher at Warwick University who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was by nature an artist intent on transforming her “shrieks” into “shouts of joy”. She had to abandon equivocation and risk losing her readers, “otherwise I die deadly, but this way, by this work, I may die forward into the intensified agon of living.” But for Bruce, the unclassifiable harlequin, to speak meant quite literally to sacrifice the “alchemy” of his art. He could not, like Rose, write his way through his illness; rather, he equivocated to the end, unconsciously asserting his rights to the intimacy that Gabriel García Márquez speaks of in Love in the Time of Cholera: “the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness”.
Many of Bruce’s readers would be disappointed to learn that he had actively denied his illness, even to himself. They might have wished for him the courage of Gillian Rose, to speak about the impasses, the limitations and the cruelties of a peremptory death. He had developed a powerful thesis for travel and so they expected him to be a fearless strider everywhere, or at the very least to provide them with an original, clear report from his visit to what Bruce himself called “the scene of the Grim Reaper”. (“I’ve been on the scene of the Grim Reaper, and I can tell you it wasn’t too bad,” he told an interviewer.) It frustrated them that he had not responded to the huge idea of living with death as another journey. Instead of pushing to the limits, he had retreated. “If you read into what he writes something which has an impact on your own moral life, why shouldn’t it have an impact on his moral life?” says Sean Beaumann, an eminent South African psychiatrist. Beaumann had worked in the community around Bruce’s Black Hill and was himself a twin. “He should have said he was dying.”
Bruce’s “moral” life was, no doubt, impinged upon by his illness. His abiding ambivalence about his sexuality and his fear about dying of AIDS, inextricably linked anyway, are bound up in the same energies which drove him to travel and to write – a case, perhaps, of a deficiency on one side of the balance producing the fruit of the other. If, in fact, the Beast which stalked him all his life grew out of this fear, there is pathos that he never engaged or resolved his ambivalence. Yet it seems reductive to say his Beast was purely sexual.
“He was ashamed,” says Peter Adam, speaking from experience. “Part of it, the outward sign, was his homosexuality, but there was the much wider thing of not knowing how to belong. He was deeply aware of his non-commitment.”
Bruce’s ambivalence, his suppression of not the truth so much as any enquiry into the truth, is what makes him the writer, the journey-maker and the storyteller that he is, wholly unwilling to be categorised by anyone. But some think he might have written better novels, been a greater man, if he had, confronted with death, been less of a “Bruce”.
Duncan Fallowell argues that it is Bruce’s very fear that clips his wings, prevents him from being a writer in the way of his models. “AIDS and the prowling death gave Chatwin the opportunity
to write an extraordinary book – his character, which gave us the books we have, meant that he couldn’t take that opportunity.” Speaking as a gay activist, Fallowell voiced the harshest objections to Bruce’s management of his illness. “Hypocrisy, lies, distortion, deceit, threats, self-disgust, cooking the facts and shame – all these may make life more interesting, but they’re no good when trying to cope with AIDS and all are exemplified in the case of the writer Bruce Chatwin, the most important AIDS casualty in the arts to date.” This was written after Bruce’s death, on World AIDS Day, and Fallowell, while among the more vociferous voices, was not alone in his punishing verdict. Peter Adam also wished Bruce had come out openly. “A great man had,” says Adam, “the writer Jean-Paul Aaron: ‘Mon SIDA à moi,’ he said on Apostrophes. If Bruce had not been such a moral coward he could have come to terms with his dying much better, and his living. Why prolong the prejudices?” But Adam also remembers how slow England was to wake up to AIDS. At that time in England, very few well-known people had AIDS, or, if they had, it was a secret disease more so than in France or America. “With AIDS came also the big lie,” Adam wrote in his autobiography, Not Drowning but Waving. “Sons would not tell their mothers, husbands protected their wives from the truth – the list of people who died became longer . . . it was usually the most brilliant, the most shining, the most hopeful who left us.” Adam and Fallowell felt that the gay community needed an articulate spokesman. They felt that as a public figure, and writer of proven worth, Bruce had a responsibility to lead the way. On 26 October, the day after Bruce’s spectral face had appeared on BBC television’s coverage of the Booker Prize, Tony Parsons requested an interview for the Sunday Times: “Seeing someone as special and precious as Chatwin with AIDS would perhaps bring home the enormity and horror of the disease to the millions who read the Sunday Times and – maybe – inspire a little more understanding and compassion than sufferers have received so far.”
But do people who are not dying have a right to judge those who are? It is unlikely that Bruce would have told another how they should exercise their own free will.
Colin Thubron defends Bruce’s decision. “Ideally, I would have liked him to have spoken publicly, but he didn’t and why should he? His reasons were respectable. It wasn’t anybody else’s business. It was his own affair. Simply because AIDS has become politicised is not enough. And with nobody knowing what your personal affections are, it’s somewhat presumptuous. The AIDS riposte would be that people should not feel ashamed of it anyway – but that’s all very well if your wife is alive or your middle-class elderly parents. I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to put the well-being of all those dying from AIDS before a number of people who would feel deeply ashamed of it.”
The novelist and biographer Sybille Bedford also supports Bruce’s non-committal stance: “I think it’s entirely private. It would have been distasteful for him to have been an example of the brave AIDS sufferer. Aldous Huxley died of cancer: he didn’t tell anyone, even his son. He just carried on as long as he could with enormous courage. It builds a wall around you, or let us say some screens. It’s very bad for your profession. People whisper in corners.”
Despite all his efforts not to be English, Bruce would die a quintessentially English death: abroad, clothed in secrets (“his impenetrable aura of concealment,” Adam called it), holding out, deflecting to the end and not without a profound sense of shame and regret. “My life isn’t as it should be,” he told Adam, remembering with envy the gypsy boy on his horse whom he had watched as a child.
Bruce was not a clichéd self-hating homosexual. He met interesting people through sex. According to James Ivory, he found sex “as natural and easy as eating”. He even fell in love. But he was not at ease with his sexuality (a word he mocked). “There was a kind of guilt thing about his homosexuality, as if he had not quite come to terms with it,” wrote Adam in Not Drowning but Waving As his HIV developed into AIDS, Bruce associated his homosexuality with what was happening to his body. “He had a great self-disgust and guilt,” says Wyndham. From his hospital bed in Oxford, Bruce whispered bitterly to Wyndham: “I’ve never spoken to you about sex before, but sex is madness.”
“At this point, the idea of homosexuality was repulsive to him,” says the composer Kevin Volans. “He associated homosexuality with disease.” To expect him to be a spokesman for homosexuals was to ask him to step outside his character and serve a political agenda from which, by temperament, he was estranged.
“He is famously criticised for the way he dealt with AIDS,” says Wyndham. “His evasion may not be politically correct or crowd-pleasing, but I think he was dealing with it in a wonderful and very heroic way. He assented to it being a kind of secret in order to protect Elizabeth, his parents, the Chanlers, Jasper. He turned it into a Bruce.”
The Songlines had made Bruce a public figure. “My book”, he wrote to Cary Welch on 22 February, “has brought me a host of new friends from ‘every quarter’. But the latest is a simply astonishing person. He is called Kevin Volans, an Anglo South-African composer – and composer of genius – who has gone into the field in Africa rather as Brahms or Dvořák went looking for folk-songs. He has filled his head with the sounds of the veldt, with Zulu chant, the shepherds’ pipes echoing across the valleys of Lesotho – and without in any way being ‘ethnic’ he has produced an entirely new modern music that also makes me think of Schubert. He is the favourite composer of the Kronos Quartet, who, it would appear are the best string quartet in America for modern music. Unfortunately, their record of Kevin’s work entitled White Man Sleeps, which is a huge hit in the US, omits the 4th movement which is so utterly transporting that one gasps with wonder. Anyway this is to me one of the really nice things that’s happened to me.”
The Kronos Quartet wished to commission a new theatre score: Volans, composer in residence at Queen’s University, Belfast, had suggested The Songlines. Volans sent Bruce his narrative piece, Hunting: gathering. Bruce responded at once. “It was music I had never heard before, or could have imagined,” he wrote. “It derived from nothing and no one.” He left a message on Volans’s answer-machine. “I’ve listened to your tape. I think your music’s wonderful and you must come straight away.”
Volans travelled nervously to Homer End. “I was convinced he thought I’d be some South African hunk in a bush jacket and I was terribly aware that I wouldn’t fulfil that expectation. I arrived. Elizabeth took me upstairs. The first thing he said was: ‘Elizabeth, fetch Kevin some champagne’. There were then three minutes of awkwardness, because he was adjusting to the way I didn’t look.”
Later Bruce said: “I then realised you looked exactly the way you should look.”
By the end of the three minutes, Volans had fallen in love. “I sat there like Scheherazade at the foot of his bed while he told me stories. There was literally nothing I wouldn’t have done. I adored him. He was one of those people who did have the key to the world.”
On the day after Volans left, Bruce would telephone him: “Since your massage, I’ve got the feeling back in my leg – so you see, I can’t live without you.”
“I feel the same,” replied Volans.
“Enough said.”
But after their first series of talks both realised that The Songlines was not suitable for a theatre piece.
“In the morning,” says Volans, “I went through to his room and he told me: ‘But I know exactly what we can do: Rimbaud.’ Bruce considered Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer a western Songline: he had written about going to the desert before he went there. Bruce told me about Rimbaud’s death scene and phoned Michael Ignatieff. ‘I want this book from Paris.’ He didn’t waste time. Ever.”
Volans, who had lived in Africa, expressed his “perfect empathy” for the idea. On his return to Belfast, he set immediately to work on the libretto with Roger Clarke, a poet whose work Bruce admired. The opera was first performed at the Almeida in London, in July 1993, as The Man with the Wind in His Heel
s.
Bruce had already been considering an operatic project at the time of Volans’s visit. In one of his remissions, he approached Peter Eyre to write an opera based on the salon of Florence Gould in wartime Paris. Gould was an elderly biddy in the tradition of Madame Vionnet: a soprano at the Opera Comique, a collector of Impressionists and porcelain, and during the occupation of France an extravagant hostess to several in Junger’s collaborator circles whom she entertained at the Hotel Bristol. “The opera would begin in English and end up in French,” says Eyre, who scratched his head at Bruce’s behaviour. “I went with him to ‘Mario’s’ round the corner to have lunch and he insisted on paying. I said afterwards to Valerie Wade: ‘Something must be wrong with Bruce. I’ve never seen him pay’.”
Bruce began to puzzle friends in other small ways. In his letter to Cary Welch about Volans, he mentioned his interest in the astonishing revival of Orthodoxy in Russia. “I didn’t know if you know, but I now think of myself as Orthodox and will be going back at some point to Athos to stay with my Serbian friends at the monastery of Chilandari.” A week later he wrote to Nin Dutton of other goings-on. “The first news is that I finished and edited a new book: the tide Utz. Tout court! Anyhow, it seems to have caught the imagination of the publisher because we’re suddenly inundated with money which we don’t really want. My temperament tells me to give it away: but that’s not so easy. And it’s certainly a change from being on the breadline.”
Two of his books – On the Black Hill and The Viceroy of Ouidah – had just been adapted for film.*1 His new agent, Gillon Aitken, had at this point also secured an advance of £100,000 for Utz as well as for a collection of journalism to be titled after the question posed by Rimbaud in the Ethiopian desert: “What am I doing here?”
After 20 years of struggling to make a living, Bruce was in a better financial position than he had ever been. He had a sense of new-found wealth; also of new-found health. “Still convinced that he is making a unique recovery,” read his medical report.
Bruce Chatwin Page 67
