Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Anxious to perform in that role, Bruce was not, however, limited to it. He became in his brother’s words “one of his own characters”: the Viceroy of Ouidah, scribbling “incoherent prophecies”, and, more obviously, the compulsive collector of the novel he had just finished. Unable to collect stories, Bruce replaced writing with buying. “He went from a nomad possessing nothing to Utz,” says Volans. “He wanted everything.”

  Bruce described Utz as “a kind of Middle European fairy-story – with some savage digs at the art business!”

  By 1988, he had more or less relinquished “anything artistic”, apart from a few tiny, exquisite objects stored in a cardboard box. “I called it his Box of Treasures,” says Elizabeth. “He’d come back and get them out on the table and literally play with them, arranging them as if they were chess pieces. There were eight or nine of them and from time to time something came and went.” The cardboard box operated as the black tin deed box of Bruce’s Mr Brady, the typewriter salesman who, whenever he returned to London from Africa, brought one new thing for the box. “He spread out the old things on the bunk. He threw away the old one that had lost its meaning.” Rushdie likened the Box of Treasures to “a tuck-box of goodies” under his bed. “When you were privileged, he’d get it out. What I liked about his attitude was the idea of beauty completely separate from ownership. These things were a transient population. You never owned them. They were for you to look after for a time and let go.”

  The objects were simple, sacred and small, what might be painted on a postage stamp or held in the palm or fit into his knapsack. “What I’ve kept are funny things which are more or less abstract in quality,” he told ABC. An Eskimo seal-toggle of walrus ivory; a white shell nose ornament from the Solomon Islands; a Celtic iron cross; an Ainu knife; a jade long-life symbol; a wooden funerary mask from Buenos Aires province; a Ngoro red lacquer snuff box from Japan with the black showing through. Holding up the latter, Bruce told Kevin Volans: “If you want to know what encapsulates what I am and everything I believe in, it’s this.”

  The objects had cost hundreds, not thousands, of pounds. In 30 years of dealing, the most Bruce paid was £4,000: for a small oil painting from the Danish Kunstkammer called The Ambassadors. This was a portrait of Poq and Qiperoq, who in 1724 became the first two Greenlanders to leave their country voluntarily.

  In the last year of his life, Bruce began the process of dispersing the box’s contents among friends. To Christopher Gibbs, an Egyptian gaming piece of green-blue faience; to Kevin Volans, a circular sixteenth-century brown lacquer box which had belonged to Herrigel, author of Zen and the Art of Archery; to George Ortiz, the haematite gold weight from the Spencer-Churchill collection. “It was a pure object, possibly from a meteorite,” says Ortiz. “It was a gesture of coming back to earth.”

  Mr Brady, too, gave the impression that he was free of things. “But he knew that nobody is free of things.” In the same breath, Bruce replaced his Box of Treasures with an alternative collection. Conceived in honour of Elizabeth, the Homer Collection would be Bruce’s memorial to his wife and to his taste with the considerable sums he supposed he had earned through his writing. He told John Pawson, for instance, of a £13 million advance on a film script.

  At the end of June, Gertrude received a letter written in what seemed to be a child’s hand. “I have been buying your daughter the beginnings of an art collection which I hope will be wonderful. In New York we bought the wax model for Giovanni da Bologna’s Neptune which has to be one of the most beautiful small sculptures in existence. We are making arrangements to give it to the Bargello in Florence with the use of it in our lifetimes. We also bought an incredible German drawing of the mid-fifteenth century.”

  Bruce drew the idea of the Homer Collection from the collections of George Pitt-Rivers, Gertrude’s father Irwin Laughlin, and George Ortiz. His ambition did not surprise John Hewett, who at Sotheby’s had introduced him to Pitt-Rivers and Ortiz. “Really, what came out was what had been there all along.” Hewett had never taken seriously Bruce’s denunciations of acquisition. Nor had Cary Welch: “Oh for the open road with nothing but a backpack, but how nice to have some castle to return to crammed with El Grecos. Suddenly, in great haste, he was putting together the very thing he’d teased us about.”

  Bruce’s desire to build a collection modelled on the museum at Farnham explains his latent rage against those, like Peter Wilson and John Hewett, whom he accused of destroying such monuments. Discharged from the Churchill on 14 June, Bruce began his eerie transformation into Utz. An early purchase was the wax bozzetto of Neptune, bought from Mrs Blumke in Madison Avenue. The dark amber figure, with one arm missing, stood only a few inches high. According to Welch, “this was a study by a Flemish artist which had been offered around for years”. Bruce, convinced the fragile figure was unique, wrote a cheque for $70,000.

  He was uninhibited by normal constraints of wealth. “Our accountant said he could spend £100,000 on the collection,” says Elizabeth. “Bruce added noughts on and told everyone he had millions. You couldn’t persuade him. He had more money than he’d ever had in his life, but he had lost track of what he did have.” It was a sad paradox that just when he did have money, it came at the moment he was least able to handle it sensibly. For a period, he spent this sum every day.*2

  Bruce amassed the Homer Collection in a burst of shopping sprees to London during June and July. One of his first excursions was witnessed by Volans, who had interrupted their Rimbaud project to write, as a curtain-raiser to the opera, a 26-minute string quartet called The Songlines. Volans intended to hire a piano, but Bruce, deciding this was inadequate, bought him a Bosendorfer upright for £13,000. “We pulled up at Bosendorfer in Wigmore Street and he gave me five minutes to choose,” says Volans. “Then we went on to Cork Street.”

  Volans watched how the dealers in Cork Street fell over Bruce. “His eye was not out of control. He knew exactly what he wanted: he was immensely precise. ‘I want that Japanese lacquer box I saw, the one made for export.’ He would write cheques out for £100,000 and no one would question. The prices were breathtaking.” In brisk succession, Bruce bought a Bronze Age arm band for £65,000, an Etruscan head for £150,000, a jade prehistoric English cutting knife, a flint Norwegian hand-axe and an Aleutian Islands hat. He could not sit waiting for the objects to be wrapped. They were shoved into plastic bags and attached to the back of his wheelchair.

  Like this, with objects worth a quarter of a million pounds dangling from the handles, Volans pushed Bruce up Bond Street towards the Burlington Arcade. They called in on Christopher Gibbs, where Bruce purchased an expensive chair. “It had started raining,” says Volans. “Christopher ran across the road and bought some plastic macs. At Piccadilly, Bruce shouted ‘Stop! stop!’ to the cars. We teetered on the pavement in pouring rain with these valuable items in plastic bags and Bruce holding up his hand, saying ‘Stop all cars!’, very angry with me when I wouldn’t push him. His mind was soaring. He was really enjoying himself.”

  Safely across Piccadilly, Bruce plunged even deeper into his pocket. He wrote out cheques to dealers in Jermyn Street for an Assyrian quartz duck and a bolt of eighteenth-century silk to cover the chairs in the dining room. Only at Spink’s did staff declare their unease – over a Tibetan tiger rug which he wanted to take away. Thwarted, Bruce appealed to the chairman with whom, 20 years before, he had shared Grosvenor Crescent Mews. “Of course, Anthony will give me credit. He’s known me all my life.” He left with the rug.

  On another expedition he crossed Duke Street and called at Artemis where Adrian Eales worked, a former Sotheby’s colleague who had bought Holwell Farm from Elizabeth. Bruce specifically asked for an engraving, The Melancholy of Michelangelo, by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Ghisi. This weird and whimsical study showed a pensive figure on the edge of a huge pond surrounded by sea-monsters, lions and birds. By rare chance, Eales had the print in stock. The price: £20,000.

  “He felt so
clever to have found it,” says Eales. “He told me it was for Elizabeth. He was now getting so much money from his royalties that he wanted to give her really special things. He was extremely plausible.”

  Bruce had to have the engraving immediately. He asked Eales to send it to the Ritz.

  His expedition with Volans and Gibbs had also ended at the Ritz, where he had rented a room for the afternoon: “Seventy pounds. Very reasonable!” There was a flurry of telephone calls and more dealers turned up, including Oliver Hoare who had shared Bruce’s flat in Kynance Mews. “I had two lines from Prince Baysunghur, the son of Tamberlaine. The page was a metre wide, with some of the most beautiful Islamic script from the early fifteenth century. It was £45,000, a big purchase. ‘I always wanted that,’ said Bruce. It was the same old panache. He had his Bologna modello with him, pointed to it. ‘Bring it here, it’s the most miraculous thing.’ He’d insured it for £600,000. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ If it had a wick on top you could light it and use it as a candle.”

  At the end of the afternoon, Bruce turned to Christopher Gibbs with an ebullient eye. “Tomorrow, musical instruments, women’s clothes and incunables!”

  The Homer Collection was not to contain anything warlike and for this reason Bruce returned the Bronze Age arm band. The objects had to be of enormous beauty with a spiritual edge and to reflect every religion, from Inca to Islam, as though making real his “One Million Years of Art” series for the Sunday Times magazine.

  Many of his purchases celebrated the leap Bruce had himself made, only recently, into the Christian faith.

  One of Bruce’s hallucinations, following his collapse in Zurich, was of the Christos Pantokrator. He described his vision to a figure who became important for him in these months: Kallistos Ware, a Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church living in Oxford. “He felt he was lying in the middle of the church in the Serbian monastery of Chilandari during a vigil service. There were candles and lamps and monks were singing.” His vision had brought back to Bruce his experience on Mount Athos, convinced him of its authenticity.

  His short visit to this centre of monasticism, Bruce told Ware, had marked a turning point in his life. “I think Bruce felt when he went to Athos: this is the truth,” says Ware. “While there he seemed a different person, transformed, marked by total happiness.” As a result, Bruce had decided to become a member of the Orthodox Church. “This was not a passing fancy but a clear and firm intention, a hope, an objective during his illness.”

  There are 2,000-3,000 lay English members of the Greek Orthodox Church. The usual practice is to receive people by baptism. Ware receives four or five converts a year. “His plan was to go to the Holy Mountain to be baptised there. For him, it was definite that he must be received there, because his whole conversion to Orthodoxy was bound up with Athos. I remember thinking, looking at him, that getting him there was going to be a complex business, with little boats and a jetty. I did say to Elizabeth: ‘Does he understand what he’s doing? Does it represent his considered judgement?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ Obviously, had he been in good health I would have wanted to talk to him much more thoroughly. I would have been interested in his motivation; how he saw his future life as an Orthodox; why he really wanted to be one. It would have meant going to divine liturgy in principle every Sunday, keeping different feasts, and going to a spiritual father for confession.

  “Normally, when someone becomes Orthodox I do ask them to make a confession of their whole life. I feel if people are making fresh start they would start with a fresh slate. He never himself said, ‘I have AIDS.’ To me this wasn’t important, why he was ill. The view of the church is: all sins can be forgiven. What matters is not our own worthiness but our desire. Nothing on his part would have constituted an obstacle. What sort of Orthodox he would have been, that’s another question. I wouldn’t have thought his parish priest would have had an easy task.”

  Ware received Bruce several times over the summer and arranged for Father Mitrophon to meet him on the shore of Mount Athos in September. Meanwhile above his hospital bed, Bruce kept a prayer written by David Jones: “MAY THE BLESSED ARCHANGEL MICHAEL DEFEND US IN BATTLE LEST WE PERISH IN TERRIBLE JUDGEMENT.”

  Hand in hand with his conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith and the hasty assembling of the Homer Collection went Bruce’s urgent desire to find the origins of his illness. “In a Bruce-like way, he latched onto AIDS as something he was going to find a cure for,” says Francis Wyndham.

  At the end of July, friends of Bruce around the globe received a curious circular asking for contributions to “The Radcliffe Medical Foundation – ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Medicine’”. Headed by a list of patrons who included Lord Goodman, the Duke of Marlborough, and the Bishop of Oxford, the letter was signed by Bruce. “I would like to think of this letter as an endless chain. If you have friends or relations who you think would be interested, I would gladly send it to them.”

  In the manner of a Victorian explorer, he sought funds to mount an expedition into an isolated community of central Africa, unspecified but most probably the Sahel in Eastern Chad, where he hoped to locate the origins of the HIV virus and so produce a vaccine.

  “We live in a time of new viruses: a time of Pandora’s Box,” his circular began. “Climatic change is the motor of evolution, and the sweeping changes in climate that have affected many parts of Africa offer ideal conditions for a virus that may have been stable over many thousands of years to burst its bounds, and set off to colonize the world.

  “The most pressing medical problem since tuberculosis is HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus), vulgarly known as AIDS. The word AIDS should never be used by the medical profession, since it plays into the hands of the gutter press, and causes panic and despair: in France, not even M. Le Pen could do much with ‘le SIDA’. There is, in fact, no cause for panic. HIV is not a late twentieth-century Götterdämmerung: it is another African virus . . .

  “As you probably know the virus constantly mutates and there seems little hope at present of preparing a vaccine. Excellent results have been achieved by the laboratories in describing the virus; but in the future we shall have to look elsewhere. The stable form of the primordial HIV must exist in Africa, and we intend to find it. The pessimists will say it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The problem may be simpler: that of the archaeologist who knows where to dig.”

  The man in charge of the expedition to the Sahel was to be Bruce’s doctor at the Churchill, David Warrell. “He is one of the finest clinical physicians in this country. He has spent many years in the Far East, working in the field to advance the study of cerebral malaria. He is a world authority on snake-bite; but he has recently returned to Oxford to lead a team of researchers into HIV.”

  On his retirement in November, Juel-Jensen had handed Bruce over to Warrell as a special category patient. Although he received his treatment on the National Health, Bruce behaved like a private patient. “Bruce was the most demanding patient I’ve ever had in a way,” says Warrell. “He commandeered the whole system. The force of his personality held you in a room talking to him. He had ideas about almost everything. At first I was dazzled by the diversity – as anyone was for the first time on meeting him or reading his books. As he went on I noticed a repetition, a paucity of originality, a recycling of concepts again and again. This was the only real evidence that he was ‘mildly demented’ in the medical sense.”

  Bruce was anxious to share with Warrell his theory of HIV. He wrote in his last notebook: “Any ‘new’ species – a man, a swallow or HIV virus must begin its career in a very limited core area – before bursting out on the world.” Man had emerged from Africa. Why not HIV?

  Warrell listened, fascinated. “One had to explain how such a devastating virus remained quiet for many years. The anthropological side of Bruce was intrigued by the idea of an isolated community which suddenly made contact with the outside world. He thought it was a palaeontological problem.”

>   Warrell agreed that an “archaeological logic” pointed to Africa. Although he judged Bruce’s scientific evidence thin, he was drawn in. “Bruce was a non-scientist with a very active mind trying to be constructive to save himself. His imagination was not limited by any scientific discipline. He made me feel very clay-footed and conventional. There is this idea of a creative step or jump one has to make for a discovery. I was aware I didn’t have it and he might. Central to his relationship with me was a mystical feeling that this knowledge might enable us to defeat the disease.”

  Bruce knew the perfect man to help them track down the “primordial” virus: the palaeontologist Bob Brain. He interested Warrell in Brain’s work and described the day on which Brain and he had discovered man’s first hearth at Swartkrans. “All of us who came into contact with Bruce felt that sort of magic might touch us,” says Warrell. “I tried to fit Bruce’s design into some scientific structure. I thought: ‘It’s bad for mankind if I don’t’.”

  Excited, Bruce telephoned Brain in Pretoria and invited him to move to Oxford where, funded by the Radcliffe Medical Foundation, he might start work on the epidemiology of the AIDS virus. “He thought that the distribution of the virus in Central Africa could be traced to racial groupings and this could go back a long time in human history,” says Brain. “I couldn’t think of any conceivable handle for this theory.” He declined.