Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Not put off, Bruce plunged into the composition of his fund-raising letter. “I couldn’t restrain him from writing it in my name,” says Warrell. The letter went out on 25 July. Over the next few days, Bruce kept in close touch with Warrell. “I don’t normally give patients my telephone number, but one was very vulnerable to his enhanced expectations. He used to ring me often at home to give revised estimates, upping the numbers. ‘I think I’ve recalculated the sum of money.’ The profits from some projected book mentioned the figure of £20 million. That was worrying. It was clear evidence that he was demented.”

  “Being Bruce, he could see the funny side,” says Elizabeth, but to her distress works of art continued to pile up at Homer End. A piece of the Red Fort, a portable twelfth-century altar from Lausanne, a Han tortoise ink-well, a £70,000 icon of Saint Paraskevi wearing a glowing tomato-coloured robe. “They were for me; he knew I would never spend money on things like that; wonderful, wonderful things, but I couldn’t keep them.” Art worth over a million pounds at one point filled the dining room to bursting point, paid for with post-dated cheques. Bruce could never have hoped to honour these cheques. Behind his back Elizabeth started to return what he had bought even as it was delivered. Unwilling to involve Charles Chatwin, Elizabeth asked Robert Erskine to help. “We set up an arrangement to catch these things,” Erskine says. “‘Look, you’ll get them back, he’s not going to last long, so please let him have them’.” Elizabeth also called upon Hugh Chatwin.*3 On 30 July, an exhausted Elizabeth flew to America to stay with Gertrude, leaving Bruce in the care of his brother for a fortnight. Once she was gone everything began to unravel.

  On the eve of Elizabeth’s departure Hugh collected Bruce from Homer End and drove him to Stratford for the weekend to be nursed by his parents. Within three minutes of swinging out of the drive at Homer End, Bruce confessed to his brother. “Hugh, before I go completely mad, there’s something I must tell you. I have taken some risks in my time, but this time . . .” He told Hugh about “a priest called Donald” in New York. “He wouldn’t mention the word AIDS. He referred to it as HIV. I was stunned.” Hugh insists that he had not seen this coming. “Juel-Jensen had told us in 1986 that Bruce was HIV. We knew it could develop into AIDS, but until that moment I had gone along satisfied and hoping because he had had what seemed to be a total remission. He blew up into a proper size. Having done it once, he could do it again.”

  Hugh did not tell his parents what he had learned. As the weekend went on, it became apparent to him that Charles and Margharita would have difficulty handling Bruce for the two weeks Elizabeth was away. “I could see he was going to cause them trouble. We were all worried. On Sunday, Bruce said he had to go to London ‘to finish his business’. I decided I’d better sleuth him.”

  Hugh drove his brother to the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill Gate where Bruce had booked a room. The brothers shared this room for the rest of the week. “It was the first time we’d been at such close quarters since making models at Brown’s Green.” Hugh judged the situation grave enough to request three weeks’ leave. “I was there to look, listen and find out what was wrong. I knew from Elizabeth something was wrong, but as a surveyor you try and find out what the truth is before you arrive at any opinion.”

  Bruce’s first appointment on Monday was at the National Gallery. He dressed in khaki drill slacks and a short herringbone coat and instructed Hugh to wheel him up the steps. “He brought with him an enamel snuff box which he had identified as coming from a painting by David,” says Hugh. Bruce outlined to the perplexed Director, Neil McGregor, his plans for the National Gallery to put on an exhibition of actual objects found in paintings and to embark on a comprehensive purchase of Russian icons. He also formulated the idea of creating a little room in the National Gallery to house the Homer Collection.

  In the course of that week, Bruce embarked on a second buying spree. Their outings followed the itinerary established with Volans, now preoccupied with the Rimbaud opera. He bought a collection of 1920s Fortuny dresses, a medieval wall-hanging, some silver, a Cézanne watercolour – the last he painted of Mont Saint-Victoire and nearly all white – and a lump of amber with a fly in it. “I took that back a month later,” says Hugh. “I was sweeping up after what he’d arranged to buy with Kevin, but he was in control. Nobody could stop him. He was using his clout and taste to do it: ‘I’m getting my royalties, I’ve got my money coming in’.” And so Bruce assembled his collection, in the words of his psychiatric report, “without any appropriate consideration or bargaining”.

  Sometimes he managed to escape Hugh’s surveillance. Francis Wyndham was walking down Westbourne Grove when a taxi stopped. “There was Bruce, frightfully skeletal. ‘I’m going to the Portobello Hotel!’ He was on the loose in his wheelchair. The driver looked worried.”

  That evening Francis Wyndham turned up at the Portobello Hotel with David King. “Traders kept on arriving – like something out of the Arabian Nights. There was one man, one almost saw him in a turban, whose wares tumbled out onto the bed and something priceless rolled away and we were on all fours clambering for it.” Another dealer produced photographs of enormous gold lions in a restricted area of China: Bruce undertook to fund their removal at once. “Bruce kept on ringing up room service; he showed us a beaded Chanel suit he had bought for Elizabeth, like chain mail; he said Hugh was a genius. Then Robert Erskine came in. None of us gave the game away: he lifted us up into this realm of fantasy with the power of his storytelling and his sweetness. It was deeply disturbing and upsetting. He just wanted to get beautiful, rare things and put them in a museum. He was very happy.”

  For Robert Erskine, the spectacle was too painful. “For the first time Bruce’s ‘eye’ had gone.”

  Bruce’s final destination on Friday was Rebecca Hossack’s gallery of Australian art. “He said I made him remember his time in Australia. He kept coming because he said there was energy in my smile.” Over the summer Bruce had grown to be a regular visitor at her new gallery. Impressed by a still life on show, he had wanted the artist to paint the backdrop for the Rimbaud opera. In June, he saw Hossack’s Aboriginal exhibition. He took to turning up three times a week. “I’d be sitting there late at night in a track suit and a car would draw up with Bruce and his brother. He’d sit in his wheelchair and hold court. On one of his last visits, he said: ‘You know I’m HIV positive, but we’ve worked out a cure. It’s terribly exciting and it involves the blood of a Nubian slave.’ I don’t have much sense of humour and I took it literally and thought, Well, that’s interesting.”

  All week, he had been high on his need to achieve his collection, but on the Friday evening, “he crumpled and went frail,” says Hugh. “He said: ‘I’m done, done, done’.” Hugh lifted Bruce into his Jaguar and drove him to Oxford. Halfway down the M40 he turned to his brother and said: “I think we might go to hospital.”

  Bruce was kept in Room 9 on the John Warin ward. Five days later, on 10 August, Nurse Patterson found on her patient’s report in red ink: “Not to leave the ward under any circumstances. To be sectioned if necessary.”

  Bruce’s plans had been getting progressively grander. In the Churchill, his mind started racing again. He wanted to buy the Duchess of Windsor’s clothes. He wanted to buy Elizabeth a Bugatti for £2 million. He wanted to found a city and to develop underwater tourism. “It was a burlesque,” says Kevin Volans. “He was terribly excited about being made an Oxford don because of his incredible theory of archaeological virology. He said they were wrong to call it that: it was historical virology: he’d invented the notion.” He had solutions for ending the Cold War. “He was going to write to Gorbachev and go and see him and stop all this nonsense, sort it out, and he, Bruce, was going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.” John Pawson, the architect who had converted Bruce’s London apartment, was having an early-morning swim at a hotel near Dallas when Bruce telephoned: he had been appointed Minister of Architecture, he wanted Pawson to be his paid adviser, would se
nd a car to collect him from the airport and which flight would he be taking? “There was an incredible enthusiasm. He was always quite convincing. One had to prick oneself to say that isn’t going to happen, but one wanted to will it.” Paddy Leigh Fermor was about to leave for Bulgaria when Bruce called. “He wanted me to meet him on Mount Athos and join the Orthodox Church and act as his sponsor.” A helicopter would fly Bruce, Leigh Fermor and Volans to the Holy Mountain. There Bruce intended to become a priest. He told June Bedford he had already decided on his religious name: Father James. “He did see himself as a priest,” says Hugh.

  Many of the proposals announced by telephone sprang from an urge to heal others. “Aren’t all true healers – from the prehistoric shaman on – all ‘thundermen’?” he wrote in his notebook. Not his least ambitious plan evolved from an idea planted by Hugh: to construct field-hospitals out of castor bricks and parachute them into trouble spots.

  “It was an idea to keep him amused,” says Hugh. “I’m involved with Crisis Action Hospitals. I told him of the Natural Resources Group, a company in the north of England that was making plastics and closed-cell rigid foam blocks out of vegetable oils like soya, castor, desert weed, rape, palm oil.” The company had sold artificial rubber sheeting to India and was negotiating to build a factory in China.

  Bruce leapt on the possibilities held out by Hugh’s castor-brick hospital with all the enthusiasm of their great-grandfather who had once seen a future for the leather tyre. He believed he had a perfect troublespot for such a hospital: Afghanistan, the site of his earliest expeditions. Through the Aga Khan’s wife he was put in touch with Prince Saddhruddin, who had at the UN a specific responsibility for Afghanistan. “The last words I spoke to Bruce,” says Hugh, “were to arrange for a pile of 50p coins to put in a pay-phone by his bed to ring up Saddhruddin Aga Khan.”

  The report Nurse Patterson found was based on the patient profile from the ward psychiatrist. “Mr Chatwin is, of course, a man of great intelligence and ability who has led a most unusual and interesting life. On at least a couple of occasions he has been under considerable personal stress. I am told that ‘living on his nerves’ is a fundamental part of his personality.” However, Bruce’s pressing speech, his grandiose ideas, his variety of “inappropriate associations” suggested that “he is suffering from mania as a complication of his HIV infection.” If the patient remained unwilling to take medication voluntarily, the psychiatrist advised David Warrell, “I think there would be an argument for your signing a three-day order under Section 5 of the Mental Health Act.”

  On the same day, Juel-Jensen telephoned Hugh Chatwin with a request that he go immediately to the Radcliffe. There Hugh was informed that the reasoning side of Bruce’s brain had shrunk. The doctors wished to give him a drug to control the mania, for which they needed the family’s consent. In Elizabeth’s absence, Hugh signed the paper. He then told his father, who took over.

  Charles Chatwin was acquainted with the drill. He had lived with the spectre of his grandfather’s gross debts and he had experience of his mother certifying lunatics. He swiftly arranged through Wragge & Co. for the Court of Protection to appoint a receiver. Bruce was put on lithium and his chequebook taken away. David Warrell was asked to sign an order restraining his patient. “As doctor in charge I had to say from a medical point of view he was temporarily not responsible. I felt very uneasy and Bruce was absolutely furious when he discovered. It was the episode that precipitated my losing his confidence.”

  Elizabeth came back from America on 15 August, and went straight to Bruce in hospital. He was muttering that the doctors had told him part of his brain was dead. Confined forcibly to the ward, he had violent mood swings, was demanding and irritable. He seized Kevin Volans’s arm. “You must save me. You must get me out of here. They all think I’m mad. I’m not. They can’t keep up. I’m simply thinking too fast for them.”

  “The saddest thing,” says Shirley Conran, “is that Bruce was well enough to know that what he was most terrified of was happening to him: his brain had been affected.”

  Slowly the lithium worked its effect.

  One day Bruce decided he wanted back his wax Neptune. As part of a ploy for getting such works of art out of the house, Elizabeth had suggested they should be carried to London to be photographed. When she asked Vic Pearson to retrieve the tiny figure from his warehouse, he could not find it. One of the keystones of the Homer Collection had disappeared. (It was never found.) The news crushed Bruce. Miserable, he told Elizabeth: “It’s symptomatic of everything.”

  His wild behaviour predictably found its way into the gossip columns. On 6 September, Today broke the following story: TOP AUTHOR CHATWIN FALLS VICTIM TO AIDS. “To the horror of his charming wife Elizabeth and the total shock of close friends like Jasper Conran, author Bruce Chatwin has become Britain’s first outstanding talent to succumb to the full force of AIDS.”

  For Charles and Margharita, the gossip that this story generated realised their worst fears. Charles contacted Hugh. “I want to know: are you holding something back from me? Can you tell me whether this story is true?” Hugh told him it was. “He didn’t say anything. Professional men don’t show their reaction.”

  Bruce had at last confessed to his brother, but he still had declined to tell his parents. His aunt Barbara, a deaconess in the Church of England, supported his decision. As soon as Elizabeth landed in England, Bruce insisted that she drive him to see his father’s sister in Pershore. On 16 August he was taken on a day outing. He demanded the two of them be left alone. “I thought how lovely to want to see me,” said Barbara Chatwin. Unable to sit, Bruce was laid out flat on a rug on the grass. “I sat on a garden chair looking down at him and he started to talk. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’ And I sat and listened and it wasn’t until after he’d gone that I realised he’d found a clergyman in order to make a confession. I suddenly realised: ‘I’m sure he knows he’s dying’.”

  Barbara Chatwin felt it best that her nephew protect his parents from the truth: she, like Charles, had lived through the scandal of Robert Harding Milward. But she had underestimated her brother. Bruce had gone to great pains to conceal something which, in the end, his father – if not Margharita – might have been equipped to handle. During the war as a naval commander, Charles had presided over a court martial on board the Cynthia. On the day before his own death in 1996, he told Hugh: “I’m sorry to say we had to part company with the ship’s carpenter. He was caught interfering with young sailors on board.”

  “Bruce had worried about Father,” says Hugh. “He thought his mother would understand and that his father wouldn’t. It was actually the other way round.” Margharita suffered the more visibly. “It was an awful, terrible sorrow,” says Hugh. “It was total pain.”

  The story in Today was kept from the person it most concerned. Efforts to divert Bruce concentrated on the imminent publication of Utz. Tom Maschler, who had taken a four-month sabbatical, was moved to make his warmest commendation to date. “Let me put it in writing,” he wrote to Bruce. “The first pages of Utz are the most perfect Bruce Chatwin that I have ever read at an early stage. Come to that, they may be the most perfect Bruce Chatwin, period. This book will be a little gem.” He had finished reading the corrected manuscript before going on leave. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.”

  Utz was published on 22 September and seemed everything that The Songlines was not: in place of a sprawling, philosophical treatise on movement which roamed the globe, he had written a compact, old European love story whose drama concentrated on the objects in a single room. “Each book of his seems to set out to contradict the expectations aroused by its immediate predecessor,” wrote John Lanchester in the London Review of Books. Peter Conrad in the Observer saw “tantalising” links with the last book. “The timeless space of Aboriginal dreaming rese
mbles the illusions of Prague, a labyrinth where you can wander back through history.” Several reviewers perceived in the author the fragile and masked Harlequin, seldom what he seemed, forever pivoting on his base of gilded foam. For Robert Stone in the New York Times Book Review, the novel represented Chatwin “at his most erudite and evocative”, but he found the author’s world “a stern, unforgiving place; the worst crime there is obviousness, followed in order of gravity by complaining and scrupulosity.”

  Most British critics echoed Philip Howard in The Times: “This shiny little novel is not just about pretty little porcelain figurines, but about dirty great issues of life and creativity.” The British edition of Utz outsold The Songlines in hardback. Final hardback sales were 21,745 and in early October it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later for the Whitbread.

  Also on the Booker shortlist of six was Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. “Bruce always used to deride the Booker and along comes Utz and gets itself onto the shortlist,” says Rushdie. “He suddenly became keen on a literary image in which he’d never been interested before. Two days before the prize-giving he rang me up. ‘Salman, I’ve come to a decision. If I win the Booker, I’m going to say I’m going to share it with you and if you win you say the same thing about me. I think that would be very good.’ I stalled. I said: ‘Let’s just think about it’.” Both of their books lost to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda.

  Bruce had refused any promotional work because of his illness. Yet the extent of his deterioration was broadcast on 25 October, the evening of the Booker Prize award. As his sole piece of publicity, Bruce had agreed to appear on BBC television to discuss his novel. His interview at Homer End was more revealing than he can have intended. With bright, sunken eyes, he spoke of how Marta’s love had triumphed over Utz’s collection. Love had won over art, which “always lets you down”. But almost for the first time, people were not listening to Bruce’s words. They were taking in his scooped features, his sticky-lipped enunciation, his lank ashen hair.