Bruce Chatwin

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Bruce Chatwin Page 79

by Nicholas Shakespeare


  Chatwin never delivered . . . TLS, 16.6.89

  a pose rather than . . . Pfister, “Bruce Chatwin and the Postmodernization of the Travelogue”

  In many ways In Xanadu . . . William Dalrymple to EC, 11.10.89

  What would his life’s . . . Anecdotage, 88

  I wish I could . . . BC to MB, 8.2.88

  I think you know . . . PL to EC, ND

  This delight which . . . Gillian Walker to EC, ND

  Real love was . . . SC to EC, 10.3.89

  He would have found someone . . . EC to SC, ND

  The coffin . . . Miranda Rothschild to NS, 1.2.97

  It is nearly springtime now . . . MR to EC, 1.2.89

  Epilogues

  Ah, Chatwin . . . told to Mary Henderson

  Elizabeth’s disbelief . . . Hugh Chatwin to GA, Box 38, 17.8.89

  Kansas is a . . . Joyce Khan to EC, ND

  The most complete Bruce Chatwin bibliography appears in Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969–89 (Jonathan Cape, 1996).

  A CHATWIN READING LIST

  Aksakov, Sergei: A Russian Gentleman; A Russian Schoolboy; Years of Childhood

  Aubrey, John: Brief Lives

  Auden, W.H.: ‘A Certain World’

  Babur, Zahirud-Din-Muhammad: The Babur-Nama

  Bail, Murray: Fairweather

  Basho, Matsuo: The Narow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

  Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations

  Bernhard, Thomas: Gargoyles; Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship

  Borges, Jorge Luis: Ficciones

  Bunin, Ivan: Dark Avenues; The Gentleman from San Francisco

  Burton, Richard: A Mission to Gelele; King of Dahomey

  Byron, Robert: The Road to Oxiana

  Celtic Nature Poetry

  Cendrars, Blaise: Moravagine; The Trans-siberien

  Chekhov, Anton: Stories

  Cioran, E.M.: De l’inconvenience d’être Né

  Connolly, Cyril: The Unquiet Grave

  Dana, Richard Henry: Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea

  Dodds, E.R.: The Greeks and the Irrational

  Donne, John: Poems

  Doorly, Eleanor: The Radium Woman, The Insect Man

  Flaubert, Gustave: ‘Un coeur simple’; Madame Bovary

  Gadda, Carlo Emilio: That Awful Mess on via Merulana

  Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time

  Hemingway, Ernest: To Have and Have Not; In Our Time

  Herzog, Werner: On Walking in Ice

  Jerbauld, Alain: In Quest of the Sun

  Joyce, James: Dubliners

  Jünger, Ernst: On the Marble Cliffs; Storm of Steel; Strahlungen: War diary from Paris occupation (not in English)

  Lawrence, D. H.: Sea and Sardinia; Etruscan Places

  Lermontov, Mikhail: A Hero of Our Time

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Tristes Tropiques

  Llosa, Mario Vargas: The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary

  Lucas, E. V.: The Open Road

  Malaparte, Curzio: Kaputt

  Mandelstam, Osip: Journey to Armenia; The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (trans. Clarence Brown)

  McCullers, Carson: The Ballad of the Sad Café

  Melville, Herman: Typee

  De Monfried, Henri: Hashish

  Morand, Paul: Close the Night

  Neri, Michele: Afrique Fantôme

  O’Connor, Flannery: Complete Stories

  Orwell, George: Homage to Catalonia

  Powell, Dilys: An Affair of the Heart

  Radiguet, Raymond: Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel

  Salih, Tayeb: Season of Migration of the North

  Satta, Salvatore: The Day of Judgement

  Simpson, Gaylord: Attending Marvels

  Singer, I.B.: Stories

  Sinyavsky, Andrei: A Voice from the Chorus

  Sitwell, Edith: A Poet’s Notebook; Planet and Glow-Worm; A Book of the Winter

  Skertchley, Joseph: Dahomey as It Is

  Slocum, Joshua: Sailing Alone around the World

  Shonagon, Sei: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (Translated: Ivan Morris)

  Spengler, Oswald: The Decline of the West

  Stevenson, Robert Louis: An Inland Voyage

  Taylor, Jeremy: Holy Living; Holy Dying

  Thesiger, Wilfred: Desert, Marsh and Mountain: World of a Nomad

  Tolstoy, L. N.: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories

  Tournier, Michel: Friday; The Other Island; The Erl King

  Turgenev, Ivan: A Sportsman’s Notebook

  Voss, John C.: The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss

  Wilson, Edmund: Black Brown Red and Olive

  Footnotes

  ‘To return to the corresponding text, click on the asterisk and reference number.’

  Chapter VII

  * Research has not been able to verify this, but Bruce was always going to tea with Avebury Manor’s owner, Sir Francis “Sissy” Knowles, the school’s head of biology and an expert on prawn’s eyes.

  Chapter VIII

  * Utz, the Prague collector, also “had a poorly paid job as a cataloguer in the National Library”.

  Chapter XV

  * A quantity was sold at Sotheby’s. Between 1965 and 1977, items continued to trickle through the Antiquities department. Marcus Linell remembers paying Stella in cash – which she carried out in a suitcase. The pieces were on the whole average.

  Chapter XVIII

  *1 Bruce may have read of Ronald Firbank’s infatuation for Evan Morgan, recorded by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher in his 1930 memoir. Firbank, finding in Morgan’s features “an amazing resembling” to the mummy of Rameses, had hurried him off to the British Museum to see “his original”. His interest became almost an obsession. He came to believe that Evan Morgan was a reincarnation of Rameses, and must, therefore, be possessed of cosmic secrets.

  *2 When the Willey Expedition published its report two years later, Bruce sent a letter to The Times “in high dudgeon and irony – so high they won’t publish it”. The report registered its dismay at the effect of hashish on European hippies who were reduced to “begging like dogs” in “sun-drenched squares that reek of death and decay”. Willey appealed to the United Nations to stop the twin evils of slavery and narcotics: “We are facing a sinister situation that is capable of infinite expansion with appalling consequences.”

  Chapter XXV

  * “I have been thinking of you a lot, day and night, all the time – don’t forget me I do my love my beautiful, I really want to hug you, kiss you, feel your body that makes me feel so good. When it’s cold I think about going out to look for you so that you can warm me, warm my body with your heat, but suddenly I remember that it’s impossible to meet you because you are such a long way from me.”

  Chapter XXVIII

  * In British paperback The Viceroy of Ouidah – for which Maschler had paid a £2,500 advance – has sold 91,135, compared with 114,689 for Utz, 245,953 for In Patagonia, 313,791 for On the Black Hill and 355,992 for The Songlines.

  Chapter XXXVII

  * Bruce takes part of his description of Utz’s flat from one of the bedrooms in the Chanlers’ New York apartment at 1 E84, a whole floor which Gertrude bought after the sale of Meridian House in 1966.

  Chapter XXXIX

  *1 Herzog was not the only film-maker interested in The Viceroy of Ouidah. In August 1985, David Bowie tried to buy the film rights.

  *2 Robert Mapplethorpe collapsed into a pathological form of collecting at the end and was wheeled to auctions. The same was true of Loulou de la Falaise’s stepfather. “He didn’t have a penny and went round buying jewels and my mother had to take them back.”

  *3 While most of the dealers involved behaved with exemplary patience, some did not and insisted on banking the cheques.

 

 

  oks on Archive.


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