Under the Sun

by Bruce Chatwin

  On his return to England early in November, Chatwin delivered his manuscript to Deborah Rogers, who waded conscientiously through it:‘I remember the heart sinking.’ She found the writing leaden, the content plodding. Unable to see a way to salvage the book, she nevertheless sent it to Tom Maschler who read 50 or 60 pages and stopped. ‘They were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write.’ Maschler told Chatwin his verdict face to face, saying: ‘Something’s going wrong here and maybe you should not be doing this.’ He says,‘I remember Bruce saying as he left: “I’ll think about it.” I hoped I’d put him off.’

  To Derek Hill

  L8 Sloane Avenue Mansions | London | 24 November 1972

  Why don’t you move into the farm pro temp. The whole upstairs can be made into studio etc. We can go away more often and it’ll all be lovely.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUNDAY TIMES: 1972-4

  Chatwin began work at the Sunday Times on 1 November 1972. He found himself part of a tight-knit editorial team that considered no subject too ambitious or too trivial. ‘For a time it was the best photo-journalism magazine in Europe. I remember angry Frenchmen demanding their money back from the kiosk outside the Café Flore. That was the Sunday when, for “economic reasons”, the magazine was not sent to France with the paper.’

  Although hired as arts consultant, Chatwin was given leave by the senior editor Francis Wyndham to spread his wings. ‘At our first meeting I made suggestions – and one was adopted. We chose a photographer.

  ‘ “Now,” I said, “we shall have to find a writer.”

  ‘ “Don’t be silly,” said Francis. “You’ll write it yourself.”

  ‘ “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t write.”

  ‘ “I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

  ‘The article was that on Madeleine Vionnet.

  ‘The rest followed.’

  After three years of tussling with his nomad book, the magazine offered Chatwin a deadline and an audience.‘We soon forgot about the arts, and under Francis’s guidance, I took on every kind of article.’ As a journalist he would file from Paris (on the couturière Madeleine Vionnet, the artist Sonia Delaunay, the writer André Malraux); New York (on the Guggenheims); Moscow (on the collector George Costakis, the architect Konstantin Melnikov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip); Vienna (on the animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz, the ‘Nazi-hunter’ Simon Wiesenthal); Upper Swabia (on the aesthete Ernst Jünger); Marseilles and North Africa (on Algerian migrant workers); Peru (on Maria Reiche and the Nazca Lines); India (on Mrs Gandhi, Shamdev the Wolf Boy). ‘He was better in short stretches,’ says the historian Robin Lane Fox, who came to know him at this time. ‘He was an unsurpassed feature writer. He had an ability to evoke a place and build supportable castles in the air which were actually well founded.’

  Few letters from this period have come to light.

  Almost the first subject Chatwin suggested for a profile was the 93-year-old Irish architect, and designer of the chrome chair, Eileen Gray, who had lived in Paris since before the First World War. One winter Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m. he called on Gray in her apartment at 21 Rue Bonaparte.

  To Eileen Gray

  L8 Sloane Avenue | London | 21 December 1972

  Dear Miss Gray

  I cannot thank you enough for the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years.374 This morning too I have looked at your cahiers with Alan Irvine375 and I am completely bowled over by them.

  I do hope you’ll come over for the exhibition. It is going to be most exciting; but if not could I please come again sometime to the Rue Bonaparte.376

  I am sorry this has taken so long. The first letter ended up in Spain by mistake! yours sincerely, Bruce Chatwin

  To Valerian Freyberg

  Dordogne | France | 25 April 1973

  Two godfathers staggering out of a marginally drunk lunch in a fairly obscure part of Perigord send their warmest greetings to their godson and hope he will not follow their example. Bruce David.377

  To Stella Astor and Martin Wilkinson378

  Postcard, Ambrosius Holbein, Portrait of a boy with blond hair, Basel, Kunstmuseum | Glos | 13 September 1973

  How I envy your eyrie in the hills. Especially after returning to the dreaded London. I walked to Kington from you, then to Penelope Betjeman nr Hay where I had two exhilarating days riding the Black Mountains bareback on her Arab. West Glos seems very heavy and dreary after the fun and games on the border. Many thanks. Much love to you both.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Telegram | October 1973

  NO PHONE HOPELESS COME ALGIERS 9 OCT STOP BRING DESERT SHOES ONE DRESS AND NOT LESS THAN 250 POUNDS WILL REPAY WILL GO CENTRAL SAHARA BRUCE

  To Ivry Freyberg

  Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 2 November 1973

  Can I come and see my godson – and his parents(!) in the near future. My life at present is the way I like it. Perpetuum mobile, so it’ll have to be a snatch visit. What about a mid-week commuter special overnight stay?? Much love B

  In November 1973 Chatwin stayed with the Rezzoris at their home near Florence. Rezzori (1914-98) was an Austrian-born author, best known for Memoirs of An Anti-Semite.‘It gave us great pleasure to exchange useless curiosities,’ he wrote of Chatwin in Anecdotage.‘He went into virtual raptures when I told him that about the only thing I remembered from my studies of mining geology were the names of the five sites where gold is found in the former Dual Monarchy: Schemnitz Chemnitz Nagybanya Ofenbanya Vöröspatàk (mineral resources of the Danube region). He tried to learn these names by heart which given the challenge they posed to his Anglo-Saxon speech apparatus was no simple matter. This only doubled his enjoyment.’ In the same vein, Chatwin left this entry in their visitors’ book.

  To Gregor and Beatrice Von Rezzori

  Donnini | Florence | Italy | 31 November 1973 [sic]

  Menu

  Huile d’olive vierge gelée avec sauerkraut

  Sardines mordecai (eat a live sardine)

  Gravelax (prepare 2 sides of a salmon and press between 2 slabs of stone with salt and dill. Leave 2 weeks)

  Stuffing for pintade or pheasant (must wrap bird in bacon)

  Sorbet aux mangues avec Rhum blanc

  Cheese: formaggio tartufato – gorgon Emile Zola

  Wines: Papa Blumen 1970 Vinsanto – Eger Bull’s Blood 56

  Camel’s milk. Infusion d’hibiscus.

  PS As alternative Boile of duck (with vinegar) serve with a horse-radish ice-cream

  In spite of commitments to the Sunday Times, Chatwin had not abandoned his nomad book. His article on the blood-sweating horses of the Chinese Emperor Wu-Ti, and their possible descent from Alexander’s battle-horse Bucephalus, drew a fan letter from Robin Lane Fox, a young classical historian then preparing his biography of Alexander the Great. Chatwin wrote a two-sided letter back. Their correspondence is lost, but Lane Fox retains a clear memory of the contents. ‘Of course, Bruce wrote, many friends had told him that there was no future chasing horse bones through the steppes of Central Asia, but he gathered that I, too, had been in Afghanistan [in 1972], and he would like to meet and discuss the discovery of Alexander’s route across the desert and what I thought of Ai Khanum, the Greek city many thought was founded by Alexander. We met in London and he gave me his essay on Animal Art. We struck up an immediate friendship. I thought: “Here is someone whose horizons stretch way beyond property prices in Bayswater; here is someone who can use allusions – Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun, Flecker, Louis Sheaffer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand; here is someone who has devoted his life to objects beyond “that last blue mountain barred with snow”. My book came out in November 1973 and Bruce was back in touch with a letter saying how much he caught. “I know it mattered as I missed the buff-coloured uplands of the lower slopes of the Hindu Kush in your company, with the scent of bitter wormwood in the air and white wild roses ahead of us. I want to talk t
o you about the Dionysiac adventures of the Macedonians in Nuristan. I have photographs which I think will appeal to you.” The photos were black and white, of boys with dark eyes, their hair entwined with long vine leaves and ivy, returning to their village in the evening. Bruce understood that Alexander’s troops believed in that area they’d discovered the groves of Dionysus.’

  In the same year, Lane Fox became a lecturer in Classical Literature and Languages at Oxford. When, the following November, Chatwin telephoned and asked him to come to Patagonia, he had to decline. ‘I couldn’t have wandered. I had a family to feed. I opted for a world of syllabus and system and approved footnoting and references, departmental collegiality, evidence and proof – and I funked it. Bruce makes me realise that there are more things in the universe than our systems and merit awards allow us to dream of.’

  Reflecting on their conversations, Lane Fox says: ‘Bruce wasn’t really romantic. He was well-informed about apparently romantic and exotic things. He talked of Diogenes and Lorenz and the animal in us all. He told me that man was essentially restless and it was an illusion he could settle in one place. Once he invited me and my first wife Louisa to lunch in Wotton-under-Edge. He had hired two horses to ride to Westonbirt. He talked the whole journey about his nomadic project, the nomads’ craving for the colour of mud on brown steppes light of tulips, and how the only way they could maintain it was in their textiles. There was incessant talk of the book he was writing about nomads. This is where conversation would come back to rest.’

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  La Fonda | Plaza Santo Cristo | Marbella | Spain | 9 April [1974]

  Dear E.

  I have got your first letter but not yet the second – and I may never get it now as I think the best thing will be if I go for a bit to the Atlas. I do love my walks so much and I get well unblocked on them, though today I have had a ? brilliant (tomorrow it will be poor) idea for one of my chapters. I am going to write my hunter’s chapter in the manner of Turgenev’s sketches. My first chapter is called Diogenes and Alexandra being the least and the most. I went from Ronda which was appallingly bleak at this time of year to Janetta’s379 House near the sea. Very well ordered days with Magouche and a beautiful garden etc. House was lovely ish. Too much care attached to maddening details. Incidentally, I honestly believe that what Holwell needs is the whitewash pail inside. It really is terribly easy to slap a new coat on each year. It takes a morning. And a lot of sofas covered in cotton and a lot of cushions. I’d bring down that old reed mat from the bedroom again for the drawing room – and I’d whitewash inside the fireplace. If you get the chance in Bristol why not have the Mahdi’s flag380 and the Moroccan (it is 16th cent) textile put behind glass – they fit exactly.

  To help the house problem etc. I’d like to give you that Ibibio head (black) which you can sell. I believe it should be worth about £500 but is perhaps best sold in France or Belgium. Ask F[elicity] N[icolson] what she thinks. Also I do think that Jap box is an awful extravaganza at the moment. Perhaps we could send it back? She’ll yowl in agony but tant pis. You should also whitewash the wall by the kitchen at the back and have masses of potted plants like they have here all round.

  I saw the Connolly thing381 in the Sunday Times. Boring. But also tant pis. In fact it was silly egocentric drivel, but that is what goes down, so one can’t mind. I’ve really gone off him. Magouche couldn’t read The Rock Pool either.

  I will come back at the end of May for June-July hopefully and then I suggest we think of going somewhere adventurous together? S America. S. Seas? (except that I’m still keen on Francisco de Souza as an idea) What are the options on the house? A professor from Bristol here for the Academic Year? Possibly Steph[anidis] might want it. Could even be persuaded to put things in it? Staff it? Why not ask him. Also say that the year’s tenure is coming to an end in June on the Feathers. What to do?

  Rang R.S.T.382 and will be dining with him in Tangier tomorrow night. Alistair Boyd383 is an extremely nice intelligent Hispanic nut, married to a second wife, who was once married to Kingsley Amis and is hopelessly drunk all the time. They are further wedded to an enormous Palazzo called Palazzo Monchagon, Moorish – 16th Cent Spanish which will be their grave unless they rid themselves of it.

  Do whatever you think with the flat. I never really want to set foot in it – or ever to live in London. But cannot be bothered. XX B

  In the summer of 1974 Bruce and Elizabeth stayed in Norway at Fiva, a traditional white painted wooden house above the River Rauma.

  To Hugh Chatwin

  Fiva | Aandalsnes | Norway | [Summer 1974]

  Dear Hugh,

  We are thinking of you here because we feel you would be better off than us. The River Rauma is apparently the best salmon fishing in Norway. Our hosts – the Bromley-Davenports384 – own about five miles of it. Recently a salmon, more porpoise than a salmon, of about 60 lbs was hauled out of it.385 All we do is watch the ten-pounders lift themselves like aeroplanes over the falls.

  We are glad, too, to escape here from the angst-ridden place we left. Imagine if you can a nervous artistic German aristocrat,386 married to but hating a Guinness, pretending in Norway to reincarnate her English suffragette aunt of 1905, wearing crinolines and parasols, even on the glaciers, and introducing a company of musically minded drunks, who played an awful wheezing bagpipe and were dreadful in their Irishness. It was, I tell you, frightful. It was enough to turn maddest of men into raving Whitelaws.387

  It is a charming country, this, but ouch the expense.388 Back soon,

  Bruce

  CHAPTER SIX

  GONE TO PATAGONIA: 1974-6

  On 1 October 1974 Elizabeth’s father died. Bruce flew out for Bobby’s funeral in Geneseo and stayed on in Gertrude’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. He had $3,500 expenses from the Sunday Times and was supposed to be writing a story on the Guggenheim family. But he felt at the end of his tether with the magazine – ‘which we all felt was being wrecked from “above” ’. On 2 November, ‘on the spur of the moment’, he made a break for it; he plotted to meet up with Elizabeth and Gertrude in Peru in early April.

  Magnus Linklater, the magazine’s editor, has no recollection of the telegram that Chatwin claimed to have sent to the Sunday Times: GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS. The telegram most likely took the form of this letter to Francis Wyndham.

  To Francis Wyndham

  Lima | Peru | 11 December 1974

  Dear Francis,

  I have done what I threatened. I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America. I have been staying with a cousin in Lima for the past week and am going tonight to Buenos Aires. I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia. I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up. I do not, for obvious reasons, want to be associated with the paper in Argentina, but if something crops up, I’ll let you or Magnus [Linklater] know. I’m working on something that could be marvellous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way.

  The third part of the Guggenheim saga389 is already complete in note form and will take only a day or two to write, but we will have to compress the rest together. Later on I’ll be looking at the Guggenheim mines in Central Chile because my cousin’s husband runs a mine near Chuquicamata.

  Can you tell Magnus that Ahmet Ertegun390 is definitely on, but I want to wait until the spring and go with him to Turkey (at his expense) and watch the king of rock music, who firmly intends to be President of Turkey, in action.

  I’ll give you an address in Buenos Aires through which I can be contacted, but I don’t want to receive any official S.T. correspondence in the Argentine. as ever, Bruce

  In Lima Chatwin stayed with his cousin Monica Barnett.

  Monica was the daughter of Charles Amherst Milward, a clergyman’s son and ‘spectacular adventurer’ who ran away to sea and by 1897 had circumnavigated the world 49 times. In that year, however, his ship sank after hitting an uncharted rock at the entrance of the Straits of Ma
gellan; he later bought an iron foundry in the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the world, where he worked both as British and German consul.

  It was Milward who had sent back a salted scrap of giant sloth skin to his cousin, Chatwin’s grandmother, in Birmingham.

  Already when in New York, at the instigation of the literary agent Gillon Aitken, Chatwin had outlined Milward’s story in a proposal for a book to be called O Patagonia. ‘Among my first recollections in life is being held up to my grandmother’s cabinet of curiosities and being allowed to handle a thick dry piece of animal skin with some reddish hair like coconut fibre. My grandmother told me it was a “piece of brontosaurus” and I developed a fetishistic obession for it . . . the piece of brontosaurus began my continuing interest in palaeontology and evolution.’ The book Chatwin wanted to write would be ‘on Patagonia – and a lot more besides . . . The form of the book must be dictated by the journey itself. As it will be – to say the least – unpredictable, there is no point in even trying to guess what it will hold. I shall start the diary the moment I cross the Rio Negro (I do not intend to fly unless it is absolutely vital; descriptions of landscape from the air are the most boring descriptions of all). I may cast a backward look at the horrors of Buenos Aires, but then I shall zig-zag down the country from the coast to the mountains and so on.’