Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

My plans are uncertain after mid-Oct: depends on how I progress over the next month. I don’t think I’ll be in this house as it’s far too expensive for one to rattle around in, and will be impossible to heat.

  I’ll write with news. This is a quick one to catch the post.

  As always, B

  To Christopher MacLehose505

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 11 September 1978

  Dear Christopher MacLehose,

  I’d very much like to see the Peter Matthiessen book.506 He’s a writer I follow with great interest, though I couldn’t take (despite some beautiful lines) the Zen-influenced novel of the turtle fishers. I’ll be at this address till the middle of next month.

  I take it you are publishing the book: do you want me to ask John Gross507 if I can review it?

  Yours ever, Bruce Chatwin

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 12 September 1978

  Dear E.,

  I’ve got masses of yellow pads. Bones508 brought me 20 hundred pages from New York in June. My size for the button-front jeans is 32 waist 33 leg. Sunil [Sethi] is on around the middle of the month: he hasn’t yet found out if he’s getting a lift on a jumbo of Air India going for an overhaul in Toulouse, but if not India Today are giving him his ticket. Ay! the floods. Haven’t heard a word since then.

  Progress pero muy lentamente. Have just been for the weekend to Janetta [Parladé]’s and had my lounge on the beach and swim. Feeling very relaxed and well. For some weeks I had terrible stomach upsets, which I have put down to coffee made in the machine. Anyway they’ve gone, but they were worrying as I was sick three times in the middle of the night.

  Magouche’s Susannah is here: I brought them up from Malaga and we called in on Gerald [Brenan].509 The bore is Xan: apparently when I came up with some more ‘Wind’ information, he took offence and thought I was trying to patronise him. Also resents my friendship with Magouche. I’ve tried my best to like him, gave Maro510 endless lectures about how stupid she was being but I’ve come to the conclusion she was right. He’s a silly, jealous A1 shit. He picks rows with M[agouche] the whole time and reduces her to a bag of nerves. She’s deeply in love with him (she’s crippled with the pinched sciatic nerve) and will to my mind not go without him. However. Sad about Hiram.511 You’re right: in places like Provence, unless you have something specific to do, you just disintegrate. Same goes for here. Alistair Boyd has taken on a completely new lease of life since he got into the House of Lords.

  I bet they’ve chopped up the Mrs Gandhi piece: the sub-editor manque le moindre étincelle d’intelligence et du goût et d’humeur. I really am NOT going to write for them again.

  Can you check with my bank and D[eborah] Rogers what has and hasn’t been paid in. The statement runs up to August 7th with a credit for £1000. There should have been paid in the French advance, the Spanish advance, and £1000 or thereabouts from the Sunday Times. If all three have been paid in, then I’m far worse off than I thought, and will be running with an overdraft of around £1000. Never ends, does it.512

  Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out. Doesn’t mean to say they won’t come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant, Kipling’s Letters of Travel etc. People lose all sense of proportion.

  Kasmin’s cottage sounds a marvel. Why don’t you go and sniff round the land agents of that part of the Dorset coast. Just get in the car one day and go.

  Must go.

  love B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 16 September 1978

  Dear E.,

  Not much here either. Xannikins has gone off to climb in the Pyrenees and so everyone is much more relaxed. He is an area of LOW PRESSURE. Susannah513 and I climbed the plateau of Torecilla by full moon.

  I for one am not too sad about the big dhurry not selling. I feel that at some point it can be used.

  I’ve enough yellow pads to be going on with and don’t really want foolscap size, as it will bulge out of my loose-leaf folders.

  The gatito has discovered all four palm pots for use as its W.C. The place is beginning to stink of cat shit and buzzing with bluebottles. But the headboard of the bed has become the nest of a most elusive mouse. So there you are! Trapped as usual.

  Gave the Magouche ménage a most fruity meal: an anchoiade of figs, anchovies and garlic (delicious); salad of leeks in uncooked tomato sauce with basil, oil and lemon juice (also delicious) and a monumental Moroccan tajine of chicken and quinces and almonds and dates and roasted sesame seeds. Also raspberries. That fearsome mother of Magouche expected next week. Sunil [Sethi] having frightful time extracting himself from the floods. Expect [him] to be here next week.

  Love

  Bruce

  When at last Sunil Sethi arrived in Ronda he found Chatwin in a state of extreme anxiety over his book. ‘He thought this was the end. He kept describing a scene – day after day – when de Souza and Ghézo make a blood pact. He couldn’t get it right. He’d crumple the paper with his hand and get very angry, saying “Am I a one-track pony?” ’

  Chatwin returned to London at the end of October with de Souza’s story still unresolved. Less than a fortnight later, he found a ‘cubby-hole’ in Albany, a former maid’s room which he sublet from Christopher Gibbs. No sooner had he arranged for an architect to convert it than on 9 December he flew to New York, to spend the winter there with Donald Richards. Among those he mingled with were Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, Edmund White, John Richardson and Jacqueline Onassis, the latter introduced to him by Cary Welch. Of this period, Robin Lane Fox remembers: ‘I’d heard he’d become the plaything of every grand American woman in sight.’

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  66 East 79th Street | New York | 11 February 1979

  Dear Maxine,

  . . . Life in New York highly social. Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis514 to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells,515 and my God she’s fly. Far more subtle than any American woman I’ve ever met. A man called Charles Rosen,516 who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating about the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned on him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: ‘Yes, of course, you can see it all in the Titian portrait.’

  Also hilarious dinner with the Erteguns, Iris Love517, the Turkish Foreign Minister and the representative in America of Mr Greater Turkey himself: am lunching with him at the U.N. tomorrow. His conversations start: ‘Look at my skull and you will see that, really, I am a Hittite.’

  Have written my piece for Geo Magazine and got paid three thousand for it. Have been interviewed for New York Times. ‘Mr Chatwin looks like a schoolboy and his eyes light up with a schoolboy’s enthusiasm etc . . .’ despite the fact that both [legs] looked like lumps of raw meat after being cut open by Dr Espy.518

  Kasmin marvellously well behaved in Haiti519 – as he had to be because the silly ass went out into a carnival crowd – despite my warning – with a wallet containing 800 bucks in cash and travellers’ cheques, and we were knocked over by four transvestites wearing Fidel Castro masks and relieved of it. I paid thereafter. Mad about Haiti.

  Apparently this week my photo is published large on the cover of the Barrytown Explorer. Unbelievable letters about In Patagonia from Chanler Chapman.520 ‘A whiff of aconite, the deadliest of poisons, a tale more heartless than King Lear etc.’

  But the BIG NEWS is this. We rang up Mr Shawn’s521 secretary on the New Yorker to see if he would like to see Mr Chatwin. She replied: ‘But surely it is Mr Chatwin who would like to see Mr Shawn?’ However, when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn’s pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a New Yorker writer who had never written for
the New Yorker. The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through eastern Europe directly I finish Mr da S[ouza] plus as many thousand dollars as I need.

  Jane Kramer522 and her husband were in a fearful motor smash between Ronda and Malaga when we were there. Crapanzano nearly died of an embolism at Malaga airport waiting to go to Switzerland. And that dreadful man whom we met at the Zuluetas was instrumental in having their daughter abandoned, aged seven in a rough tourist hotel downtown, where she almost got lost.

  But the Albany523 is ready to begin work and as the workmen are on hand I suppose I must go back. Kassl has found me a flat in Covent Garden for two months while the work goes on (at £75 a week) but that is the price. I am really rather undecided. I have to say that I would like to spend about five months of the year in New York rather than London, and or even Paris. The trouble is laying out all that rent. I imagine the best would be to buy a cooperative, but the small places are v. difficult to find.

  Love

  B

  To Clarence Brown524

  Postcard, Christo’s Wrapped Walk Ways 1977-8, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri (15,000 square yards of silk over 4.5 km of walkways) | L6 Albany | London | 21 March 1979

  Why you should get this of all postcards is beyond me: it’s the only one that happens to be lying around. Best, Bruce Chatwin

  To Charles Chatwin

  Postcard, Jean Baptiste Chardin’s Pipes and Drinking Vessels | Vaucluse | France | 4 April 1979

  I inspected Bonnieux – and concluded it was in far too tricky condition to buy; could be an endless structural headache not what we want. The Paris one was – on reflection – just that much too small: a rare pied à terre and nothing more.

  Chardin evidently loved his drinking cup:525 it crops up again and again in the paintings. Bruce

  In April, Chatwin received a letter from Osip Mandelstam’s translator, Clarence Brown, who asked ‘with a certain trepidation’ whether Chatwin was aware ‘that the spirit of OM seems to peep out from behind this or that phrase or stroke of portraiture or landscape.’ Brown also suggested that In Patagonia was not second but third in a fascinating succession – ‘for Mandelstam’s title alone makes it clear that he was very mindful of Pushkin’s Journey to Erzerum.’

  To Clarence Brown

  as from Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 14 April 1979

  Dear Clarence Brown,

  Coming from you – of all people – that was indeed a gratifying letter. I owe you an enormous debt.

  A friend gave me a copy of your translation of The Noise of Time when it first appeared. It set me off to ‘discover’ [Isaac] Babel and the others. Soon afterwards I started to write.

  Of course Journey to Armenia was the biggest single ingredient – more so even than met the eye. Perhaps too much so – ‘skull-white cabbages etc’ (O that mad Veraschagin in the Tretyakov!) But one bit of plagiarism was quite unintentional (though indicative of the degree to which I had steeped myself in the Journey) Not until after I had passed the final proofs did I realise I had lifted ‘the accordion of his forehead’ straight. I rang up the copy editor in a panic. She said it was too late and, besides, all writers were cribbers.

  You must by now be viewing the O[sip] M[andelstam] translation industry with a rather jaundiced eye. But for what it’s worth – and at the risk of being a bore – I’d like to put it on record that you are surely the finest translator out of Russian alive; that you have a most finely tuned ear for the cadence of a sentence; that your literal translations of M[andelstam]’s poems are far better than the work of the versifiers, and, lastly that you are TOO MODEST.

  In an ideal world you would be appointed generalissimo in charge of vetting all translations from the Russian; one only has to think of the horrors of the so-called Oxford Chekhov.

  To my shame I don’t read Russian and one day will have to go to the Berlitz. I know vaguely of Pushkin’s Erzerum and, obviously, want to know more. No translation, I suppose?

  Do give my very best to Richard McKane526 and to Ted Weiss527 if you see him. Also could you drop me a quick card at this address, saying whether you will be around Princeton on May 23rd?

  I am working here, but vaguely tempted to come and get my prize.528 If you were about, it would be an added inducement.529

  as ever, Bruce Chatwin

  To Valerian Freyberg

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [Easter Sunday 1979]

  Dear Valerian,

  Your mother tells me you like shells. I used to have a collection of shells. During the war when I was three my father brought me a huge conch from Panama. He said you could hear the wind and the waves of the Caribbean Sea if you put your ear up close. I decided that my shell was a woman and we called her MONA, though I don’t know why.

  You can’t hear the Indian Ocean in this shell, but I think the design is very beautiful and I chose it for you. The white things look like mountains, don’t they?

  When I come back to England in June, I’ll come and take you out from school. I think we must find you a book on shells. If you promise to collect them and look after them, it would be lovely for me, because when I go round the world, I can find more shells and send them to you.

  With love from your affectionate godfather

  Bruce

  To Peter Adam530

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | Easter Sunday | 3 May 1979

  Quick card to say hello. Stuck on Tuscan hillside trying to plough my way through to finish 30 pages of manuscript but must have finished 150 of them.531

  To John Fleming and Hugh Honour532

  L.6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 11 May 1979

  Dear John and Hugh,

  Back in London with a belated thanks for – as usual – a lovely time with you both. By far the best house I know in Italy! I’ll be back in the solitude of Chianti in about three weeks.

  In the meantime, C. Gibbs still has the Duchesse de Berry’s Granet,533 measurements on the back. It has a whopping Chatsworth frame made up from bits of late 17th century English moulding which I think makes it look marvellous. He wants about £5-6,000 for it, but is absolutely open to the idea of a swap. Apparently the National Gallery of Wales are nibbling at it, but I wonder whether they have the nous much love, Bruce

  One of several Anglo-Argentines who objected to the depiction of British estancia owners in In Patagonia was Millicent Jane Saunders. She took particular exception to Chatwin’s ‘false description’ of her late husband, ‘a highly respected Patagonian’. On p.195 Chatwin had interviewed an elderly Chilean: ‘He had worked twenty years on the estancia and now he was going to die. He remembered Mr Sandars, the manager, who died and was buried at sea. He did not like Mr Sandars. He was a hard man, a despotic man . . .’

  To Millicent Jane Saunders

  L6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 27 September 1979

  Dear Mrs Saunders,

  . . . I deeply regret that you should have been upset by Chapter 94 of my book In Patagonia. I think, however, you will appreciate the circumstances under which it was written. I was simply recording the words of a dying Chilean peon. He said that the manager of his estancia had been a Mr Sandars (my spelling), who had been buried at sea, who was an ‘hombre duro e despotico’ (his words), though he remembered him in a favourable light compared to what came after under the Allende regime and later. Having lived, as I did, in peons’ quarters all over Patagonia, it was the most common thing in the world to hear men grousing about their employers in that kind of language, usually as we sat around the maté kettle.

  My business was to record what people said. I did not, I can assure you, intend to pass any judgement on a man about whom I knew nothing, and whose name, apparently, I did not know how to spell.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bruce Chatwin

  To Peter Adam

  L6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 15 February 1980

  Have gone to New York for 10 days but will phone on return. xxx Bruce

  Chatw
in was in New York to work with Jim Silberman, his American editor, on The Viceroy of Ouidah, as his book was to be called. Previous titles he had considered were: Dom Francisco , The Elephant, The Brazilian, Skin for Skin, The Merchant of Ouidah. He had rewritten and typed out half a dozen drafts, changing Francisco de Souza’s name to Francisco da Silva. What had commenced as the history of a Brazilian slave-trader was now a novel. An introductory paragraph composed for Silberman, and later deleted, shows that Chatwin had found it impossible to transform de Souza’s life into a biography: ‘. . . when I tried to fit these pieces into a narrative, each fact seemed to contradict each other fact. The story gave out at the critical points and, with a mixture of relief and despair, I decided to write a work of the imagination. I changed the names of the principal characters, having a prejudice against making historical figures say things they did not say, or do things they did not do.And having changed the names, I was then free to borrow, to combine, to juggle with dates, to invent new characters and new situations – to such an extent that even I can hardly disentangle the real from the invented.’