Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  It represents the limit of my attachment to London, and I pray the whole thing doesn’t fall through. Much prefer one nice room to a lot of dreary ones.

  If you like phoning, evenings are the best around 8 your time.

  much love, XX B

  In February, ‘in a mood of extreme recklessness’, Chatwin signed ‘an enormous cheque’ to his architect, John Pawson, telling him ‘just to get on with the flat’. He then flew with Donald Richards to Kenya, spending ten days on the Island of Lamu.

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Lamu Island | Kenya | 7 February 1982

  Dear Charles and Margharita,

  I’ve had a week now of mindless hot windy days on this Muslim island on the North Kenya Coast. I managed to borrow a 17th century merchant’s house, built of coral blocks and stuccoed inside with traditional Arab decoration. From the roof you see palm thatched roofs, the minaret of the mosque, a sea of bougainvillea and, beyond, the channel of bright blue water up and down which dhows speed past at all hours of the day.

  One of the fishermen took me snorkelling on a coral reef about 9 miles down the coast, and I must say that the pictures you see of such things bear no relation to the staggering beauty both of the fish and the corals.

  Before leaving I managed to get a commission from the New York Review to write a long article on the discoveries of Richard Leakey564 on Lake Rudolf – L Turkana as it’s now called. A few years ago he excavated the skull of a hominid – a near-man – dating from 1½ million years together with his stone tools, and evidence of his camp-site.

  Leakey is a Kenyan MP, and even in the half talk we had – in between his visit to the Prime Minister and his work as head of the National Museum – I felt that we saw eye to eye on an astonishing number of points. The fact that he picked up on so many of the same references as I did with the nomad book encourages me to take it up again. The upshot of the visit anyhow is that he is going to take me up to Lake Turkana, probably next week.

  Otherwise I’ve been windsurfing: the trouble with it here is that either the wind blows 5 knots or 20 – and I need 10. I always seem to get catapulted forward and end up in the sea about 15 feet ahead of the board – but one day I’m going to overtake Hugh in his ocean racer.

  On my second day in Nairobi I went for a walk in the Ngong Hills, near where Karen Blixen565 had a coffee plantation but had to beat a retreat from a herd of buffalo.

  After a tremendous brouhaha – 6ft long telegrams flying across the Atlantic etc – the deal with Viking Press has gone through. Enormous relief all round! But what a fuss! However, I stick to my guns. The move was not taken light heartedly. It was taken because I felt that I needed advice, and that one should try and get the best advice. There’s no real point in having a publisher with whom you cannot discuss a project beforehand.

  Returning March 1st. Lord knows where I’ll be staying. The architect says he’ll have Eaton Place finished – but I don’t believe that! Much love B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Lamu Island | Kenya | February 1982

  A few days of wind-surfing on Lamu Is before Richard Leakey flies me up to Lake Turkana. Howling gale most of the day: so I’m quite bruised from falling off. Snorkelling in the coral reefs unbelievably beautiful. Viking Press deal has gone through – apparently – at last

  XXX B

  To Deborah Rogers

  In Kenya | Mid February [1982]

  Dear Deborah,

  . . . Re On The Black Hill: we’ve got a fairly tricky timing problem, I’m afraid. I get back on March 1st, possibly a day later, but anyhow not later than March 3rd. Can we start at once? I have given a copy to my friend Joan Saunders,566 who as you may know is a literary researcher, very accomplished in spotting inaccuracies etc. I then must go to New York around the middle of the month to consult with the new American publisher, Elisabeth Sifton of Viking, before returning to send off the final copy.

  I haven’t got one word of it with me here: but my own thoughts are that the Peace celebrations chapter (195-220) may need some revisions; also I am not at all happy about the character of Philippa (towards the end) and feel she should come out. She is modelled, quite accurately, on Penelope Betjeman, and I think the whole episode jars.

  The other thing we have to watch out for are the phrases ‘one fine morning . . . On a Thursday in June . . . etc’ They are essential to get the sequence of events moving through time, but I feel they are repetitive and stereo-typed, and we must think of ways of turning them, dispensing with them etc . . .

  As always, Bruce

  To Susan Sontag567

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 3 April 1982

  My dear Susan,

  London’s a fine place to be this week – the spectacle of the entire Houses of Parliament clamouring to send an ARMADA – no less a word – of 40 ships to relieve the Falkland Islands. Makes me wonder if one’s gone mad. Presumably by the time they get there, the islanders will have been spirited off to the mainland anyway.

  I loved our dinner of entrails568 and hope for a repeat. Our friend Calasso569 sends greetings: I am machinating to try and get his Satta Day of Judgement570 published. George Steiner571 pronounces it one of the truly great works of the century etc.

  Do let me know if and when you’re coming to France or Italy. Also, I am seriously interested in the idea of Berlin: it might be ideal for the next project I have in mind.

  As always, Bruce

  To Susan Sontag

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [13 May 1982]

  13 May – and to think that I am 42 today.

  Dear Susan,

  The New York dinner season may be winding down: here, in London, we have the HUNT SUPPER. The English, having found in a seedy bunch of pseudo-fascist generals THEIR IDEAL ENEMY, having tasted that enemy’s blood, are now baying for more. Under the rhetoric, under the phoney talk of ‘making the world safe for democracy’, you can hear the yelp of the hounds. I suspect, however (just wait till the Montonerostyle guerrilla squads get going – ? in London) that all is going to end very badly.

  I did my little bit of sounding off on the Australian radio, an article here etc. Then, In Patagonia appeared in Italy and the critics found – as I had forgotten – that, in the last line but one, a Falkland Island boy says ‘’Bout time the Argentines took us over, we’re so bloody inbred.’ This was interpreted as a case of history imitating art – and you can imagine the absurdity of the rest – interviews on TV etc – a whole ten minutes on the evening news – and a piece of footage which showed, not the sophisticated crust of BA but some Amazonian Indians thatching their huts with palm fronds.

  The novel about the incestuous brothers is in the press. And when I get the proofs, I’ll leave by the first boat or plane – passing of course through Paris if you’re there – on my way to . . . ? Well, Outer Mongolia is a possibility.

  Calasso sends greetings. We both agreed on the grotesque character of the reaction to your very simple – and – if you’ll forgive my saying so – very evident statement,572

  As always, Bruce

  To Graham C. Greene573

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | June 8 1982

  Dear Graham,

  I want to make it clear at the outset that ON THE BLACK HILL is not a roman à clef, not some kind of faction, but a work of the imagination that has its own structure and operates accordingly. True, it is set in the Black Mountains or, preferably, the Radnor Hills. The town of Rhulen could be either Hay-on-Wye, or Kington, or Knighton, or Clun. There is indeed a Black Hill on the eastern scarp of the Black Mountains, but there is another one, overshadowing the house, in Shropshire, where I began the first draft of the book.

  I have used the Border Country (which I have known since the age of six); the eternal feud between the two farms; and the motif of twins (for whom there is no possibility of an advance) as vehicles for a sustained meditation on the concept of Cyclical, as opposed to Linear, Time. But I have done an immens
e amount of research, in life and from old newspapers, to root the story in actuality.

  There are four houses in the book – The Vision, The Rock, Lurkenhope Castle, and The Tump. If there are any prototypes for these, none have any connection with the other, in real life.

  1. The Vision. Read Chapter 1, 32, and p203 Chap 44.

  About five years ago, my friend Penelope Betjeman (wife of the Laureate) took me to her neighbours, George and Jonathan Howells, two bachelor brothers now (1982) in their late sixties574, who live on the eastern side of the Black Mountains in their farm called New House. The story she told of them (and which captured my imagination) was that sometime before the War their mother, seeing them to show no signs of interest in the opposite sex, had sent them to the fair at Hay-on-Wye to meet some young ladies. They came back with crestfallen faces, never having seen girls in short skirts before. This put them off forever.

  Their farmhouse kitchen does in some way resemble that of The Vision (Chap 1); but then it is hardly different from any border farmhouse from before the War. The Howells brothers are not twins. They were not involved in the First War. Their mother was an ordinary Welsh farmer’s daughter from Radnorshire. Both their parents survived till well after the Second World War. They have not lived in the house all their lives. They have one (I think maybe two) sisters. Also a younger brother, who, in turn has a son called Vivian, a dashing dark-haired boy, who stands to inherit their 300 acres, but has not to my knowledge yet done so. He, Vivian, had a rather beautiful blonde girlfriend, of whom the brothers disapproved; but they have since split up. He did not marry. He didn’t take his uncles in an aeroplane p 236. He had no hippie friends. What he did do was wear sunglasses and fail to attend the agricultural training college.

  I felt the Howells’ situation was so tangential to the story of Lewis and Benjamin in the book that one needn’t worry about it. That is until Penelope gave the manuscript of my book WITHOUT MY PERMISSION to a Mrs Mary Morgan (nee Penoyre, and thus one of the local gentry, and a bluestocking to boot!). She managed to get almost everything wrong; and though she professed to have loved the book, have wept real tears etc was full of fatuous suggestions as to how, in her view, it could be improved, and was determined to identify every character in the novel with someone she knew. She seems to have identified her own family with the Bickertons (false!); Amos Jones with a local farmer and a great friend of mine (completely false) etc. BUT she also got hold of Vivian Howells and told him that he was ‘in my book’. I suspect she even let him read passages from it.

  THE ROCK Read pp. 49 ff. pp. 128-131, pp. 154-55, pp. 169-71, pp. 195-200, pp. 210-212, p. 222, pp. 223-7; whole of chapter 47.

  This is much more closer rooted in reality than The Vision, which is I repeat a creation.

  The model for the Rock is a smallholding called Coed Major, high up on the hillside, the property of a family called Philips. Joe Philips, better known as Joe the Barn, was a great local character who died last year after spending twelve months in hospital after a stroke. Before the War, the Barn (as Coed Major was called) was famous for being a place where local farmers could dump their illegitimates. It was a place of wild female energies. The exact relationships of the inhabitants of the Barn are too complicated to explain in this letter; but the reader should bear in mind that Meg the Rock is the only character in this book who bears any real relationship to a living person. But also he should note the characters of Sarah and Lizzie.

  The other chapter that should be read in connection with the Rock is the account of the murder in Chapter 34

  LURKENHOPE CASTLE is a complete fiction. If the Bickerton family had any resemblance to anyone, it is to some Lincolnshire cousins of mine;575 but the connection is far too remote for anyone to worry.

  THE TUMP inhabited by Rosie Tilman. p.184

  There is an old woman, in her advanced eighties, bearing no relation to any of the above, who lives alone in a cottage on the side of Hay Bluff. She is called Miss Tyler the Tack, and was once seduced by a young gentleman in a big house, and retreated to a place of total isolation where she has lived for more than fifty years. Otherwise I know nothing more of her.

  Perhaps we should change the name to something less resembling Tyler?

  Sorry about all this,

  as always

  Bruce

  To Robyn Ravlich576

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 25 June 1982

  Dear Robyn,

  Now that many hundred Argentine boys have been slaughtered so that, for a brief period of weeks, not months, the trains in this country would run on time etc; and now that I have finished the unusually protracted birth pains of a book, I am turning towards both the idea and actuality of Australia with something like the fervour of a first love affair. It now appears that I shall be coming earlier than I thought, say, by the 1st of September, and I intend to be as footloose as possible for a bit.

  But, of course, I’ll be in touch with you at once in Sydney.

  My best to you and Stan.

  as ever

  Bruce

  To Susan Sontag

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 30 June 1982

  My dear Susan,

  So the trains ran on time in this tinpot country for precisely five weeks while, in the blighted Southern Hemisphere, the boys were killed. Now London is paralysed with rail strikes, which is proof that things are back to normal.

  I will, for certain, be in NY around the last week in August, and long for a repeat in Chinatown.577

  As always, Bruce

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 30 June 1982

  My dear E,

  I’ve spent the past week frantically trying to sort out my finances and have decided to transfer the accountant from Ernst & Whinney to a Mr Shah, 23 Harcourt St W.1. who is Deborah Roger’s accountant and specialises in the chaotic affairs of writers. My position which seems to me frantic doesn’t seem to phase anyone in the least; and perhaps in the autumn depending on the sale of On the Black Hill I’ll be able to help with Homer End. I have so much to do, what with articles etc. and I’m off to Teddy M[illington]-D[rake]’s for 3 weeks.

  Love

  B

  Leo [Lerman] and Grey [Foy, Lerman’s partner] send their love: they were at an overstuffed soiree at Lord Weidenfeld’s578 last night.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Interior of Eski Cami ‘Old Mosque’ | Beyoglu | Turkey [August 1982]

  Amazing to think that this exists in what is really the heart of middle Europe. And did you when you were here see the hospital of Gullion Beyazit where they cured the mentally ill with music 3 times a week. You stay in a caravanserai by Sinan579 with weeping willows, a chameau and fowls in the yard that wake you up by coming into the room. Still in a mess, creatively. May embark right away on my so-called Russian novel.580 Back around the 15th August.

  To Ivry Freyberg

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 13 August 1982

  Oh! How sad to have missed the party. I’ve been rotting in a Greek Island for 6 weeks. Long to see you all. Bruce

  To Susan Sontag

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 16 August 1982

  Dear Susan,

  And how was Kiev? Whiffs of that peculiar Soviet disinfectant, unrefined gasoline? And the sight of a Cossack cavalry brigade along a cobbled street. I was last there at the time of the invasion of Prague – and, from that vantage point at least, it seemed quite evident that the event was staged to impress the Ukrainians not the Czechs that they’d better try no more nonsense.

  In recent weeks I’ve been strolling along the Turkish-Bulgarian border and seem to have contracted some dread stomach disorder. This means that NY is postponed until mid-September – when I do hope to find you there!

  As ever Bruce

  To David Mason

  Postcard, Nicholas Roerich painting, ‘Overseas Guests’, depicting Vikings staring over the rail of their bright ship at the Russian landsc
ape | Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | November 1982