Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  On the strength of this, and of the movie-rights being sold (not for much admittedly!) I bought myself in Stockholm an incredibly beautiful c. 1760 Swedish crystal chandelier627 which comes out of a manor in Southern Sweden for which it was made. God knows what to do with it, because I’m not sure it’ll look quite right in the flat: but my fantasies about Sweden are somehow connected with a lit chandelier and a crayfish party on a half-dark summer night. I propose to do something to pay for half of it. It’s not over big either.

  Otherwise, nothing, except that I am inundated to write forewords for this and that. One could easily develop into an exclusive forewordmerchant : for a photograph book on Machu Picchu; for Clemente’s628 paintings of S. India; for the Sierra Club Calendar; and latest for Jackie O[nassis]’s book on Indian costume. By the last, I have to say, I was tempted in that it involved a trip to India in January. (Apparently the idea was not only hers but Mapu629 somebody’s who runs the Ahmedabad Museum). However, since Cary W[elch] was in on the act (it being in connection with the Met. Costume Institute etc.), I told Jackie I’d phone him for saying yes or no. C.W. was relentlessly hostile to the idea: you could literally feel him squirming on the other end of the line. So I chucked, and anyway the timing of it was horrendous, and might have put this book back six months. I must say she was extremely nice about it when I called. Your car is not ready yet, another three weeks or so; because it needs a new part. I’m not going to London if I can help it, and so don’t need a car. I intend to go slogging on till December 15th and then I’ll take a break. My working year was so mucked up, I think it’s the only thing to do.

  John B[etjeman] had a heart attack and very nearly died630. It was national news for a week, and now he’s better.

  XXXX B

  To Ivry Freyberg

  The Tower | Scethrog | Brecon | Powys | 3 November 1983

  So glad it wasn’t too embarrassing. I had no idea what I was doing in the programme at all. xxx B

  To Elisabeth Sifton

  Postcard of ‘Mexikanische Miniatur-Maske aus der olmekischen Zeit’ from the Schatzkammer der Residenz, München. as from Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 6 December 1983

  How’s this for a really hideous-and-marvellous object! The hands are gold, green enamelled. The ‘work’ goes laboriously on – and is very strange but now manageable. I can begin to see the end: but not before I’ve gone to S. Africa AND back to Australia Feb/March. I miss you. I almost came to N.Y. the other day, but funked it.

  Much love,

  Bruce

  To Murray Bail

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [December 1983]

  March’ll be upon us before one can shout. I am coming to Australia from – of all places – South Africa, where I have to go to meet a man631. It depends on what happens there and whether I make a trip with him into the Kalahari – as to whether I come to Sydney after March 7 or before. I’ll call you, I think, sometime in January: then we can make a tentative plan.

  As always, Bruce

  To Shirley Hazzard

  as from; 77 Eaton Place: but written nr Siena | [January 1984]

  My dear Shirley,

  . . . It’s late at night; there’s a peppering of snow on the ground, and the central heating’s been turned off. I may easily be driven under the eiderdown before too long.

  The piece of work which I gaily hoped to complete in a matter of months is proving far more intractable than my worst fears. Last January, in the Outback, I met an incredibly moving character whose job was to map the sacred sites of the Aborigines, especially those which might lie in the way of the new Alice-to-Darwin railway. He was the son of Russian immigrants; and when a policeman discovered his origins, he said, of us both, ‘What did I tell you? A Pom and a Com.’ Anyway, I went with this Anatoly on a surveying expedition, together with a group of Aboriginals, and on three successive nights, we sat up by the campfire discussing everything that came into our heads. Anatoly, I might say, had Cossack blood, and so was in a position to discuss my major obsession: the nomads.

  I have, left over from my foray into the academic world in the late Sixties, the draft of a projected book on nomadism.632 I had written an essay which discussed whether the nomads were necessarily the destroyers of Civilisation, or whether they were the necessary impulse behind the First Civilisations; whether, in fact, the nomads gave to all Civilisations their restless and expansive character. It is not an angle that many historians have dared to tackle: I, of course, am completely incompetent to do so. Yet the subject is so compelling, I cannot leave it alone. For once you enter the world of nomadism, you have to tackle Renan’s dictum, ‘Le désert est monothéiste’ – and from there the search for nomads becomes the search for God.

  All last summer, I experimented, wrote, tore up, wriggled this way and that. Then on Patmos, I had the brainwave – revelation if such it was – that the way to do it was to hold an imaginary dialogue with Anatoly (who would, of course, become a fictional character!). Now you see what I’ve landed myself in for. I’ve done eighty passable pages; but as for the rest, a long, long tunnel ahead.

  To give the whole thing greater veracity, I decided to go back to the Centre, and reconstruct our journey amid those scenes of hopeless desolation. Yet I have found, as I write, that there is something immensely moving about the dried-up continent, a place which has far from yielded its secrets and may yet surprise us. Anyway, when I got the invitation to go to the Adelaide Festival, I was mighty pleased.

  As for the year of disgrazia ’84 that, too, may surprise us – in that it does seem to have made people aware of the hollowness of the doommongers. For my own part, I am going to try, this year, to do my meagre share to add a small voice of dissent.

  Fifteen years ago, with Vietnam in swing, I became aware of how the politicians were using some so-called ‘facts’ of our evolutionary past to justify their own squalor. Among these ‘facts’ was the idea that the human species had begun its career in cannibalism and bloodlust. The evidence for this was supposed to come from the Cave of Peking Man (since destroyed) and some caves in the Transvaal, which their excavator, an Australian called Raymond Dart633, interpreted as the Original Human Bloodbath. Recently, a man called Brain, now Director of the Transvaal Museum, has reinterpreted the evidence, and has found that all the damage to the bones was the work of one particular (now extinct) carnivore, known to science as Dinofelis. There is, he suggests, the possibility that this creature was a professional Man-eater: in other words, by becoming human, we had to live and defend ourselves from this beast. The fact that we did so successfully is perhaps a measure of the Original Threat to our existence. Since then, it seems to me at least, the story of humanity has been the invention of monsters that do not exist. I put this rather schematically, because – please remember – it is very late at night. Anyway. I am sufficiently fascinated to fly to South Africa next week to try and make sense of the evidence for myself. Hopefully, I may be able to incorporate it into the final, imaginary discussion with Anatoly, under a gum tree.

  Incidentally, our discussions took place at Neutral Station, N.T. I’m not sure that I can’t play with ‘Neutral Station’ as a title . . .

  If you need a billet in London, you’re welcome to the above, providing no one’s there. I suggest you call Jasper Conran at work 01-437-XXXX. He could arrange for you to have a key.

  I’m thinking of quitting London for a bit, and of finding some kind of billet in Tuscany. One can work so much better there.

  Much love, Bruce

  ‘Australia is Hell’ Chatwin wrote in a lost postcard to his Italian publisher Roberto Calasso. In another lost postcard from Australia, to Paul Theroux, he wrote: ‘You must come here. The men are awful, like bits of cardboard, but the women are splendid.’ One woman he had met on his visit to Alice Springs in February 1983 was Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist of Dutch descent who had worked on Walbiri land claims. They had a genuine rapport; on Chatwin’s part, amounting almost to an infa
tuation. ‘He made it clear he found me attractive,’ she says. He would rework Vaarzon-Morel into the idealised characters of Marian and Wendy in The Songlines. ‘The moment I set eyes on Wendy I could hear myself saying, “Not another one!”Not another of these astonishing women. She was tall, calm, serious yet amused, with golden hair done up in braids.’

  To Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

  Donnini | Florence | Italy | 8 January 1984

  My dear Pet,

  I am terribly sorry for sloping off without warning and not coming back – as I fully intended. The truth was I got hideously ill in Java, with amoebas and all that – so ill, in fact, that for a moment they thought I had cholera. And though I did go back to Sydney for a week or two, I was in a considerably lowered condition.

  But I’m coming back. By a stroke of luck the Adelaide Festival offered to pay the fare out: so on March 7 or thereabouts I’ll have to sing for my supper, and then I’ll be sure to come again to Alice.

  I’m writing something very odd – which although set under a gum tree somewhere in the MacDonnells has nothing much to do with Central Australia. No, that is wrong, it has everything and nothing to do with Central Australia and I need desperately to know certain things.

  What do you think the chances of being able to arrange a trip up to Kintore?634 I missed the chance of going out of sheer stupidity and regret it. I’ll probably be coming to Alice with a friend, Salman Rushdie,635 who wants to go on a short jaunt before going back to England.

  As for me, I want to stay in Australia for months and months. I imagine I will stay at the dreaded Melanka Lodge636 . . . I do hope you’re THERE! Never have I caught a bus in such a DIZZYING way.637

  Give love to Toly,638

  Bruce

  To Tom Maschler

  Kardamyli | Messenia | Greece | 29 January 1984

  Dear Tom,

  A quick note to tell you that I’ve gone to ground in Greece for the winter. I had thought of going to your old stamping-ground, Chania. But the only flat available was the top of the Stavroudakis/Haldeman639 set-up, and I thought it really too sinister and depressing in its implications – to say nothing of the street noise below – and instead have found an ideal spot on the Mani, a few hundred yards from Paddy and Joan Leigh-Fermor.

  I won’t say anything about the work in hand, except that I work at it at least six hours a day and am pressing forwards rather than procrastinating – at least, I hope so!

  The grape-vine tells me you’re in fine fettle.

  To Lydia Livingstone

  Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [January 1984]

  Thinking of you often if not always. And now, next week, I take the first leg of my return journey towards you – if somewhat obliquely – just to Johannesburg and the Kalahari desert – then on March 2 to Sydney xxxx Bruce

  On 1 February 1984 Chatwin stayed with Bob Brain in Pretoria. ‘B. quiet, meditative, self-effacing with impeccable manners,’ Chatwin wrote in his notebook. The next morning he accompanied him to the cave at Swartkrans in the Sterkfontein valley near Johannesburg. Brain’s classic text on early human behaviour was based on his excavations here.

  What happened on that day, 2 February, would reverberate in Chatwin’s mind for the remainder of his life. ‘Around 3.30 Bob came back from the dig with a piece of bone which he said was “highly suggestive” .Antelope long bone: which layered beige white on the exterior and black on the inside, broken in 2. With it were some flecked fragments – speckled with manganese staining. He had, he said, so often searched for use of fire. It had been found by George [Moenda, Brain’s foreman] lying alongside an arrangement of 3 stones 6-7” across and was slightly cracked. The question is whether this could conceivably be the hearth . . . He had tried so often, had so many false alarms, that one must always expect the worst. At the same time he was visibly excited.’

  To Bob Brain

  Le Thalonet | Johannesburg | South Africa | [February 1984]

  Dear Bob,

  I found the following in the Muquaddimah of Ib’n Khaldun (the Father of modern history) ca. 1400 AD. ‘The animal desire of attacking others and destroying them or being their master confronts man with the need to defend himself against wild animals which would destroy him if he lived alone. Man can protect himself only through organised communal defence. Instead of physical power, of which he possesses less than many other animals, he has to utilise the power in which he excels, namely the power of thought and practical reason. These faculties help him to become dexterous in the shaping of tools and to organise communities for producing them.’

  If I remember the passage correctly (for all I have found is an extract) it goes on something like that ‘in conditions of surplus, when the needs both of the individual and of the community have been surpassed, the war of all against all breaks out with the weapons devised to protect man from the beasts.’640

  I had a wonderful day at Swartkrans: and, as luck would have it, I met Alun Hughes641 at the tea-party who took me today to Sterkfontein. Yes, indeed! Quite another style! But most instructive. I’ll hope to see you, if I may, around the 24th of the month. In any case I’d like very much to come again to Pretoria to see the museum at great length. I’d be most grateful, too, to have a copy of the photo of the juvenile skull and leopard canines . . .

  I stupidly left a pair of shoes in the house. But please don’t worry as they were extremely uncomfortable. I could perhaps get them on my return.

  My very best wishes and thanks to your wife. As always, Bruce.

  To Francis Wyndham

  Holiday Inn | Botswana | 15 February 1984

  This trip has proved really abortive – except for the S. African archaeologist /zoologist who should be given a Nobel Prize on the spot. Otherwise, in Botswana – heat, dust, spiders – and NO Bushmen.

  Much love, Bruce

  Staying beside the Zambezi river with Kasmin, who had joined him in Botswana, Chatwin continued to dwell on the conversations he had had with Brain. About Birmingham, where Chatwin had grown up and from where Brain’s father, finding England restrictive, had departed for the Cape. About Brain’s son Ted, who died at 14 months when he choked on a piece of apple, teaching Brain – painfully – to live his life as though each day might be his last. Moved to review his own life, Chatwin wrote in his notebook: ‘And in the morning while the car was in dock we sat on a fallen tree with a mat of weeds, looking out across the Zambezi which appeared to be being blown back upstream. The District Commissioner’s House/mine recruiting camp with its mosquito screens and terraced gardens gone to seed. To think that I, in my schoolboy dreams, pictured such a place as the place in which I would spend my life, in khaki shorts, with Shakespeare and Shelley, dreaming of a leafy Warwickshire which no longer existed. I would go out in a hat . . . Had a dream of my parents, Margharita in her blue dress with the orange and green cummerbund, and Charles in tails, dancing in the moonlight. I felt that, in their way, they’re the most romantic couple on the earth.’

  To Gertrude Chanler

  South Africa | as from: 30 Victoria Street | Pott’s Point | Sydney | Australia | 2 March 1984

  My Dear Gertrude,

  For the first day in a month of feverish coming and going I’ve got the time to sit down and write a letter or two. I was a little bit apprehensive about going to South Africa in the first place: but I must say things there are not at all what gets reported in the international press: some better, some worse, but never bland. As Lib may have told you, I came to talk to a man who wrote a book about the Earliest Man, and I’ve had perhaps the most stimulating discussions in my life. Prof. Brain has, for the past 20 years, been excavating a cave near Johannesburg in which you find at the lower level (Date: around 2 million years) a situation in which the ancestors of Man were literally dragged there and eaten by an extinct giant cat called Dinofelis. Then in the upper level, Man (the First) suddenly takes control and the Beast is banished.

  The only way to inhabit a cave, which is also inhabited by p
redators, is to deter them with fire. And though archaeologists have been hunting for fire in Prehistoric Africa for thirty years now, the earliest hearth they could find was only 70,000 years old. On the one day I visited Brain’s cave, at Swartkrans, I remembered how nice it would be to discover the human use of fire in the cave. Half an hour later, we excavated a bit of blackened bone. Brain, who is a most undemonstrative man, said: ‘That bone is remarkably suggestive!’ – which indeed it was. It turns out I was present at the uncovering of a human hearth, probably dated around 1,200,000 years old. The earliest by 700,000 years.

  I’m off to Australia in the morning, where I have to give a talk at the Adelaide Festival next week (on what Lord knows!) and then I’m off into the Outback again for four weeks or so. My new book is a very slow operation, but if it comes off I think it could be very unusual.