Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  PS Maybe Uzès, too! Or Catalonia?

  To Roberto Calasso

  c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 18 February 1986

  My Dear Roberto,

  Forgive the almost interminable silence. Things, as usual, got on top of me in England: and, as usual, I fled. First to China – where, in the remoter parts of, say, Yunnan, the world of Taoist gentleman-scholars, plant-hunters, poets, calligraphers – still very much exists.

  I’ve had a terrible time with the ‘Australian’ book: have torn up 3 successive drafts: only to find, borrowing a leaf from La Rovina di Kasch741 that the only way is the ‘cut-up’ method. Not that I can see the end – yet. But at least I think I know what I’m doing. You’re the first person I want to show it to – as and if and when it’s ready – even perhaps before. My friend Grisha von R[ezzori] has been horribly ill, heart-attacks and I don’t know what, and I must come and see them. Possibly on the way back from here – end April, beginning May, but I’m not sure yet of the dates. Will you be there?

  As always, Bruce

  To Elisabeth Sifton

  c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 18 February 1986

  Dearest Elisabeth,

  Ay! Ay! News of Grisha – bad! I had a post card from our pal, Kasmin, who was with us in Nepal for Christmas and then flew straight to the bedside. Can’t we/you/all persuade him not to go racketing around America. There must be proper doctors in Italy and there certainly are in Switzerland (to which he can go by car). He should stay in his study, in Donnini – or if Donnini gets too cold in winter, now that Southern Europe has its annual Scandinavian freeze, in a hotel. All that Vanity-Vogue life is not good for anyone’s health, mental or physical.

  News is that I’ve been beavering away for 2 months in a Rajput fort: overlooking a lake, flashing kingfishers, peacocks on roof, cool rooms with photos of maharajahs etc.. No comment on the book – except that, once again, it’s unrecognisable. A third method now being tried – with, I think, greater success. We’ll see.

  I may appear in the U.S. for my favourite sister-in-law’s742 wedding mid-May. But not to N.Y. except for a second to see you only – if you’re there. Can’t tell yet, because I don’t fancy leaving here without something to show for it. I’ve decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: ‘The only country in which I do not feel at home.’ E. is beginning to feel the same way: so we’re going to look for a bolt hole: Has to be in Southern Europe. But nothing elaborate – like Donnini.

  Don’t bother to reply to this unless something crops up . . .

  Much love,

  Bruce

  To John Pawson

  c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | [February 1986]

  Monday 10am. 1 week after receiving yours.

  Dear John,

  What a nice, expansive letter! The first I have had in 3 months because Elizabeth, against my advice, insisted on having our mail sent AIR to Nepal, – and it has, all of it, failed to arrive: cheques for thousands of $, invitations, etc. – all, temporarily at least, gone.

  First things first. The flat. I know you and I will not agree on the question of dead white. I suppose it’s because I’ve lived at various times in the incomparably beautiful whitewashed houses of Greece and Andalucia that dead white walls, in England, always used to be just that: dead – because of the English light. I agree that the existing colour was too creamy: what I’d like is something the colour of milk (if there is such a thing) – and anyway it doesn’t matter too much. I’m sure you’re right: that the shower, all the minor repairs, and the painting should be done together – but what about hocking the books off the shelves – and the enormous labour of getting them back again? Elizabeth returns to England on March 15; and if the operations were to coincide with her arrival, she would make arrangements to have the books sent down to Homer End. If, on the other hand, the paint job could be done around then, I’d be a lot happier.

  My only complaint vis-à-vis last time was that the venetian blinds were not sanded down, which made them a kind of dirt trap.

  We’ve decided to hang onto the flat indefinitely, because at that price, a roof over one’s head in London is going to be quite irreplaceable. I’m just not interested in letting it again. But the news also is that somehow, we as a family (my parents are going to chip in) are going to try and find (build?) a bolt-hole for me to work in – somewhere in the Mediterranean – for the winters and probably most of the year. I get such terrible colds and bronchitis in the winter; and if they start in November, they go on till May. And the longer I go on, the less I want to be for ever searching for a suitable place to write. It happens, for this winter, we’ve found one: but that was a lucky fluke. It is funny, too, that you should mention Majorca. I’ve never been – and, although I love Catalonia, I wouldn’t want to live there. But I’m told that if you clear off the coast (into the mountains), there are many parts of Majorca which are like the South of France was in the Thirties. I had in mind, the moment this book was in shape, to go and investigate the possibility of land on which to build. I need a courtyard, a flat roof with walls with a room open to the sky, 2 bedrooms (1 a library-cum-bedroom) and a living-room-cum kitchen with an open fire. All simplicity itself like that Portuguese architecture from the Alentejo. So you can think about it.

  There is no more wilderness in the Med: so one just has to make a compromise. Any house built there must turn in on itself.

  You said ‘at last a building in the round’. Do you mind my saying that you haven’t – or strike me as not having – done enough to apply your unbelievable gifts for coping with interior space to the articulation of facades of buildings. I cannot quite imagine how a building by you would be.

  You also list a catalogue of complaints about your partners: but I’m afraid you’ll have to face the fact, with your sense of style and fastidiousness, that you’ll have to be a one-man band. In order to do what you have to do, you have to be the tyrant who directs, not the partner who cajoles – and, in fact, many people would prefer working for you as an assistant rather than having a slice of the cake.

  The only way to run a business these days is to keep a very tight ship – and not to sacrifice control. When scribbling off that article, I couldn’t help having misgivings about POSA:743 it struck me as a silly name, but that’s beside the point: the work on the flat was yours. Others may contribute very valuable bits here and there, but they are not stylists – or if they are, not in the same sense as you. They are, however, bound to be fractious if they are all supposed to be on one level.

  I hate submarines – I’ve been down in one once – from Plymouth. Hate the claustrophobia: the same as the clum-pf of an aircraft door closing.

  We had a wild dust storm this morning, but that has now cleared and the birds are chirruping again. I want to go on a tour of Rajput and Mughal architecture. The place we’re in is fairly marvellous, but it is ironic that my book which is a passionate defence of movement should involve its author in years of limpet like existence. as always, Bruce

  PS I suppose, thinking about it, the choice of Venturi744 was almost a foregone conclusion. As I said, they were after something ‘Neo-classical’ and, I’m afraid, hell bent on an American – who are supposed to know so much more about Museums than Europeans – though with the exception of the Gardner Museum in Boston, I don’t think I’ve ever been in an American Museum whose pictures didn’t cry to be released from it.

  I’ve written a very irreverent piece on the Norman Foster Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.745 As you may know it went over budget four times over – and is, I think, absurd: a maintenance nightmare, not a vision of the future at all, but a backward, thoroughly retrograde glance back to Soviet Constructivism plus a sort of nostalgia for the glorious days of the Royal Navy. I managed to find the ‘feng-shui’ man: that is to say, the traditional Chinese geomancer whose advice the Bank took – and ignored – before commissioning the architect – and you should hear
some of the things he said about the cross-braces!

  To Sunil Sethi

  c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 5 March [1986]

  Dearest Sunil,

  We’re coming to Delhi by train from Jodhpur, arriving on the morning of the 12th. E. leaves for London the night of the 13th, and I thought I’d see her off. Is that OK vis-à-vis the room for a few nights? If not we can easily stay – and after a most abstemious two months in whatever hotel. But unless I hear to the contrary, may we assume it is on? Could you, if not too terrible a bore, do something for me. Inquire how – and the quickest way possible – for me to extend my Indian visa? It runs out on April 6th and I will want to stay at least another month – preferably without having to nip up to Nepal and back. I rather dread the bureaucracy of the immigration dept, so maybe there’s a travel agent who can expedite it.

  Anyhow, I’ve decided to come back here after Delhi, immediately after getting the visa, for another spell of work: at least until the end of the month. I have a vague sense that, in that time, I can get the whole thing between covers – which would mean I was free to pack up my notes and books etc., and be free to toy about with the manuscript. I can’t see any point in moving from here – even in the heat (there are some cool, almost subterranean rooms) – and one is so well looked after, and above all, CALM. A new place might disrupt things. After that, I thought I’d take to the hills for a bit, and then maybe fly direct to America, to my favourite sister-in-law’s wedding in mid May. Who can tell?

  I wanted to write to you anyway to say how much I approve of the Indian Mail. No waffle! Clear, sensible English – such has not been seen in an English newspaper for the past 20 years – and none of the carping tone. You were absolutely right to leave India Today: re-reading it critically over three issues, I find the tone there both gloomy and trite: an unpleasant combination. It’s about time people realised just how wonderful India is – not in the exotic sense – but day to day realities. Watching Manvendra here coping with the drought is the kind of thing that Mr Naipaul746 would never ‘see’.

  We are still without post from Europe, but tant pis.

  Much love, B

  To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]

  Dearest Paddy and Joan,

  . . . We’ve managed to install ourselves in the wing of a Rajput Fort about 30 miles from Jodhpur, belonging to one of the old zamindar families: the grandfather, who is still omnipresent in the memory of the retainers, was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and one of the best polo players in the world. The suite of rooms we occupy is where he’d entertain his English friends. The walls are blue; there are punkah hooks, old dhurry carpets, chintz curtains, prints of the Quorn or Pytchley, others of Norwegian fjords and wolves: 18th century miniatures of the family, enthroned or on shikar [hunting] and replaced, gradually, by the same subjects taken by the Rajputana Photo studio. My study leads out onto a terrace along the battlements, about the size of Montaigne’s, from which there is a view of the lake, a Shiva temple on an island, the family memorials (in Mughal style) onshore and a rest house for visiting sadhus. There was an old rogue who arrived a few days ago, in saffron, with a hennaed beard747 down to his ankles: a scion apparently of a great Rajput house who had quarrelled irrevocably with his wife and taken to the road. After a puff or two of his ganja I found myself reciting in Sanskrit the opening stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita.

  The food is delicious and brought by delicious girls on solid mahogany trays. Last week, for example, we had for lunch a light Little Bustard curry, a purée of peas, another of aubergines and coriander, and bread rolls, the size of potatoes, baked in ashes. The lake is seething with duck – shovellers, scaup, pintail, pochard – awaiting the call to fly back to Siberia. Herds of black buck come down to drink with the camels. There are spoonbills, storks, cranes and ibis; and yet I long for walks in the Mani.

  The temptation to take a siesta instead of a walk is irresistible. I’ve never been so immobile in my life. The afternoon sun is very strong; and the plain beyond, having missed last season’s monsoon, is an ashen wilderness with willy-willies blowing across it.

  The book is by no means done; I’ve decided the only thing to do is to let it run its own course and shove everything in. I’ve been casting back over my old notebooks, and have managed to find a place for things like this:

  Djang, Cameroon

  There are two hotels in Djang: the Hotel Windsor and, on the opposite side of the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor

  Or:

  Goree, Senegal

  On the terrace of the restaurant a fat French bourgeois couple are guzzling their fruits-de-mer. Their dachshund, leashed to the woman’s chair, keeps jumping up in the hope of being fed.

  – Taisez-vous, Romeo! C’est l’entracte

  Don’t bother to reply to this except, perhaps, a post-card to say when the book748 is coming out; and whether, if I broke my journey in late April or May, you’d be there. Elizabeth has to go to her sister’s wedding in the middle of May; and if I had something to show the other Elisabeth [Sifton] I should be tempted to go too. But that’s all too early to decide. I might even stay here, and take to the hills. I’ll be going to Delhi to prolong my visa and pick up mail around March 15th.

  Much love, as always

  Bruce (and Elizabeth!)

  To Ninette Dutton

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extentsion | New Delhi | India | 5 March 1986

  Dearest Nin,

  I am sorry for the prolonged silence. At the beginning of the winter (northern hemisphere) things got terribly out of hand. As I think I jotted on a card, we had this house all fixed up in the countryside outside Kathmandu, with wonderful views of the mountains etc. But then the Englishman to whom it belonged (Perfide Albion!) welshed out on the deal and we were left with a kind of cottage orné in the heart of the city: pretty enough superficially, but terribly damp and with the most fragrant smells of the city sewer. Nepal really is one of the great unhealthies. Much more so than India, and both E and I were really quite ill, before deciding to flee to India. Nothing makes me in a worse temper than having set aside X number of months in which to work, then to find one is junketing round from hotel to hotel, looking for a place to settle. We did, however, meet up with Murray and Margaret Bail in Delhi. They had been in Simla for Christmas – against our advice! – in a freezing hotel three feet deep in snow. Anyway, we all went to Jodhpur whose Maharajah is an old friend of mine: we share a part of some really riotous times at the Cannes Film Festival of 1969.749 Although he has no political power he has now become a most magnificent ruler and also owns the biggest palace in India. At his 40th birthday party, we were introduced to all his courtiers, mostly polo playing types; thakurs that is landed gentry. Among them a total charmer (not a polo player) called Manvendra Singh, whose grandfather was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and fought in Flanders etc.

  I did my usual spiel about being desperate for somewhere to write, and he said ‘Why not write in my fort?’ We’ve been here now for 2 months: a 17th century Rajput fort, on a lake, with a Shiva temple on an island, every kind of birds: ducks, flamingoes, spoonbills, pelicans. A burble of life going on in the courtyard below: the buffalo to be milked, the laughter of children, the howling of peacocks – at seven as alarm call! I never left. I hardly even went to Jodhpur, only 20 miles away except to get typing paper. I won’t say I’ve finished the book: that would be going too far – but I do have the sense of an ending. The book is not just an ‘Australian’ enterprise, but sets down a lot of crackpot ideas that have been going round my head for twenty years. So this is not three years work but 20. We shall see. The terrifying moment will come when I dare to re-read what I’ve done.

  We are, in fact, leaving tomorrow. Elizabeth has to get back to her lambing. The past week has really been too hot. It would be fine if I didn’t have something critical to do. But it’s too hot to take exercise, an
d the mind starts to go soggy too. So I’m taking her to Delhi and then going for the rest of the month and most of April to a guest-house750 we’ve heard of not far from Simla. Spring in the hills should be lovely, I hope! My aim is to get a rough first draft, and then take it to America. In the editing stages, I think I will have to come to Oz: when going through some of it with Murray, I realised just how easy it is for a Pom to slip up on the tiniest mistakes.

  I’ll get the post from my pal Sunil in Delhi. It’d be lovely to get a scrap of news. Goodness I hope every thing’s gone OK vis-à-vis Piers Hill.751

  All my love to you, dearest. E sends hers.

  Bruce

  PS We have to leave! They’re all hotting up for the Holi festival. This means grinding accordion music all night!

  To Charles Way

  c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 9 March 1986