Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Page 43
Dear Charlie,
I had – feeling rather guilty – at one moment thought of getting on a plane and coming back again. But one of my (? unconscious) calculations was that the first productions of On the B.H. were by no means going to be the last. I had an immediate sense, on meeting you and the Made in Wales people, of the rightness of the enterprise: and obviously I was right!752 Many congratulations! I long to hear, and see more. But don’t bother to reply to this, unless there’s something urgent. I shall be here: the above is a better contact for mail – until April 25th, when I’m coming back.
I had no idea, when I set out to do the current book, what an enormous enterprise I’d let myself in for. I, who liked to think of myself as a kind of miniaturist, am now faced with hundreds and hundreds of chaotic pages. But I think that’s the way it has to be. Every book – though of course not a play – seems to have its length predicated by the opening paragraphs, and one simply has to go on to the bitter end and then take stock of the matter. I do like being out of touch, though. Yours was the first – and welcome! – letter I’ve had in a month or so. I suspect the local P.O. of monkeying with the mail, but we have vaguely kept in touch with the weather in Britain etc . . .
As always, and again a thousand congratulations and thanks, Bruce
To Murray Bail
c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 11 March 1986
Dear Murray,
Hello there! The Fort at Rohet has proved a resounding success. The rooms were cool. I shed my cold. The desk was at the right height. Coffee – real – came at the right moment. There were bicycles to take some exercise. The timeless scenes of Indian life went on from day to day. The arrival of a new species of Siberian duck on the lake and, one morning, flamingoes were about as much as we got in the way of excitement. We went to Jaipur in the car for two days: Jodhpur twice, for the afternoon. Otherwise, a hard slog. I won’t say I’m finished: but the experiment I was dreading so much, and have been putting off for months, is done – and there’s now a lot of book. I’m only capable of functioning away from all the hullaballoo – although I sometimes find myself envying your very calm house in the middle of all that hullaballoo. Considering I now hardly ever set foot in a bookstore, or read literary journals, it’s quite amazing how you and I pick up on the same things. I thought Kolyma Tales753 very wonderful; what I would love to try and get down someday is the rightmindedness of Russians in extreme adversity. Also Ray Carver754 has been a favourite of mine since the first collection came out and a girl who, herself, came from Washington State advised me to get them. He really does make most other American writers look like so much junk. He’s the only one who knows that there is such a thing as prose rhythm, and he has to be the most sensitive observer of the American scene. He’s apparently spawned a troop of imitators, none of them any good. I’m told he’s at work on a big novel, and it’ll be interesting to see.
[Mario Vargas] Llosa’s quite something, if you get a chance to meet him. Robbe-Grillet755 is something I’ve never taken in.
I’m off this evening to the hills: a guesthouse with separate chalets in a nature reserve at Bhimtal, owned and run by ancient refugee Czechs.756 E returns to England and her lambs. We shall see.
Forgive this chaotic note. Hot evening outside. Whirling with mosquitoes. Rohet, alas, has been unbearable for the past week with temperatures in the hundreds.
Write to England sometime but don’t bother here unless urgent. We are still without our backlog of three months post, and chasing letters round India is not a pastime for me.
Love from E. Love to Margaret and from me to you both.
Bruce
Magnus Bartlett (b.1943) had been the photographer on Bruce and Elizabeth’s trip to Yunnan. Based in Hong Kong, he was the publisher of a series of guides to or around China, including Tibet by Elizabeth Booz. He had persuaded Chatwin to contribute a short piece to a forthcoming illustrated guide to Hong Kong, ‘on a Feng Shui man “doing” the just-finished Norman Foster HSBC building’.
To Magnus Bartlett
c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 12 March 1986
New Delhi but as from: Homer End, Ipsden, Oxford
Dear Mag,
. . . I have, in the past, had requests for just one page of manuscript from well-wishers in the United States. At Rohet, where we were staying, I was often appalled by the way in which our servant would empty the contents of my waste paper basket from the rampart, littering a patch of ground in front of the lake with a kind of papierarie.
This is not a complaint – and not to be broadcast around – but I don’t think you have any idea of my intense loathing of magazines and magazine editors: there are, of course, individual exceptions, but each case must be judged on its merits. I would like to think that I never have to work for one again.
I want you to get Ducas757 to get my piece back from the Connoisseur – though they must pay me (to England) the kill fee. And I want the original copy, too. I’m not interested in publishing it, and certainly don’t want him touting it round the New York magazines, thank you. If anyone’s going to do that, I will or my agent will – but I don’t want to get any crossed wires . . .
Otherwise, nothing dims the memory of Yunnan – and nothing would have been better than my 2 months in Rajasthan – in that I’ve got a terrific lot done. I’m now going to the hills till the end of April – hoping, at last, to break the back of it. All contact had better be through E. in Oxfordshire. She leaves first week in May for the US.
All the best to you and Paddy, Johnson and Prof Tea.758 The Tibet guide is first rate. I’ve read Elizabeth Booz’s introduction – a masterpiece of tact and common sense. Pictures A1 etc. E. would like to know more of what’s involved vis-à-vis the Silk Road project.759
B
To Magnus Bartlett
c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]
Dear Magnus,
Postscript to last screed. I’m told by people here who’ve worked for them, that the editorial staff of the Connoisseur (the word is enough to make one squirm) are deeply bonkers: and that to do anything for them, even at a long distance, is to drive oneself into the looneybin with them. So please get the text back!
B
To John Kasmin
The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | March 1986
Have moved up into the hills. Old English tea plantation now run as a hotel guest house by Czech adventurer type, ex inhabitant of Punta Arenas in Chile, refugee from Germany in the 30’s for having thrown a knife at Hitler. B
To Elizabeth Chatwin
c/o Smetacek | The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | 27 March 1986
Dearest E,
Quick note because some U.S. Embassy people are going down to Delhi and will post it, a saving of five days or so. Yes. It’s very nice here: not too cold. I have a house to myself, with a verandah and Banks’s rose clambering over it, a view of wheatfields etc. On the mountain above lives a charming sadhu, the father of the Forest, whose business it is to protect the trees. Old Smetacek has gone to Germany for four months. Sounds an incredible character. Hounded from Germany for throwing a knife at Hitler;760 Chilean citizen (resident of Punta Arenas, where else?). Ended up in Calcutta during the war, and married a Muslim girl through correspondence column in the newspaper. I think I’ll stay on as long as possible. There’s no point in lumping oneself to Manali, or even Nepal, when the Kumaon is obviously very fascinating. Badrinath is a two-day bus ride: besides this is Jim Corbett761 country – and as I’m writing about man-eaters I appear to have landed in the right spot. Below the sadhu’s cave there is a leopard lair, but the animal is supposed to be very friendly. The Smetacek dogs though, if you take them on a walk, are inclined at certain places to get jittery.762
xxx B
To Elizabeth Chatwin
c/o Smetacek | The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | 10 April 1986
Dear E.,
Well
, it’s still very nice here but the heat increases each day with hot dusty winds coming from the plain. I’ve done some very good work. The cut-up method does actually solve the problem. I’ve just been writing the tramp and the Arctic tern. I’m not going to finish needless to say, but I’ve done all the back-writing i.e. there are now few gaps in the narrative.
I’m not quite sure what to do. I’d like to go on a trek before returning and in a week or so I’ll be in the mood to pack the book in for a bit. I can go north of here into the Kumaon Himalaya with Peter S[metacek], youngest of the sons, or, I suppose I could go up to Nepal. But Peter has been ill with measles and the after-effects are slow. Manali, I gather, is out of the question. Chandigarh is cut off by the army: you can’t get to Simla, and they anticipate that no one will go to Kashmir the whole year. The situation is apparently quite dreadful, much worse than anyone anticipated. I certainly intend to be back by May 1st or so . . .
Will you tell [John] Pawson I do want to be able to use the flat in May and June. None of that hanging round waiting for them to finish.
Nice birds here on my terrace. A Himalayan magpie, blue and white with a tail 2 feet long. The scarlet minivet, the Himalayan barbet and the funniest whistling thrushes that look like Barbara Cartland.763 Then pheasants . . .
The V & A story764 . . . just shows you. Things are both tough and vulnerable but no safer in a museum than in some old Rajasthan fort.
This letter is going to be posted in England by some friends of S[unil] who are flying to London tomorrow night. Apparently the cheapest ticket now is Air France, but with a 6-hour stopover in Paris. I shall try and get Vayadoot765 down to Delhi because that Trunk Road is a nightmare to travel down, to say nothing of the cost . . .
My Dad has given us 6000 quid each from family capital: useful for paying off the mortgage: but I told them I’ll only accept it providing they can call for it back if needed.
Must stop because they’re going.
xxx with love B
PS I have an idea. I should like to go on holiday in Turkey in September with the car and windsurfer. So don’t make too many plans.
‘We’ve just had bad news from India.’ Back at Homer End Elizabeth was telephoned in April by Dinah Swayne, who ran the office for Penelope Betjeman’s trekking tours in the Western Himalayas. ‘I thought of Bruce immediately. Why do they know? But it was Penelope.’ Penelope Betjeman had died on 11 April while leading a tour in the Kulu valley. Soon afterwards, Chatwin telephoned from India.‘It was the only time I’d known him in tears,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He was shattered.’ In Wales, during his separation from Elizabeth, Penelope had become, he said, ‘a sort of mother to me’.
To Candida Lycett Greene766
Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | [April 1986]
PENELOPE DIED SITTING UPRIGHT LAUGHING AT HER PONY WHICH HAD STRAYED INTO A WHEATFIELD STOP IN ACCORDANCE WITH INDIAN CUSTOM HER ASHES WERE DIVIDED INTO TWO PARTS STOP ONE PART WAS SCATTERED AT KHANAG WHERE SHE DIED STOP THE SECOND PART INTO THE BEAS RIVER THIS MORNING TEN DAYS AFTER HER DEATH
To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor
Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | 24 April 1986
My dear Paddy and Joan,
I got your card at the same moment as news of Penelope’s death – and decided to go up to Kulu at once. Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carried her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the R[iver] Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with Om mani padme hum767. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oakleaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.
The doctor, who was with her on the trek, gave ‘heart-attack’ as the cause of death: but the word ‘attack’ is far too strong for what happened. If ever there was a ‘natural death’, this was it. All morning she was in the best of spirits – although people in the party said she was already beginning to dread going back to England, to pack up her house etc. Around 10, she called in on her favourite Pahari temple. The priest, who knows her, welcomed her to join in the puja.768 She received the blessing and then rode on towards a place called Khanag. There she dismounted to rest, laughed (and scolded) at her pony which had strayed into a wheat field, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.
Although it’s nowhere finished, I had – only two days before – been writing the final chapters of the book: of how Aborigines, when they feel death close, will make a kind of pilgrimage (sometimes a distance of thousands of miles) back to their ‘conception site’, their ‘centre’, the place where they belong. In the middle of nowhere in the desert I was taken to see three very old Aborigines, happily waiting to die on three metal bedsteads, side by side in the shade of an ironwood tree.
Penelope, as I’m sure you know, would cheerfully discuss the pros and cons of going back to India to die: she could never quite work out how to arrange it. Over the past year or so, she would discuss, quite rationally, the building of her new ‘Anglo-Indian’ bungalow in Llandrindod Wells;769 I don’t think she ever believed in it. She had sworn never, ever to head another trek to Kulu, but when the offer came, her instinct must have told her to accept.
I’m writing this in a smoking tea-house waiting for the bus to take me and the Tibetan porters on a Penelope Memorial Walk.
Over the years I’ve heard so much about Kulu from her. On my first night, in the village behind Kranti’s house, there was a dance of young boys in pleated white skirts (like evzones)770 with cockades of monal pheasant feathers. The silver trumpets looked entirely Celtic, and the village houses with their dragon finials and mica-glinting roofs could easily be the Heorot771 in Beowulf.
I said, months ago, that I’d go to Elizabeth’s sister’s wedding in Upstate New York on May 10. Since Delhi is about half way round the world, I’m going to slip off to Japan for a week (I have a Japanese publisher!). Then to England – at last! I do hope this catches you before you leave and that I’ll find you both in London around 20 May.
Much love
Bruce
To John Pawson
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 30 May 1986
1. Part of my anxiety about the shower stems from a previous experience. For my (or rather Christopher Gibbs’) cubby-hole in Albany, John Prizeman772 installed just such a shower with a zinc tray underneath. That, however, did not prevent it leaking and, over 10 years or so, causing dry rot damage to the tune of some thirty thousand quid – for which we were mercifully insured, but it did cause a very unpleasant scene.
2. [Can you ask] your people to rip out the existing shower as soon as possible or at least to make sure there are no drips. I also, as you may remember, have had an altercation with a dreadful woman downstairs over a leak when the plumbing was being put in.
3. We have used, very successfully, in the big room here an off-white which is Sanderson’s 7-13 P, and I would like to repeat the same in the flat.
Otherwise all is well. I’m sorry I didn’t come over: but with a lot of friends from abroad in London, I was on the run. Work on the book recommences this morning.
All my love to Caius,773 Bruce Chatwin
To Sunil Sethi
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 25 June 1986
Dear Sunilito,
I have you terribly on my conscience: the truth is, at the end of the day, when I’ve written myself into a standstill, I develop such a horror of words that to write a simple thank-you letter is worse than Tantalus rolling the stone. It absolutely goes without saying how incredibly grateful we are, to you and Shalini, for ‘the winter’, no less.
I have not been entirely idle on your behalf, however. I have talked to Shelley Wanger at House and Garden who is very interested in the Sarabhai house774 – and positively wishes you’d write that famous letter. I have made tentative enquiries about the most discreet of ‘house photographers’ [De
rry Moore] and believe he would love to do it, and work with you. So, the ball is in your court!
I have also been to Smythsons.775 There seem to me to be two possibilities: one an elongated address book with a green leather binding and space for oodles of numbers; the other a slightly more portentous affair with marbled end papers, less space, and more gilding. The choice is yours. Either’s fine by me. But how to get it out to you?
The book creaks on, at snail’s pace: but it is some book. I’m not too discouraged because it really is about something. E. is well, and obviously cock-a-hoop to be back among the sheep: not without the usual attendant dramas!
Japan was the nastiest place I’ve ever been, except, of course, to where I then went, the USA. The most decadent corrupt country in the world, well on the way to ruin, if you ask me. Europe on the other hand strikes me as being rather less hopeless: certainly with the Libyan bombing,776 the scales have fallen from people’s eyes. Paris without Americans was unbelievably charming – and the French, to my surprise, were revelling in their absence.
No possibility, I suppose, of your visit here!
Much love, to you and Shalini
Bruce
To Ninette Dutton