Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  187 Louise Brydon Brown, American pharmaceutical heiress.

  188 E.C.: ‘Nonsense.’

  189 Edward Safani (1912-98) Iranian dealer, established the Safani Gallery in New York in 1946.

  190 Founder and writer of Albany column, Sunday Telegraph (1961-97) and royal biographer (b.1924); Chatwin had met Rose at Derek Hill’s in Ireland.

  191 Randolph Churchill in his biography of Winston Churchill made a brief reference to Milward’s conviction for ‘fraudulently converting to his own use moneys entrusted to him’.

  192 Vasile Parvan, Dacia: An Outline of the Civilizations of the Carpatho-Danubian Countries (1928).

  193 E.C.: ‘I didn’t go. It was too complicated, obviously.’

  194 S.P. diary: ‘This morning Bruce’s friend George Ortiz has joined us. I hope he will prove congenial – an odd young Bolivian millionaire.’ Ortiz was travelling as ‘Doctor Ortiz of the Basel Museum’.

  195 John D. Rockefeller III (1906 – 78), patron of Asia House.

  196 Michael Fish, British fashion designer responsible for the kipper tie.

  197 The British boutique Annacat had opened on Madison Avenue.

  198 John Stefanidis (b.1937), interior designer and partner of Teddy Millington-Drake.

  199 Hon. Desmond Guinness (b.1931), founder of the Irish-Georgian society.

  200 O’Donnell Iselin, Elizabeth’s cousin.

  201 Brendan Parsons, Lord Oxmanton (b.1936) m. 1966 Alison Cooke-Hurle; succeeded father 1979 as 7th Earl of Rosse.

  202 Pancakes for the Queen of Babylon (1968).

  203 A.V. Masson, director of Institute of Archaeology at Leningrad.

  204 S.P. diary 12 July 1968: ‘At 4.00 we were suddenly switched into a room in the museum & plied with vodka and wine & salads. Very jolly if it hadn’t been for the first of three parties that evening. On returning we went to more drinks with some Americans met in the Institute library & then to an awful interminable evening with Masson and a female cousin. More vodka more wine and fortunately a pilaff to sop up some of the alcohol. I survived miraculously as did B[ruce].’ E.C.: ‘When Bruce got back to his hotel room, George said: “I have to congratulate you,” and was upset when Bruce then was sick over his dressing gown.’

  205 Animal Style (Art from East to West), Bruce Chatwin with Emma Bunker & Ann Farkas, New York: The Asia Society Inc. (1970).

  206 The eldest of Elizabeth’s sisters.

  207 Charles Tomlinson (b.1927), poet and translator, the Chatwins’ closest neighbour; m. 1948 Brenda Raybould.

  208 Mariano Rivera Velasquez, a Mexican friend of Batey’s whom Chatwin had met in Paris at the house of Jimmy Douglas. He later killed himself.

  209 Gordon Washburn, Director of Asia House.

  210 Tom Maschler, head of Jonathan Cape, had published Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape in 1967. On 23 January 1969 Deborah Rogers had sent Maschler Chatwin’s text for the Asia House Exhibition. ‘Can he come and see you tomorrow? I am sure he is worth your spending half an hour with. I have a good feeling about him.’

  211 Kittypuss, ginger female.

  212 Christopher Gibbs (b.1938), antiques dealer and collector.

  213 A South Seas Maori door, covered with faces, sold to George Ortiz.

  214 Desmond Morris to T.M., 4 April 1969: ‘I was interested to read Bruce Chatwin’s Nomad summary. It is positively bursting with ideas and clearly has the makings of an exciting book. Just the kind of thing I like. I have only one criticism . . . a matter of definition. What exactly is a nomad? It gets a little confusing at times as I read his chapter summaries . . . It seems to me that there is a fundamental psychological difference between wandering away and then back to a fixed base, on the one hand, and wandering from place to place without a fixed base, on the other. As I said in The Naked Ape, the moment man became a hunter, he had to have somewhere to come back to after the hunt was over. So a fixed base became natural for the species and we lost our old ape-like nomadism. Maybe the answer is to get rid of the word nomad altogether and think in initially vaguer terms of “HUMAN WANDERLUST”. Then he can relate man’s urge to be mobile to its different causes and functions without implying that he is dealing with the same basic phenomenon in each case.’

  215 Christopher Rundell.

  216 Guy Hannon, managing director of Christie’s. Chatwin had agreed to work for Christie’s on an annual retainer of £1,250. On 7 June, on his way to Kabul, he flew with Hannon to Cairo on an abortive mission to secure the sale of the contents of the Cairo Museum.

  217 E.C.: ‘I flew straight to Kabul. Can you imagine me driving all that way by myself?’

  218 Peace Corps.

  219 John Semple, Arabist with antique shop in Lower Sloane Street.

  220 Helene C. Seiferheld, New York dealer. She had rented Grosvenor Crescent Mews off Bruce.

  221 Illegible.

  222 American actress (1943 – 69) m. 1967 to film director Roman Polanski; she was murdered when eight months pregnant by followers of Charles Manson.

  223 In April Chatwin had signed a short lease on 9 Kynance Mews.

  224 Peter Straker, a 19-year-old Jamaican, played the part of Hud in Hair. Chatwin believed that he resembled the Pharaoh Akenaten. The outline for Chatwin’s musical is lost, although Straker remembers its drift: the sun-worshipping and hermaphroditic Pharaoh uproots his court from Thebes to the desert, getting away from old conventions.

  225 At Sotheby’s on 1 December.

  226 The Arctic Tern was one of few works of art he kept, along with the Peruvian feathered cape.

  227 Mughal painter (1550-1610).

  228 John Kasmin (b.1934), British art dealer.

  229 The Asiatics (1935), picaresque novel featuring a nameless 22-year-old American who walked, hitchhiked and sometimes travelled in luxury from Beirut to Damascus and across India to China.

  230 For the opening of the Asia House Exhibition.

  231 Noel Coward had been awarded a knighthood.

  232 To Oliver Hoare, the carpet expert at Christie’s, on the stipulation that Bruce and Elizabeth had squatting rights once a week.

  233 E.C.: ‘I had a horse at Holwell Farm and I was approached by someone saying “Because you have a horse, you’ll be able to get around. Will you help?” There was a doom atmosphere, as if everything was going to collapse.’

  234 The Making of the President – 1960 by Theodore H. White, about the 1960 presidential race between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.

  235 Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), English caricaturist.

  236 Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), English novelist.

  237 Lady Florentia Sale, Journal of the Disaster in Afghanistan, 1841-2.

  238 Loelia, Duchess of Westminster (1902-93).

  239 E.C.: ‘I had a parrot before I was married and gave it away and I moaned and groaned so Bruce got me an African grey. It hated men, and Bruce couldn’t go anywhere near it – even if it saw Bruce through the window it would shriek. I gave it back to the vendor.’

  240 Peter Levi.

  241 Margaret Mead (1901-78) American anthropologist. Her daughter Catherine Bateson had been at Radcliffe with Elizabeth.

  242 Friends of Teddy Millington-Drake. Ginette Camu, a famous Belgian beauty m. to Bernard Camu, banker and bon vivant; William L. Bernhard, who bought a ruin in Patmos; Stephan von Watzdorf, brother of Thilo who worked at Sotheby’s.

  243 A poncho with checker-board patterns, sold to finance Chatwin’s journey to Patagonia. The feathers were a rectangular hanging of blue and yellow parrot feathers, possibly intended for an Inca temple, discovered in an earthenware drum near the River Ocana in Peru. Bruce and Elizabeth had bought the feathers in New York with their wedding money.

  244 J. L. Bruning, Biological Clocks in Seasonal Reproductive Cycles (1968).

  245 Ron Gurney, Quaker banker; Chatwin had met Penelope Betjeman at his house near Wantage.

  246 Clem Wood married to Jessie, daughter of Louise de Vilmourin, shared a
house with the Welches on Spetsai.

  247 Iain Watson (b.1942) m. in 1967 Miranda Rothschild (b.1940). Miranda was, in her own description, ‘a tragic young widow’. In 1964 her previous husband, an Algerian, had been assassinated as a gun-runner. ‘I found him in a charnel pit.’ Rescued by her mother, Barbara Ghika, who discovered her in a hut living off worms, she went to live in Athens with her two-year-old daughter, Da’ad Boumaza.

  248 Maxime Birley (1922 – 2009), fashion model, food writer and mother of Louise (‘Loulou’) de la Falaise (b.1948), m. to John McKendry, curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who influenced Robert Mapplethorpe to take photography seriously.

  249 Irina, elderly Greek woman who lived by herself.

  250 A Mogul, jade-handled dagger.

  251 A Napoleonic campaign bed, supposedly ‘Marshal Ney’s steel campaign bed with its original lime green hangings’.

  252 Oliver Hoare (b.1945), with whom Chatwin shared 9 Kynance Mews. B.C. diary: ‘V restless as myself, v likeable and attractive.’ He later achieved celebrity as one of the Princess of Wales’s lovers.

  253 Monica, a dressmaker, who lived on the top floor at Holwell.

  254 Agnes Jean Magruder (b.1921), Boston-born daughter of American naval commodore, m. 1st Arshile Gorky 1941 – 48, Armenian artist who coined the nickname ‘Mougouch’, which meant ‘my little powerful one’ in Russian; 2nd John C. Phillips Jr in 1950; 3rd Xan Fielding in 1979.

  255 Turkish dish with aubergine.

  256 E.C.: ‘He liked fountain pens. Like books, they had to be guarded.’

  257 E.C.: ‘A beautiful ikat chapan from Afghanistan, a man’s silk coat put on over garments, as worn by Hamid Kharzai.’

  258 Martin Buber (1878 – 1965), Austrian-Israeli philosopher.

  259 (Sir) Patrick Leigh Fermor (b.1915); author, living in Greece; m. 1968 Hon. Joan Eyres-Monsell, photographer (1912-2003), whom he had met in wartime Cairo.

  260 E.C.: ‘He had an infection of the jaw. Eventually, I sent him to my London dentist, Russell King, who sorted him out.’

  261 E.C.: ‘Everything having been paradise on earth suddenly turned into the biggest bore. It happened everywhere, except the Black Hill.’

  262 Barbara (‘Llama’) Hutchinson (1911 – 89) m. 1st 3rd Baron Rothschild, 2nd Rex Warner, 3rd Nico Hadjikyriakou-Ghika, painter and sculptor; mother of Miranda Rothschild.

  263 Ferdy Mayne (1916-98) owner of Kyance Mews studio leased by Chatwin; MI5 informant and German actor, famous for playing Count von Krolock in Roman Polanski’s 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers.

  264 A bargeboard from a Polynesian hut that had belonged to the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who used it as a bedhead. On 30 June 1968 E.C. wrote to her mother: ‘Bruce has swapped the Greek head for a fantastic piece of Maori sculpture, for which he has already been offered more than twice what he paid. It belonged to Sarah Bernhardt: she brought it back in 1902 when she made a tour of New Zealand & she bought it from an already old collection then.’

  265 London antiquities dealer, sentenced in January 2005 to two years in prison; he served seven months.

  266 Framer.

  267 Nomadic shepherds inhabiting the northern Greek mountains and central Balkans.

  268 Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and her younger sister Lee Radzwill. E.C.: ‘Derek knew everybody.’

  269 Monica, the dressmaker, had married a policeman.

  270 To cover running costs, the Chatwins had loaned Holwell Farm to Linda Wroth, a girlfriend of John Michell. Chatwin had walked with her in Wales; on 13 December 1969 he described Linda in his diary as having ‘the wide staring intense eyes of the American intellectual initiate’.

  271 Desmond Fitzgerald married Olda Willes in 1970.

  272 Sandy Martin, dealer and one-time partner with John Hewett.

  273 Union des Transports Aériens, French airline.

  274 Silk from Afghanistan.

  275 Margharita had made Chatwin a tweed overcoat. E.C.: ‘She did eventually make him one that fitted.’

  276 Sally Perry (1911-91), m. 1945 Gerald Grosvenor, 4th Duke of Westminster (1907 – 67); and companion of Henry Somerset, 10th Duke of Beaufort (1900-84), Master of Queen’s Hounds; neighbour of Chatwins at Wickwar Manor.

  277 Lenny Ballinger, the Chatwins’ tenant farmer.

  278 ‘It’s a Nomad Nomad Nomad NOMAD world’ appeared in Vogue, December 1970.

  279 Mr Ball, known as Canon Ball.

  280 William and Rosalie Fergusson, neighbours at Holwell.

  281 John Michell (1933-2009), English author. The View Over Atlantis (1969) popularised ley-lines, ‘referring to ancient stone circles, menhirs and graveyards which are laid out in lines across Britain,’ as Chatwin wrote in The Songlines. Chatwin walked with him in Cornwall and Wales.

  282 Keith Steadman, horticulturalist neighbour at Wickwar.

  283 Hercules Seghers (1589-1638), Dutch painter. Cary Welch owned a Seghers oil painting of a skull.

  284 Miniature drawing of a sikh grandee.

  285 Giant hogweed. E.C.: ‘Bruce thought you’d get poisoned if you stood next to it.’

  286 Maori shell.

  287 E.C.: ‘He really didn’t know anything about animals.’ Chatwin’s notebook: ‘Hell is a house – house dog is Cerberus.’

  288 E.C.: ‘I didn’t.’

  289 Fred Mewis, the Chatwins’ gardener.

  290 Anthony and Doe Bowlby lived at the Old Rectory in Ozleworth.

  291 Elizabeth’s trust at the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh.

  292 16 November.

  293 Willow plantation.

  294 Polly Devlin, journalist, married to Andy Garnett, entrepreneur, neighbours at Bradley Court near Alderley.

  295 Independent American publishing house, founded 1936.

  296 A stoneware firelighter soaked in kerosene.

  297 ‘I love her dearly but she is impossible to be with for longer than two hours at a stretch.’ James Lees-Milne diary, 5 September 1972.

  298 E.C.: ‘I still have it.’

  299 Ajit Mukherjee’s The Art of Tantra (1970) generated an interest in Tantric Art.

  300 Elms & Sons, the Chatwins’ builders.

  301 E.C.: ‘The water was perfectly all right. The Etheridges, who owned the Lodge after us, had it tested.’

  302 E.C.: ‘I went back to Bombay twice to meet Bruce because he said he was coming. I traipsed back, driving hundreds of miles, and he didn’t come, ever.’

  303 E.C.: ‘A half-Siamese ginger cat completely focussed on me. When I left, he went mad and never recovered.’

  304 E.C.: ‘The sherbet spoon was mine.’

  305 Valerian (b.15 December 1970), 3rd Baron Freyberg; ‘my godson and perennial favourite’, Chatwin described him in an inscription to On the Black Hill.