Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  403 E.C.: ‘In Peru I could tell he was speaking Argentine Spanish, full of expressions the Peruvians didn’t understand.’

  404 George Plimpton (1927-2003) journalist and founder of Paris Review.

  405 Stone Cottage was a conical gatehouse once owned by Margaret Stone, widow of Austin Tappan Wright, author of the Tolkien-like novel Islandia (1942).

  406 Adrian Chanler, E.C.’s brother, with his then wife, Teri Blackmer. They divorced.

  407 E.C.: ‘There was constant fresh fish. Fishermen would give us sea-bass and bluefish. The water’s so polluted now, you can’t eat the fish.’

  408 Elsie de Wolfe, known as Lady Mendl (1865-1950), American interior decorator. E.C.: ‘She had rag-rugs in Persian carpet patterns that were stunning and real French provincial furniture. I stole a rug and a lamp that they’d chucked out.’

  409 Ethnographic picture.

  410 Leslie Chatwin (1871-1933), Chatwin’s grandfather.

  411 Hubert Jones, cousin of Chatwin’s Milward grandmother.

  412 John Chatwin, Chatwin’s first cousin.

  413 Charles and Margharita had come for Christmas. E.C.: ‘Most of the time we went off on picnics and left Bruce behind for the day.’

  414 A dark brown leather rucksack, copied from a canvas bag, without a frame but with special pockets, that Chatwin had made up by a saddler’s in Cirencester. He left it to Werner Herzog.

  415 Michael and Sandy Marsh (née Alexandra Acevedo Kirkland) had driven from Paris with Chatwin’s friend, David Sulzberger. The bearded Michael was third son of a Texas rancher with petrol and helium reserves, and brother of Stanley, who erected a fence from half-buried new Cadillacs. Sandy eventually jumped out of a window in New York.

  416 David Sulzberger (b.1946), oriental dealer and former lover of Sandy Marsh; Chatwin used to write in his apartment at Quai Bourbon on Isle St Louis.

  417 Gregor Von Rezzori.

  418 Linda Adams, Kasmin’s girlfriend. J.K.: ‘I was divorcing my wife Jane and I used to pour my heart out to Bruce.’

  419 Son of Countess of Sutherland and a former policeman in the Metropolitan Police.

  420 Hill never completed his autobiography.

  421 Grace Kolin (b.1923) m. 1961 William Ward, 3rd Earl Dudley.

  422 Lynda Price (b.1944), nicknamed ‘Tiger’ and a student from Chelsea Art School, had lived with Brenan since 1968. ‘I loved him but I loved him as one loves an uncle.’ Brenan never even once kissed her passionately. In 1978 she married the Swedish painter Lars Pranger.

  423 Zalin Grant, neighbour of Brenan and author of Survivors, who spent 30 years trying to establish what had happened to the missing journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. ‘Of course the Vietnam War was always with us.’

  424 José de Ribera (1591-1652), Spanish painter. E.C.: ‘Bruce had decided Ribera was the greatest artist ever, the usual hysteria.’

  425 Maschler agreed to pay an advance of £600 under the terms drawn up eight years earlier for The Nomadic Alternative.

  426 Brenan would leave to Chatwin all his Central Asian books bought during the First World War.

  427 E.C.: ‘He would wear out people in certain places and then have to move on. Everything was absolute paradise etc for about a month and then things were not quite what he wanted them to be. I discovered after years of this nonsense that the sure-fire way of making Bruce not buy a house was for me to agree.’

  428 Notebook: ‘The king sat down on the green plastic seat of the throne. He was a very old king. A man called Burton came to see his father the year he was born. That made him a hundred and twelve. He had thick glasses and a big square jaw. One of the queens held a yellow parasol over his head. He knew all about Dom Francisco. “My grandfather’s best friend,” he said. “My grandfather called him Adjunakou, The Elephant. He was a big man, bigger than both of you together. My grandfather took him out of prison. He lifted him up a ladder and over the wall. My grandfather was even bigger than Dom Francisco.”

  ‘The queen was bored. She sat and mended the parasol which had a broken strut. She steadied the handle with her big toe. A man came in and kissed the concrete floor. The King went on with the story. At the end he held out his hand and we paid a thousand francs. He told another story and we paid a little less.

  ‘He could go on all day. He liked telling stories. He liked getting paid for them. There was not much left for a king to do.’

  429 E.C.: ‘He called me this ever since our honeymoon, when we all bought name tags in a petrol station on the way to Maine.’ The labels stuck. Chatwin was Max; Elizabeth, Maxine; Cary, Earl; Edith, Darleene or The Dahling (as sometimes was Elizabeth).

  430 Keith Nicholson Price. Brenan had sent Chatwin his address in Ibadan, writing on 8 December: ‘Do go & see him.’

  431 E.C.: ‘There was a dish called “baked vegetables”, covered with a thick white sauce and cooked in the oven.’

  432 Pierre Verger, alias Fatumbi (1902-96), photographer, self-taught ethnographer and Yoruba priest, was an expert on the slave trade between West Africa and Brazil.

  433 Sutherland had looked after Holwell when Elizabeth was in India. ‘Bruce didn’t get on with him at all.’

  434 Chatwin’s guide – ‘a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth’ – was a direct descendant of de Souza.

  435 Xango, the Orixa god of fire.

  436 N.S.: ‘The situation remained unchanged in 1995 when I accompanied the Bahia street musician Rasbutta da Silva to Benin to seek his African ancestors. At the Maison Familiale da Silva in Porto Novo, the clan, all descended from the Bahia slaver José-Rodrigues da Silva, imagined Rasbutta to be immoderately rich, like his namesake. They crowded around him, saying: “When are you going to take us to your big house in Brazil?”’

  437 Susannah Clapp, Chatwin’s editor at Cape.

  438 Hélder Camara (1909-99), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife, famous for saying: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.’

  439 Chatwin means Mother Teresa.

  440 Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), Italian journalist.

  441 The Sunday Times did not commission the article.

  442 Margaret Mee (1908-88), English botanical artist living in Rio de Janeiro.

  443 The footnote on page 148 of the first edition of In Patagonia read: ‘My great-grandfather, Robert Harding Milward, did not go into the family’s Worcestershire needle business, but went into the law. He was a wonderful-looking man, eaten up with snobbery and delusions of grandeur. He was the Duke of Marlborough’s man of business and went to America to negotiate the Vanderbilt marriage settlement. (The Duke later sacked him for “grose incompitance”.) He was a friend of Richter, the Wagnerian conductor; of Madame Patti, and of Charles Gounod, whose son, Jean, was briefly engaged to my great-aunt Dora. His financial manoeuvres were bound to land him in trouble. In 1902 he went bankrupt for £97,000 and the Lord Chief Justice gave him six years for embezzlement. In Ventnor Jail a tumour developed in his brain and he died.’

  444 David King (b.1943), art editor of Sunday Times Magazine 1965-75.

  445 Graziella Ortiz was kidnapped from the grounds of Chateau Elma near Lake Geneva. The trail led to an abandoned Alfa Romeo near the French border. She was released ten days later, slightly chubbier – ‘obviously from being fed starches,’ her father said – following the payment of a $2 million ransom.

  446 Wyndham’s mother, author and socialite Violet Leverson m.1923 Guy Percy Wyndham (1865-1941). On 25 October, Wyndham replied: ‘Yes, Violet is a million times better – it seemed like a miracle cure, though of course all it really consisted in was not taking what the doctor ordered.’

  447 Antony Lambton, 6th Earl of Durham (1922-2006), Conservative MP, author and owner of Villa Cetinale, a 17th century villa in Tuscany.

  448 Kitty Lillaz, Parisian beauty married to philanthropist George Lillaz, had driven to
Tuscany from Grasse; Jacqueline Roque who had married Picasso in 1961 was to have come with her but suddenly was unwell.

  449 Writer and traveller (1926-2007) who had reviewed In Patagonia in the Observer. ‘Chatwin’s telling is masterly, as tantalising as the synopsis of a newly discovered Conrad novel.’ Wyndham wrote: ‘Perhaps none of them quite get the hang of what you are doing, but they all seem to love the book and that will make lots of people read it, some of whom may get the hang!’

  450 Tom Maschler’s cottage on the Welsh Borders; one of Chatwin’s myriad writing places.

  451 E.C.: ‘It rained all summer.’

  452 The Baburnama, the memoirs of Zahir ud-Din Mohammad Babur (1483-1530), founder of the Mughal Empire, translated by Annette Beveridge.

  453 Soviet short story writer (1884-1940).

  454 Untraced. Babur’s father was drunk or the steps to the pigeon loft were rickety.

  455 Abu’l Faz’l (1551-1602), author of the Akbarnama, the official history of Akbar’s reign.

  456 In Patagonia did not have photographs in its American edition.

  457 Jim Silberman of Summit Books at Simon & Schuster paid an advance of $5,000.

  458 Welch had written to Chatwin: ‘We telephoned G[eorge] O[rtiz] this morning. Graziella is back and not discussing her 10½ days of captivity . . . she is “resilient & strong” says G. and the captors did not treat her badly. But how utterly horrible!’

  459 Howard Hodgkin, married father of two, had come out as gay and left his wife for a younger man. Welch had written to Chatwin: ‘RS, in London, told me that life had been painful for H. on the personal front. Sad.’

  460 Monica’s brother was born, and lived, in England. In her letter to Charles Chatwin, Monica had written: ‘As I’m sure you know, rape usually results in two victims, and did so in this case – and herein lay the tragedy . . . The tragedy of my brother is neverending for he found after many years that he was not even a British citizen – this after serving 8 years in H.M. Forces during and immediately after the war, and having obtained a job with Municipal Welfare services in the UK (he never returned to Chile after 1928).’ About the identity of the rapist, she wrote to Chatwin on 25 March 1978: ‘I do know the man’s name, and believed he suffered a terrible retribution as I understand one, maybe two of his children went down in the “Aviles” on their way to the war.’

  461 Monica never completed her father’s biography.

  462 On 26 January 1978 she telephoned Elizabeth at Holwell Farm, dictating this message: THANK YOU LETTER JUST RECEIVED STOP AGREE CHANGES PAGE 173 AND APPRECIATE REVISION OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT NOTE CONGRATULATIONS BOOK‘S SUCCESS MONICA.

  463 Indira Gandhi (1917-84), after her election defeat in 1977, in which she lost her seat, was campaigning to be relected, possibly as a prelude to running again for Prime Minister. The Sunday Times magazine had commissioned Chatwin to write a profile.

  464 E.C.: ‘The flat was near Canonbury Square. At the last minute, he pulled out. He suddenly realised that it was too far away and no one would come and see him.’

  465 ‘On the Road with Mrs Gandhi,’ Sunday Times magazine, 30 July 1978.

  466 Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer (1864-1927), British officer who gave orders in Amritsar on 13 April 1919 to open fire on unarmed civilians, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths.

  467 Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944 film directed by Frank Capra based on Joseph Kesselring’s play.

  468 Charan Singh (1902-87), Prime Minister of India 1979-80.

  469 Lala Leach, Monica’s sister.

  470 ‘The Quest for the Wolf Children’ appeared in the Sunday Times magazine, 30 July 1978.

  471 Donald Richards. Frances Partridge, diary 4 May 1974: ‘Donald good-looking (and knows it) but charming . . . He is Australian and has worked among aboriginal children, is now trying to write a Ph.d on the Indian Raj, loves opera, is drawn to the idea of death, calls everyone by their Christian names at once, but in a way that doesn’t offend.’

  472 Paul Scott (1920-78), British novelist best known for The Raj Quartet.

  473 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b.1927), novelist and screenwriter who worked with James Ivory.

  474 R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), Indian writer in English much praised by Graham Greene, who published him.

  475 (Sir) V. S. Naipaul (b.1932), British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent.

  476 Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), Russian short story writer. One of Chatwin’s unfinished projects was to write an introduction to Dark Avenues for Robinson Books.

  477 Russian poet and essayist (1891-1938).

  478 Les Prés D’Eugénie, Eugénie les Bains.

  479 Sonia Brownell (1918-80) m. George Orwell 1949 and 1958-65 Michael Pitt-Rivers.

  480 Chatwin had visited Nadezhda Mandelstam in Moscow, through the introduction of Martha Gellhorn who advised him to take her ‘champagne, cheap thrillers and marmalade’. A dishcloth printed with a map of Queensland hung from a hook on the door. She asked him to straighten a picture, explaining: ‘I threw a book and hit it by mistake. A disgusting book by an Australian woman. Don’t you want to know what the book was? The Female Eunuch.’ Chatwin’s introduction to Clarence Brown’s translation of Journey to Armenia (1933) was first published in Bananas, Russian Issue (1978), and later by the Redstone Press (1989).

  481 Emma Tennant (b.1937), British novelist.

  482 His Highness Maharaja Sri Gaj Singhji of Marwar-Jodhpur (b.1948), or ‘Bapji’, was at Eton and Christ Church.

  483 British artist (b.1945), specialising in crosses, who had introduced Chatwin to Donald Richards.

  484 Novel written by Stendhal in 52 days (from 4 November to 26 December 1839).

  485 Jan Morris (b.1926), British writer known as James Morris prior to sex change in 1973.

  486 Kynaston McShine, curator at Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  487 Alison’s husband Brendan had worked for the United Nations in Dahomey in the late 1960s; it was partly at his urging that Chatwin had made his first visit there in 1972. The Oxmantons were now based in Algiers.

  488 ‘Fatal Journey to Marseilles – North Africans in France,’ Sunday Times magazine, 6 January 1974.

  489 American actor and director (b.1942).

  490 James Fox, journalist on Sunday Times magazine (b.1945), m. Chloe Peploe.

  491 Xan Fielding (1918-91), British S.O.E. agent and author, was writing a book on the wind, Aeolus Displayed (1991). He and Magouche would marry in 1979.

  492 Acheson’s family home on the Welsh Marches.

  493 Joao was barman at the Othon Palace Hotel on Copacabana.

  494 ‘I have been thinking of you a lot, day and night, all the time – don’t forget me I do my love my beautiful, I really want to hug you, kiss you, feel your body that makes me feel so good. When it’s cold I think about going out to look for you so that you can warm me, warm my body with your heat, but suddenly I remember that it’s impossible to meet you because you are such a long way from me.’

  495 Acheson’s family had worked in Iqique during Chile’s nitrate boom, before the discovery of artificial fertiliser in the late 1920s. The story of their overnight decline and humiliating suburban decay – ‘still wearing tattered Worth dresses’ – captivated Chatwin.

  496 BBC television producer (1934-84).

  497 L’Atalante (1934), French film directed by Jean Vigo about a honeymoon barge trip between Le Havre and Paris. Chatwin’s parents were shareholders of an Atalanta class low-keeled boat, ideal for exploring estuaries and canals. H.C.: ‘Margharita had fallen in love with the simple life of French couples operating the sand barges of the Seine. If born again into another existence, she said, this was to be her preferred occupation.’ The Royal Crusing Club, of which Charles was a member, enjoyed mooring rights on the Isle de la Cité.