Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  590 George Melly was appearing at the Perth Jazz Festival with John Chilton’s Feet-warmers.

  591 Father Dan O’Donovan. ‘Yes, I remember well the day Bruce turned up at my paperbark humpie, just south of Cape Leveque lighthouse . . . Regarding the pages which pertain to me [in The Songlines], apart from a couple of details accurately conveyed, the whole statement is purest fantasy.’

  592 Richards ended up working at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

  593 Diana’s daughter. Her Italian boyfriend, Marco Bellucci, a friend of Teddy Millington-Drake, had died in a car accident in Radda in Chianti. Chatwin wrote to her, the only person to do so. ‘My dear Candy, A short and terribly inadequate note to say I am thinking of you in your sorrow. With all my love, Bruce.’

  594 Lady Sophia Vane Tempest Stewart (b.1959), Marco’s previous girlfriend.

  595 Hon. Jasper Guinness (b.1954) lived near Siena.

  596 1923 novel by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) about his short residence in Western Australia and New South Wales, and reflecting his sense of persecution at the hand of the English.

  597 Sydney film producer; Chatwin was so taken with her name that he planned to call his projected ‘Russian novel’ Lydia Livingstone.

  598 Werner Herzog (b.1942), German film director, was filming Where the Green Ants Dream in Coober Pedy, based on the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement and their lawsuit against a mining company. Chatwin had met Herzog in Melbourne on 8 March 1983, and talked for 48 hours non-stop, it seemed to Herzog. W.H.: ‘It was a delirium, a torrent of storytelling. It went on and on, interrupted by only a few hours of sleep.’

  599 M.B. to B.C. 26 June 1983: ‘I mentioned to S. Hazzard and Steegmuller we’d penetrated the Blue Mountains, but that our view of “Govett’s Leap” was spoiled by a girl squeezing the pimples on the back of her fiancé’s neck nearby, perhaps you noticed?’

  600 E.C.: ‘He didn’t go back then. Werner offered him a bit part, but he decided that he didn’t want to be in the film.’

  601 Margaret Wordsworth (b.1944); m. 1965-91 Murray Bail.

  602 Lisa van Gruisen (b.1951), m. 1986 Tenzin Cheogyal; marketing director Tiger Mountain Group Nepal 1974 – 97. She had organised the Chatwins’ trek.

  603 On 9 June 1983 the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher won the most decisive election victory since that of Labour in 1945. Chatwin had been equally appalled when Harold Wilson’s Labour Party hung on to power in October 1974. He had watched the result on Robin Lane Fox’s television in London. R.L.F: ‘I said, “This is so awful, I might emigrate.” Chatwin said: “I can’t think why anyone would want to live here in the first place.”’

  604 E.C.: ‘We were near Gokyo-Ri, at 13,000 feet. We’d been in our tent and Bruce said, “Come over here. Look, what do you think of this?” There were tracks. I said, “Nah, can’t be.” I was hugely sceptical. Immediately, I thought: Someone with a broomstick and shoe can make those. But they weren’t bootprints and they ended where the snow had melted off the bare rocks. There was no explanation.’

  605 Independent bookshop set up by John Sandoe in Chelsea in 1957.

  606 Mario Vargas Llosa (b.1936), Peruvian novelist.

  607 Frank Delaney, BBC2, broadcast on 24 October 1983.

  608 Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine short-story writer and essayist. ‘What is wonderful about his writing is the compression of his thought,’ Chatwin said on the programme. ‘They say Borges lives in a world of imagination and dreams, but he’s central to life.’ His influence is evident in Chatwin’s 1979 story ‘The Estate of Maximilian Tod’.

  609 The General Belgrano was an Argentine Navy cruiser sunk by HMS Conqueror on 2 May during the Falklands War with the loss of 323 lives. In notes for an unpublished essay on this episode, Chatwin wrote: ‘I cling to the archaic idea that unjustifiable killing in peace or war eventually rebounds on the killer. The dead do haunt the living. There is such a thing as blood guilt.’

  610 Margaret Thatcher (b.1925), British Prime Minister 1979-90.

  611 General Leopoldo Galtieri (1926-2003), President of Argentina 1981-2.

  612 Nicholas Shakespeare (b.1957), author and broadcaster, had invited Chatwin to appear on BBC2’s Frank Delaney with Borges and Vargas Llosa.

  613 Charles P. Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert (1976). Bail had written to Bruce: ‘The entire edition was pulped after Aborigines complained that it revealed secrets of dreamtime etc.’

  614 Thomas Bernhard (1931-89), Austrian playwright and novelist.

  615 Kathleen Stuart m.1972 Theodor Strehlow.

  616 Robert Layton, Professor of Anthropology.

  617 Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (b.1920), widow of Sir Anthony Eden, Prime Minister from 1955-57.

  618 The Rezzoris had a house on Rhodes.

  619 A cottage near Hay-on-Wye.

  620 E.C: ‘A group I took to the Himalayas, a 22-day tour that started in Pakistan.’

  621 To Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia. He never wrote it.

  622 The War of the End of the World (1981).

  623 On the show, in the moment before Borges came on, Chatwin enthused: ‘He’s a genius. You can’t go anywhere without packing a Borges. It’s like taking your toothbrush’ – to which Borges, overhearing this on the monitor, muttered: ‘How unhygienic.’

  624 Not quite. Chatwin was staying with David Heathcoat-Amory at Glenfernate. At the critical moment, with the stag in range, he refused to take the rifle and pushed it away. ‘No, I’d like you to shoot it.’

  625 Henry Vaughan (1621-95), Metaphysical poet.

  626 The English novelist William Golding (1911-93) had won the 1983 Nobel Prize.

  627 Notebook: ‘The old Swedish gentleman who told me “The Swedes are the only people who understand about chandeliers. The way ice hangs from a tree.”’ E.C.: ‘Ever since Bruce stayed with the Bratts as a schoolboy he had been longing for a Swedish chandelier.’

  628 Francesco Clemente (b.1952), Italian artist.

  629 Maharaja of Kapurthala at the Calico Museum of Textiles.

  630 Betjeman died the following year.

  631 Dr Charles Kimberlin (‘Bob’) Brain (b.1931), South African palaeontologist, director of the Transvaal Museum and author of The Hunters or the Hunted? described by Chatwin as ‘the most compelling detective story I have ever read’.

  632 E.C.: ‘Margharita had pulled the manuscript out of a wastepaper bin. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to throw this away.”’

  633 Australian anthropologist (1893-1988) known for his 1924 discovery of the first fossil of Australopithecus africanus, ‘flesh-eating, shell-cracking and bone-breaking, cavedwelling apes.’ Notebooks: ‘At his 90th birthday party I watched him swinging about a hematite dumb-bell with which he hoped to keep himself in shape.’

  634 Aboriginal community 530km west of Alice Springs, renamed Cullen in The Songlines . Between 18-30 March 1984 Chatwin stayed in a caravan there at the invitation of the storekeeper, Rob Novak, whom he met at the Adelaide Festival.

  635 British-Indian novelist and essayist (b.1947).

  636 A back-packer’s hostel in Alice Springs.

  637 P.V-M.: ‘I remember him embracing me, jumping on to the bus to Broome . . . There was a certain sense in which he was intoxicated by the place, the things he had found out, and I was part of it.’

  638 Anatoly Sawenko (b.1950), Australian-born son of Ukrainian immigrants, then a consultant to the Aboriginal land rights body of the Central Land Council; Chatwin based Arkady, the central character in The Songlines, on him.

  639 In 1963 Maschler had published The Sun’s Attendant, a first novel by Charles Haldeman, an American whom he had met in Chania. T.M.: ‘We ended up buying jointly, with a friend of Charles’ called Stavroudakis, a flat in a tall Venetian building overlooking the water on No 1 Angel Street. One year in the early 1970s Charles was away in Athens, and his boyfriend, a beautiful Cretan boy, took it upon himself to take an axe and chop through the head of Allen Bole
, a homosexual would-be American writer and friend of Chatwin’s who lived in an apartment across the way. I never went back to the flat after.’

  640 Chatwin had remembered it well. Ibn Khaldun’s actual words: ‘in moments of surplus, when the needs of the individual are surpassed, the war of all against all breaks out with equipment designed to defend himself against wild beasts.’

  641 Alun Hughes supervised excavations at the nearby limestone caves of Sterkfontein where, in 1976, he found the cranium of Homo habilis, c 1.5 million years old.

  642 Julian Randolph Stow (b.1935), Australian anthropologist, librettist and novelist.

  643 William Dalrymple has in fact traced the origin of these prostrations to an Eastern Christian practice in the early Byzantine period.

  644 Lady Maisie Drysdale, widow of Australian artist Sir Russell Drysdale.

  645 Geoffrey Dutton (1922-98) Australian author and historian, had recently left Ninette, his long-standing wife, for one of his students, Robin Lucas, whom he married in April 1985.

  646 James Mollison (b.1931), director of the National Gallery of Australia 1977-90.

  647 Australian anthropologist whom Chatwin had met at the Aboriginal community of Haasts Bluff.

  648 Pitch Dark by Renata Adler (b.1939), American novelist.

  649 In St James’s, where Chatwin and Bail bought their art books. M.B.: ‘Bruce often attacked the British for not seeing the importance of Cézanne. In the 1920s it was almost impossible to see a Cézanne in London; you had to go to Paris.’

  650 The projected novel Lydia Livingstone, with a heroine partly based on Ninette Dutton.

  651 Rushdie had written an article for Tatler about the Adelaide Festival which included the passage: ‘Later in the evening, a beautiful woman starts telling me about the weirdo murders. “Adelaide’s famous for them,” she says, excitedly. “Gay pair slay young girls. Parents axe children and inter them under lawn. Stuff like that. You know.” Rushdie wrote in a postscript, ‘some of the citizens of Adelaide were upset by its reference to “weirdo murders,” even though I’d been told about such crimes by more than one resident of the city.’

  652 Shiva Naipaul (1945-85), author and younger brother of V. S. Naipaul.

  653 Robyn Davidson (b.1950), Australian travel-writer.

  654 Teresa Rose (‘Tisi’) Dutton (b.1961), singer, d. of Ninette and Geoff.

  655 Ian Fairweather (1981).

  656 Harland’s Half Acre (1984).

  657 Russian writer (1925-97), who published his novels in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. Chatwin particularly admired A Voice from The Chorus (1973), a collection of his thoughts from the gulag where he was imprisoned from 1965-71. Chatwin had met him in Barcelona on 26 September 1984. Notebooks: ‘Sinyavsky in a blue jacket with strange long brown shoes. The face of an agreeable peasant. Warm handshake. White beard, gold-rimmed spectacles.’

  658 M.B.: ‘I was in London and trying to get into Sudan. At this small dinner with Bruce – at Michael and Anne Davie’s, whom he hadn’t met – there was discussion on how best to go about it. When we left, Bruce tore into the British, the Davies – for their mundane, philistine, drab way of living and seeing the world. I went into the Embassy the next day. I was “interviewed” by a very tall man with tribal marks cut across both cheeks, and in the middle of the conversation a papier maché portrait of his country’s leader fell off the wall behind him. I didn’t get a visa. Harare was where I went instead.’

  659 ‘Why Australia?’ had appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.

  660 At Pam Bell’s house in Boona, Chatwin had seen a grey Fairweather guache, Painting 1959, that, in Bail’s words, ‘knocked his socks off’.

  661 John Rewald (1912-94), German-born American art historian and author of Paul Cézanne (1948) who created a foundation to turn Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence into a museum.

  662 Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was assassinated in New Delhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984 on her way to be interviewed by Peter Ustinov for a documentary on Irish television.

  663 Mirella Ricciardi (b.1933), photographer.

  664 Ranald Allen, who had met Chatwin in Australia. In the 1970s Allen lived and worked as an Art and Craft adviser with Aborigines. Herzog had briefly approached him to advise on Where the Green Ants Dream. Some time later Allen talked to Wandjuk Marika who had appeared in the film along with his brother Roy, both Senior Law Men from Yirrkalla in North East Arnhem Land. ‘Wandjuk told me how close he and Roy went to spearing Werner on the set when he got a bulldozer driver to keep driving at them during a protest scene and almost ran them over. They reckoned he was a crazy man.’

  665 E.C.: ‘The letter was probably blown out of the car or slipped behind the seat. He was very untidy at loading things. You should have seen his baggage. He had no system at all. It was all jumbled together.’

  666 Ted Strehlow had willed 1,200 sacred artefacts to his second wife Kath for safekeeping, until their baby son Carl came of age. These tjuringas were the subject of a ferocious debate. On 29 May 1992 government agents raided her house in Adelaide and seized books, papers and objects. K.S.: ‘One of the things bugging them was my friendship with the English writer Bruce Chatwin.’

  667 Chatwin had based himself in the Hotel Theano, a five-minute walk from the Leigh Fermors.

  668 By Gerald Murnane (b.1939), Australian writer. The Plains (1982) was a short Borgesian novel about a young film-maker who travels to an imaginary country within Australia where he fails to make a film.

  669 Marina Vaizey, Sunday Times art critic.

  670 Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), French primitive painter and customs officer, known as ‘Le Douanier’.

  671 On 24 August Bail had visited Homer End where Chatwin had read to him the Swartkrans section, after which Bail wrote in his diary: ‘Felt it was written too smoothly, lightly’.

  672 Charles was supposed to be sailing across the Atlantic in a concrete boat. His childhood dream was to sail his own yacht on a trade wind passage, to arrive in time for Christmas at Nelson’s Dockyard, English Harbour, Antigua – all in accordance with Royal Cruising Club tradition.

  673 Two anti-hunt saboteurs had attempted to dig up the late Duke of Beaufort’s grave in Badminton churchyard.

  674 Jasper Conran (b.1959), English fashion designer with whom Chatwin had been involved since 1982.

  675 Australian artist (1904-84). Bail had contributed an essay for a retrospective at the New South Wales Art Gallery. He replied to Chatwin on 18 February 1985: ‘I saw John Passmore as a peculiarly Anglo/Australian product, a slightly primitive man who raised himself with his kind of isolation.’

  676 M.B. replied: ‘Yes, SR is back on the camel lady. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to last . . . SR sent me a note a few weeks ago with a letter enclosed for P. White. He ’d just reread Voss and this was “his first and only fan letter”.’

  677 At Vassar College in New York State.

  678 M.B.: ‘Bruce and I often talked about Cézanne, arguing for our favourite ones. Towards the end, in the wheelchair, he phoned me to say he had bought a Cézanne painting, unfinished, just a few brush strokes, of the mountain. As good as a fully finished work, “better than a Constable cloud study.”’

  679 James Mollison, director of National Gallery of Australia, was then looking to acquire a Cézanne. M.B. was a member of the Council. ‘By the time they got one they could only afford a strange early painting of a bloke in bed with a woman.’