Bruce Chatwin (17 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce responded in the manner of Paul Pennyfeather seeing Margot Beste-Chetwynde (pronounced Beast Chained) alight from her Rolls Royce at Llanabba school sports day. “I suddenly represented something he wanted to be a part of,” says Ivry. “I was Bruce’s first taste of London glamour and sophistication.”
Ivry and Emeric took the two boys out to lunch. In the afternoon Raulin brought his sister to Bruce’s study where they consumed the cake. (“Awfully nice to give us such a wonderful lunch – and the cake!! Oooh!! You really must think I am starved. It’s an absolute beauty,” Raulin wrote the following day.) About Bruce, he had warned Ivry: “This is the most fascinating man with whom I think you’ll have a great deal in common.” As her brother had predicted, she found Bruce “vital and intensely bright”.
Ivry Guild’s visit may have inspired Bruce’s essay on “Cars & Character”. “You can tell a man’s character from the vehicles he owns and the way in which he drives them,” he wrote. A white Allard showed moral depravity and an addiction to drugs; a Rover exemplified the solid world of solicitors and accountants, and whereas the owner of a black Rolls Royce – “or, just permissibly, a midnight blue or olive green one” – gave clear indication of his or her social respectability, the owner of a red or white one most certainly did not: “Indeed he is probably a property speculator in Birmingham.” And Birmingham, his father’s city, was definitely not what Bruce wanted for himself.
In his third year at Marlborough, Bruce had planned to try for a place at Oxford. His housemaster hoped that his desire to read Classics at Merton – the college of his grandfather and of Robert Byron – would give him “the stabilising influence and the ambition to be achieved, which I think he has lacked up till now.” But then National Service ended. The university had abruptly to find room for a whole extra generation of students. It meant that Bruce might have to delay coming up for two years. Worried about the financial implications – he had had to borrow from the bank to pay for the fees at Marlborough – Charles failed to encourage Bruce to push for a place at Oxford. “I told him: I’m not keen on paying when you don’t know what to do.” In the absence of a firm purpose, Bruce was unwilling to contradict his father. Charles did nothing to conceal his satisfaction. “When it was decided that I should not go to the University,” joked Bruce in his essay on sailing, “it was the sign for instant celebration and the purchase of a new yacht.”
If later in his life Bruce regretted that he had not gone to Oxford and blamed his father, at the time he turned the decision to his advantage. It singled him out. “You’re all so boring,” he told Michael Cannon. “You’re all going to Cambridge. I’m going to do something else.”
“I remember thinking, it was rather brave,” says Cannon.
Bruce proposed a stage career. In March 1958, he had directed a successful production of
Tons of Money
, for which Margharita had supplied the dresses. “I congratulate him on his direction,” wrote his by now desperate housemaster. “The undoubted success he had on the stage in Memorial Hall shows that he is extremely capable at organising other people, while the unsatisfactory reports in this folder show that he is not very capable at organising himself. In the holidays Bruce simply
must
get to grips with himself, and with his father’s aid,
must
evolve a plan for his future.”
Tons of Money
, for which Margharita had supplied the dresses. “I congratulate him on his direction,” wrote his by now desperate housemaster. “The undoubted success he had on the stage in Memorial Hall shows that he is extremely capable at organising other people, while the unsatisfactory reports in this folder show that he is not very capable at organising himself. In the holidays Bruce simply
must
get to grips with himself, and with his father’s aid,
must
evolve a plan for his future.”
Charles Chatwin shrank at the prospect of his son as an actor. He wondered if Bruce might not be interested in a career in the family’s other business: architecture. “He could draw and I felt he had the ability to create buildings.” Here two problems arose. Bruce was no good at maths (“He has been feeling his way very slowly in the realms of Calculus”); and if he was going to study architecture, he insisted on doing so at the Architectural Association in London. Charles would not agree. He had inherited his forebears’ aversion to the capital. “He felt London was dangerous,” says Hugh, denied four years later on the same grounds. “London experience may be a good thing – but not straight from boarding school, living away from home for the first time.”
Bruce’s second idea was a job in Africa. Marlborough had strong connections with the colonial service. On leaving school, several boys went to work in Northern Rhodesia, including Guild. However, when Bruce proposed his African plan, it was Margharita who objected. In Africa Uncle Humphrey had met his “sad end” and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was still fresh. It was “obviously quite unsafe”, she told him.
Then, in
Vogue
, Margharita read an article about a firm of fine art auctioneers. She canvassed Charles. “What about Sotheby’s for Bruce?” Mastering his reluctance to send Bruce to London, Charles contacted one of his clients, a chartered surveyor who had sold at Sotheby’s a Monet “of a train going over a bridge”. On 15 April 1958, enclosing Guy Bartleet’s letter of introduction, Bruce wrote to Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s. “I am very anxious to learn the best way of making a career in Fine Art. If you would find time to see me before I go back to school on May 1st, I should be most grateful.” A meeting was fixed.
Vogue
, Margharita read an article about a firm of fine art auctioneers. She canvassed Charles. “What about Sotheby’s for Bruce?” Mastering his reluctance to send Bruce to London, Charles contacted one of his clients, a chartered surveyor who had sold at Sotheby’s a Monet “of a train going over a bridge”. On 15 April 1958, enclosing Guy Bartleet’s letter of introduction, Bruce wrote to Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s. “I am very anxious to learn the best way of making a career in Fine Art. If you would find time to see me before I go back to school on May 1st, I should be most grateful.” A meeting was fixed.
The interview went well. “I very much enjoyed meeting your son and shall look forward to seeing him again during the summer,” Wilson informed Charles on 7 May. He had asked Bruce to get in touch in June, when it would be known whether there was a vacancy. “If there does happen to be a job available,” Bruce wrote to Wilson, “I am very keen to take it.”
And there matters rested. A meeting proposed by Wilson for 3 July fell in the middle of Bruce’s A Levels. (He would get passes in Latin, Greek and Ancient History). Two further appointments were cancelled at the last minute, one coinciding with the family’s sailing holiday to St Malo. At last, on Friday, 26 September, an interview took place with Richard Timewell, Head of Furniture in the Works of Art department.
“I was told he had just left Marlborough,” says Timewell. “It’s very difficult, when you’re trying to engage someone, to ask the right questions. I said to him: ‘Do you know Avebury Manor?’ I’d had a lot to do with the sale of that house. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I used to go as a paid guide on Saturday afternoons.’
*
He was then able to go through the house room by room and describe everything and say what it was. I was enormously impressed. I took him on.”
*
He was then able to go through the house room by room and describe everything and say what it was. I was enormously impressed. I took him on.”
Bruce liked to remind Margharita that he had accepted the job with her in mind, to honour her wishes. “I was sent to Sotheby’s very much against my will by my mother who decided it would be much better for her precious little child to be working in the safe firm of fine art auctioneers than to travel to Kenya.” Years later, sick and dying, he told her: “Mummy, you ought
never
to have let your little boy go to London at 18.”
never
to have let your little boy go to London at 18.”
VIII
The Smootherboy
An emporium where nobody expects you to buy, a museum where all the objects are changed once a week like the water in a swimming pool . . .
—Cyril Connolly, Sotheby’s
Yearbook,
1960–1
Yearbook,
1960–1
A LITTLE AFTER 9.30 P.M. ON 15 OCTOBER 1958, SOTHEBY’S NEW
chairman Peter Wilson raised his gavel to auction seven Impressionist masterpieces. He had staked his career on this moment, the culmination of two years of intense negotiation with the estate of the German-Jewish collector Jakob Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt’s executors had first approached Christie’s, traditionally auctioneers to the nobility, requesting a big social splash. Sir Alec Martin had pulled a long face at the suggestion of an evening sale with bidders in black tie and evening dresses, and was not impressed by the expectation of a lower than usual commission. The executors next sounded out Sotheby’s, auctioneers to the carriage trade. Peter Wilson revelled in special terms. He would arrange the sale on the far side of the moon if that was what the estate wanted.
chairman Peter Wilson raised his gavel to auction seven Impressionist masterpieces. He had staked his career on this moment, the culmination of two years of intense negotiation with the estate of the German-Jewish collector Jakob Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt’s executors had first approached Christie’s, traditionally auctioneers to the nobility, requesting a big social splash. Sir Alec Martin had pulled a long face at the suggestion of an evening sale with bidders in black tie and evening dresses, and was not impressed by the expectation of a lower than usual commission. The executors next sounded out Sotheby’s, auctioneers to the carriage trade. Peter Wilson revelled in special terms. He would arrange the sale on the far side of the moon if that was what the estate wanted.
Maximum publicity, as stipulated, attended the event. The first evening sale since the eighteenth century; television news cameras for the first time; and 1,400 ticket holders in evening dress, including Margot Fonteyn, Kirk Douglas and Somerset Maugham.
Wilson was a charismatic auctioneer. “He could make each person in turn think only you and he had this special understanding of this work of art,” says Peregrine Pollen, his former assistant. Within five minutes Wilson had sold three paintings. The sixth lot was Cézanne’s
Garçon au Gilet Rouge.
When the bidding stopped at £220,000, double the price ever paid for a modern picture, Wilson cast his gaze around the room. In a calm voice, he said: “What, will no one offer any more?”
Garçon au Gilet Rouge.
When the bidding stopped at £220,000, double the price ever paid for a modern picture, Wilson cast his gaze around the room. In a calm voice, he said: “What, will no one offer any more?”
“That,” says Pollen, “snapped the elastic.” Gasps broke into applause. This was not only a world record, but by such a large margin that for a number of years Impressionist paintings did not go for auction anywhere else. In the span of 21 minutes the fortunes of Sotheby’s, the art world, and of London’s place in it, had shifted. It was, for Bruce, a piece of good fortune to be joining the firm that autumn.
Until Wilson’s appointment as chairman, Sotheby’s had operated like a quiet and rather scholarly family firm in a more innocent time. It comprised four departments, a staff of about 60 and a representative in New York whose secretary forwarded letters. Publicity consisted of a modest advertisement placed in
The Times.
After the Goldschmidt sale, Wilson took Sotheby’s by the scruff of its neck and expanded the number of departments from four to 15. Marcus Linell, the porter whom Bruce was hired to assist, says: “It can only be described as the Wild West. We were a tremendously ignorant bunch of people with extraordinary confidence, being sent off to Paris, Switzerland, New York. It was the exceptional moment, rather than the exceptional person.” Linell likened the experience to riding in a troika. “You were panting behind, thinking, ‘My God! What a marvellous life this is’.”
The Times.
After the Goldschmidt sale, Wilson took Sotheby’s by the scruff of its neck and expanded the number of departments from four to 15. Marcus Linell, the porter whom Bruce was hired to assist, says: “It can only be described as the Wild West. We were a tremendously ignorant bunch of people with extraordinary confidence, being sent off to Paris, Switzerland, New York. It was the exceptional moment, rather than the exceptional person.” Linell likened the experience to riding in a troika. “You were panting behind, thinking, ‘My God! What a marvellous life this is’.”
Bruce rode the crest of this expansion. “There is no doubt in my mind,” says David Nash, who worked alongside Bruce in the Impressionist department, “that Sotheby’s was the main stimulus of Bruce’s life, whether he likes to admit it or not.” He learned how to look at an object and to describe it compactly. Sponsored by Sotheby’s, he travelled to countries where these objects originated and in Robert Byron’s footsteps to Afghanistan. Sotheby’s enabled him to meet a network of aesthetically-minded, rich, enquiring young people. It also introduced him to his wife.
Yet after three years the loathing set in. “I suddenly had a horror of the so called ART WORLD,” he wrote to a friend, “and though I went on to be a Director of Sotheby’s everything about the firm filled me with claustrophobia and disgust.”
Bruce entered Sotheby’s as a numbering porter in the Works of Art department at a salary of £8 a week. For his first season, he took the tube from Ealing Broadway to Victoria. In the evening he returned to his uncle John’s house at III Cleveland Road, Ealing, a semi-detached Wimpey house built in the 1930s. He did not discuss his work. “He was finding his way,” says John Turnell. “He went into that job relatively cold.”
The dealer Jane Abdy met him during these early days. “He was stocky, thickly built and looked like a country boy.” Speaking in a piping voice, Bruce struck Abdy as unsophisticated, with an enthusiasm and a bounciness which her Oxford contemporaries would have considered “most odd”. Brian Sewell, the art critic, that year started work at the rival house, Christie’s. “It is easy to forget how pure Bruce was at that stage,” he says. “There was a frankness and honesty about him. He would have made a very good priest.” To the dealer Robert Erskine, Bruce looked like a young curate “rather wet behind the ears”. The transformation from chubby-cheeked Marlborough
ingénu
to “Smootherboy” would take place, in the words of one who had known Bruce since childhood, “in a phenomenally short time”.
ingénu
to “Smootherboy” would take place, in the words of one who had known Bruce since childhood, “in a phenomenally short time”.
Bruce’s first duties in the Works of Art department were to shift and dust European and Oriental ceramics, glass, majolica, and tribal antiquities. His job was to locate each object on the storage shelves where it might have stayed for months, dust it, place the owner’s name against a lot description, and safely stack it on the trolleys to take up to the sale room. “Whenever there was a sale,” he said, “I would put on my grey porter’s uniform and stand behind the glass vitrines, making sure that prospective buyers didn’t sticky the objects with their fingers.” Soon he was bored by the menial tasks required of him.
For three weeks he shared a room with John Mallet, a junior cataloguer in ceramics. Mallet says, “We were supposed to be cataloguing ceramics, including Chinese; sculpture from the fall of the Roman Empire to Rodin, objects of
vertu
and miniatures. Bruce would go for the objects that appealed to him and leave me with the boring things.” Mallet found him bumptious, “a slightly phoney figure” interested in silly ideas. “He said he had written a thesis on ‘Sausages as phallic symbols’. This didn’t interest me a great deal. I had my doubts as to what he was up to. It seemed confidences of a most horrific kind were waiting to be prised out of him.”
vertu
and miniatures. Bruce would go for the objects that appealed to him and leave me with the boring things.” Mallet found him bumptious, “a slightly phoney figure” interested in silly ideas. “He said he had written a thesis on ‘Sausages as phallic symbols’. This didn’t interest me a great deal. I had my doubts as to what he was up to. It seemed confidences of a most horrific kind were waiting to be prised out of him.”
Marcus Linell, the department’s other numbering porter, was technically his boss. “Bruce would wander around where he wanted. When sales went on view, there would be 35 lots missing and things were misnumbered and dirty. After four months I went to Jim Kiddell and said: ‘This is hopeless, he simply won’t concentrate on doing the job.’ The next thing I’m told, he’s going to work in furniture.”
The Head of the Furniture department was Richard Timewell, who had interviewed him, but hardly had Bruce landed there before Timewell was visited by Peter Wilson, who wanted to discuss his young charge.
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