Bruce Chatwin (38 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
While Bruce was away, Margharita had helped Elizabeth to decorate Holwell Farm. “I am full of admiration for the way she copes with everything,” Bruce’s mother wrote to Gertrude. For the exterior, Elizabeth had mixed a special ochre for the stucco using canisters of Winsor & Newton paint powder which the previous owner had left behind in the barn. In September, she took receipt of a double-boiler, another gift from Gertrude.
Bruce arrived home with several French cheeses and a Kelim carpet, and threw himself into a week of handiwork. He stippled the bathroom. He erected osier hurdles as a windbreak for the vegetable garden. He collected fresh water in milk churns. On 4 October, he wrote to Gertrude before going up to Edinburgh: “The whole place has taken a terrific turn for the better and is becoming simply beautiful inside. The kitchen is the most pleasant I have ever known and I think we will almost live in it. I am in the middle of painting the study which will be ready before we go. I once learned a very good technique for colouring walls. You paint them with flat white oil, and then put a very thin layer of coloured wax glaze. This gives the walls a slightly transparent look. We are doing the study in golden ochre which sounds horrible but I think you’ll like it. The bathroom doors which I glazed green over grey blue are a great success. A painter friend of mine is seriously thinking of adopting the technique. The boiler at last works after its teething troubles and the whole place is remarkably warm and has dried out in a way I never thought it would.”
Bruce started his second year at Edinburgh as the lone male in his course. The group of 41 first-year students had slimmed to seven: Bruce and six girls referred to by Piggott as “my foolish virgins”.
Rowan Watson had abandoned his degree and Bruce did not seek another lodger. “We see mostly professors,” wrote Elizabeth to Gertrude.
A blow was the departure of Charles Thomas to the chair at Leicester. No one was found to replace him to lecture in Dark Ages Archaeology and with his departure Bruce was stuck with Roman Britain.
London friends came on fleeting visits, but matters did not improve. “Bruce continues to be steeped in gloom,” Elizabeth wrote in February 1968. “He says he is bored to tears here and doesn’t like
anything
and so doesn’t know what to do at all. I can’t even make out if he likes archaeology now – he says the way you have to study it takes all the romance out of it and all archaeologists are stuck in their own little ruts and aren’t interested in what the others are doing etc., etc. I think really it’s this place – he hasn’t anything to do except study.”
anything
and so doesn’t know what to do at all. I can’t even make out if he likes archaeology now – he says the way you have to study it takes all the romance out of it and all archaeologists are stuck in their own little ruts and aren’t interested in what the others are doing etc., etc. I think really it’s this place – he hasn’t anything to do except study.”
As part of his second-year course, Bruce studied Fine Art under David Talbot Rice. What commended this course to Bruce was his tutor’s friendship with Robert Byron, Talbot Rice’s friend at Eton. It was Talbot Rice, after a visit to Constantinople in 1925, who planted in Byron an interest in Byzantine art. Together they had explored Mount Athos and collaborated in
The Birth of Western Painting
.
The Birth of Western Painting
.
Inasmuch as anyone filled the gap left by Charles Thomas, it was Professor David Talbot Rice and his wife, the historian Tamara. “She is a big Russian version of Penelope Betjeman,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth, “and he beams.”
Eager to hear scraps about Byron, Bruce was a frequent visitor to their house in Nelson Street. The Sunday lunches, served with mulled wine, provided him with a social beacon, while Tamara considered Bruce a breath of fresh air. “I can picture him, elegant, neat, clean, attractively turned out, hair brushed, very definite in his movements, no hesitancy: if he wanted a book from the book case, he was at it before you knew.” She found him ambitious to distinguish himself, but reticent about his personal life – except for one or two vitriolic remarks about Sotheby’s. “He wasn’t a social climber, nor an intellectual climber. I always imagined he was lower middle-class. He was frightfully secretive over his parents. He said he came from Dursley, where his father was an engineer. He was so secretive I didn’t even know where he lived.” She got in touch with him through the Archaeology Department. “I couldn’t see this meteor staying four years at Edinburgh. I kept saying to David: ‘Will he last out?”’
Tamara Talbot Rice was a Lithuanian Jew who had spent the bulk of her life in exile. Her stories were not confined to Byron’s wild shrieks and remorseless teasing, but ranged from Rasputin, whose coffin she had seen hijacked before her eyes in Sergevskaya Street, to Claude Monet with whom she used to sip honey-coloured tea, to her brother who had joined the Maquis. Tamara replaced Peter Wilson as Bruce’s favourite subject for impersonation. “Tamara and Tamara and Tamara . . .”
Her childhood was one Bruce might have concocted for himself: the only daughter of a treasury official, she was brought up in St Petersburg and on two country estates. “Sometimes during Lent I was taken to a jeweller, generally Fabergé, to buy miniature Easter eggs to be worn as bracelets or necklace charms.”
In 1918, she escaped from Russia on the last train using a false passport, reaching Stockholm in time for Christmas, pulled, so she claimed, behind reindeers under white skins in the snow. In Paris, she had worked in the fashion industry. At Oxford, she had known most of the Hypocrites’ Club, including Evelyn Waugh in the days when he was a cartoonist, and Robert Byron.
Five days before she died, Tamara considered the differences between Chatwin and Byron: “Robert I inherited from David. I
chose
Bruce as a friend. But I never had a deep personal affection for him. I think it was not possible. I could have it with Evelyn, who could be maddening, or with Robert, but not with Bruce. He was very self-contained.” This self-containment, she felt, affected his work. “That’s the difference between him and Robert, whom passion activated in the first place. Bruce had no passion. It was all cerebral.”
chose
Bruce as a friend. But I never had a deep personal affection for him. I think it was not possible. I could have it with Evelyn, who could be maddening, or with Robert, but not with Bruce. He was very self-contained.” This self-containment, she felt, affected his work. “That’s the difference between him and Robert, whom passion activated in the first place. Bruce had no passion. It was all cerebral.”
In 1935, Tamara had accompanied Byron back to Russia for a Congress on Persian art. In the Hermitage they had seen displayed the same frozen excavations from the Altai, the same tattooed skin, which had so entranced Bruce. It turned out that on her family’s estate of Volgovo on the middle reaches of the Volga “we had one or two nomadic burial mounds.” Tamara, wearing Harrods boots and a sealskin fur coat, proceeded with her tutor to excavate these sites. “We dug up bits of horse harnesses, nothing exciting.” But her tutor’s tales of how the Scythians ransacked the Crimea in the fourth century and how the Great Wall of China was built against the nomads cultivated a fascination which resulted in her book
The Scythians
, dedicated “to those who lived at Volgovo”, and continued to figure in her conversations with Bruce in Nelson Street. “He wanted to know: Where had the Ark begun? Had the Sarmattans been on Hadrian’s Wall? When did metal stirrups start?” Exactly as her husband had pointed Byron in the direction of Byzantine art, so Tamara led Bruce to his subject. “It was first through me that he came to be interested in nomads.”
The Scythians
, dedicated “to those who lived at Volgovo”, and continued to figure in her conversations with Bruce in Nelson Street. “He wanted to know: Where had the Ark begun? Had the Sarmattans been on Hadrian’s Wall? When did metal stirrups start?” Exactly as her husband had pointed Byron in the direction of Byzantine art, so Tamara led Bruce to his subject. “It was first through me that he came to be interested in nomads.”
It might have come to nothing without the paternalistic hand of Cary Welch, who in the winter of 1967 recommended Bruce to curate an exhibition devoted to the Nomadic Art of the Asian Steppes. Welch had collected this art – weapons, jewellery, horse-harnesses – from the age of 14 while still at boarding school with George Ortiz. He had persuaded the Asia House Gallery in New York to mount the first major exhibition to be called The Animal Style.
Welch never believed that Bruce would make a good academic, but once he had introduced him to Piggott and the decision was made he gave his full support. Recalling the excitement that Bruce had shown over the frozen herdsman, he put his name forward when he heard that the exhibition’s principle curator, Emma Bunker, required an extra hand. “He was billed as a young scholar – and distant relative by marriage of Cary Welch – who, in spite of his captivating eccentricities was somewhat rational,” says Bunker, a young academic in Buddhist studies from Denver.
The exhibition was not due to open until January 1970. Until that time Bruce was expected to use his Sotheby’s training to contact museums and collectors and to gather the best examples of nomadic art, essentially portable objects worn by mounted herdsmen who wandered the steppes of Asia and Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries
BC
. Bruce embraced a project that reflected a variety of his interests. There was the prospect of a book to coincide with the exhibition. Furthermore, there was the incentive of income. Asia House would pay travel expenses to the areas for which Bruce would hold responsibility: Thule and Eskimo, North Russia and Finland. “From the moment he became involved,” says Kasmin, “it marked the new Bruce.”
BC
. Bruce embraced a project that reflected a variety of his interests. There was the prospect of a book to coincide with the exhibition. Furthermore, there was the incentive of income. Asia House would pay travel expenses to the areas for which Bruce would hold responsibility: Thule and Eskimo, North Russia and Finland. “From the moment he became involved,” says Kasmin, “it marked the new Bruce.”
That winter, on his way to Geneseo for Christmas with his in-laws, Bruce met Welch in Boston to discuss ideas. Welch agreed to loan several important bronze ornaments; so would Ortiz. In January, Bruce returned to Edinburgh with a noticeable spring in his step.
The
événements
of May 1968 passed him by. “What amused me was his tunnel vision,” says George Melly. “He knew everything there was to know about Persian miniatures, but he’d never heard of the Muppets.” While students erected barricades in Paris, Cambridge and Ohio, Bruce concentrated on the Asia House exhibition. “The prehistoric Animal Style of Central Asia now obsessed him,” wrote Hugh Honour, who was then a series editor at Allen Lane, “and so well did he talk about it that Penguin was easily persuaded to commission him to write a book on the subject. Everyone who met him at that time was struck by him. He seemed a twentieth-century version of Robert Browning’s
Waring.
And like Waring he would quietly slip away to no one knew where.”
événements
of May 1968 passed him by. “What amused me was his tunnel vision,” says George Melly. “He knew everything there was to know about Persian miniatures, but he’d never heard of the Muppets.” While students erected barricades in Paris, Cambridge and Ohio, Bruce concentrated on the Asia House exhibition. “The prehistoric Animal Style of Central Asia now obsessed him,” wrote Hugh Honour, who was then a series editor at Allen Lane, “and so well did he talk about it that Penguin was easily persuaded to commission him to write a book on the subject. Everyone who met him at that time was struck by him. He seemed a twentieth-century version of Robert Browning’s
Waring.
And like Waring he would quietly slip away to no one knew where.”
“I think he’s probably going to spend the whole of Spring vacation-travelling,” wrote Elizabeth. On 16 March, he departed for Helsinki’s Kansallismuseo, “probably to be birched in the sauna at the expense of Asia House,” he wrote to Welch. “I’ve never been able to make up my mind if I like the idea or not. Wouldn’t it be awful if one suddenly found one was a physical masochist as well as everything else?” He had bought a bellows to take with him for what he conceived as “my Asia House tour”. Also, “the largest
coco-de-mer
I have ever seen. Beautiful and obscene. We take it to bed.”
coco-de-mer
I have ever seen. Beautiful and obscene. We take it to bed.”
In April, he was in France, Switzerland and Italy. He skied for four days with Ortiz in St Moritz, and afterwards drove with Elizabeth to Geneva to pick out some Siberian plaques from the Ortiz collection. They then embarked on a circuit of museums in Basle, Munich, Trento, Mantua, Ravenna and Turin.
Bruce consulted Tamara Talbot Rice at the embryonic stage. She confirmed what he suspected: by far the best stuff was in Leningrad. In 1930, Tamara had assisted with an exhibition of Persian art at Burlington House and its most striking exhibits had come from the Hermitage. “I told Bruce his exhibition couldn’t be done without many important loans from Russia. He wanted me to come and help, but the money didn’t materialise.”
On 26 April, Elizabeth wrote: “Bruce’s plans are still terribly vague; he only knows he wants to go to Russia and is waiting for the money to appear from somewhere.” Piggott now came to the rescue. He invited Bruce to join him and Ruth Tringham on an official tour of archaeological museums in the Soviet Union.
It was a curious little group: Piggott, Ortiz, who had never dug in his life (described in Piggott’s diary as “an odd young Bolivian millionaire”) and Ruth Tringham, who had spent a year arranging the official invitation. “I did it all by letter. Bruce was not going to be part of it. Then before I knew it, Stuart included Bruce. And Bruce invited George Ortiz.”
Relations between Bruce and Tringham, whom he described as “a lady Marxist archaeological student from Hampstead”, were already stretched. It grated on her to find Bruce and Stuart Piggott so close. “I thought: ‘What is this person doing here?’ He knows nothing about European archaeology. He was treated as a post-graduate without any basis at all. I had a feeling he wanted an academic grounding to give him legitimacy. It got on my nerves.” Moreover, the Chatwin van was causing Tringham problems. Its bottom dropped out before she had had it a year.
Piggott, too, was apprehensive about the group’s composition, their different motives for wanting to visit Russia and the threats posed to his palate by a Soviet cuisine. “I now dread [the visit] and wake in the night thinking what hell it will be.”
On 30 June, Piggott went to drinks at Robert Erskine’s where he found Bruce and Andrew Batey. At eight the following morning, Batey drove them to Dover. At Ostend, they boarded a train for Warsaw, there intending to meet up with Ortiz and Tringham.
It seemed to Piggott that foreign travel was an escape for Bruce, “who is running away from himself by travelling.” On 5 July, Piggott glimpsed the origins of Bruce’s volatility. “Bruce talked a lot last night on the necessity of constant escape from Elizabeth’s possessiveness, etc., etc. I can’t make it out. ‘Of course, she’s sweet,’ he said perfunctorily and then discussed how he could get a one-room flat on his own, somewhere to go and work. His travel passion is slightly maniac & could become actually so. And while he’s highly intelligent he’s not really a scholar and I would think won’t make any real academic contribution to archaeology. But he might go crackers.”
Bruce might have complained about Elizabeth’s possessiveness, but he then sat down in his hotel room and dashed off a letter to his wife urging her to join him in Romania.
“Could you try and bring with you
my
compass which is somewhere in my room I think, and failing that can you buy a fairly good one? Can you also bring my copy of Parvan’s
Dacia
, a small green book in
my
shelves and a map of Romania. I only hope you’ll be able to come on the Transylvanian jaunt. Also remember to put the
tent
in the car + a
small
billycan for gas in case you run out . . . I think the best thing is to miss out Hungary if this is going to be difficult by taking the Yugoslav autobahn from Belgrade to Ljubljana.”
my
compass which is somewhere in my room I think, and failing that can you buy a fairly good one? Can you also bring my copy of Parvan’s
Dacia
, a small green book in
my
shelves and a map of Romania. I only hope you’ll be able to come on the Transylvanian jaunt. Also remember to put the
tent
in the car + a
small
billycan for gas in case you run out . . . I think the best thing is to miss out Hungary if this is going to be difficult by taking the Yugoslav autobahn from Belgrade to Ljubljana.”
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