Bruce Chatwin (65 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
The critic John Russell says: “When he was in New York his presence had a real (not a sham) glitter, as if he wanted not so much to charm as to subjugate everyone he met. He also dressed down to a degree that had a dandyism in reverse – unusual at that time – and would appear at some fashionable lunch in a collar-less shirt (no tie, of course). He got away with it.”
He enjoyed his success. “He was vulnerable to incredible wealth and aristocracy,” says Rushdie. “He was vulnerable to old ladies who were vulnerable to him. He had a wonderful array of international battle-axes. Wherever he would turn up there would be some fantastically tough old lady who would want to spend all her time with him and he with her. He multiplied himself all the time and that’s another way of saying perhaps he stretched himself too thin.” He became a walker for Diana Vreeland, the doyenne of the fashion world whose demented extravagance he understood (“Pink is the navy blue of India”). He ate with Susan Sontag in Chinatown. “He was the only person whom I could invite to eat a
hakka
– fried intestines and toe-nails”. And he met Jackie Onassis.
hakka
– fried intestines and toe-nails”. And he met Jackie Onassis.
“Called at 10.40 5th to pick up J. O.” Confirmation of Bruce’s glamorous status was his friendship with Onassis, about whom he spoke at length, alluding to shared intimacies. “He met Jackie two or three times,” says Katz, “but she did say she was charmed by him.”
One evening in December 1978, Bruce arrived at Onassis’s apartment to escort her to a dinner party. “Was it John [her son] who came down in the lift in a vaguely bike-boy’s jacket? Thin, washed and face enigmatic – beautiful distant smile, tight hips in blue jeans on the way for forbidden pleasures.” Upstairs, he cast his eyes around the apartment: exquisite eighteenth-century French chair, straw mat on floor, lacquer table piled with magazines, an album which said “Jack 1962” on the spine. “She came in: in black gold pyjama pants, looking wonderful. The whisper is conspiratorial not affected. The whisper of a naughty child egging you on to do something mildly wicked.”
Bruce told Kenneth Rose how “mucking out a barn in Wales he recalled that it was exactly a week since he had been having a drink with Jackie Onassis”. Her effect on him can be seen in a letter he wrote not long afterwards to Elizabeth:
“Dear Maxine
An impossible piece of paper to write on. Life in New York highly social. Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells, and my God she’s fly. Far more subtle than any American woman I’ve ever met. A man called Charles Rosen, who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating about the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned on him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: ‘Yes, of course, you can see it
all
in the Titian portrait’.”
all
in the Titian portrait’.”
Old friends shrank from the new Bruce. “He had changed,” says Tilo von Watzdorf. Erskine remembered how he came back from America and said: “I’ve just met the most wonderful person in my life. She’s so wonderful, I can’t tell you how wonderful.” It struck Erskine the tone was one of snobbery. “Or had he found merit in someone previously deemed to be spurious? I was a bit sad. I felt I’d slightly lost out with Bruce. I stopped seeing him when he was much too busy being lionised by
glitterati
. I thought: ‘He’s in another room now and it’s not a room I terribly like being in’.”
glitterati
. I thought: ‘He’s in another room now and it’s not a room I terribly like being in’.”
Erskine was not alone in feeling neglected. Welch had introduced Bruce to Onassis, but Bruce now avoided the Welchs when he came to America. Welch wrote to him, “All our encounters of the past few years have been useless: too many people about. Neither of us at his best under mob conditions.” Edith Welch felt Bruce had turned away from them in favour of Mapplethorpe’s razzle-dazzle world. His childhood and Marlborough friend Guy Norton saw him at a restaurant in London: “I said to Bruce ‘How are you?’ and he dismissed me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d heard from friends in the Midlands how he didn’t want to be reminded he belonged to that circle.”
Peter Adam thought that Bruce had become “swamped” by his own silliness. “He was aware – how could he not be? – that he was special. It was a tragedy that he diluted his currency with this silliness, being impressed by people, running after the famous, Nureyev, Jackie Onassis. Why want to be a Truman Capote when you could be a Büchner?”
The Bruce Chatwin of the New York years is one aspect of his life that many close friends, even his wife, could hardly have anticipated. Their puzzlement runs parallel to those who worked with him at Sotheby’s and were frankly astonished to discover that he had become a writer. Having immersed himself in that world he was equally capable of rejecting, or denying it.
James Ivory was a close friend for two years in the decade before Manhattan. In 1972, he took a photograph of Bruce on their drive through Washington State to Oregon, and in a way that image was frozen because it was not developed until 1998. When Ivory had the film processed and looked at the spirit of his friend 26 years on, and already ten years dead, he reflected that he might have misjudged Bruce.
“Bruce loved to have people caress and fondle him (in private). I think he found sex personally very self-affirmative, and as natural and easy as eating. He seemed to be without hang-ups, or guilt. But when I study the photograph I took of him in the Oregon desert, his image springs out at me and suggests there was a man there I might not have known as well as I thought. He must have had a more dangerous, a more self-destructive kind of sex drive than I guessed. I can’t help thinking of the trip he told me about that he made to Russia in order to run down some modern paintings, and how, when he went to view this secret collection, its keeper, big and brawny, once Bruce was inside proceeded to lock the door. Not to keep the KGB out, Bruce said laughing, but in order to passionately throw him down on the floor, where he raped the daylights out of him. A true story or a heavily fantasised one, embellished for dining out? But why should it not have been true? I think he must have experienced, and not just fantasised about, such encounters in the nomad lands he loved to explore. His readiness, his eagerness, in prim Western societies to have someone unbutton his flies, must have had more violent developments in the much wilder, far-off Oriental places he trudged through – not looking very different from the rosy-faced, overgrown schoolboy in the photograph I took. He must have been a sexual magnet in those lands; he must have seemed easy prey: a male version of those romantic nineteenth-century European ladies who travelled to the East to paint watercolours and were captured by sheikhs and kept in a harem for 1001 nights. Is this possibility part of Bruce Chatwin’s image and legend?”
XXVII
Oh, mais c’est du Flaubert!
He felt a slight pain in his chest. The pain came and went in twinges below his heart. It was not serious. This particular pain came when he was in England. It was his English pain. He greeted it as an old friend. It was the pain that told him to head south.
—From BC’s unpublished story, “November”
THE CHANGES IN HIS LIFE MAY BE REFLECTED IN BRUCE’S
fictionalised life of de Souza: a generous man engaged in an abominable traffic, a reluctant exile who fought his natural good impulses to conduct his low life. “I wanted to show in the book how the fate of the slave trader is really rather the same as the fate of someone who might be an executive of Shell or a mining company, who’s originally a good man who gets bound up in the impossible economic system and then is actually dragged down by it.”
fictionalised life of de Souza: a generous man engaged in an abominable traffic, a reluctant exile who fought his natural good impulses to conduct his low life. “I wanted to show in the book how the fate of the slave trader is really rather the same as the fate of someone who might be an executive of Shell or a mining company, who’s originally a good man who gets bound up in the impossible economic system and then is actually dragged down by it.”
The changes also colour the difficult composition of
The Viceroy of Ouidah
. Bruce was tormented by the question of
where
to write his book. From now until the end of his life he was in search of what he described to Kasmin as “this mythical beast ‘the place to write in’”.
The Viceroy of Ouidah
. Bruce was tormented by the question of
where
to write his book. From now until the end of his life he was in search of what he described to Kasmin as “this mythical beast ‘the place to write in’”.
He had written to Kasmin from Bahia: “I think I’ll sit out the summer at the farm because
this
will need a lot of other men’s books if it’s to be anything – though I’m still taken with the story.” The prospect of Gloucestershire, however, filled him with dread. “As you know I find it very hard to work there,” he wrote to Elizabeth from Benin. He wrote to Kasmin of “the state of hysteria that comes over me at Holwell Farm”, and in a letter to Acheson explained how, “wherever I go, particularly in deserts, the image of that misty Gloucestershire valley passes before my eyes. But one should never go near it, except to recharge the IDEA of it once every two or three years.”
this
will need a lot of other men’s books if it’s to be anything – though I’m still taken with the story.” The prospect of Gloucestershire, however, filled him with dread. “As you know I find it very hard to work there,” he wrote to Elizabeth from Benin. He wrote to Kasmin of “the state of hysteria that comes over me at Holwell Farm”, and in a letter to Acheson explained how, “wherever I go, particularly in deserts, the image of that misty Gloucestershire valley passes before my eyes. But one should never go near it, except to recharge the IDEA of it once every two or three years.”
Once asked what he did in the country, Bruce said: “I just pace up and down and stand against the wall and I do this,” and he banged his head against a wall. One evening in London he had a sad encounter. “At the end of the Burlington Arcade a thin black boy in a black leather jacket was beating his white crash helmet with his head still in it against the lamppost. Then he hit his fist against the trashcan, bruising his knuckles. I asked what was the matter. He smiled sheepishly, wriggled, shuddered and said ‘Oh, I’m so fed up!’ I asked if I could help, but he said, ‘You can’t do nothing.’
“Coming back 5 minutes later across Piccadilly, police cars with hooting sirens were roaring up in the street. He had lobbed a brick through the jeweller’s window. A man with white hands was removing a diamond and enamel necklace off its grey velour neck stand. A couple from Chicago said: ‘He probably comes from Chicago. The blacks in Chicago carry on like that.’
“He had run off . . .”
Bruce felt a natural sympathy for the boy. He, too, had exhausted the alternatives. He was boxed in. Nothing in the end could relieve him, except the writing.
“Those of us who presume to write books would appear to fall into two categories,” Bruce wrote in an article for
House and Garden.
“The ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move. There are those like myself who are paralysed by ‘home’, for whom home is synonymous with writer’s block and who believe . . . that all will be well if only they were somewhere else.”
House and Garden.
“The ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move. There are those like myself who are paralysed by ‘home’, for whom home is synonymous with writer’s block and who believe . . . that all will be well if only they were somewhere else.”
He would complete his second book in other people’s houses. “Bruce was very good at borrowing places to stay,” says Kasmin.
In May 1977, he rented Maschler’s cottage above Liantony. “It’s not far from Penelope [Betjeman] and he has bought a tiny Fiat for £500 to get around in, as it’s pretty remote,” wrote Elizabeth. “But it’s only an hour and 1/2 from here so we can get together when he needs a break.” No sooner was he installed than it began to rain. The downpour continued through June and July. The cottage leaked, the structure for the book eluded him. “The whole of last summer is like a bad dream to me,” he wrote to Elizabeth.
In October, Elizabeth drove him to Italy where he moved into a wing of Millington-Drake’s villa at Poggio al Pozzo. All was well to start with. “Flat is exactly what I wanted,” he wrote to Kasmin, “within bicycling distance of Siena on a south-facing hillside. Hope to recover from my summer of infinite frustrations.” The bare stone villa stood on a hilltop overlooking the oak- and pine-hills of Chianti. When Kasmin visited at Christmas he found it warm but short of windows and armchairs, with no “cosy reading corners”.
Millington-Drake charged Bruce £25 a week. He was by now accustomed to his guest: “He was a cuckoo, though he thought of himself as a nomad. When he came to stay, he settled in and made his nest in whatever part of the house he had been assigned; then, when it suited him, he would move on to another nest in someone else’s house. He expected to be fed. ‘What’s for lunch?’ he’d cry as he breezed in at half-past twelve. Occasionally, he would contribute a couple of bottles of champagne or, as a great treat, some wild rice. Then there was the telephone bill. He telephoned continually to his agent, his friends, to a young man he’d fallen in love with in Brazil. At the end of a visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about £4) saying he hadn’t used the ‘phone much.”
Bruce resumed work at Poggio in a brighter mood. “This is better than the Welsh Mountains,” he wrote to Wyndham. “Bare hills, bright light and most of the English gone back for the winter. I cycle to Siena for groceries and speak to shopkeepers in an incoherent mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin: they smile breezily and ask if I want peanuts.” Meanwhile, he was writing about the Dahomean coup. “Have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line. So it goes.”
He had started out confidently: “I know exactly what to do with the book: write it in one long stretch without even the favour of chapters,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “Balzac’s
Eugénie Grandet
gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present.
Eugénie Grandet
gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present.
“I am beginning with the family celebrating their annual commemorative mass in the Church in Ouidah and retiring for the dinner in Sigbomey which means the Big House or Casa Grande in Fon . . . The scene is then set for his life and what a life! Cattle drover turned man drover who ends up the prisoner of the King of D and dies of
rage
at being trapped when all he wants to do is get
out
of Africa and retire to Bahia.”
rage
at being trapped when all he wants to do is get
out
of Africa and retire to Bahia.”
Bruce’s talent was to dig up extraordinary facts and link them. “He was an intellectual gibbon who swung from connection to connection with incredible ease,” said a friend. His imagination, oddly, faltered at pure invention. He could enlarge and colour and improve his stories, but he could not make them up from scratch. After toiling a month on de Souza, he reached an impasse. “I had thought of giving it up when I was kicked out of Benin last winter,” he wrote to Welch. “Then thought that was weak-kneed and so I go on. I am in no position to judge how it will turn out.” He felt distracted by thoughts of Joao and, lately, of Donald. By December, rumours had reached Maschler. “Kas mentioned to me on the telephone today that you were a little depressed about progress on the new book and perhaps a little lonely as well? I don’t know how I can help except to tell you that my confidence in you is absolutely supreme. As I never cease to tell you
In Patagonia
is one of the best first books we’ve published for many a year and it’s no more than a beginning for you. That, I realise of course, only makes it the harder to follow in a way.”
In Patagonia
is one of the best first books we’ve published for many a year and it’s no more than a beginning for you. That, I realise of course, only makes it the harder to follow in a way.”
Other books
The Brit by Silver, Jordan
Black Roses by Jane Thynne
Chunky But Funky by Karland, Marteeka
Heroes for My Son by Brad Meltzer
A Shadow All of Light by Fred Chappell
The Pig Comes to Dinner by Joseph Caldwell
Someday: 3 (Sunrise) by Kingsbury, Karen
Paradigm (9781909490406) by Lowe, Ceri A.
Captured and Crowned by Janette Kenny
In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard
