Bruce Chatwin (66 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
In January, Bruce showed him the first 107 pages. Maschler was encouraging: “At its best . . .
The Merchant of Ouidah
goes way beyond
In Patagonia
in its qualities. And that’s quite something. I know you can get it right . . . When you are at the end we can
really
talk about structure.” He enclosed a £100 bill for Bruce’s expenses at his cottage in Wales. “Sorry it’s so much, but as you will see most of it is your telephone conversations!”
The Merchant of Ouidah
goes way beyond
In Patagonia
in its qualities. And that’s quite something. I know you can get it right . . . When you are at the end we can
really
talk about structure.” He enclosed a £100 bill for Bruce’s expenses at his cottage in Wales. “Sorry it’s so much, but as you will see most of it is your telephone conversations!”
“You’ve got to steal wherever you can,” Bruce told James Fox, when Fox was having difficulty with the composition of
White Mischief
“You must go down to the London Library and look at the beginning of all the great books. No white knuckles. Don’t sit there gripping the rails in terror. Plunge in.”
White Mischief
“You must go down to the London Library and look at the beginning of all the great books. No white knuckles. Don’t sit there gripping the rails in terror. Plunge in.”
After
In Patagonia
Bruce embraced a new set of authors. Attempting a more classical structure, he looked away from Mandelstam and Hemingway towards French writers – Balzac, Flaubert and Racine.
In Patagonia
Bruce embraced a new set of authors. Attempting a more classical structure, he looked away from Mandelstam and Hemingway towards French writers – Balzac, Flaubert and Racine.
“We used to read Racine out loud together,” said Millington-Drake, who felt that Bruce had switched his ability to find antiques “to one of finding unusual characters”.
His neighbour Charles Tomlinson was responsible for much of his French (and other) reading. Tomlinson had pressed on him the notebooks of Philippe Jacottet and Raymond Radiguet’s
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel
(“Of course, that’s the great book, you know,” Bruce told him later). But Bruce was most excited by Racine. “The greatest master of psychological realism in the world is Racine,” he told an interviewer in Australia, “and in a Racine play the characters are always doomed from the moment they open their mouths and yet they are still permitted the liberty by the author of hope and they are still permitted the illusion themselves that things are going to turn out differently from what they do and that sets off an essential tension in a story.”
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel
(“Of course, that’s the great book, you know,” Bruce told him later). But Bruce was most excited by Racine. “The greatest master of psychological realism in the world is Racine,” he told an interviewer in Australia, “and in a Racine play the characters are always doomed from the moment they open their mouths and yet they are still permitted the liberty by the author of hope and they are still permitted the illusion themselves that things are going to turn out differently from what they do and that sets off an essential tension in a story.”
In the summer of 1978 Bruce saw an open-air production of
Phèdre
in Paris with Peter Eyre. “He liked the purity and discipline of Racine, the tight mechanism of the plot, the way the characters express themselves by what they do rather than by what they say,” says Eyre. “I remember him saying that Racine’s vocabulary was a hundred times more compact than Shakespeare’s. He told me that in writing this book he was trying to apply the same classical discipline.”
Phèdre
in Paris with Peter Eyre. “He liked the purity and discipline of Racine, the tight mechanism of the plot, the way the characters express themselves by what they do rather than by what they say,” says Eyre. “I remember him saying that Racine’s vocabulary was a hundred times more compact than Shakespeare’s. He told me that in writing this book he was trying to apply the same classical discipline.”
Bruce’s admiration for Racine was quite soon unlimited. “I am
very
serious about
Bajazet
,” he wrote to Jonathan Miller, after studying the play for its prison atmosphere. “I believe there’s some way that Racine can be made to work for a non-French audience through being declaimed/intoned in the bravura passages with the help of music.” His enthusiasm would result, some years later, in a comical interview with a French journalist who asked him, when promoting
The Viceroy of Ouidah
in Paris, what he thought of Racine. “As an Englishman who comes from Stratford and thinks Racine’s infinitely better than Shakespeare, I was off.” After an interval, the lady interrupted in a puzzled, anguished voice: “Mais
Racines
?” She meant Alex Haley’s
Roots
.
very
serious about
Bajazet
,” he wrote to Jonathan Miller, after studying the play for its prison atmosphere. “I believe there’s some way that Racine can be made to work for a non-French audience through being declaimed/intoned in the bravura passages with the help of music.” His enthusiasm would result, some years later, in a comical interview with a French journalist who asked him, when promoting
The Viceroy of Ouidah
in Paris, what he thought of Racine. “As an Englishman who comes from Stratford and thinks Racine’s infinitely better than Shakespeare, I was off.” After an interval, the lady interrupted in a puzzled, anguished voice: “Mais
Racines
?” She meant Alex Haley’s
Roots
.
Next to Racine, he admired Flaubert. One year into his book, Bruce wrote to Milow: “the Flaubertian
conte
is progressing
pero muy lentamente
. I might just manage to finish its hundred or so pages by the end of the year. What I had estimated at three months will be at least six, but that’s the usual story. Yet imagine the
Chartreuse de Parme
being written in eleven weeks [actually, 53 days] and packed off to the publisher without need of corrections! On the subject of Flaubert, read
Un coeur simple
, in French, or at least with a French text in hand. Best thing written in the 19th century – and ours?”
conte
is progressing
pero muy lentamente
. I might just manage to finish its hundred or so pages by the end of the year. What I had estimated at three months will be at least six, but that’s the usual story. Yet imagine the
Chartreuse de Parme
being written in eleven weeks [actually, 53 days] and packed off to the publisher without need of corrections! On the subject of Flaubert, read
Un coeur simple
, in French, or at least with a French text in hand. Best thing written in the 19th century – and ours?”
“Un coeur simple”
is the first story of
Trois Contes.
Heartbreakingly unsentimental, it has the sweep of a Russian novel in miniature: an entire life hastened and condensed into 40 pages. Flaubert gave his Félicité a heart so pure that even after half a century she had nothing to confess. Bruce, by contrast, had chosen a man with everything to confess. He sought for
The Viceroy of Ouidah
the same pace, control and tone as Flaubert, but he found the technical problems colossal: “how to string so many disparate facts and ideas into the life of one man,
and
carry the reader sailing from page to page.” He wanted his book, like
Trois Contes,
to be extremely small. “I doubt if it’ll print up to much more than a hundred pages. But then I’ve never liked long books myself, so I don’t see why I should try and write them myself. Unless you’re Tolstoy, most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.”
is the first story of
Trois Contes.
Heartbreakingly unsentimental, it has the sweep of a Russian novel in miniature: an entire life hastened and condensed into 40 pages. Flaubert gave his Félicité a heart so pure that even after half a century she had nothing to confess. Bruce, by contrast, had chosen a man with everything to confess. He sought for
The Viceroy of Ouidah
the same pace, control and tone as Flaubert, but he found the technical problems colossal: “how to string so many disparate facts and ideas into the life of one man,
and
carry the reader sailing from page to page.” He wanted his book, like
Trois Contes,
to be extremely small. “I doubt if it’ll print up to much more than a hundred pages. But then I’ve never liked long books myself, so I don’t see why I should try and write them myself. Unless you’re Tolstoy, most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.”
When Bruce gave him his novel to read in typescript, Wyndham compared it to
Salammbô
and “
Hérodias
” in
Trois Contes.
“It’s a sadistic book in a way. There’s a heartlessness.” Writers like Colin Thubron wonder if this very quality that makes his books so powerful is, in the end, what holds him back and makes him fall short of his models. “His lack of heart is arguably a fault,” says Thubron, “but it is hard to see how his virtues could have co-existed. Maybe his extraordinary qualities depended on there being no heart.”
Salammbô
and “
Hérodias
” in
Trois Contes.
“It’s a sadistic book in a way. There’s a heartlessness.” Writers like Colin Thubron wonder if this very quality that makes his books so powerful is, in the end, what holds him back and makes him fall short of his models. “His lack of heart is arguably a fault,” says Thubron, “but it is hard to see how his virtues could have co-existed. Maybe his extraordinary qualities depended on there being no heart.”
Bruce’s fascination was for visual surface, and in the process finding the inner by describing the outer. “At all costs stay dead pan,” he wrote to Bill Buford, the editor of
Granta.
The composer Kevin Volans says, “Bruce felt art and composition of the late twentieth century should be ‘pure description’. I told him what Morton Feldman once said to me: ‘In the twentieth century there is no such thing as background.
Everything
must be foreground.’ Bruce understood this. The author should not get in the way. His description should be totally direct. There must be no secondary material, nothing between him and the object. He was the Matisse of writers.” He once said: “A trick I learned, when writing something tragic and claustrophobic, is to write it from the outside as if you are just present at a
tableau vivant
.”
Granta.
The composer Kevin Volans says, “Bruce felt art and composition of the late twentieth century should be ‘pure description’. I told him what Morton Feldman once said to me: ‘In the twentieth century there is no such thing as background.
Everything
must be foreground.’ Bruce understood this. The author should not get in the way. His description should be totally direct. There must be no secondary material, nothing between him and the object. He was the Matisse of writers.” He once said: “A trick I learned, when writing something tragic and claustrophobic, is to write it from the outside as if you are just present at a
tableau vivant
.”
Thubron says, “What was underneath the surface spoke through the patina and he would in many ways leave that to happen without delving. Stylistically he was neutral – there were very few value judgements or value adjectives. But underneath he was moral. There was a tension between the mental passion, the intense intellectual involvement with what he was doing, and the coolness of the prose.” The effect, to Thubron, was of a cold dawn light. It reminded Sybille Bedford of a shipwreck by Watteau, and Bob Brain of a photograph of the
Kasluk
: a ship squashed in tinsel ice, lit from the back, everything gleaming for that moment, everything in silhouette with a corona around it, transformed by an icy radiance. “It was a style honed to survive,” says Thubron.
Kasluk
: a ship squashed in tinsel ice, lit from the back, everything gleaming for that moment, everything in silhouette with a corona around it, transformed by an icy radiance. “It was a style honed to survive,” says Thubron.
Flaubert offered a style, also a look. Bruce crafted each page to resemble the pages of his French master. He was concerned with the integrity, even the visual effect of the paragraphing. “His one-sentence paragraphs are very like Flaubert,” says Wyndham. He took infinite pains over the cover, the print. To Jonathan Cape’s designer he conveyed his preference for Bembo, smallish, lots of leading and small Roman numerals for the chapter openings. “He despised what English books looked like,” says Wyndham, to whom he gave a first edition of
Trois Contes.
“He loved the chaste white covers of the French.”
Trois Contes.
“He loved the chaste white covers of the French.”
And he resorted to visual aids to break out of an impasse: “One quite useful technique – which I used for the fantastic compression necessary for
The Viceroy
– is to get a board with a huge sheet of graph paper, divided into squares. You then write the ‘synopsis’ sections on little cards and pin them on with drawing pins. You then have a flexible way of setting out the story with the possibility of change.”
The Viceroy
– is to get a board with a huge sheet of graph paper, divided into squares. You then write the ‘synopsis’ sections on little cards and pin them on with drawing pins. You then have a flexible way of setting out the story with the possibility of change.”
Sunil Sethi stayed with Bruce while
The Viceroy of Ouidah
was being written. “His pens were always Mont Blanc; his notebook was always a
moleskine
from a place in Paris that no longer exists. His complexity comes out of this great fastidiousness. For Bruce to sit down was a great achievement. He was the mother of all grasshoppers. And he was only sitting down when he found the right book and a very comfortable chair, or he was reading his day’s work to you.” To ensure the clarity of each sentence, Bruce read out his books. Sethi says, “They have been read aloud, every word – sometimes to the point of high self-consciousness. The point was to see when you were getting bored.” When correcting the French proofs, Bruce stayed in Paris with Loulou de la Falaise. One night she and her husband lay in bed, kept awake by Bruce. He was reading his proofs aloud in the bath.
The Viceroy of Ouidah
was being written. “His pens were always Mont Blanc; his notebook was always a
moleskine
from a place in Paris that no longer exists. His complexity comes out of this great fastidiousness. For Bruce to sit down was a great achievement. He was the mother of all grasshoppers. And he was only sitting down when he found the right book and a very comfortable chair, or he was reading his day’s work to you.” To ensure the clarity of each sentence, Bruce read out his books. Sethi says, “They have been read aloud, every word – sometimes to the point of high self-consciousness. The point was to see when you were getting bored.” When correcting the French proofs, Bruce stayed in Paris with Loulou de la Falaise. One night she and her husband lay in bed, kept awake by Bruce. He was reading his proofs aloud in the bath.
“Oh, mais c’est du Flaubert!”
To try to finish the book, Bruce rented a house in Ronda for five months: “an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentine architect who has run out of money.” He wrote in longhand on 20 yellow legal pads, refilling his Mont Blanc from two bottles of Asprey’s brown ink. But progress was slow. “Ow! the strains of composition and of keeping up the momentum,” he wrote to Wyndham. “How to eliminate the longueurs without eliminating the sense. Will
never
tackle a historical subject again.” The days were hot and lethargic and his self-doubt was “in full flood”. He wrote to Sethi: “Five hours of work and I’m exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won’t; don’t like what I’ve already done: feel like burning the manuscript.
never
tackle a historical subject again.” The days were hot and lethargic and his self-doubt was “in full flood”. He wrote to Sethi: “Five hours of work and I’m exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won’t; don’t like what I’ve already done: feel like burning the manuscript.
“I get up at sunrise at eight; over coffee I sit out on a semi-circular terrace, contemplate the mountains opposite, and the hideous glazed pottery busts of a nymph and the Infant Bacchus on the arched portico: then settle down to work. Four-and-a-half hours brings me to 12.30 and letter-writing time if I am to catch the post which closes at 2. I leave the house at I, bounce down the mountain in my little Fiat and zigzag up the other side of Ronda, which perches on the top of a sheer cliff and looks like an iced cake. I unlock the aluminium PO Box, usually empty and hurtle to the market, which also closes at 2. Twice I have had a fight with the local
condessa
(a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie) as to who shall have the last lettuce. Then to a bar in a side street which has magnificent
tapas (hors d’oeuvres)
which I make into lunch. The other day I had a raw clam and was violently sick in the middle of the night. The proprietor is a fantastical red-haired queen, with draperies of white flesh hanging from his upper arms. I have seen him smile once, when the bar was full of soldiers.
condessa
(a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie) as to who shall have the last lettuce. Then to a bar in a side street which has magnificent
tapas (hors d’oeuvres)
which I make into lunch. The other day I had a raw clam and was violently sick in the middle of the night. The proprietor is a fantastical red-haired queen, with draperies of white flesh hanging from his upper arms. I have seen him smile once, when the bar was full of soldiers.
“Then usually I go for a swim at the pool of a friend called Magouche [Fielding]. She is an old friend, magnificent, stylish, the daughter of a U.S. Admiral: her name was once Agnes MacGruder, that is, until she worked for Edgar Snow’s ‘Support Mao’ campaign in New York in the ‘40s, met the painter Arshile Gorky and married him.
“She still lives off the contents of the studio, is haunted by Gorky’s suicide and quarrels frantically with all but one of her four daughters. One of these is married to the son of Stephen Spender, lives in Tuscany and is the most dangerous gossip I know (though I love her) . . .
“So the afternoon is usually spent bellyaching about Magouche’s children. Then I look in on two peasants who keep the house, Curro and Incarna, who keep me in onions, raspberries, cucumbers. They live in a spotless white house shaded by walnut trees in the bottom of the valley. Then I try to work for another three hours, but can rarely get much done other than prepare notes for the next day.
“After that cook dinner. Last night disgusting experiment with spices bought in Morocco. Then read Flaubert, Racine or Turgenev if I’m up to it: Maupassant or Babel if my eyes start to flutter.”
When he got the American reviews of
In Patagonia
– “I have a huge batch of them” – he bounced across the valley to share his literary success with Magouche and Xan Fielding six miles away. That summer Xan was engaged in writing a book on the winds. Bruce disrupted his concentration on a more or less daily basis. “Bruce would appear, unfortunately, always as we were sitting down to lunch,” said Magouche, “with little nuggets about some female saint in medieval France who had theories on wind. You would hear him as he approached the house. He had crossed Ronda, picked up his post – this simply stuffed with prizes – and he couldn’t resist putting it on the table and reading it out. Then he would talk. Everything he was thinking, doing, being, feeling. Xan would go off to his study and pull his hair. ‘I can’t stand it. Either we’ve got to go or Bruce has got to come at a different time.’ When I asked Bruce not to turn up to lunch every day he was awfully sweet. But he wouldn’t have understood. He did see himself as a sort of present to mankind. He’d come with such nice ribbons and wrapping and heaven knows what goodies inside, yet you never did unwrap it.”
In Patagonia
– “I have a huge batch of them” – he bounced across the valley to share his literary success with Magouche and Xan Fielding six miles away. That summer Xan was engaged in writing a book on the winds. Bruce disrupted his concentration on a more or less daily basis. “Bruce would appear, unfortunately, always as we were sitting down to lunch,” said Magouche, “with little nuggets about some female saint in medieval France who had theories on wind. You would hear him as he approached the house. He had crossed Ronda, picked up his post – this simply stuffed with prizes – and he couldn’t resist putting it on the table and reading it out. Then he would talk. Everything he was thinking, doing, being, feeling. Xan would go off to his study and pull his hair. ‘I can’t stand it. Either we’ve got to go or Bruce has got to come at a different time.’ When I asked Bruce not to turn up to lunch every day he was awfully sweet. But he wouldn’t have understood. He did see himself as a sort of present to mankind. He’d come with such nice ribbons and wrapping and heaven knows what goodies inside, yet you never did unwrap it.”
By September, the tension was apparent even to Bruce. “Apparently when I came up with some more ‘Wind’ information, he took offence and thought I was trying to patronise him. Also resents my friendship with Magouche. I’ve tried my best to like him . . .” A week later, he was able to report: “Xannikins has gone off to climb in the Pyrenees and so everyone is much more relaxed. He is an area of LOW PRESSURE.”
Magouche, whom he had first met with the Leigh Fermors in Greece, had introduced Bruce to Ronda in 1974. They would go on lengthy walks. “Bruce had been up every peak in the valley. When I walked with him I would say: ‘I can’t go on if you talk, I’m going to stumble.’ It was, after all, interesting.” She observed his contradictions. She knew him to be very generous – especially with his time (“I never heard him say, ‘I can’t do this’.”); also a total sponge. “He was sensitive about other people, but not in relation to himself. I was once cross with Xan and walked out of the room with some horrid quip and Bruce reprimanded me: ‘That was hard to take.’ He didn’t like arguments.”
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