Bruce Chatwin (78 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
In January 1984, Bruce escaped the gloom of a Welsh winter and paused in South Africa on his way back to Australia. On 2 February, he discovered with Brain the charred antelope bone. He was moved to write to Gertrude for the first time in several years: “As Lib may have told you, I came to talk to a man who wrote a book about the Earliest Man, and I’ve had perhaps the most stimulating discussions in my life. Prof. Brain has, for the past 20 years, been excavating a cave near Johannesburg in which you find at the lower level (Date: around 2 million years) a situation in which the ancestors of Man were literally dragged there and eaten by an extinct giant cat called
dinofelis
. Then in the upper level, Man (the First) suddenly takes control and the Beast is banished.
dinofelis
. Then in the upper level, Man (the First) suddenly takes control and the Beast is banished.
“The only way to inhabit a cave, which is also inhabited by predators, is to deter them with fire. And though archaeologists have been hunting for fire in Prehistoric Africa for 30 years now, the earliest hearth they could find was only 70,000 years old. On the one day I visited Brain’s cave, at Swartkrans, I remembered how nice it would be to discover the human use of fire in the cave. Half an hour later, we excavated a bit of blackened bone. Brain, who is a most undemonstrative man, said: ‘That bone is remarkably suggestive!’ – which indeed it was. It turns out I was present at the uncovering of a human hearth, probably dated around 1,200,000 years old. The earliest by 700,000 years.”
The most stimulating discussions in my life
. The substance of their discussion would become a vital component of
The Songlines
. “The Beast is the heart of the book,” Bruce told Thubron.
. The substance of their discussion would become a vital component of
The Songlines
. “The Beast is the heart of the book,” Bruce told Thubron.
Brain had stuck patiently to his task and had been rewarded. He represented everything that Bruce would like to have been but by temperament could not be. Moved by Brain’s modesty, the scale of his achievement, Bruce sent a postcard to Wyndham. Brain “should be given a Nobel Prize on the spot”.
Something in Bruce loosened in the presence of Brain, “a man of infinite gentleness and patience”. In the resonance of their findings, Bruce slipped into a reflective mood. He gathered in the strands of his life.
He was meant to be writing a travel article to pay for his detour. He had flown to South Africa with Kasmin. They spent February visiting Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. In the Kalahari he bought a footstool for Jasper, but his thoughts kept returning to his childhood. One night he dreamed fondly of his parents, dancing in the moonlight in evening dress. Beside the Zambesi, “which appeared to be blowing back upstream,” he sat on a log and looked at what was once a District Commissioner’s house with its mosquito screen and terraced gardens gone to seed. “To think that I in my schoolboy dreams, pictured such a place as the place in which I would spend my life, in khaki shorts, with Shakespeare and Shelley, dreaming of a leafy Warwickshire which no longer existed.”
These thoughts ran concurrently with his struggle to synthesise the mysteries offered up by Strehlow and Brain. “Black mood. Cross with all the world,” he wrote in his notebook on Mount Omei. His alternating introspection and compulsive theorising began to create fissures between him and Kasmin.
The
Observer
had commissioned Bruce to write “My Kind of Town”. “It was a question of finding a town which rapidly
could
become his favourite town,” says Kasmin. Bruce had looked at the map and selected Molepole in Botswana, apparently the largest village in Africa. Kasmin’s diary for 8 February records their arrival. “At the little hotel we shared a big hall with 40 or so solemn and abstemious blacks, conference of southern schoolteachers . . . Molepole was enormous but no centre at all . . . The highway is tarmac super new. Plenty of cars – Toyota land cruisers, BMW, Merc, Rovers etc. Not a single typically African jalopy.”
Observer
had commissioned Bruce to write “My Kind of Town”. “It was a question of finding a town which rapidly
could
become his favourite town,” says Kasmin. Bruce had looked at the map and selected Molepole in Botswana, apparently the largest village in Africa. Kasmin’s diary for 8 February records their arrival. “At the little hotel we shared a big hall with 40 or so solemn and abstemious blacks, conference of southern schoolteachers . . . Molepole was enormous but no centre at all . . . The highway is tarmac super new. Plenty of cars – Toyota land cruisers, BMW, Merc, Rovers etc. Not a single typically African jalopy.”
“It was so deeply unlovable we had to find another town,” says Kasmin. With their options narrowed, Bruce chose Luderitz, within striking distance on the coast of Namibia
Luderitz turned out to be a nondescript mining town. “There’s a lot of friction between us,” Kasmin wrote on 26 February. “His way of swapping ‘facts’ with ill-informed members of the public irritates me. He has so many diverse opinions & theories about realpolitick – goodness knows how he adds them up in any consistent pattern. At this relatively low point (in relationship) I brood on his driving – frequently vague so the car wanders to the verge, and then his use of the mirror – at each glance he is riveted by his own image & adjusts his facial expression while we wobble again . . . somehow we get into no real trouble.”
Bruce was irritating his loyal friend, he was dreaming of his parents, he was unable to hammer out a structure, he was ill with a mysterious virus. He alluded to his difficulties in an ABC interview a few weeks later in Adelaide. “There is a point at which my African research and my Australian research tie up and I am damned if I know how I’m going to put them down on to paper.” He had “vague ideas floating in my head and I can’t formulate them at the moment”. His search for the point at which all these ideas converged would, he suspected, “drive me mad”.
Holed up in the Mellys’ medieval tower on the Usk, he had written to Bail: “Australia, I find, even on the most superficial level, is extremely difficult to describe.” Ever since leaving Australia in April 1983, Bruce had longed to make another foray into the desert near Alice Springs. “Aboriginal Australia was – and still is – one of the world’s most astonishing phenomena – the anthropologists and linguists are still only scratching the surface.”
One reason for his return was to spend more time on an Aboriginal reservation. On 14 January 1984, he wrote to Petronella: “What do you think the chances of being able to arrange a trip up to Kintore? I missed the chance of going out of sheer stupidity and regret it.” Receiving no answer, he wrote to Lydia Livingstone, a friend in Sydney. “Thinking of you often if not always. And now, next week, I take the first leg of my return journey
towards
you – if somewhat obliquely – just to Johannesburg and the Kalahari desert – then on March 2 to Sydney.”
towards
you – if somewhat obliquely – just to Johannesburg and the Kalahari desert – then on March 2 to Sydney.”
An invitation to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival was his excuse to go back. “They wrote to me the other day, and said that ‘since I fit into no known category’ they are going to programme ‘An Hour with Bruce Chatwin’. Lord save us! What shall I say?”
Bruce viewed the literary world through the same prism as he had viewed Sotheby’s and Edinburgh. There were times when he was curious and eager to learn from it, for he had come late to writing and this made him vulnerable to flattery: he once told Emma Tennant “George Steiner
adores
my book – and mummy loves yours”. Yet he shrank from the pack. “I agree with you about the London literati,” he wrote to Bail. “The only possible use I can think of for a spaceship would be to take them out of our orbit – but then more would grow! . . . The review of [Thomas Bernhard’s]
Concrete
by some arse was enough to bring one to the passport-burning stage. But then England, unlike Ireland, Scotland or Wales, is an utterly barbarian country.” About the only prejudice Enzensberger found in Bruce was “his sincere disgust of England”. He professed to hate the London publishing scene and coped with it either by disappearing or by celebrating its absurdities. “There have been some frightfully funny incidents here,” he told Bail. “The best is that Virago Press were about to publish an astonishing new ‘find’, a novel by a young Pakistani girl called Rahita Khan or something like it, with some quite sexy scenes between Pakistani girls and white boys: all very suitable to bring ‘literature’ to Britain’s Asiatic community, all set for a big promotion etc., when it was discovered that Rahita Khan was an Anglican clergyman in Brighton called the Rev. Toby Forward! Great?”
adores
my book – and mummy loves yours”. Yet he shrank from the pack. “I agree with you about the London literati,” he wrote to Bail. “The only possible use I can think of for a spaceship would be to take them out of our orbit – but then more would grow! . . . The review of [Thomas Bernhard’s]
Concrete
by some arse was enough to bring one to the passport-burning stage. But then England, unlike Ireland, Scotland or Wales, is an utterly barbarian country.” About the only prejudice Enzensberger found in Bruce was “his sincere disgust of England”. He professed to hate the London publishing scene and coped with it either by disappearing or by celebrating its absurdities. “There have been some frightfully funny incidents here,” he told Bail. “The best is that Virago Press were about to publish an astonishing new ‘find’, a novel by a young Pakistani girl called Rahita Khan or something like it, with some quite sexy scenes between Pakistani girls and white boys: all very suitable to bring ‘literature’ to Britain’s Asiatic community, all set for a big promotion etc., when it was discovered that Rahita Khan was an Anglican clergyman in Brighton called the Rev. Toby Forward! Great?”
However good he was at promoting the public
persona
of Bruce Chatwin, he was a private person. In his literary life, as elsewhere, he ran away from his growing reputation even as he was attracted to it. “I’m fed up with being a
soi-disant
‘writer’,” he wrote to a friend in Adelaide. “It’s my experience that the moment one starts being a writer, everything dries up.”
persona
of Bruce Chatwin, he was a private person. In his literary life, as elsewhere, he ran away from his growing reputation even as he was attracted to it. “I’m fed up with being a
soi-disant
‘writer’,” he wrote to a friend in Adelaide. “It’s my experience that the moment one starts being a writer, everything dries up.”
In October 1983, he had appeared on BBC television with Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa in a discussion about South American literature. He wrote, “Llosa and I share some of the same ground, in that we have both written about a Brazilian village called Uaua: we were even there in the same month. I thought it’d be rather a good thing to chat about the dreariness of Uaua: but he thought otherwise, and the moment the cameras were turned on him, he turned from being lively and entertaining into the WRITER-AS-PUBLIC-FIGURE. Of course, we both dutifully held our tongues when the Magus of BA appeared, and any attempt to have a chat thereafter was drowned in a flow of beautiful 17th-century English and beautiful Castilian verse.” As Borges waited to come on stage, he overheard Bruce extolling him on the monitor: “You can’t go anywhere without packing a Borges. It’s like taking your toothbrush.” Borges responded: “How unhygienic.”
Bruce was relieved to discover that his friend Salman Rushdie had also been invited to the Adelaide Festival.
Rushdie says, “I fitted into his compartment ‘My literary life’.” He had first met Bruce in Cambridge at a dinner for George Steiner. Upon learning that Bruce had come from Scotland, Steiner asked if he had been with John Updike at the Edinburgh Literary Festival. Confronted with a
bona fide
European intellectual, Bruce reached for his Man of Action hat. “I said (realising my
fantastic
error before I actually said it): ‘No, I’ve been doing something much more atavistic. Shooting stags!’ – which, I’m afraid, was true. It had the most terrible effect; and I’m sure that no matter what I say and do, he’ll look on me, in his heart of hearts, as a murderer. Be that as it may, I’ve shot stags since I was a boy. And though I say it, I’m a good clean shot – when it comes to stags, and nothing else.”
bona fide
European intellectual, Bruce reached for his Man of Action hat. “I said (realising my
fantastic
error before I actually said it): ‘No, I’ve been doing something much more atavistic. Shooting stags!’ – which, I’m afraid, was true. It had the most terrible effect; and I’m sure that no matter what I say and do, he’ll look on me, in his heart of hearts, as a murderer. Be that as it may, I’ve shot stags since I was a boy. And though I say it, I’m a good clean shot – when it comes to stags, and nothing else.”
This was not quite true. The good clean shot was delivered by his friend David Heathcoat-Amory at Glenfernate. At the critical moment, with the stag in range, Bruce had refused to take the rifle and pushed it away. “No, I’d like
you
to shoot it,” he told his companion.
you
to shoot it,” he told his companion.
When Rushdie learned of Bruce’s plan to revisit Alice Springs, he asked if he might travel with him. “I said to Bruce: ‘What would make it worth while for me to go all the way to Australia is if I were able to come with you into the centre and look around a bit.’ I thought it would be a wonderful short-cut into the reality of that, to me, completely unknown world.” Bruce was willing and they arranged to spend a week together in Central Australia after the Festival was over.
Bruce arrived from Africa on 4 March and for a hectic week he mingled with Thomas Keneally, Angela Carter, D. M. Thomas. He dined with Kath Strehlow. He planned with Nin Dutton a drive from Adelaide to Brisbane in order to see more of the outback. And he introduced Rushdie to Geoff Bagshaw, whom Bruce had met in a caravan in Haasts Bluff a year before reading
Midnight’s Children.
Bagshaw, an old friend of Petronella, afterwards wrote to her. “Bruce, Salman Rushdie and I had a very pleasant lunch in a sunshine-bathed park the other day. As you would expect Rushdie is a very interesting man.” It was from Bagshaw that Bruce learned that Petronella had moved to America.
Midnight’s Children.
Bagshaw, an old friend of Petronella, afterwards wrote to her. “Bruce, Salman Rushdie and I had a very pleasant lunch in a sunshine-bathed park the other day. As you would expect Rushdie is a very interesting man.” It was from Bagshaw that Bruce learned that Petronella had moved to America.
The poet Pam Bell, who had seen Bruce last in New York, met him in one of the large tents. “He was wandering around in that caged-tiger sort of way, an animal on the prowl, restless.” Bruce had just watched Vladimir Ashkenazy rehearse Beethoven. “He was excited because Ashkenazy had told the violinist that Beethoven was in love at the time with a woman called Teresa and she must imagine, in playing, the word Teresa, Teresa, Teresa.”
At the end of the week, Bruce and Rushdie flew to Alice Springs. “As the plane took off I looked down and I saw this incredibly moving landscape, like the moon with atmosphere,” says Rushdie. “By the time we landed in Alice Springs, I was really excited.” There Bruce introduced him to the characters who would reappear, without much disguise, in
The Songlines
: Sawenko, Jenny Green, Phillip Toyne. “One of the strange things about being introduced to Alice Springs by Bruce is that when I got to know these people a bit they drew me aside. ‘We weren’t really sure about you because you came with Chatwin.’ They were suspicious of him: they were left-wing – and Bruce was a friend of Kath Strehlow.”
The Songlines
: Sawenko, Jenny Green, Phillip Toyne. “One of the strange things about being introduced to Alice Springs by Bruce is that when I got to know these people a bit they drew me aside. ‘We weren’t really sure about you because you came with Chatwin.’ They were suspicious of him: they were left-wing – and Bruce was a friend of Kath Strehlow.”
Bruce also introduced Rushdie, by telephone, to the friend who had originally put him in touch with these people: Robyn Davidson. “Having never before read her book,” says Rushdie, “my view until this trip was why travel across the desert on a camel when you can fly?” He changed his mind after he found
Tracks
“mellowing in a rack” in an ethnic bookshop. Bruce insisted that, since Rushdie had enjoyed the book, he should meet Davidson when he went to Sydney. The introduction was to have far-reaching consequences. “He left his wife for my friend the ‘camel lady’ Robyn Davidson,” Bruce wrote to Nin Dutton. “All my fault – or so I was told!”
Tracks
“mellowing in a rack” in an ethnic bookshop. Bruce insisted that, since Rushdie had enjoyed the book, he should meet Davidson when he went to Sydney. The introduction was to have far-reaching consequences. “He left his wife for my friend the ‘camel lady’ Robyn Davidson,” Bruce wrote to Nin Dutton. “All my fault – or so I was told!”
Bruce and Rushdie rented a four-wheel drive and drove to Ayer’s Rock. Bruce disliked cars as he disliked planes. “The spirit of generosity already threatened by the horse, evaporated entirely with the motor car,” he wrote in his Patagonia notebook. Nor was he a reliable driver. As with Kasmin in Africa, Bruce’s thoughts on the way to Ayer’s Rock concentrated anywhere but on the road ahead. “I was looking out of the window at Australia and Bruce was in Russia with Costakis,” says Rushdie. “He talked unceasingly from dawn to dusk, a relentless name-dropping.” In the middle of the red wilderness, they paused to look at a dingo on the road. “Bruce, meanwhile, was talking about the Aga Khan and Diana Phipps. I finally cracked. ‘Bruce, is there anybody you know who’s not famous?’ He got incredibly upset and began to bluster and scream: it wasn’t his fault and he wasn’t a snob, it was because he’d worked at Sotheby’s.”
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