Bruce Chatwin (92 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
“It does seem that my inexplicable fever was malaria: the temperature returned to normal nine hours after taking anti-malarial pills. You can imagine what 3½ months of raging fever has done to the system. But I don’t regret a second of it.
“My grey matter functioned perfectly and I took a number of most rational decisions. I am entirely concerned with the matter of healing . . . I hope to divide my life into four parts: a. religious instruction b. learning about disease c. learning to heal d. the rest of the time free to give my undivided attention to Elizabeth and the house. A tall order, but with God’s help not impossible.”
He could not do this work, he told his mother-in-law, if he was fettered to possessions. “I have envied and grasped at possessions, but they are very bad for me. I want to be free of them.” He wished to give Elizabeth all he had in the form of a trust. “I have never known the extent of her capital, but I believe I would increase her existing assets by at least twice if all mine were totted up.” The real difficulty was to get her to spend money on herself. “She said it is in her Iselin blood. She is retentive of possessions, whereas I have always thought that by giving or dispersing, you attract more.”
In his final paragraph he asked Gertrude to buy Elizabeth a horse. “I have been very worried that she is over-exhausting herself and might make herself ill: a. by the strain of looking after me (not easy!) b. by the house, the cooking and the garden. c. most exhausting of all by the sheep. She loves the sheep but, literally, they tear her apart. I think she needs a horse instead and stabling when she goes to India or with me to the sun. It’s wonderful riding country all around and the field is big enough for a horse and a donkey.”
Gertrude, who wondered if he was suffering from “manic depression”, showed the letter to her eldest son John. “Ma, I have very carefully read Bruce’s letter twice. I am glad he has come to some sort of conclusion as to what he is going to do, but obviously some of it is a pure fantasy. His marriage to Lib is a fantasy . . . If they had a true marriage it is not his money, or her money, but our money. It belongs to both of them.” John did not consider “the horse routine” a good idea at all. “I don’t think Lib really wants to get into that kind of life and she does love her sheep.”
On 17 May, Bruce returned to the subject of the horse. “The horse! Obviously she has to be an Arab mare, not perhaps up to competition standard, but breedable.” He suggested to Gertrude that they both went Dutch on the purchase and upkeep (“with the proviso of “a ‘safety-net’ so that the horse doesn’t have to be sold for ‘economic reasons’”). Otherwise, he was on the mend. “I get better by the day . . . The nerves should heal entirely within five years.”
Eleven days after writing this, Bruce was back in the Churchill for an emergency blood transfusion. He had lost the feeling in his legs, which he referred to as “my little boys”. He was frightened they were not there, wanted to see them. “Profound loss of walking ability,” noted his report. From now on he would be “wheelchair dependent”. He had believed that walking was a way to cure ills. The refusal of his “unruly boys” to respond to his call brought home to him that at last he was no longer the spry, youthful explorer. He told Elizabeth: “If I can’t walk I can’t write.”
Rimbaud had written a century before: “I am entirely paralysed.” Over the summer, Bruce increasingly identified with the hero of Volans’s opera: the Rimbaud of the piercing blue eyes, the gang rape in the Paris commune, the flight to Africa, the religious conversion, the poet, who “makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses”. But as the opera progressed, Volans noticed that the correspondences were growing more and more uncomfortable. “Bruce wanted
Aida
as he got sicker. ‘We must have camels and sand dunes.’ Later on, he decided he was the only person who could play the role of Rimbaud. I had to invent reasons he wouldn’t like – six week rehearsals etc. – without saying the obvious one. He couldn’t sing.”
Aida
as he got sicker. ‘We must have camels and sand dunes.’ Later on, he decided he was the only person who could play the role of Rimbaud. I had to invent reasons he wouldn’t like – six week rehearsals etc. – without saying the obvious one. He couldn’t sing.”
Anxious to perform in that role, Bruce was not, however, limited to it. He became in his brother’s words “one of his own characters”: the Viceroy of Ouidah, scribbling “incoherent prophecies”, and, more obviously, the compulsive collector of the novel he had just finished. Unable to collect stories, Bruce replaced writing with buying. “He went from a nomad possessing nothing to Utz,” says Volans. “He wanted everything.”
Bruce described
Utz
as “a kind of Middle European fairy-story – with some savage digs at the art business!”
Utz
as “a kind of Middle European fairy-story – with some savage digs at the art business!”
By 1988, he had more or less relinquished “anything artistic”, apart from a few tiny, exquisite objects stored in a cardboard box. “I called it his Box of Treasures,” says Elizabeth. “He’d come back and get them out on the table and literally play with them, arranging them as if they were chess pieces. There were eight or nine of them and from time to time something came and went.” The cardboard box operated as the black tin deed box of Bruce’s Mr Brady, the typewriter salesman who, whenever he returned to London from Africa, brought one new thing for the box. “He spread out the old things on the bunk. He threw away the old one that had lost its meaning.” Rushdie likened the Box of Treasures to “a tuck-box of goodies” under his bed. “When you were privileged, he’d get it out. What I liked about his attitude was the idea of beauty completely separate from ownership. These things were a transient population. You never owned them. They were for you to look after for a time and let go.”
The objects were simple, sacred and small, what might be painted on a postage stamp or held in the palm or fit into his knapsack. “What I’ve kept are funny things which are more or less abstract in quality,” he told ABC. An Eskimo seal-toggle of walrus ivory; a white shell nose ornament from the Solomon Islands; a Celtic iron cross; an Ainu knife; a jade long-life symbol; a wooden funerary mask from Buenos Aires province; a Ngoro red lacquer snuff box from Japan with the black showing through. Holding up the latter, Bruce told Kevin Volans: “If you want to know what encapsulates what I am and everything I believe in, it’s this.”
The objects had cost hundreds, not thousands, of pounds. In 30 years of dealing, the most Bruce paid was £4,000: for a small oil painting from the Danish Kunstkammer called
The Ambassadors
. This was a portrait of Poq and Qiperoq, who in 1724 became the first two Greenlanders to leave their country voluntarily.
The Ambassadors
. This was a portrait of Poq and Qiperoq, who in 1724 became the first two Greenlanders to leave their country voluntarily.
In the last year of his life, Bruce began the process of dispersing the box’s contents among friends. To Christopher Gibbs, an Egyptian gaming piece of green-blue faience; to Kevin Volans, a circular sixteenth-century brown lacquer box which had belonged to Herrigel, author of
Zen and the Art of Archery
; to George Ortiz, the haematite gold weight from the Spencer-Churchill collection. “It was a pure object, possibly from a meteorite,” says Ortiz. “It was a gesture of coming back to earth.”
Zen and the Art of Archery
; to George Ortiz, the haematite gold weight from the Spencer-Churchill collection. “It was a pure object, possibly from a meteorite,” says Ortiz. “It was a gesture of coming back to earth.”
Mr Brady, too, gave the impression that he was free of things. “But he knew that nobody is free of things.” In the same breath, Bruce replaced his Box of Treasures with an alternative collection. Conceived in honour of Elizabeth, the Homer Collection would be Bruce’s memorial to his wife and to his taste with the considerable sums he supposed he had earned through his writing. He told John Pawson, for instance, of a £13 million advance on a film script.
At the end of June, Gertrude received a letter written in what seemed to be a child’s hand. “I have been buying your daughter the beginnings of an art collection which I hope will be wonderful. In New York we bought the wax model for Giovanni da Bologna’s Neptune which has to be one of the most beautiful small sculptures in existence. We are making arrangements to give it to the Bargello in Florence with the use of it in our lifetimes. We also bought an incredible German drawing of the mid-fifteenth century.”
Bruce drew the idea of the Homer Collection from the collections of George Pitt-Rivers, Gertrude’s father Irwin Laughlin, and George Ortiz. His ambition did not surprise John Hewett, who at Sotheby’s had introduced him to Pitt-Rivers and Ortiz. “Really, what came out was what had been there all along.” Hewett had never taken seriously Bruce’s denunciations of acquisition. Nor had Cary Welch: “Oh for the open road with nothing but a backpack, but how nice to have some castle to return to crammed with El Grecos. Suddenly, in great haste, he was putting together the very thing he’d teased us about.”
Bruce’s desire to build a collection modelled on the museum at Farnham explains his latent rage against those, like Peter Wilson and John Hewett, whom he accused of destroying such monuments. Discharged from the Churchill on 14 June, Bruce began his eerie transformation into Utz. An early purchase was the wax bozzetto of Neptune, bought from Mrs Blumke in Madison Avenue. The dark amber figure, with one arm missing, stood only a few inches high. According to Welch, “this was a study by a Flemish artist which had been offered around for years”. Bruce, convinced the fragile figure was unique, wrote a cheque for $70,000.
He was uninhibited by normal constraints of wealth. “Our accountant said he could spend £100,000 on the collection,” says Elizabeth. “Bruce added noughts on and told everyone he had millions. You couldn’t persuade him. He had more money than he’d ever had in his life, but he had lost track of what he did have.” It was a sad paradox that just when he did have money, it came at the moment he was least able to handle it sensibly. For a period, he spent this sum every day.
*2
*2
Bruce amassed the Homer Collection in a burst of shopping sprees to London during June and July. One of his first excursions was witnessed by Volans, who had interrupted their Rimbaud project to write, as a curtain-raiser to the opera, a 26-minute string quartet called
The Songlines.
Volans intended to hire a piano, but Bruce, deciding this was inadequate, bought him a Bosendorfer upright for £13,000. “We pulled up at Bosendorfer in Wigmore Street and he gave me five minutes to choose,” says Volans. “Then we went on to Cork Street.”
The Songlines.
Volans intended to hire a piano, but Bruce, deciding this was inadequate, bought him a Bosendorfer upright for £13,000. “We pulled up at Bosendorfer in Wigmore Street and he gave me five minutes to choose,” says Volans. “Then we went on to Cork Street.”
Volans watched how the dealers in Cork Street fell over Bruce. “His eye was not out of control. He knew exactly what he wanted: he was immensely precise. ‘I want that Japanese lacquer box I saw, the one made for export.’ He would write cheques out for £100,000 and no one would question. The prices were breathtaking.” In brisk succession, Bruce bought a Bronze Age arm band for £65,000, an Etruscan head for £150,000, a jade prehistoric English cutting knife, a flint Norwegian hand-axe and an Aleutian Islands hat. He could not sit waiting for the objects to be wrapped. They were shoved into plastic bags and attached to the back of his wheelchair.
Like this, with objects worth a quarter of a million pounds dangling from the handles, Volans pushed Bruce up Bond Street towards the Burlington Arcade. They called in on Christopher Gibbs, where Bruce purchased an expensive chair. “It had started raining,” says Volans. “Christopher ran across the road and bought some plastic macs. At Piccadilly, Bruce shouted ‘Stop! stop!’ to the cars. We teetered on the pavement in pouring rain with these valuable items in plastic bags and Bruce holding up his hand, saying ‘Stop all cars!’, very angry with me when I wouldn’t push him. His mind was soaring. He was really enjoying himself.”
Safely across Piccadilly, Bruce plunged even deeper into his pocket. He wrote out cheques to dealers in Jermyn Street for an Assyrian quartz duck and a bolt of eighteenth-century silk to cover the chairs in the dining room. Only at Spink’s did staff declare their unease – over a Tibetan tiger rug which he wanted to take away. Thwarted, Bruce appealed to the chairman with whom, 20 years before, he had shared Grosvenor Crescent Mews. “Of course, Anthony will give me credit. He’s known me all my life.” He left with the rug.
On another expedition he crossed Duke Street and called at Artemis where Adrian Eales worked, a former Sotheby’s colleague who had bought Holwell Farm from Elizabeth. Bruce specifically asked for an engraving,
The Melancholy of Michelangelo
, by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Ghisi. This weird and whimsical study showed a pensive figure on the edge of a huge pond surrounded by sea-monsters, lions and birds. By rare chance, Eales had the print in stock. The price: £20,000.
The Melancholy of Michelangelo
, by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Ghisi. This weird and whimsical study showed a pensive figure on the edge of a huge pond surrounded by sea-monsters, lions and birds. By rare chance, Eales had the print in stock. The price: £20,000.
“He felt so clever to have found it,” says Eales. “He told me it was for Elizabeth. He was now getting so much money from his royalties that he wanted to give her really special things. He was extremely plausible.”
Bruce had to have the engraving
immediately.
He asked Eales to send it to the Ritz.
immediately.
He asked Eales to send it to the Ritz.
His expedition with Volans and Gibbs had also ended at the Ritz, where he had rented a room for the afternoon: “Seventy pounds.
Very
reasonable!” There was a flurry of telephone calls and more dealers turned up, including Oliver Hoare who had shared Bruce’s flat in Kynance Mews. “I had two lines from Prince Baysunghur, the son of Tamberlaine. The page was a metre wide, with some of the most beautiful Islamic script from the early fifteenth century. It was £45,000, a big purchase. ‘I always wanted that,’ said Bruce. It was the same old panache. He had his Bologna modello with him, pointed to it. ‘Bring it here, it’s the most miraculous thing.’ He’d insured it for £600,000. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ If it had a wick on top you could light it and use it as a candle.”
Very
reasonable!” There was a flurry of telephone calls and more dealers turned up, including Oliver Hoare who had shared Bruce’s flat in Kynance Mews. “I had two lines from Prince Baysunghur, the son of Tamberlaine. The page was a metre wide, with some of the most beautiful Islamic script from the early fifteenth century. It was £45,000, a big purchase. ‘I always wanted that,’ said Bruce. It was the same old panache. He had his Bologna modello with him, pointed to it. ‘Bring it here, it’s the most miraculous thing.’ He’d insured it for £600,000. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ If it had a wick on top you could light it and use it as a candle.”
At the end of the afternoon, Bruce turned to Christopher Gibbs with an ebullient eye. “Tomorrow, musical instruments, women’s clothes and incunables!”
The Homer Collection was not to contain anything warlike and for this reason Bruce returned the Bronze Age arm band. The objects had to be of enormous beauty with a spiritual edge and to reflect every religion, from Inca to Islam, as though making real his “One Million Years of Art” series for the
Sunday Times
magazine.
Sunday Times
magazine.
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