Under the Sun

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING
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Letters by Bruce Chatwin copyright © The Estate of Bruce Chatwin, 2010. Preface and annotations by Elizabeth Chatwin copyright © Elizabeth Chatwin, 2010. Introduction and notes copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare, 2010. Compilation copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin, 2010 All rights reserved.

 

Extract from
The Unquiet Grave
by Cyril Connolly. Copyright Cyril Connolly, 1945.

 

Extract from
Ups and Downs
by Frances Partridge. Copyright © Frances Partridge, 2001.

 

Additional acknowledgments for permission to reprint copyrighted works appear on pages 527-528.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Chatwin, Bruce, 1940-1989.
[Correspondence. Selections]
Under the sun : the letters of Bruce Chatwin /selected and edited by
Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare.
p. cm.
Includes index.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Jonathan Cape.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47568-3

1. Chatwin, Bruce, 1940 – 1989—Correspondence. 2. Authors, English—20th century—
Correspondence. I. Chatwin, Elizabeth. II. Shakespeare, Nicholas, 1957 – III. Title.
PR6053.H395Z48 2011
823'.914—dc22
[B]
2010033591

 

 

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I first met Bruce in late 1961 at Sotheby's, where I came to work for a couple of years. I was the first American that the auction house had employed in London and was, of course, a curiosity. Not long afterwards, Bruce was sent on his first trip to New York, to look at collections of paintings for possible sale. He was enchanted by everything, especially the glamorous old wealthy Wasp milieu which made a fuss of him. After that trip – from which he returned wearing a large checked woollen jacket and hat to match, the sort worn by country people at work – I became more interesting.

During the next few years we spent weekends in the Black Mountains, walked the Malvern Hills with his father, and one summer we almost rendezvoused in Libya. We were married in 1965.

His letters and postcards from that time have disappeared. I managed to keep most of the subsequent ones. I am thrilled that a collection of his correspondence is to be published. Letters are the most vivid writing of all. His mother kept his weekly notes written from prep school and these are already full of different interests and enthusiasms. It is fascinating to see the child develop into an art historian at Sotheby's. He was always good at stories, which became his eventual career.

Bruce was Sotheby's expert for the Impressionist and Modern Art (excluding British) and the Antiquities Departments. The latter meant artefacts from India, the Ancient Near East and Europe and Amerindia, the Pacific and Africa – the World – and involved endless research at the British Museum and Musée de L'Homme in Paris. He became more and more disturbed by archaeological objects brought in to sell – some of which were stolen from unrecorded sites – and fakes. He began to regret that Sotheby's had cajoled him into not going to Oxford when a place came up. They persuaded him that he would do very well without a degree.

By 1966 he was looking at universities with the idea of reading archaeology . . . Only Edinburgh and Cambridge offered a degree course for undergraduates, so to Edinburgh he went. It would mean a dramatic fall in income but we reckoned we could manage.

Edinburgh in those days was very grim in the winter. The Royal Mile on which we had rented a flat in a newly built block had 23 pubs and none with chairs to sit on. To get green vegetables and salad, I had to go to the New Town (across the bridge in the eighteenth-century part) where there was a proper greengrocer. The huge North British Hotel did not know what a salad was. The best things were the fish and the outside oyster bar. You took your white wine and they provided brown bread and butter with the oysters. Freezing but fun.

Bruce worked terribly hard and well into the night. He was very competitive and at 26 was a mature student up against teenagers just out of school. He studied Sanskrit as well as archaeology and came out top of his class, to his delight. Then, after two and a half years of a four-year course, he quit. He did not even tell me he was going to. He became disillusioned after going on digs in the summer and realising he didn't like disturbing the dead.

By this time he had become fascinated by nomads and he began to write about them. Thanks to a fee to go and look at a collection in Egypt he had enough money to travel a bit. In 1969 he and Peter Levi went to Afghanistan on a grant Peter had from Oxford. This was Bruce's third visit. I joined them after two months and was utterly beguiled by the country. Nine years later, the Russians upset the balance forever.

He worked on the nomad book for several years, but it was and remains unpublishable. Then he was persuaded to go and work for the
Sunday Times
magazine, quite a distinguished publication in those days. He made many lifelong friends there.

Bruce began as the art expert to replace David Sylvester who was leaving. He ended up doing articles on Algeria, Mrs Gandhi, André Malraux as well as on art. He met Eileen Gray, an Irish designer of furniture and interiors who was an important influence in the use of new materials such as Perspex in combination with traditional ones. She had lived in Paris since 1904. Gray encouraged him to go to Patagonia for her, as she had always wanted to go but was now too old.

So again he made a dramatic move in his life, without telling anyone till he was nearly on his way. He wrote a letter to the
Sunday Times
on a little piece of yellow foolscap now lost or stolen. He usually telephoned me from some tiny bar on the road as he was moving south. He was full of praise for Moet & Chandon Argentine bubbly. To find champagne in an unlikely place was a great lift to his morale. He loved it.

He nearly always travelled alone: two people have a defence, but a single person is approachable. He could never have managed Patagonia with me tagging along, or
The Viceroy of Ouidah
or most of his books.

He slightly altered the people he met along the way – the brothers in
On the Black Hill
were not twins; a nurse in
In Patagonia
was a devotee of Agatha Christie, not Osip Mandelstam. It enraged the people thus altered, as Nicholas Shakespeare and I found when retracing his steps in 1992 in Patagonia – all part of his storytelling.
The Songlines
has completely invented characters.

People used to ask me how I felt about his endless absences from home. Sometimes it was annoying that I had to cope alone, but I knew he was working; he had to be free. At the very beginning of our marriage he said he hoped I didn't mind, but he had to go off by himself –
The Cat that Walks by Himself
, a lovely picture by Kipling is on my kitchen dresser.

Bruce always kept in touch by letter or telephone from the ends of the earth and I simply wasn't curious about what he was doing. He would entertain me with stories on his return.

In the early 1970s I was given my first Black Welsh Mountain ewes, and from then on my calendar was set to a sheep timetable. I still have their descendants and am just as fond of them.

Bruce attracted all sorts of people throughout his careers. He had a talent for making friends wherever he was: on buses, trains, ships. Somehow he discovered a stranger's abiding interest within minutes, and they chattered away like old friends. It always amazed me. They thought it was friends for life. Exchanging addresses meant letters coming to him from all sorts of unlikely places. A Nigerian had a plan to start a shop and asked for a huge list of things like socks and shirts and pants and cotton thread to stock it with. More lists would arrive. I'm afraid we ignored them.

Once Bruce began to write books he became addicted to it and woke up in the morning thinking of the work. When we travelled together on the Continent he would become very restless if he had not been able to write for more than a couple of days. He would rearrange the room we were staying in so he could sit and work. I was sent out to sightsee for myself.

It is wonderful how many people kept his letters, even before he became a well-known writer. He never kept anything, including the first editions of his books.