Under the Sun (13 page)

As ever, Bruce

Flat 6 | 234 Canongate | Edinburgh | 27 November 1966

 

I still think that the 9in tiles would be nice in the dining room and don't think they would be too noisy. We could put an easy chair up by the fireplace with a rug in front to give it a bit of warmth. They might look very well laid diagonally but I'm not sure about that. I think you can get Dutch Delft copies with the little figures in the middle; they might be better than nothing. Also make sure they sink a space for a door mat (big) inside the back door.

XXX B

 

On 20 December 1966 Stuart Piggott invited Chatwin to dinner (‘smoked salmon & venison,
ananas au cognac
'), afterwards writing in his diary: ‘I became bored as he stayed until 1.30 a.m. oh my God. I suppose he was enjoying himself but oh when will the young realise that three hours is the ideal time to come and stay for a meal?' On 6 February 1967 Chatwin invited himself to dinner again,‘revealing all in the same breath and too obviously that Elizabeth had gone back to their Gloucestershire house, and sounding rather gay and relieved about it'. Piggott speculated whether Chatwin ‘has homo. tendencies. No change to be had from
me
!'

Flat 6 | 234 Canongate | Edinburgh | Saturday [February 1967]

 

Dear D.,

My parents have lent us their car and we got out of this place, thank God, for the first time. In Perth we found a huge Wemyss
jardinière
¹²⁷
which I thought was horrid, but could scarcely be considered an expert judge. Enclosed is the shop's card. Run by a
very
swishy number who couldn't decide whether he was going to talk Highland or Hairdresser. I thought it was fiendishly expensive, but considering the prices here for really bad and beaten up bowls I suppose you would be getting value for money. Green bands above and below, green handles and cabbage roses on the body. Am very keen about this Hermes glass
¹²⁸
, which I have tried to monopolise, but E. thinks she would like to wear. I have just bought her a lacquered Javanese coolie hat. When are you coming to see us in Glos? We can put you up as yet in a state of intense discomfort, but the food is delicious, or perhaps you'd prefer the rival attractions of our nearest neighbour, Alvilde L.-M.
¹²⁹
I say you were right about Peter Saunders
¹³⁰
. After greasing about for months sending messages about how keen he was to meet us, when I said that I was an undergraduate he looked slightly nonplussed, spluttered something about Sotheby's and after the truth had dawned, ignored us. Poor thing to have wasted a whole moneymaking evening; he was quite crestfallen; I feel he may have wanted a free evaluation. He seems to have a beastly collection of modern pictures. Did you see his house tarted up by David Hicks
¹³¹
in that decorating book? It is quite the funniest book to appear last year.

We are going down to Glos in Mid-March and don't have to be back again till the end of April. I HAVE to go and excavate in Bangor, on some beastly Neolithic site being developed for industry just opposite the front gates of Vaynol.
¹³²
As it is very easy to get on the ferry to N. Ireland from there I thought we might come over to Ireland for a week. Are you going to be there in early April? We can't make it definite because it rather depends on the state of the house. Do let me know?

What are you doing in the summer? I intend to go to Afghanistan and Persia and possibly N. India and Nepal for four months with E. joining me for some of the time only because she is going home for her brother's wedding. I really feel I am justified in opting out. It's bad enough raising the wind for one air fare let alone two. Spent the whole of December having my teeth seen to in Birmingham; owing to incompetent dentistry of the most expensive Harley St kind, they were on the point of falling out, but were rescued just in time. I went to Sotheby's for two hours and felt that feeling of helpless rage coming over me again. I am afraid it is terribly boring here; I expected it, and have to convince myself that it's good for me. But the intense relief of not having to turn up each morning to that lugubrious firm is a compensation. And I dare say that a really massive trip will put me right. I haven't had a proper holiday for two years. You are lucky to be going to Greece at this time of year. I once went on the Acropolis in February and there was nobody else except a party of Russian sailors. Edinburgh station is draped in Hammers and Sickles for Mr Kosygin,
¹³³
and there is a ramshackle bunch of demonstrators demanding freedom for the Ukraine.

Love, Bruce

Holwell Farm | Wotton-Under-Edge | Glos | 29 March 1967

 

V. sorry cannot make it. At the moment, I have a streaming cold. That's what comes of excavating in the snow.

Flat 6 | 234 Canongate | Edinburgh | 8 May 1967

 

I have a Wemyss pot and cover with strawberries for you. No one could accuse me of divided loyalties. Bruce

 

Holwell Farm | Wotton-Under-Edge | Glos | 5 July 1967

 

Dear Gertrude,

We are covered in paint. Things are suddenly beginning to happen, like the electricity is going to be switched on and the central heating given its trial run. Needless to say when we are really settled down to a job of work there is always a country drama. I have spent half the morning chasing somebody else's cows out. The kitchen is all but ready and we aim to move into it, one bedroom and the little study at the end of the house very soon. It will be a great relief to get out of the lodge and begin to lead a civilised life again.

The examinations went off all right, and in fact I was top of the year and a prizewinner,
¹³⁴
something that never happened to me at school, and despite my gloomy predictions to the contrary; it was all very encouraging. Stuart [Piggott] is not excavating this year and I am off in ten days to Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria to see some museums and excavations. He has given me a whole battery of introductions. This year is International Tourist year and it does seem rather amazing that one does not require visas for an Iron Curtain Country except Russia. An old school friend
¹³⁵
is in the embassy in Sofia which will make life more comfortable and interesting there. I am then going to Turkey for about three weeks with Andrew Batey
¹³⁶
and hope that Lib will come out and join us on the way back. I have just finished an article I am writing for a book on the flowers of Greece, not really my subject and I am afraid it's been more hard work than it's worth. I dread that it is inaccurate and that learned botanists will tear it to shreds.

I have been howling with laughter at all the hoo-haa in the press about the art forgeries. This is in fact only the tip of the iceberg and more will come. But I do take a certain pleasure in the fact that I threw Mr Legros
¹³⁷
physically out of Sotheby's by the neck some four years ago.

Last weekend we went to Penelope Betjeman's. He is about to be made Poet Laureate
¹³⁸
and wasn't there, and she is so exhausting that we came back here to collapse. This weekend we hope to have a real work corvée, and Felicity [Nicolson] is expected too. The cat has had kittens and this time they are doing fine even though she is a hopeless mother. Poor David Nash has mumps terribly badly in New York and has temperatures up to 105. They are now recovering in Brittany and I am going to wait for them to arrive here before setting off. I hope that Cary [Welch] will come over this autumn. We have just had a totally incoherent letter from him. They are building a house in Greece with Billy Wood's brother Clem and one day it'll be lovely for us to use it as well. Then he has schemes for other hide-outs in Mexico: and the Burning Ghats in Benares!

We must go back to the scraping. I'll send John and Sheila
¹³⁹
a cable from darkest Moravia, but this time the cables office must send them on.

Lots of love B

 

No sooner had he moved into Holwell Farm than Chatwin set off for his summer's excavation at Zàvist, south of Prague. He took with him for the first and last parts of the journey a 23-year-old American architecture student, Andrew Batey. This was ‘the
steamer-chair character' whom he had met on board the
Queen Elizabeth
when sailing to get married. Batey, then studying history at Occidental College in Los Angeles, was sailing home. ‘We had adjacent deck chairs on the stormy, freezing crossing. One moved over and it turned out to be Bruce.' So began a fifteen-year friendship. Chatwin, says Elizabeth, was ‘very, very keen' on the willowy Batey, who in 1966 matriculated at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Batey visited the Chatwins at Ozleworth and pestered Chatwin to go travelling. In July 1967 they took the Orient Express to Venice, stopping off at the Villa Malcontenta to meet Dorothea Landsberg. Batey continued by train through Bulgaria to Turkey; Chatwin to digs in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania. They planned to reunite in Istanbul.

This letter would, twenty years later, inspire the opening of Chatwin's novel
Utz
about a collector of Meissen porcelain in Cold War Prague.

Hotel Kaiserhof | Frankenberggasse | Vienna | Austria | [July 1967]

 

Dear E,

I am very late in my time-table because I should be through Hungary by now. I arrived here today from Bratislava and spent the afternoon in the Volkerkunde museum as everything else was shut. There are three feather Aztec objects here, which I knew vaguely about but was totally unprepared for. One is Montezuma's fan (from the collections of H. Cortez and Charles V – no less), a circular arrangement of brilliant feathers with an acid green butterfly in the middle. Then there is his green feather headdress with blue and red stripes and little gold plaques and another circular fan with a coyote in violet and orange in a raspberry fan. These three objects make the Bliss collection
¹⁴⁰
et al sink into nothingness, and there is heaven knows what besides.

We failed to get into the Stocklet Collection
¹⁴¹
because the objects and the furniture were all put away for the summer, but Mme S[tocklet] was very accommodating and asked me to come again in the autumn. She even remembered my visit of 1960! Then we went to Aix and looked at Charlemagne and the Schatzkammer where there are some objects that nearly made me die, especially the engraving on the back of the cross of Lothar and Richard of Cornwall's sceptre. We separated at Cologne after looking over that monstrous cathedral and I went to an exhibition of ‘Rome on the Rhine' which was only fairly instructive and visually barren. I then went on to Bonn, to Habelt
¹⁴²
the bookseller where I found a copy of Dörpfeld's
¹⁴³
Troy
and the v. rare Berlin Troy catalogue both of which I bought. The Bonn Landesmuseum has the gold Fritzdorf Cup which is paralleled by the Wessex Culture Rillaton Cup
¹⁴⁴
and one from Mycenae. There was also a smashing Hunnish cauldron which I had not known about. On to Nuremberg where I had the row with the hotel
¹⁴⁵
and would never have set foot in Germany again were it not for the great kindness on the part of the manageress of the next hotel who was so appalled that she treated me to breakfast. In the Dom is the fantastic, hideous but rather wonderful ‘sacrament haus' of Adam Kraft
¹⁴⁶
who portrayed himself with his mason's mallet supporting the monstrous load. The museum is quite wonderful with Durers and manuscripts of Otto III's scriptorium at Endernach. I made the happy discovery that the chalcedony salt [cellar] I bought from David Lethan
¹⁴⁷
is Augsburg c.1600, and that means it's really worth something.

Prague is one of the most curious places in the world. The whole place is utterly bourgeois and always obviously was. Communism sits on it in a most uneasy way, and I would have said cannot last long. It is virtually impossible to meet a single communist. Even in the trains and buses they joke about it. Some of the younger generation might be communist but would not dream of owning up to the fact. It must be one of the few places in the world where one can hear the American position in Vietnam actually defended. They loathe the Russians and Chinese with an emotional fervour. A great many speak English, and I had a long lecture from a man on the excavation who could only be described as a peasant on the merits of Eton and how England was an education to the world. The world is full of surprises.

I rather fell on my feet and met a charming couple called Plesl.
¹⁴⁸
He directs the excavations of a Celtic oppidum called Zàvist, nr. Prague and I was given the professional suite at the camp which meant that I didn't have to live in town. We went on a tour in their car of S. Bohemia to see another friend digging another Celtic oppidum called Trisov. Nearby is a Schwartzenburg castle called Chesky Krumlov
¹⁴⁹
with a theatre with the Commedia dell' Arte figures in a sub Tiepolo manner. We drank pre-war Burgundy in a wine-cellar. Also on the Zavist excavation was an Italian called Maurizio,
¹⁵⁰
who is my new friend. There is every reason why I should dislike Maurizio but somehow I do not. He is over six and a half feet tall and indecently fat. Despite the solid nature of Bohemian food he needs to be refilled every half hour. In July he was awarded a doctorate at Rome University and is vaguely connected with Tucci
¹⁵¹
and his nefarious crew. His thesis, calculated to make me hate him, was on the close of the Indus Valley Civilisation and the coming of the Aryans. He got it all wrong, and used a number of inapplicable analogies about the movement of the Maya from Guatemala to Yucatan. Maurizio is never at a loss for some apparently brilliant remark about some obscure facet of Central European archaeology, but I fear that his knowledge is about as superficial as mine. He tells me he was once employed in smuggling microfilms from East to West Berlin. He is a man of many parts, an archaeologist of sorts, a smuggler, an International Socialist and also a self-styled great lover. Maurizio cannot talk about the stratigraphy of the Lower Quetta valley without finding two bulges which remind him of firm breasts. He bent double, which for him is no mean feat, to kiss the hand of a ferocious Slav lady archaeologist. She was somewhat affronted, but in general it must be said he enjoys considerable success. He is engaged to a girl in Andover, the Wessex bird as he calls her. This is not to say that Maurizio doesn't have birds in any European town one cares to mention. The current object of his affections is Eva. ‘Eva, the first woman, she gave herself utterly to me.' Eva is an enthusiastic wide-hipped blonde with sparkling blue spectacles and buck teeth, who lives up the hill from Zàvist with her refined but calculating mother, and I fear that Maurizio did not bargain for her as well. Mother and daughter work as a team, and they are determined to catch Herr Doktor Maurizio. Both have visions of a splendid Roman future, and Maurizio has built up such a baroque image of grandeur that it will be hard for him to dispel their illusions. He has already invited them to Rome. ‘Supposing they really come,' he moans. ‘How would I explain it to my family – and the Roman bird?' In the mean time Maurizio is eating them out of house and home – vast quantities of duck and dumplings, chocolate cake, red currant tarts and apricots. He sits on the sofa, and while mama presses her attentions and Eva ladles yet another spoonful of cherry jam down that ever open mouth, he contemplates himself in the mirror occasionally inclining his head to admire that strange Roman profile. I cannot imagine how he will extract himself from the situation, especially as mama has specially rented a riverside cottage for the two lovers this weekend. Despite a lingering feeling that he may have made Eva pregnant, Maurizio faces the prospect of the final parting next week with equanimity. ‘It is very simple,' he says. ‘I shall burst into tears, and when I cry who can be angry?' I cannot imagine it will be so simple and Evsen Plesh is full of gloomy prognostications of the scene that will follow.