Under the Sun (28 page)

Hotel de Douala | Douala | Cameroun | 16 February 1972

 

This place is something between Lausanne and a Turkish bath. Perfectly ghastly. Am on the hunt for a sculpture in the bush – one of the Bamileke dance masks of which four examples are known. Kasmin to whom I talked on the phone is sending some money. One or two other things to buy and I hope to recover the expenses of the trip. If I get the mask I shall probably fly back with it in a week or two xxx B

Dahomey was absolutely fascinating with voodoo dances etc.

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | [March 1972]

 

Dear Jim,

So I'm back, never thinking to be back, and all the time I was in Africa having the guilty feeling of not having written you. Not having your address there was nothing I could do about it.

I have a moustache. I am thinner. I am crazy about Africa and the Africans. There aren't enough of them here yet. The thing I most miss here is the
proximity
of people. There one is quite used to a big mama with the fat rolling on her slapping you in the face with her tit as she humps it out to feed her infant. Here they recoil at the least touch.

I am still writing the bloody book. I finished it once to my satisfaction, but not the publisher's, and now I firmly believe it to be a load of humourless, egotistic, sententious rubbish. And I've set it aside to write a little story about an old style-French whore who retreats into the desert to run a hotel, and then there's another one about a young Hong Kong salesman of cheap cotton, who catches syphilis in Free Town and cannot return to his wife and newborn son. I've got to pick up better Chinese patter before this one will come off.

I also made a short filum. Hated doing it I might say. People threw things at the camera when I pointed it at them. It's about the markets in Niger, where trade is a sort of language which prevents people from cutting each other's throats. I thought – and still do – that it's far too amateurish to be of any use, but Vaughan Films are prepared to hack it into something, and then hawk it about the television companies.

Cary and Edith [Welch] were here and I just caught them in Paris on my way back from Dahomey. Seemed in very good form. They were with that zombyish creature called David Becker. They also said you were coming to Europe, especially for the Cannes Festival. Will I see you?
³⁵⁹
May even go to the Grand Banc with my writing for a bit.

I do have a flat. A hideous one-room affair, shaped ‘in the form of a pompadour wafer' to quote the estate agent. I bought it because the rents are so capricious. Its merit lies in its being on the 9th floor overlooking half London, and its position, just off the King's Road. Can't move in quite yet till the painters come. The address is L8 Sloane Avenue Mansions, London SW3. Am about to send a letter to an African boy, who has just written ‘I am very happy I have saved the money to write to you', also hoping that I am well and strong enough to do my job.

That Andrew [Batey] story
³⁶⁰
is fascinating. Maybe we could do something. Sorry must catch the post. Otherwise this will be delayed three days or more.

Will write soon.

much love, Bruce

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 29 March 1972

 

Please can you ring up over the weekend to resolve our dilemma. Ivry Freyberg's Floral Luncheon – this is not my style at all
but
though I will not go if you do not go, I cannot not go if you do. Wind blowing everything flat here.

Love, B

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 8 April 1972

 

Dear Jim,

I had your letter today. I have been mouldering as usual in the country. It all seems so prissy after Africa. I think really considering the life I lead, I should try to
live
three months of the year in NYC which nobody could ever describe as dull. England is now little England with a vengeance, the world of boutiques and bitchery and little else.

Savages
sounds a bit like NYC. What may very well horrify your smart friends is this. Everybody is prepared to slum. Ultra Violet you could film upside down with dildo up her twat
³⁶¹
surrounded by 10 year old lesbian nymphettes providing her
surroundings
were suitable and everyone could draw comforting moral conclusions. Once you transfer that sort of thing into a Waspish Upper New York State it becomes less funny because you have moved into a province where innuendo and suggestion are the rule. I look forward to seeing it.

I did see Mr Chaudhuri.
³⁶²
And I enjoyed it. But I do think he's an almost impossible subject because you can't make a conversation piece out of someone who hasn't the vaguest idea how to converse, only to lecture. And on our set with its rotten reception he was all but inaudible. My dear, you have got to tell the public everything. My publisher says my book is exactly the same. We have to make the conclusions the preface or nobody will read a line more.

I'm going to have a word with Jeremy [Fry] about Le Grand Banc, but he is in Bangladesh selling boats to Bengalis. The alternative is a folly, literally, in the Atlas mountains about twenty miles south of Marrakesh which Christopher Gibbs will lend me. Please signify interest, rather quick as I'll have made up my mind.

Meanwhile I have to stay in London a bit to supervise the doing up of my minuscule flat. It resembles the bridge of a second-class cruise ship of the 1930's. The building was a famous call-girl warren before and after the war, and the whores are still there, mainly Hungarian, who drop their handbags in the lift and ask you ‘Zahling, plis . . .' to pick them up. I am on the 9th floor with a panoramic view over London, which at that height doesn't remind me of London, so that's all right.

The Batey story. I think it is good. And my feelings are now totally numb and dispassionate. Quite good to start off on the ‘France' or some such liner with the seduction – for the hell of it – by a young ravishing American of an older less ravishing Englishman (young don?) on his way to get married and the subsequent chaos
³⁶³
.

Where are you going to be in the summer. I have a rather less than defined longing to go to the US.

much love, in haste

B

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 8 April 1972

 

Dear C

England is gradually closing in on me again, and the moments of euphoria become rarer and rarer as one gets paler and paler and fatter and fatter and the backbiting conversations grow bitchier and bitchier, and everyone thinks and talks of selling something to somebody else. Mrs Chatwin and Mrs Kasmin are thinking of going into partnership in their idea of gathering together the folk arts of the world in a single emporium for taste-ridden, guilt-laden semi-intellectuals to browse among the indigo stuffs of Africa, the gauze saris of Rajastan, the basketry of Indo-China. It'll be a fine business.
³⁶⁴

I have been making art works. The first a green fetish container called the God Box,
³⁶⁵
then a night blue affair called the Skinner Box, and I am presently cutting out Mainland Chinese literature to make a vivid red collage called The Colour of Immortality.

I rather liked your friend David Becker. Everyone here who met him couldn't understand why you were going round with ‘an impossible zombie'. He wasn't really a zombie at all. Very tortured about something. That ashen quality. But he kept on making intelligent, if unsure remarks. This in contrast to oneself, who makes cocksure, but unintelligent remarks. My filum is not at all too bad. I was quite amazed, considering my extreme irritation at the whole process. They say they'll be able to cut it into a picture of about twenty-five minutes and sell it to European television.
³⁶⁶
Now I want to do another one.

My African artworks are so much appreciated that Mr [Sandy] Martin wants me to go back to Africa at once and buy the things I didn't buy. I am tempted, but feel it's tempting fate. Remember what nearly happened last time. Nemesis building up? Warning signals? Don't touch the ju-jus, massa. Dont want no buy carved stick, massa. Carved stick he have bad medicine, massa. And talking of bad medicine I appear to have a jigger in my foot. Elizabeth expressed the hope that I wouldn't have elephantiasis. Last week she thought I might have sleeping sickness. Incidentally we would not know of the existence, let alone the symptoms, of these dread complaints were it not for a Little Red Book put out by the Royal Geographical Society called the
Traveller's Guide to Health
.

It is written in the most beautiful military prose and concentrates on the prevention of disease rather than its cure, with such admonitions as ‘The Tse-tse fly is the vector of Sleeping-Sickness, which usually proves fatal to the European. If the traveller must penetrate Tse-tse fly regions, he must be sure to clear the forest to within a quarter of a mile radius of his camp.'

Must now stop and pay bills,

much love Bruce

 

In the summer of 1972 Chatwin had a call from Francis Wyndham ‘who master-minded the
Sunday Times
colour supplement' – and was offered a position, which he accepted, as adviser on Art. ‘The job, as I understood it, was to commission articles from people who knew about art. I was at my wit's end.All my schemes to work had
come to nothing. My confidence was at zero. I was in debt. 'The job would start in November. On 25 July he abandoned London for America, where Ivory had lent him a clapboard cabin in Oregon. Here, goaded by the publication of Peter Levi's account of their journey to Afghanistan, Chatwin determined to finish his nomad book once and for all.

P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 28 August 1972

 

Dear E.,

We've had a succession of brilliant days here, and I must say it's quite pleasant. The house is a bit gloomy because it's under vast pine trees and doesn't get much sun till about 11-30. But there's a dock you can sit on which juts out into the water. And now everyone's going home for labour day and the noise of the motor boats will happily cease for weekends. There's a mountain called Mount Pitt at the end of the lake, and endless trails through the forests. I wandered along the Brown Mountain trail STARK NAKED for fifteen miles without coming across a soul
³⁶⁷
but deer and birds and that made me very happy.

The Book is coming on well. Not fast. But I have now found myself with it and I know what I'm doing instead of flailing around in a disorganised way with marvellous material and no sense of direction. When I went to Geneseo I bought a beige Volkswagen with a loan of 700 dollars from your mother. I thought it better to buy a good one rather than some rattle-trap that will collapse. Jim [Ivory] got your cheque before he left NY but now we have a note saying it isn't payable in Continental USA. What can be done? I cannot imagine what happened . . . Can you correct the same? Because I find it rather embarrassing. Failing that can the Mellon send it direct?

God this country's so expensive. I don't know how anyone lives here at all. I'm down to 300 bucks and will have to borrow more from Jim to get back. So that's why I'm anxious about the other. He is leaving in a week and I will drive him down the Northern California coast route just to San Francisco for two days and then return here for the whole of the rest of the month. What do you intend to do? I will have to be back in England I suppose for the wretched
Sunday Times
by October 15th at the latest. The idea of a job horrifies me. I am more doubtful about the thing than ever before.

I think they'd like you to come over at Geneseo. It was very pleasant when I was there. I suppose before there have always been too many people swamping me whenever I've been. Lonely for them too now that everyone's gone.

Of course what I should really like to do would be to go and sit in a little house in Yucatan and watch sharks and fiddle about in the ruins of Tulum.

Much love Bruce.

P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 30 August 1972

 

Hello!

I'm sorry I left in such a precipitous hurry, but there we are. I usually do and I did. I was getting totally exasperated a. by the weather which had given me the worst chest and lung combination I have ever had. London in July and one was literally coughing up grey slime. b. that film company was driving me nearly desperate. I always think I'm pretty disorganised but they are something else. I'd go in each day prepared to work on it and there'd be some hold up. I couldn't use the cutting room or my assistant was needed to play court on some movie mogul. It's a terrible business. At least if you write, you are your own master. The only way to get my little film out of the way was to announce my departure. Then it happened. At least I hope it did, because there's not been a single word. And I must finish the book before I begin with the
Sunday Times
. Otherwise it'll never be done.

Of course I've completely unscrambled it. In fact I'm completely rewriting it. It'll be about half as long and instead of six whopping chapters with an argument linking them all in a continuous flow (which not even I could understand let alone the poor reader), we now have about thirty chapters, each one I hope intelligible by itself.

Oregon is simply beautiful. The house I have borrowed is a little log cabin on a lake called Lake of the Woods, surrounded by tall pines. There is a canoe and I can paddle up a river to look at beavers making dams and it's very warm for swimming. The nights are cold because we're five thousand feet up. The nearest town is thirty-five miles away so I've bought an old Volkswagen for the summer. I'm staying here till about September 10th; then I'm going to take a short break and go up to Puget Sound and Vancouver. It's only a day's drive from here to Seattle, your old stamping ground
³⁶⁸
, though I bet it's changed. I'd very much like to see all that rain forest they've preserved as a national park on the Olympic Peninsula. Elizabeth may come and join me but since she's been away we haven't been in touch. It is an awful hassle to get out all this way, and one really feels like completing the circuit having got thus far.