Under the Sun (33 page)

I'm sorry I'm so hopeless at writing. When you pore over the typewriter all day it's the last thing you want to do.

X B

 

Chatwin stayed on in Fishers Island till after Labour Day in September, returning to England on the new
Queen Elizabeth II
. He had a second-class ticket, but obtained permission from a steward to work in the first-class library, until he was discovered and ejected. ‘He came home in a rage saying how horrible it was, all plastic furniture and terrible muzac.' He was still writing
In Patagonia.

Postcard, Bonnieux | 12 Rue Droite | Bonnieux | France | 2 December 1975

 

Our terrace marked with a pretty indistinct arrow. Weather fine, clear and quite cold. Mountain air etc. make one feel very well. I will be signing a cheque for £900 shortly. Could you please check with bank that this is O.K. in view of the £650 from
Sunday Times
due at the end of Dec. If not please transfer funds to cover. Many thanks. See you. B

12 Rue Droite | Bonnieux | France | 12 January 1976

 

Dear Kassl,

Seems ages since you left. Probably because I have the family here.
⁴¹³
I haven't lived with them like this for twenty odd years and I feel I am back at school. Everyone holds opinions and airs them at great length while I am trying to write or think or even breathe.

Reached a crisis the other morning and so I packed a little section of my writing into the leather rucksack
⁴¹⁴
and headed for the Luberon. By lunch next day I was at Le Beaumanière at Les Baux and sat down to a solitary and enormous lunch of
Paté des Anguilles aux pistaches
,
Noisettes de Chevreuil
etc. The maitre d'hotel was charmed by the leather rucksack and bore it in his arms to the cloakroom, showing it to the owner's wife who bought me a glass of champagne. I have conceived a plan of walking to all of the best restaurants in France from a distance of fifty miles.

We have admittedly had ten days of the clearest weather, some days so hot I had to sit in the shade rather than let my brain burn up in the sun. I have packed my family out house hunting, but can't decide if I like the region well enough. I do find that phoney Provencal atmosphere rather trying.

I had quite a funny letter today from the Rasputins
⁴¹⁵
who enclosed the particulars of that
nouvelle cuisine
restaurant and spa at Eugénie les Bains. Somewhere obviously to be avoided at all costs. I don't see the point of taking a health cure at a place so pretentious that it would give you an apoplectic seizure after two hours.

I enclose a cheque payable to David
⁴¹⁶
for £133. I hope this is enough. I also have your
Guide Gourmand de la France
which I conveniently and
truthfully
discovered half an hour after the Sulzberger contingent left. I have taken to reading it in conjunction with Pound's
Cantos
as bed-time reading. My parents will bring it back to you, unless I go up to Paris and give it to Sulz[berger] to bring over.

Let me know if you plan to go skiing with Grisha
⁴¹⁷
and I might come over to Sestrìere and join you.

Love to Linda.
⁴¹⁸
Keep your marriage guidance counsellor posted on that front.

Love, Bruce

12 Rue Droite | Bonnieux | France | 12 January [1976]

 

My dear D.,

We have let the house to Alistair Sutherland
⁴¹⁹
and are squatting here for the winter in a rather Spartan dwelling. But the sun seems to shine with regularity, and I must say it's comforting to have to sit in the shade outside while writing.

I was in England for a month only in the autumn, and before that I was in Argentina, Chile and Peru, taking Gertrude round the Andes in my cousin's camper truck.

I am writing about my cousin Charlie Milward the Sailor, who ran away to sea; was shipwrecked near Cape Horn; introduced reindeer to South Georgia; found the Giant Sloth in a cave in Last Hope Sound, preserved in salt; was accused by Churchill of being a German spy in the First War. I am cobbling his diaries together with Patagonian Giants; an Anarchist revolution against British estancia owners; the albatross; E. Allan Poe; the Patagonian Welsh; Boers; Butch Cassidy and the inevitable Mr Darwin.

I am going to sit it out here until it's done. Once you break it, fatal. I like this country and we're thinking of buying a
cabanon
here, even if it is a bit like the geriatrics ward . . .

We hear you're writing your biography.
⁴²⁰
That'll give reviewers like Mr [Douglas] Cooper some fun. I always used to like him in a perverse way, but no more. Last November in New York I went to a dinner, and suddenly heard floating from the next table: ‘My dear, I can't IMAGINE what Grace Dudley
⁴²¹
thinks she's doing bringin' in that piece of trash.'

I do wish you'd come here on one of your lightning tours. You just might over the next three months.

Love from Elizabeth and from me,

Bruce

 

At the suggestion of Magouche, Chatwin called on the British writer Gerald Brenan (1894-1987), best known for
The Spanish Labyrinth,
who lived at Alhaurin-el-Grande – ‘the Garden of Eden, though with Adam much older than he ought to be'. At first, the two men hit it off. Brenan wrote to Chatwin: ‘I so much enjoyed your visit – it was a great stimulus though I felt terribly envious of your travels.Travel gives immediate pleasure, writing only satisfaction – or dissatisfaction. But it's the combination I should like to have had.' Chatwin, in turn, fell in love with a small house in Pitres: one of many that he would contemplate buying over the next two decades. In Kasmin's opinion: ‘Bruce's biggest problem was where to be. He never knew where to be. It was always somewhere else.'

In the Lot | as from Holwell Farm | 26 August [1976]

 

Dear Gerald and Lynda
⁴²²
and Lars,

This morning my voice returned. (You must forgive the whirlwind of conversation). All the same I wish I were back in the Alpujaras. I've always found this part of France suffocating and depressing, one's thought leaden, and head hanging dead weight like a pumpkin.

At Malaga airport there was no unbooked seat for days, so I went out for the day to Alhaurin-el-Grande, and in the evening Zalin
⁴²³
put me on the night train to Madrid. He is, as you say, tormented by Vietnam, and I think it will be years before the horror of it heals.

Next morning I rested in the Prado in the room of black Riberas,
⁴²⁴
the least frequented room in the museum, and after lunch took the milk train for Bordeaux. On crossing the frontier I asked some German boys to make sure I didn't miss the station and woke up with the light and the outskirts of Paris. The next day I spent getting back down here and the whole journey cost rather more than an airfare, but at least I didn't have to set foot on a plane.

I loved the house at Alhaurin-el-Grande, so cheerful and workmanlike, but the Alpujaras are definitely for me. Elizabeth sounded delighted at the prospect of terraces, shivering water and Muslim architecture. Providing the price is within the margin we discussed, I think we'd better buy it. If we sold Gloucestershire and moved to Spain, we'd have to find something bigger but I'm sure we could sell it later, and if not, at that figure, it's not the end of the world.

To my immense relief Jonathan Cape have taken my book on Patagonia;
⁴²⁵
so I shall be taken up revising and rewriting for the next month or two. But if things came to a crisis, Elizabeth could perhaps find a cheap fare to Malaga and straighten things out. She is far more competent about property than I am. We have the money set aside in an American bank account, so we can by-pass the labyrinths of the British Treasury.

Do please, if it's not too inconvenient find out the price, but do not on any account, put yourselves to any further trouble. You must promise this. If it falls through or is unavailable, we shall come back in the late spring of next year and look for another.

I shall send you Sinyavsky, Isaac Babel and the Prose of Mandelstam. Don't order them yourselves.
⁴²⁶
Thank you – all of you. Bruce

 

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 21 September 1976

 

Dear Gerald,

Though I'm sad the little dream house No 1 isn't for sale immediately, perhaps it's all for the best. Elizabeth and I will come out and prospect further sometime in the fairly near future. After all, one can't expect to find the ideal place in a single afternoon.
⁴²⁷

I am sitting in London, working over some unresolved sections for my book, before embarking on a new project. Some years ago I went to a place called Ouidah on the slave coast of Dahomey and met members of a family called de Souza, now totally black. The original de Souza was a Portuguese peasant, who went to Bahia, became captain of the Portuguese fort on the slave coast and successively the leading slave-dealer, the Viceroy of the King, and one of the richest men in Africa. At one point he had 83 slave ships and 2 frigates built in the Philadelphia dockyard, but he could never leave his slave barracoon and his hundred odd black women in Ouidah. The family went mulatto and are now
feticheurs
. A de Souza is high priest of the Python Fetish, which Richard Burton saw on his Embassy to Dahomey in the 1860's. At that time it was in decline but, since independence, has taken a new lease of life. Tom Maschler of Cape's says I should go and try and chronicle the gradual blackening of the family. I'll probably leave for Dahomey in November and then go to Brazil for a month in March, returning through Spain.

I hope you've got the Sinyavsky, Babel and Mandelstam by now.

Love to Lynda, Bruce

as from Holwell Farm | 8 December 1976

 

My dear Monica,

A few lines to keep you abreast of developments here. By the time, though, this reaches you I'll be in West Africa in a country called the Republic of Benin to do some research on a book about a slave trader.

Patagonia
is finished and delivered, down to the last Spanish accent (which I hope are right). Reasons of space have obviously restricted the amount of C[harles]. A. M[ilward] material I could – and would like to have used, but this is all to the good. I have printed verbatim in the first person the story of the boys getting lost overboard (my literary friends say it's better than Conrad) and two others The Bushmen dancing and the Indians' Canoe, both v. short, about 2pp each. The others I have duly compressed, sometimes to a line or two and put into the Third Person.

The book ends with the following:

‘This book would not have been written without Charley Milward's daughter Monica Barnett, of Lima, who allowed me access to her father's papers and sea-stories. This was particularly generous since she was writing her own biography in which the stories will appear in full.'

This leaves absolutely no room for question about matters of copyright.

 

Abomey | Benin | 9 December 1976

 

K[asmin] & I have been walking round the north of the country making a preliminary tour. We have had an audience with the king – born in the year of Burton's visit in 1863.
⁴²⁸
The story is wonderful, already forming in my mind, but I've hardly touched on it yet. I think it will have to be written in the high style of
Salammbo
. If you liked & could afford it you can come out in Feb for 3 weeks – fare to Cotonou £320. I will have lodgings in Pto. Novo hopefully, but it is hot sticky and I'll be working.