Under the Sun (54 page)

I keep worrying about Piers Hill. Do let me know if you think there's anything I can do to help.

Had a card from Robyn [Davidson] and Salman, who are using Homer End as a weekend retreat. Bitter complaints from them about the London fog.

All my love to you, Bruce

PS Tomorrow night, for dinner, we are meeting a Mr Chang, the Number One official in charge of foreign travel in Tibet. Now that really would be something, if we can swing a trip on him. All the places I dreamed of going to: Kashgar, Urumchi, The Takla-Maklan, Lhasa – are suddenly OPEN.

 

Over Christmas, the Chatwins were joined in Kathmandu by Kasmin – Ninette Dutton and Chatwin's parents having cried off. But Elizabeth's bronchitis had worsened. ‘The city was cold and damp and polluted, I couldn't breathe, couldn't lie down to sleep.' Early in the New Year, Kasmin suggested that they leave. The three of them flew to Benares and drove to Delhi where Chatwin had arranged to meet Murray and Margaret Bail. Dropping Kasmin at the Oberoi Hotel, the Chatwins accompanied the Bails to Jodhpur
.
There, after inspecting several houses, Chatwin found the ideal place in which to complete
The Songlines,
a red sandstone fort 20 miles from Jodhpur.

Benares | India | [January 1986]

 

Have fled from disease-ridden Kathmandu: the world's No 1 capital for complaints of the upper respiratory tract – and am now on the loose in India. I have, even with near pneumonia and the constant upheavals, done some writing.

Love as always, BC

c/o Manvendra Singh | The Fort | Rohet | Jodhpur | India | 23 January 1986

 

Dear John,

At last I have an address that may last a month or two. Our rented house in the Kathmandu Valley turned out to be a catastrophe . . .

Can you let me know if the flat is now empty? And if not when it will be? Next, can you work out what's owing? As it's been such a long time, frankly I don't want to spend all of it on repairs. Some can go to pay off the mortgage.

Can you arrange the shower to be tiled first, and put completely in working order? The same tiles as you have in Drayton Gardens. I think it's very important that the whole thing is leak-proof. The next step, I think, should be to prepare the surfaces for painting, filling in old plaster etc. But I feel we should wait till I get back for its final colour. I don't think I want it dead white. Or if I did want it white, then I feel the colour of the floor should be changed, bleached or something.

I'll take a decision as to what to do with the place when I get back. Frankly, it must either be arranged so it is lettable: company lets etc., in which case I must remove all my things and have it anonymous. But the business of letting anyone into so small a space, if the things
are
there, is really not possible. Or at least, it causes more angst than it's worth. Everyone, in some way or other, is territorial, and there's no point in having a place that isn't one's own.

I have, here, a suite of cool blue rooms in a Rajput Fort. Turtledoves cooing, peacocks honking, and little children with bells on their clothes playing hide-and-seek in the garden below. I battle on with the arid landscapes of Central Australia.

Do send
other
news. The baby? The projects in N.Y.? I've been completely out of touch now, without so much as a letter, only some asinine telexes from
Vanity Fair
, for three months.

as always,

Bruce

c/o Manvendra Singh | The Fort | Rohet | Jodhpur | India | 27 January 1986

 

Dear Kassl,

I must say communication in this country is really very dicey. We had calls from you, and then cancelled, and then when we did finally make it to the receptionist in the [Hotel] Oberoi [in Delhi] we were told you'd just gone. The first stab at this mythical beast ‘the place to write in' was a dud. Babji Jodhpur said he had a cottage with a swimming pool in a mango orchard halfway to Udaipur, in a place called Ranakpur, where there is an astonishing Jain temple. The whole thing sounded wonderful, but wasn't; in that a bus load of tourists were liable to swoop on the place for lunch, and besides it was all a bit cramped and there was no place to spread.
⁷¹⁸
We did, however, at H.H.'s birthday celebrations, meet an extremely pukkah gentleman, ex-zamindar type who said he had a fort in the country. Absolutely secluded, on a lake, with an ageing mother in the zennana, a kitchen full of cooks with traditions going back to the 17th century – and I might say, fabulous miniatures (though if you breathe one word to the other H.H. [Howard Hodgkin], I'll brain you!). On the lake, spoonbills, cormorants, pochards, storks, three species of kingfisher. Slight ruckus from the peacocks in the early morning. Anglo-Indian furniture of the mid-19th century. A cool blue study overlooking the garden. A saloon with ancestral portraits. Bedroom giving out onto the terrace. Unbelievably beautiful girls who come with hot water, with real coffee, with papayas, with a mango milk-shake. In short, I'm really feeling quite contented. The cold and cough has been hard to shake off. A dry cough always is. But thanks to an ayurvedic cough preparation, it really does seem to be on the wane. Today was Republic Day, with Mrs Chatwin on hand to present the prize to the volleyball team, and sweeties to 500 schoolchildren . . . she's gone today via Jaipur and Agra [to Delhi] leaving me to sahib-ish splendour. Over the past week I have at last been cutting some fresh furrows with the book, and I don't think I have quite the same sinking feeling that all the rest of it was in chaos. Murray [Bail] was, in fact, a great help with Australianisms.
⁷¹⁹
I'll have to watch the whole thing like a hawk. What one can't help feeling is the degree to which English has been Americanised, compared to Australia. I've always thought that Australian writing, on a page, looks a little archaic: now I'm beginning to realise why. They went off to Udaipur, and we came here.

Lots of love to B[eatrice] and G[regori Von Rezzori] – and I hope all goes well with the party. And to you, always B

PS I wonder what you'd think of Gadda
⁷²⁰
,
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
. My pal Calasso says Gadda is wonderful. Murray lent it to me. I love it.

c/o Manvendra Singh | The Fort | Rohet | Jodhpur | India | 1 February 1986

 

Dear Charles and Margharita,

Well, all we can say is some little fly must have buzzed in your ear a warning, ‘Don't go to Kathmandu!' I don't know if you've heard what happened. The house we were promised: an Englishman's house with servants and sofas, in the country etc fell through and E. was then offered a
cottage orné
, in a garden admittedly right in the heart of the city, not far from the Royal palace. She had to furnish it etc, which all cost money; and when I arrived from Hong Kong, I had, I have to say, misgivings. Almost immediately the offer came up of a trek in the mountains to prospect a new route for Shirley Williams,
⁷²¹
so I went off walking for six days, came back feeling wonderful, only to find a message at the airport that E. had bronchitis, which for her, is very unusual. Within a couple of days, I then had a lung collapse on the scale of my Christmas performance last year.
⁷²²
The house, it turned out, was sitting in a pool of pollution, plus the fact that over the wall was the city shit-house, plus the fact that they burned the shit and other refuse at night so that the fumes would settle in our throats. All I can say is that it brought back a kind of bronchial misery I associate with Stirling Road winter '47.
⁷²³

Kasmin, who misbehaved dreadfully, then came up trumps and suggested flight, at once, to India: not next week, now. The first flight we could get on was to Benares, and to Benares we went. I've become completely neurotic about overweight, seeing that I'm forty kilos over, in books: but we sailed through that, arrived; went to watch the Burning Ghat (which is not at all sinister, but calming. You literally stand within, say 15 feet, of half a dozen burning corpses: and after you get used to the smell – though I with my cold, could hardly smell a thing – it all seems perfectly natural and harmonious). We then drove to Delhi along the Grand Trunk Road (all planes and trains booked) in a taxi. I hoped to show Kas the
Martinière
which is an enormous ‘French' 18th century chateau, now a boy's school, but since the fog was such that we couldn't see the bonnet of the car, there seemed little point.
⁷²⁴
On to Delhi where we stayed with my pal, Sunil Sethi, a journalist whom I first met while ‘doing Mrs G[andhi]', now the editor of a new newspaper
The Indian Mail
. He has a new and beautiful wife: all very
soignée
. Then our Australian friends, Murray and Margaret Bail, he a novelist, she seems to run the welfare department of Sydney, and we went off to Jodhpur, where they had already arranged to go and I know the maharajah. The palace in Jodhpur is the last
great
ruler's palace to be built anywhere: at least as large as Buckingham Palace and completed, finally, in 1949. My friend H.H. (or Babji), a totally wonderful character, replied to my note at once, saying he was overcome with his 40th birthday celebrations. Would we come for a drink now? This minute? Which we did: to find him also entertaining a real lunatic, the Belgian ambassador to Iran. The question then was how to get rid of the Belgian, and keep us back for dinner – which I might say then developed into a farce, with the ambassador hoping he'd been invited, we knowing he hadn't but too polite to say so, etc. It passed off. I said I was looking for somewhere to write, and Babji immediately proposed a cottage in a mango orchard laid out by his grandparents at a place called Ranakpur, about 75 miles away (we went there, later, with the Bails; but it wasn't really very satisfactory. Every day, tourists staying in one of Babji's hotels would descend for lunch, and there was nowhere really for me to spread my books). The next night, however, was the birthday; the maharanee choked solid with diamonds and emeralds;
⁷²⁵
all the courtiers in whirligig Rajasthani turbans and real white jodhpurs; the musicians playing ghazals; polo playing colonels; the British Ambassador – Wade-Gery,
⁷²⁶
distinguished for a change! And then we met a real charmer! Manvendra Singh.

He comes from a line of Rajput zamindars,
⁷²⁷
which is to say, a little bit more than squire: courtier and landowner to be more exact. I did my usual babble about finding a place to write in, and he said, ‘I think I have the place'. He had, too. Although he lives four days a week in town, he has his family fort, a building going back to the 16th century, around a courtyard with neem trees and a lawn, its outer walls lapped by a lake with little islands, temples on them etc. The rooms we occupy are a self-contained flat, bluewashed, with 19th century Anglo-Indian furniture, photos of maharajahs, and a never ending procession of birds. The country is flattish, and almost semi-desert; and since there was no monsoon last year, the situation is quite grim. But the lake, which is filled from a canal, is one of the only tanks in the region, and the stopping off place for all the migrants on their way to or from Siberia. Almost within arms reach are ducks, spoonbills, egrets, storks, cranes, herons, bee-eaters, a dazzling kingfisher which sits in the nearest tree. Each morning brings something new. Tea arrives with the sun. Siesta. Buckets of hot water. Breakfast. Morning coffee (real). Lunch. Siesta. Walk. More work. Then in the evening you hear the muezzin being called from the Mosque, and incredible bangings and trumpetings from the Krishna Temple, then silence.

I have the most charming study to work in, and work I do. I have learned long ago not to make any prognostications about when this book will be finished. All I will say is that I've enlarged it considerably since I've been here. There's a tricky passage to come, and after that . . . Well, who knows?

But I'm afraid this gypsyish life cannot go on. I shall have, whether I like it or not, to get a proper bolt-hole to work in. Otherwise I find I can fritter away six months at a time without achieving anything, and that only makes me very bad-tempered. In a way, I like being in Italy, but the climate's quite tough in winter, and the villages (because I'm sure it must be in a village) are usually quite depressing. Our old stamping ground in the Basses-Alpes is not half bad. Uzès is another possibility. What it'll mean, I'm afraid, is that the London flat will have to go. I'm after 3 rooms: one to sleep and work in; one to live in, and a spare room. It'll have to have a terrace, somewhere to sit out at least; and walks in neighbourhood. Greece, I think, is too remote; especially when one sees the problems Paddy and Joan [Leigh Fermor] have to face.
⁷²⁸
I know nothing about it: but I'm told the mountain villages of Majorca are still extremely attractive. It's no use thinking I could have something like
Les Chênes Lièges:
⁷²⁹
because I do need at least the minimum of a working library, and that will take up space. The point is that it must be available for me to descend on, as and whenever,
I
, not anyone else, wants. It must not be let out – as I've had to do with the flat, because it's my experience now that the moment you let anyone in to your surroundings, they are suddenly no longer yours.
⁷³⁰
Anyway, the conclusion of this little moan is that, as and when the book is delivered to the publishers, I am taking off some months a. to try and teach myself some Russian b. to find the bolt-hole and set it up properly.