Under the Sun (78 page)

Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930), E.C.'s eccentric great-uncle, muralist and painter of screens, briefly married to Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri.

E.C.: ‘In Peru I could tell he was speaking Argentine Spanish, full of expressions the Peruvians didn't understand.'

George Plimpton (1927-2003) journalist and founder of
Paris Review
.

Stone Cottage was a conical gatehouse once owned by Margaret Stone, widow of Austin Tappan Wright, author of the Tolkien-like novel
Islandia
(1942).

Adrian Chanler, E.C.'s brother, with his then wife, Teri Blackmer. They divorced.

E.C.: ‘There was constant fresh fish. Fishermen would give us sea-bass and bluefish. The water's so polluted now, you can't eat the fish.'

Elsie de Wolfe, known as Lady Mendl (1865-1950), American interior decorator. E.C.: ‘She had rag-rugs in Persian carpet patterns that were stunning and real French provincial furniture. I stole a rug and a lamp that they'd chucked out.'

Ethnographic picture.

Leslie Chatwin (1871-1933), Chatwin's grandfather.

Hubert Jones, cousin of Chatwin's Milward grandmother.

John Chatwin, Chatwin's first cousin.

Charles and Margharita had come for Christmas. E.C.: ‘Most of the time we went off on picnics and left Bruce behind for the day.'

A dark brown leather rucksack, copied from a canvas bag, without a frame but with special pockets, that Chatwin had made up by a saddler's in Cirencester. He left it to Werner Herzog.

Michael and Sandy Marsh (
née
Alexandra Acevedo Kirkland) had driven from Paris with Chatwin's friend, David Sulzberger. The bearded Michael was third son of a Texas rancher with petrol and helium reserves, and brother of Stanley, who erected a fence from half-buried new Cadillacs. Sandy eventually jumped out of a window in New York.

David Sulzberger (
b
.1946), oriental dealer and former lover of Sandy Marsh; Chatwin used to write in his apartment at Quai Bourbon on Isle St Louis.

Gregor Von Rezzori.

Linda Adams, Kasmin's girlfriend. J.K.: ‘I was divorcing my wife Jane and I used to pour my heart out to Bruce.'

Son of Countess of Sutherland and a former policeman in the Metropolitan Police
.

Hill never completed his autobiography.

Grace Kolin (
b
.1923) m. 1961 William Ward, 3rd Earl Dudley.

Lynda Price (
b
.1944), nicknamed ‘Tiger' and a student from Chelsea Art School, had lived with Brenan since 1968. ‘I loved him but I loved him as one loves an uncle.' Brenan never even once kissed her passionately. In 1978 she married the Swedish painter Lars Pranger.

Zalin Grant, neighbour of Brenan and author of
Survivors
, who spent 30 years trying to establish what had happened to the missing journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. ‘Of course the Vietnam War was always with us.'

José de Ribera (1591-1652), Spanish painter. E.C.: ‘Bruce had decided Ribera was the greatest artist ever, the usual hysteria.'

Maschler agreed to pay an advance of £600 under the terms drawn up eight years earlier for
The Nomadic Alternative
.

Brenan would leave to Chatwin all his Central Asian books bought during the First World War.

E.C.: ‘He would wear out people in certain places and then have to move on. Everything was absolute paradise etc for about a month and then things were not quite what he wanted them to be. I discovered after years of this nonsense that the sure-fire way of making Bruce not buy a house was for me to agree.'

Notebook: ‘The king sat down on the green plastic seat of the throne. He was a very old king. A man called Burton came to see his father the year he was born. That made him a hundred and twelve. He had thick glasses and a big square jaw. One of the queens held a yellow parasol over his head. He knew all about Dom Francisco. “My grandfather's best friend,” he said. “My grandfather called him Adjunakou, The Elephant. He was a big man, bigger than both of you together. My grandfather took him out of prison. He lifted him up a ladder and over the wall. My grandfather was even bigger than Dom Francisco.”

‘The queen was bored. She sat and mended the parasol which had a broken strut. She steadied the handle with her big toe. A man came in and kissed the concrete floor. The King went on with the story. At the end he held out his hand and we paid a thousand francs. He told another story and we paid a little less.

‘He could go on all day. He liked telling stories. He liked getting paid for them. There was not much left for a king to do.'

E.C.: ‘He called me this ever since our honeymoon, when we all bought name tags in a petrol station on the way to Maine.' The labels stuck. Chatwin was Max; Elizabeth, Maxine; Cary, Earl; Edith, Darleene or The Dahling (as sometimes was Elizabeth).

Keith Nicholson Price. Brenan had sent Chatwin his address in Ibadan, writing on 8 December: ‘Do go & see him.'

E.C.: ‘There was a dish called “baked vegetables”, covered with a thick white sauce and cooked in the oven.'

Pierre Verger, alias Fatumbi (1902-96), photographer, self-taught ethnographer and Yoruba priest, was an expert on the slave trade between West Africa and Brazil.

Sutherland had looked after Holwell when Elizabeth was in India. ‘Bruce didn't get on with him at all.'

Chatwin's guide – ‘a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth' – was a direct descendant of de Souza.

Xango, the Orixa god of fire.

N.S.: ‘The situation remained unchanged in 1995 when I accompanied the Bahia street musician Rasbutta da Silva to Benin to seek his African ancestors. At the Maison Familiale da Silva in Porto Novo, the clan, all descended from the Bahia slaver José-Rodrigues da Silva, imagined Rasbutta to be immoderately rich, like his namesake. They crowded around him, saying: “When are you going to take us to your big house in Brazil?”'

Susannah Clapp, Chatwin's editor at Cape.

Hélder Camara (1909-99), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife, famous for saying: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.'

Chatwin means Mother Teresa.

Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), Italian journalist.

The
Sunday Times
did not commission the article.

Margaret Mee (1908-88), English botanical artist living in Rio de Janeiro.

The footnote on page 148 of the first edition of
In Patagonia
read: ‘My great-grandfather, Robert Harding Milward, did not go into the family's Worcestershire needle business, but went into the law. He was a wonderful-looking man, eaten up with snobbery and delusions of grandeur. He was the Duke of Marlborough's man of business and went to America to negotiate the Vanderbilt marriage settlement. (The Duke later sacked him for “grose incompitance”.) He was a friend of Richter, the Wagnerian conductor; of Madame Patti, and of Charles Gounod, whose son, Jean, was briefly engaged to my great-aunt Dora. His financial manoeuvres were bound to land him in trouble. In 1902 he went bankrupt for £97,000 and the Lord Chief Justice gave him six years for embezzlement. In Ventnor Jail a tumour developed in his brain and he died.'

David King (
b
.1943), art editor of
Sunday Times
Magazine 1965-75.

Graziella Ortiz was kidnapped from the grounds of Chateau Elma near Lake Geneva. The trail led to an abandoned Alfa Romeo near the French border. She was released ten days later, slightly chubbier – ‘obviously from being fed starches,' her father said – following the payment of a $2 million ransom.

Wyndham's mother, author and socialite Violet Leverson m.1923 Guy Percy Wyndham (1865-1941). On 25 October, Wyndham replied: ‘Yes, Violet is a
million
times better – it seemed like a miracle cure, though of course all it really consisted in was
not
taking what the doctor ordered.'

Antony Lambton, 6th Earl of Durham (1922-2006), Conservative MP, author and owner of Villa Cetinale, a 17th century villa in Tuscany.

Kitty Lillaz, Parisian beauty married to philanthropist George Lillaz, had driven to Tuscany from Grasse; Jacqueline Roque who had married Picasso in 1961 was to have come with her but suddenly was unwell.

Writer and traveller (1926-2007) who had reviewed
In Patagonia
in the
Observer
. ‘Chatwin's telling is masterly, as tantalising as the synopsis of a newly discovered Conrad novel.' Wyndham wrote: ‘Perhaps none of them
quite
get the hang of what you are doing, but they all seem to love the book and that will make lots of people read it, some of whom
may
get the hang!'

Tom Maschler's cottage on the Welsh Borders; one of Chatwin's myriad writing places.

E.C.: ‘It rained all summer.'

The Baburnama
, the memoirs of Zahir ud-Din Mohammad Babur (1483-1530), founder of the Mughal Empire, translated by Annette Beveridge.

Soviet short story writer (1884-1940).

Untraced. Babur's father was drunk or the steps to the pigeon loft were rickety.

Abu'l Faz'l (1551-1602), author of the
Akbarnama
, the official history of Akbar's reign.

In Patagonia
did not have photographs in its American edition.

Jim Silberman of Summit Books at Simon & Schuster paid an advance of $5,000.

Welch had written to Chatwin: ‘We telephoned G[eorge] O[rtiz] this morning. Graziella is back and not discussing her 10½ days of captivity . . . she is “resilient & strong” says G. and the captors did not treat her badly. But how utterly horrible!'

Howard Hodgkin, married father of two, had come out as gay and left his wife for a younger man. Welch had written to Chatwin: ‘RS, in London, told me that life had been painful for H. on the personal front. Sad.'

Monica's brother was born, and lived, in England. In her letter to Charles Chatwin, Monica had written: ‘As I'm sure you know, rape usually results in two victims, and did so in this case – and herein lay the tragedy . . . The tragedy of my brother is neverending for he found after many years that he was not even a British citizen – this after serving 8 years in H.M. Forces during and immediately after the war, and having obtained a job with Municipal Welfare services in the UK (he never returned to Chile after 1928).' About the identity of the rapist, she wrote to Chatwin on 25 March 1978: ‘I do know the man's name, and believed he suffered a terrible retribution as I understand one, maybe two of his children went down in the “Aviles” on their way to the war.'

Monica never completed her father's biography.

On 26 January 1978 she telephoned Elizabeth at Holwell Farm, dictating this message: THANK YOU LETTER JUST RECEIVED STOP AGREE CHANGES PAGE 173 AND APPRECIATE REVISION OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT NOTE CONGRATULATIONS BOOK‘S SUCCESS MONICA.

Indira Gandhi (1917-84), after her election defeat in 1977, in which she lost her seat, was campaigning to be relected, possibly as a prelude to running again for Prime Minister. The
Sunday Times
magazine had commissioned Chatwin to write a profile.

E.C.: ‘The flat was near Canonbury Square. At the last minute, he pulled out. He suddenly realised that it was too far away and no one would come and see him.'

‘On the Road with Mrs Gandhi,'
Sunday Times
magazine, 30 July 1978.

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer (1864-1927), British officer who gave orders in Amritsar on 13 April 1919 to open fire on unarmed civilians, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths.

Arsenic and Old Lace
, 1944 film directed by Frank Capra based on Joseph Kesselring's play.

Charan Singh (1902-87), Prime Minister of India 1979-80.

Lala Leach, Monica's sister.

‘The Quest for the Wolf Children' appeared in the
Sunday Times
magazine, 30 July 1978.

Donald Richards. Frances Partridge, diary 4 May 1974: ‘Donald good-looking (and knows it) but charming . . . He is Australian and has worked among aboriginal children, is now trying to write a Ph.d on the Indian Raj, loves opera, is drawn to the idea of death, calls everyone by their Christian names at once, but in a way that doesn't offend.'