Under the Sun (81 page)

Charles P. Mountford,
Nomads of the Australian Desert
(1976). Bail had written to Bruce: ‘The entire edition was pulped after Aborigines complained that it revealed secrets of dreamtime etc.'

Thomas Bernhard (1931-89), Austrian playwright and novelist.

Kathleen Stuart m.1972 Theodor Strehlow.

Robert Layton, Professor of Anthropology.

Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (
b
.1920), widow of Sir Anthony Eden, Prime Minister from 1955-57.

The Rezzoris had a house on Rhodes.

A cottage near Hay-on-Wye.

E.C: ‘A group I took to the Himalayas, a 22-day tour that started in Pakistan.'

To Strehlow's
Songs of Central Australia
. He never wrote it.

The War of the End of the World
(1981).

On the show, in the moment before Borges came on, Chatwin enthused: ‘He's a genius. You can't go anywhere without packing a Borges. It's like taking your toothbrush' – to which Borges, overhearing this on the monitor, muttered: ‘How unhygienic.'

Not quite. Chatwin was staying with David Heathcoat-Amory at Glenfernate. At the critical moment, with the stag in range, he refused to take the rifle and pushed it away. ‘No, I'd like
you
to shoot it.'

Henry Vaughan (1621-95), Metaphysical poet.

The English novelist William Golding (1911-93) had won the 1983 Nobel Prize.

Notebook: ‘The old Swedish gentleman who told me “The Swedes are the only people who understand about chandeliers. The way ice hangs from a tree.”' E.C.: ‘Ever since Bruce stayed with the Bratts as a schoolboy he had been longing for a Swedish chandelier.'

Francesco Clemente (
b
.1952), Italian artist.

Maharaja of Kapurthala at the Calico Museum of Textiles.

Betjeman died the following year.

Dr Charles Kimberlin (‘Bob') Brain (
b
.1931), South African palaeontologist, director of the Transvaal Museum and author of
The Hunters or the Hunted
? described by Chatwin as ‘the most compelling detective story I have ever read'.

E.C.: ‘Margharita had pulled the manuscript out of a wastepaper bin. “I'm sure he didn't mean to throw this away.”'

Australian anthropologist (1893-1988) known for his 1924 discovery of the first fossil of
Australopithecus africanus
, ‘flesh-eating, shell-cracking and bone-breaking, cavedwelling apes.' Notebooks: ‘At his 90th birthday party I watched him swinging about a hematite dumb-bell with which he hoped to keep himself in shape.'

Aboriginal community 530km west of Alice Springs, renamed Cullen in
The Songlines
. Between 18-30 March 1984 Chatwin stayed in a caravan there at the invitation of the storekeeper, Rob Novak, whom he met at the Adelaide Festival.

British-Indian novelist and essayist (
b
.1947).

A back-packer's hostel in Alice Springs.

P.V-M.: ‘I remember him embracing me, jumping on to the bus to Broome . . . There was a certain sense in which he was intoxicated by the place, the things he had found out, and I was part of it.'

Anatoly Sawenko (
b
.1950), Australian-born son of Ukrainian immigrants, then a consultant to the Aboriginal land rights body of the Central Land Council; Chatwin based Arkady, the central character in
The Songlines
, on him.

In 1963 Maschler had published
The Sun's Attendant
, a first novel by Charles Haldeman, an American whom he had met in Chania. T.M.: ‘We ended up buying jointly, with a friend of Charles' called Stavroudakis, a flat in a tall Venetian building overlooking the water on No 1 Angel Street. One year in the early 1970s Charles was away in Athens, and his boyfriend, a beautiful Cretan boy, took it upon himself to take an axe and chop through the head of Allen Bole, a homosexual would-be American writer and friend of Chatwin's who lived in an apartment across the way. I never went back to the flat after.'

Chatwin had remembered it well. Ibn Khaldun's actual words: ‘in moments of surplus, when the needs of the individual are surpassed, the war of all against all breaks out with equipment designed to defend himself against wild beasts.'

Alun Hughes supervised excavations at the nearby limestone caves of Sterkfontein where, in 1976, he found the cranium of Homo habilis,
c
1.5 million years old.

Julian Randolph Stow (
b
.1935), Australian anthropologist, librettist and novelist.

William Dalrymple has in fact traced the origin of these prostrations to an Eastern Christian practice in the early Byzantine period.

Lady Maisie Drysdale, widow of Australian artist Sir Russell Drysdale.

Geoffrey Dutton (1922-98) Australian author and historian, had recently left Ninette, his long-standing wife, for one of his students, Robin Lucas, whom he married in April 1985.

James Mollison (
b
.1931), director of the National Gallery of Australia 1977-90.

Australian anthropologist whom Chatwin had met at the Aboriginal community of Haasts Bluff.

Pitch Dark
by Renata Adler (b.1939), American novelist.

In St James's, where Chatwin and Bail bought their art books. M.B.: ‘Bruce often attacked the British for not seeing the importance of Cézanne. In the 1920s it was almost impossible to see a Cézanne in London; you had to go to Paris.'

The projected novel
Lydia Livingstone
, with a heroine partly based on Ninette Dutton.

Rushdie had written an article for
Tatler
about the Adelaide Festival which included the passage: ‘Later in the evening, a beautiful woman starts telling me about the weirdo murders. “Adelaide's famous for them,” she says, excitedly. “Gay pair slay young girls. Parents axe children and inter them under lawn. Stuff like that. You know.” Rushdie wrote in a postscript, ‘some of the citizens of Adelaide were upset by its reference to “weirdo murders,” even though I'd been told about such crimes by more than one resident of the city.'

Shiva Naipaul (1945-85), author and younger brother of V. S. Naipaul.

Robyn Davidson (
b
.1950), Australian travel-writer.

Teresa Rose (‘Tisi') Dutton (
b
.1961), singer, d. of Ninette and Geoff.

Ian Fairweather
(1981).

Harland's Half Acre
(1984).

Russian writer (1925-97), who published his novels in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. Chatwin particularly admired
A Voice from The Chorus
(1973), a collection of his thoughts from the gulag where he was imprisoned from 1965-71. Chatwin had met him in Barcelona on 26 September 1984. Notebooks: ‘Sinyavsky in a blue jacket with strange long brown shoes. The face of an agreeable peasant. Warm handshake. White beard, gold-rimmed spectacles.'

M.B.: ‘I was in London and trying to get into Sudan. At this small dinner with Bruce – at Michael and Anne Davie's, whom he hadn't met – there was discussion on how best to go about it. When we left, Bruce tore into the British, the Davies – for their mundane, philistine, drab way of living and seeing the world. I went into the Embassy the next day. I was “interviewed” by a very tall man with tribal marks cut across both cheeks, and in the middle of the conversation a papier maché portrait of his country's leader fell off the wall behind him. I didn't get a visa. Harare was where I went instead.'

‘Why Australia?' had appeared in the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

At Pam Bell's house in Boona, Chatwin had seen a grey Fairweather guache,
Painting 1959
, that, in Bail's words, ‘knocked his socks off'.

John Rewald (1912-94), German-born American art historian and author of
Paul Cézanne
(1948) who created a foundation to turn Cézanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence into a museum.

Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was assassinated in New Delhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984 on her way to be interviewed by Peter Ustinov for a documentary on Irish television.

Mirella Ricciardi (
b
.1933), photographer.

Ranald Allen, who had met Chatwin in Australia. In the 1970s Allen lived and worked as an Art and Craft adviser with Aborigines. Herzog had briefly approached him to advise on
Where the Green Ants Dream
. Some time later Allen talked to Wandjuk Marika who had appeared in the film along with his brother Roy, both Senior Law Men from Yirrkalla in North East Arnhem Land. ‘Wandjuk told me how close he and Roy went to spearing Werner on the set when he got a bulldozer driver to keep driving at them during a protest scene and almost ran them over. They reckoned he was a crazy man.'

E.C.: ‘The letter was probably blown out of the car or slipped behind the seat. He was very untidy at loading things. You should have seen his baggage. He had no system at all. It was all jumbled together.'

Ted Strehlow had willed 1,200 sacred artefacts to his second wife Kath for safekeeping, until their baby son Carl came of age. These
tjuringas
were the subject of a ferocious debate. On 29 May 1992 government agents raided her house in Adelaide and seized books, papers and objects. K.S.: ‘One of the things bugging them was my friendship with the English writer Bruce Chatwin.'

Chatwin had based himself in the Hotel Theano, a five-minute walk from the Leigh Fermors.

By Gerald Murnane (
b
.1939), Australian writer.
The Plains
(1982) was a short Borgesian novel about a young film-maker who travels to an imaginary country within Australia where he fails to make a film.

Marina Vaizey,
Sunday Times
art critic.

Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), French primitive painter and customs officer, known as ‘Le Douanier'.

On 24 August Bail had visited Homer End where Chatwin had read to him the Swartkrans section, after which Bail wrote in his diary: ‘Felt it was written too smoothly, lightly'.

Charles was supposed to be sailing across the Atlantic in a concrete boat. His childhood dream was to sail his own yacht on a trade wind passage, to arrive in time for Christmas at Nelson's Dockyard, English Harbour, Antigua – all in accordance with Royal Cruising Club tradition.

Two anti-hunt saboteurs had attempted to dig up the late Duke of Beaufort's grave in Badminton churchyard.

Jasper Conran (
b
.1959), English fashion designer with whom Chatwin had been involved since 1982.

Australian artist (1904-84). Bail had contributed an essay for a retrospective at the New South Wales Art Gallery. He replied to Chatwin on 18 February 1985: ‘I saw John Passmore as a peculiarly Anglo/Australian product, a slightly primitive man who raised himself with his kind of isolation.'

M.B. replied: ‘Yes, SR is back on the camel lady. Personally, I don't think it's going to last . . . SR sent me a note a few weeks ago with a letter enclosed for P. White. He 'd just reread
Voss
and this was “his first and only fan letter”.'

At Vassar College in New York State.

M.B.: ‘Bruce and I often talked about Cézanne, arguing for our favourite ones. Towards the end, in the wheelchair, he phoned me to say he had bought a Cézanne painting, unfinished, just a few brush strokes, of the mountain. As good as a fully finished work, “better than a Constable cloud study.”'

James Mollison, director of National Gallery of Australia, was then looking to acquire a Cézanne. M.B. was a member of the Council. ‘By the time they got one they could only afford a strange early painting of a bloke in bed with a woman.'

Louise de Chaisemartin had offered to sell the painting, owned by her mother Madame Lecomte, at auction free of charge. It was sold to the National Gallery for 6 million francs, but there is no mention in the Gallery's archives of her association with Chatwin.

The Case of Mr Crump
(1926), by Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955) Berlin-born American author. ‘The opposite story to a feminist tirade-novel. A real horror story.' M.B. to B.C. 18 February 1985.

Italian novelist (1861-1928).