Under the Sun (84 page)

His rift with Rogers continued to preoccupy Chatwin after he and Elizabeth returned to Homer End. On 24 October his sister-in-law Sheila Chanler arrived for a Sunday lunch at which were also present Michael Ignatieff, Salman Rushdie and Murray Bail. Chanler wrote in her diary: ‘Murray an Australian, dry subtle man v likeable. Lunch noisy and confusing. Lots of cross-fire conversations on hot literary topics, one situation in particular concerning B's former agent now involved in some sinister plot and all v disturbing to B.' Bail wrote in his notebook: ‘B. told with a certain relish of a Russian he'd met in Prague, a dark ex-monk who, after being harsh with women, would slash his face with a razor, his face criss-crossed multiplying the torment.'

Head of Literature at the British Council (
b
.1934). ‘I'd asked him to come to our Contemporary Writers Seminar which we had every year in Cambridge. We got together a team of about 20 British writers, young and old, known and unknown, together with a group of about 50 people from overseas who had anything to do with contemporary writing, laid on industrial quantities of food and drink, especially drink, and hoped something would happen. Usually it did.'

Hans Magnus Enzensberger (
b
.1929) German polymath, author and editor.

On 13 October 1986 Tom Maschler had written to Chatwin looking forward ‘to more extraordinary things. No doubt totally different from what you would have written otherwise. Perhaps this will be in the direction of fiction, and perhaps will also be the “international” novel (Russian, France, etc) you have spoken of. If you recall, that is the book which I told you would be an enormous commercial breakthrough in addition to being great literature.' On 11 February 1988 Maschler would write again to Chatwin: ‘I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.'

Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China
, by Colin Thubron (1987).

American novelist and playwright (
b
.1933). Woolmer, a dealer in rare books, had met Chatwin at a gallery opening in London. ‘We discussed several writers, primarily Cormac McCarthy, Bruce hadn't read McCarthy at the time so I sent him copies of
The Orchard Keeper
and
Suttree
.'

Clapp had edited
In Patagonia
and
The Viceroy of Ouidah
for Cape.

Diana Sternberg (
b
.1936) to whom he dedicated
Utz
; m. 1957 Henry Ogden Phipps (1931-62).

Deborah Rogers continues to be Chatwin's agent of record.

EC: ‘We were staying at a hotel at the end of Les Saintes and on a long walk through the forest passed a sign saying “Attention!” but we didn't think what it was for. Bruce went for a shit and squatted down and within minutes he was in agony. From church, he went straight to the doctor.'

Robert Musil (1880-1947), Austrian author of the unfinished modernist novel
A Man Without Qualities.

On 12 February 1988 Gillon Aitken had written to Georges Borchardt: ‘Bruce wishes to make a charitable donation to the Commissioner for Refugees of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan and Ethiopian Aid of $3,000 from the first payment accruing to him following the sale of paperback rights in
In Patagonia
and
Viceroy of Ouidah
and a similar donation of $3,000 from the second payment.'

Down the Road, Worlds Away
, by Rahila Khan. Virago published the book in June 1987, but pulped it when the author was discovered to be not a shy girl in her twenties, married with two children and living on a south London housing estate, but a white clergyman based in Brighton.

Under the Eye of the Clock
, by Christopher Nolan.

Ian McEwan (
b
.1948), English novelist and screenwriter, shortlisted for
The Child in Time.

In Charles Chatwin's last words of admiration for his son's work, he pointed out to Hugh ‘Bruce's stamina at having delivered three books to publishers – half of his output – during the last three years of his life, when ill.'

Kevin Volans (
b
.1949) had studied under Stockhausen in Cologne and was composer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast. His compositions blend the music of Europe and his native South Africa.
Cover Him With Grass: In Memoriam Bruce Chatwin
was recorded in 1989. His opera about Rimbaud, based on an idea by Chatwin,
The Man Who Strides the Wind
, premiered in London at the Almeida in 1993, with a libretto by Roger Clarke.

Welch was special consultant (1979-87) for the department of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of Chatwin's hallucinations, following his collapse in Zurich, was of the Christos Pantokrator. According to Kallistos Ware, a titular Metropolitan Bishop of the Greek Orthodox faith living in Oxford: ‘He felt he was lying in the middle of the church in the Serbian monastery of Chilandari during a vigil service.' Chatwin came to see Ware several times over the summer, to discuss the possibility of becoming Orthodox. ‘What he wanted was to be received by baptism on the Holy Mountain since the Holy Mountain had played such a decisive part in his conversion. I was quite convinced by the firmness of his purpose, although I realised his illness was beginning to affect him. I asked Elizabeth: “Does he understand?” There was no doubt, she said: he understood very clearly what it was he was doing.' But Chatwin's second trip to Athos, though arranged for September, during which he hoped also to attend the 900th anniversary celebrations for the founding of St John's monastery on Patmos, never took place. ‘Unfortunately, his health deteriorated rapidly and he could not go,' says Ware. ‘I offered to receive him myself, but we were overtaken by events.'

E.C.: ‘It took weeks to diagnose what was wrong. It was a return of the fungus, in fact. It got so bad, he went back to the Churchill Hospital.'

Bail had edited
The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories
(1988).

E.C.: ‘Where she was raped. She went immediately to the police.'

E.C.: ‘Bruce had been very well coached by the Jesuit Father Murray. Then, two days before our marriage, the parish priest in Geneseo, Father Carron, gave me a nasty little pamphlet spelling out 32 reasons why I should not marry a non-Catholic. Bruce felt it was a slap in the face. He was furious.'

E.C.: ‘He was by this time putting noughts onto his sums.'

E.C: ‘True. The Iselins are dyed-in-the-wool Swiss bankers with a Puritan work ethic.'

E.C: ‘He always said I didn't spend enough money. He was used to living on his wits and not having any. I couldn't live on my wits and I didn't have very much.'

E.C.: ‘I didn't have any home for it. I'd given up horses when I moved to Homer End – a horse is much more work and money than sheep. Bruce was ringing up Arab breeders and finding out how much they cost.'

Chatwin's medical report of 13 June read: ‘Still convinced that he is making a unique recovery.'

E.C.: ‘It was real: a little nude of wax, from the antique dealer Blumka on Madison Avenue. It was lost in storage. Bruce added umpteen noughts to the insurance statement and someone saw and it was stolen, along with an Indian bracelet.'

E.C.: ‘A drawing for a carved box, of wild men and women in a tangle of leaves and owls.'

Chatwin had met Marshall, a young documentary-maker, on 17 July 1987. H.M.: ‘We were going to make a film together and planned to go to Russia and look at the roots of modern Russian art in icons.' The following day Chatwin signed a copy of
The Songlines
. ‘To Harry, a sequence of non-sequiturs'.

In
The Songlines
Chatwin writes of his uncle Geoffrey Milward – a friend of Emir Feisal and who had fought with Lawrence – ‘who died, chanting the suras of the Glorious Koran, in a hospital for holy men in Cairo'.

John Chanler's son.

The collection of French eighteenth-century drawings made by Gertrude's father, Irwin Laughlin (half of which is now in the National Gallery in Washington), on which Chatwin drew the idea to form The Homer Collection. He planned to leave it to Elizabeth.

Bail divorced in 1991; he m. 2nd Helen Garner.

In March 1988 Rebecca Hossack opened a gallery in Windmill Street, the first in Europe to exhibit Australian Aboriginal painting.

David Miller (
b
.1966), an undergraduate at Cambridge reading theology. His mother June MacLellan had worked with Chatwin at Sotheby's. She moved after her marriage to Edinburgh, where Chatwin visited her and saw Miller in his cot.

C.W.: ‘I had a thought that Bruce would like the poetry of Alun Lewis [1915 – 44] who died at the very early age of 28, in Burma, it is generally agreed by his own hand. The poem I could always quote was a romantic one which describes the last time Alun ever saw his newly-wedded wife Gweno in a boarding house in Liverpool the night before he left for India. It's called “Goodbye”. Verse 5 reads:
Everything we renounce except ourselves;/Selfishness is the last of all to go;/Our sighs are exhalations of the earth,/Our footprints leave a track across the snow.'

Chatwin's secretary at Sotheby's, Sarah Inglis-Jones (
b
.1943) m. 1971 John Bennett.

Philip Chatwin.

Shakespeare's novel
The Vision of Elena Silves
was published in September 1989 and dedicated to Chatwin.