Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  . . . Nowhere is smaller than Patagonia. Of course the good-looking American couple in the Hotel Cabo de Hornos lived near Barrytown, New York. Of course, he was painted as a boy by Robert Chanler.402 I have been hurtling around Punta Arenas in search of the ghost of Charlie Milward. Fascinating place. For example parked on a beach with a rash of tin shacks almost on top of it is the Kabenga, the boat that took Stanley up the Congo. There is a concrete replica of the Parthenon which is the Gymnasium, there are little octagonal summer houses that could be Turkish. My menu of last night was as follows –

  Loco de mer mayonnaise (Abalone)

  Jambon Cru de la Terre de Feu

  Pejerrey a la planche

  Latuna nature (prickly pear)

  Café

  I am really looking forward to Peru and our circuit round the sites. How about your learning Quetchua (?sp) if you want to be really useful – or at least some Spanish.403 Could probably do with some sunglasses if only for the wind.

  Don’t forget International Driving Licence

  Bless you,

  B

  PS. Don’t forget a big – and I mean big bag – or bags – of bran. Hopeless line. Apparently it’s always the same xxxx B

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Cueva del Milodon | Ultima Esperanza | Chile | 15 March 1975

  The story of Charlie the Sailor is, as I originally guessed, absolutely fascinating. Monica has the manuscript, albeit unfinished, of his autobiography, which introduces me into a Conradian world of sailing ships. Then from this end I have unearthed an extraordinary mass of documents of his extraordinary activities in Chile. He was German vice-consul as well as English. No wonder Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher thought he was a German agent. Am returning up the Canales Fueginos and Magellanes to Puerto Montt, thence to Buenos Aires to work in the libraries for a week and will meet Elizabeth and Gertrude in Peru on the 5th April. Much love B

  Early in April, Elizabeth and Gertrude met up with Chatwin in Monica Barnett’s house in Lima. After visiting Arequipa and the Convent of Santa Catalina, they travelled by train to Cuzco in order to see Machu Picchu, and then flew back to Lima where they picked up the Barnetts’ camper van, driving to Huaraz, Chavin and Nazca, before returning to New York.

  Unwilling to work at Holwell, Chatwin rented a house on Fishers Island, a private island off the Connecticut coast, while Elizabeth returned to England to oversee renovations.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  1030 5th Avenue | New York | 7 June 1975

  Dear E.

  When you have Mr Elms fix the study at the end why don’t we lay your sisal on the floor, BUT making first very sure that the floor is sealed with some insulating material to keep out the draughts and the cold from underneath. Also let us plan on having a Franklin or a Shaker stove. Ask him how complicated it would be to remove the fireplace entirely. I don’t think very.

  Went last night to the most ghastly, chicy, swanky occasion at George Plimpton’s,404 all the people I most hate, which left me in a vile depression. I think I might try my hand at a short story called THE GADARENE LEFT.

  Longing for you to see my Norman tower on the beach.405 It is slightly like a set for a Hitchcock movie, with a castle beyond and flights of ferocious seagulls. I got slightly alarmed about the cost, and went to Nantucket to try my hand there for a house – and hated it. Full of maddening boutiques and middle class American children pretending to be hippies. Fishers Island on the other hand though it may be stuffy as all hell has a dreamlike vaguely surrealist atmosphere that is not at all disagreeable.

  Adrian406 is here and looks a bit better and less depressed. Perhaps he is getting the upper hand. much love,

  B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Box 271 | Fishers Island | New York | [July 1975]

  Dear E.,

  Got your letter. R[obert] E[rskine] is here. We have had an enormous lunch of steamed clams and grilled shrimp, and will have lobsters for dinner. Whew? There is a grey fog. Did I not tell you this house is not near the beach but in the beach. To such an extent that I have seagulls nesting in the house. Moules, delicious moules, not fifty yards from where I type, that is at low tide.407

  Among the books I shall need are: Marshall Sahlins. Stone Age Economics. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and other related Ideas in Antiquity . And Il Jimmy, the story of a Patagonian Outlaw. The first I once lent to Charles [Tomlinson] who may still have it. Of course there is too much furniture in the end room [at Holwell]. It should have: a desk, a chair, an easy chair, the stand, the French chair y nada mas.

  Was supposed to go to N.Y. next week, but am having cold feet about it, because I do not like going off the island.

  I had wondered why the main house had an astonishingly beautiful appearance and was full of amazing things. Huge Hawaiian bowl to keep the magazines. French Empire painted screens of Incas. Hokusai wave in the bedroom, but have since learned that it was decorated in 1932 by the famous Lady Mendl.408 Now being turned, rapidissimo, into the spirit of Bloomingdales, like everything else in the U.S.

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX B

  P.S. Did you send the Ladies of Lima409 to Monica. If so, good. If not, why not and how do we get it to her? One way is to get it to Christopher Barnett who would I suppose take it to Lima. I haven’t heard from Monica.

  In a lost letter to Robin Lane Fox, whom he had invited to go with him to Patagonia, Chatwin explained: ‘I’m having to write my account and you will think it is a contrived attempt at noticing, and I step out every morning looking at the ordinary world as if through a kaleidoscope of fractured glass – that’s what you will say, but I’m aware I’m doing it.’ Lane Fox says: ‘He later showed me a draft of In Patagonia. I said: “It’s too brightly lit, you’ve decided to go and notice everything.” Chatwin replied: “But the point of it is precisely that.”’

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Fishers Island | New York | 25 August 1975

  Dear C and M,

  Well, I have done about half the book of Patagonia. There is a 3-inch pile of manuscript, much of which will have to be scrapped when I come to the revision. This island has been well worthwhile. We rented a tiny Norman style garage stuck right out in the middle of the sea. It belongs to a family of mattress makers who have the big house. Seagulls virtually live in the house. Fifty yards away is the hideous mansion of Mr Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Magazine, whose banal conversation makes one long for England.

  I am just starting in on the part of the book which deals with the legendary Charlie Milward the Sailor. What a history! The life as a cadet up the mast of the Cape Horners. A shark-riding episode. Shanghaiing in San Francisco. Mad passengers etc. Monica has let me have a copy of his manuscript which describes the wreck on Cape Pillar at the entrance to the Straits of Magellan. The extraordinary thing about Milward is that he could never shake off Birmingham. The house in Punta Arena is pure Edgbaston arts and crafts. In his letter book there are a number of letters from L.B.C.410 Evidently he was fond of his cousin Isobel. From time to time he sent odd curiosities of Patagonia, such as a bow and some arrow heads of the Ona Indians. And I imagine he sent the piece of Giant Sloth at the same time.

  Many thanks for your letter, which was also a bulletin of the doings of the family. In doing this piece about Charlie Milward I have wondered about them from time to time. I must say I was amazed to hear that the Joneses411 were still with us. That really takes me back. I’m told by people, here even, that John Chatwin412 is considered quite a name among young modern architects in England.

  We leave here next week and go to New York for a few days. I am going to the West to Utah to do an article for the Sunday Times. Absurd subject. Butch Cassidy, the most famous cowboy outlaw of the West, skipped the USA in 1902 and managed to shake off the men from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He and his friend the Sundance Kid got a concession of land in Northern Patagonia at a place called Cholila, where they lived from 1903 to 1910. There are
people who remember them quite well, and their log cabin survives with its wall-paper intact. Later they were supposed to have been killed in Bolivia but Cassidy’s sister, now in her 90’s in Utah says her brother spent the twenties as a country gentleman in Ireland and returned to Utah for burial. This is the case of the Hero that never dies.

  I am in two minds about coming back before this is finished, but I think it will probably be better to come over in October, stay at least a couple of months and do my extra research in Oxford rather than Harvard. I talked to Cary [Welch] today and he’s going to give me a room in their house. So I am going to have 2 weeks at least in Harvard!

  I must say Gertrude was very remarkable in Peru. We had her climbing up mountains at 10,000 feet. Her friends say she has stretched upright since going away. She had never been on a camper before and although she got a bit tired, I think she enjoyed it. Peru was extremely beautiful, but it gives you the cold shudders. The Spanish colonial empire does have a very lowering effect. In Argentina, though, where everything was chaos, and one was supposed to be machine-gunned at every second if you believe the foreign press, it struck me as being about as peaceful as Stratford-on-Avon.

  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.

  That November, he rented a house in Bonnieux belonging to Anthony Carver, brother of the Field Marshal. Elizabeth says, ‘I am sent on ahead AS USUAL to drive on my own, 500 miles, to the Vaucluse, to prepare it. The place was impractical, uninsulated and insanely badly arranged, the top two floors of a house built into a cliff. We had a catalytic gas heater which ate up all the oxygen, and were feeling cold and nauseous, until we realised that we had to have the window open all the time.’ Visitors over the winter included Kasmin, some friends from Paris and Chatwin’s parents.

  To Charles Chatwin

  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

  To John Kasmin

  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 rucksack414 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 Rasputins415 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 David416 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 Grisha417 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

  To Derek Hill

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

  My dear D.,

  We have let the house to Alistair Sutherland419 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 Dudley421 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

  That summer, Chatwin visited Ronda in Spain where his friend Magouche Phillips (now living with Xan Fielding) had bought a house. ‘It was raining,’ Magouche remembers. ‘I was looking out of the window. “Why, why, why do I have to put myself on this perch?” Suddenly I saw Bruce. He just appeared through the apple orchard, like an angel.’

  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.’

  To Gerald Brenan

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

  Dear Gerald and Lynda422 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 Zalin423 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.