Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 17 August 1978

  Dear M.,

  Often I can’t think what I’m doing in this overelaborate house: it has fountains, potted palms, arcades, some hideous statuary, a wonderful view and every comfort but electricity. The last wouldn’t matter if the days weren’t so hot and lethargic. I feel quite lively at night. I’ve tried working to the light of a butagas lamp, but the thing overheats so much you’re back where you started, feeling lethargic again.

  Nevertheless, I believe the book may be finished one day. This, I might say, I have [not] believed before: so that is already an advance. The technical problems have been for me so colossal: how to string so many disparate facts and ideas into the life of one man, and carry the reader sailing from page to page. It will also be extremely small. I doubt if it’ll print up to much more than a hundred pages. But then I’ve never liked long books myself, so I don’t see why I should try and write them myself. Unless you’re Tolstoy, most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.

  The American reviews of In Patagonia are coming through and, so far, are much the same as the English. Who knows? I might even make some money. In the Pop Magazine ‘Rolling Stone’ there is a cartoon of the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat.

  After bellyaching about the Mrs Gandhi article, the editor of the Sunday Times magazine now says he likes it enormously. So where are you? It’ll be out on August 30th or thereabouts, cut to ribbons I have no doubt, and I bet there’s a printer’s strike as well. The whole thing seems to be on its last legs. Do you wonder in an organisation where Old Etonians have to trim their accents to Yorkshire when they go upstairs to the Editor, to cockney when they go downstairs to the printing rooms?

  Magouche Phillips and Xan Fielding491 are here, about six miles away. I go and swim in the pool. There are a couple called Zulueta, he the son of the Foreign Minister in the Republic and a great expert on the anopheles mosquito: she English, rather a bluestocking but most agreeable. Otherwise society in Ronda revolves around the penniless Lord Kilmarnock and his wife the ex-Mrs Kingsley Amis; two Americans who are the Spirit of Lake Tahoe: another called Mr Finkel . . . with many extra syllables . . . stein: a German called Siegfried: a memsahib lady called Grace: a Chilean sculptor and the local Condessa who is a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie.

  God knows what will result from Elizabeth’s American trip: the Chanlers all seem at sixes and sevens and plainly need something to DO.

  Fares to Malaga aren’t expensive and it costs nothing to live here. Would you think of coming out in September?

  much love, B

  Following the coup in Benin, Chatwin had found himself on the same flight to South America as Nigel Acheson, a teacher at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro. Over the next two months, Acheson had become Chatwin’s host and guide in Brazil.

  To Nigel Acheson

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 25 August 1978

  My dear N.,

  Nice talking to you. I thought Much Birch492 might have its effect and have thought of the good lady mixing her China and Indian and shaking her head sadly over her son.

  I’m not entirely sure I approve of feeding Joao493 with Black Magic, unless he was going to the gym as he promised. To my eternal regret there has been a six month silence now. My replies in Portuguese were quite inadequate, both in literary and emotional content, to this kind of thing:

  ‘Tenho pensado muito em voce de dia de noite a toda hora nao me esquece I do my love my beautiful, tenho vontade de te abracer te beijar sentir o seu corpe que tanto bem me faz. Quando esta frio eu penso em sair de casa a sua procure para me esquentar aquecer meu corpo com o seu calor, mas logo me lembre que e impossivel te encontrar pois voce esta tao longe de mim.494’

  – which for rhythm and poetic expression could almost come out of the Song of Songs.

  Ah! the geographical impossibility of passion!

  Plans: I’d adore you to come here, and if in September you wanted to go to Lisbon, I have some research (minor odds and ends, like what would a Lt. Colonel in the Portuguese Army be wearing in the tropics in 1875?) – and of course YOU, if you wouldn’t mind, would be an enormous help.

  I would even pay the ticket as a research fee, so that honour would be satisfied all round. Let me know if you can make it and I’ll send you a cheque.

  The only minor complication is the possibility of the arrival of a friend from India: the 23 yr old whizz-kid of Indian journalism, whom I want to take around a bit. The three of us in my tiny car might make rather an ill-assorted group. The chances are, however, that he won’t scrape up the money for the fare. Getting to Europe for an Indian is tantamount to disposing of a real fortune.

  How is your Television project coming along?495 Watch out for those people! They are professional time-wasters and you must get them to pay researchers’ fees. Incidentally, I think you’re quite barmey to have anything to do with films or articles. Your Iquique material and the family connections are the stuff of a marvellous novel. And you should sit down, hack it into a rough form and then go out again to fill out the details.

  Cable me and I’ll ring you. But do state a time because I have to book the call.

  As always, B

  To Francis Wyndham

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 2 September 1978

  The sizzling heat seems to be over and Mr da Silva advances ‘pero lentamente’. Might get finished one day. Ow! the strains of composition and of keeping up the momentum. How to eliminate the longueurs without eliminating the sense. Will never tackle a historical subject again. Saw Julian Jebb496 last week.

  Much love Bruce

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 2 September 1978

  Yes. A bitch to write – about a bitch. I went very sympathetic to anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable, but in the end couldn’t dredge up one particle of sympathy for the woman. A pity: I don’t like writing about people I dislike. Even in the villains you can usually find something – but Mrs G[andhi] is the essence of bathos. XXX B Atalante497 my FAVOURITE movie

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 6 September 1978

  Dear E.,

  We were cut off in the middle of the call: no warning of course.

  The letter from Whinney Murray,498 dated 1970, makes no sense to me at all. I propose to ignore it: if they come back yawling for money, I shall say that I had NO income for that year, and what was more, the accountant’s bill but swallowed up the free-of-tax grant on which I was supposed to live.

  I was 14 weeks at Teddy’s: at £25 per week that makes £350 in rent: I don’t think I paid quite that but with telephone calls etc.499 we’ll put in for that amount. Enclosed is a cheque for £400 to tide you over the next week or two: I suppose I can afford it: I’ve now completely lost count of what I have and what I owe. We’ll just have to hope and pray that money does come from Messrs. Summit Books. The reviews (I have a huge batch of them) are simply extraordinary. New York Times’ ‘Most praised book of the Season’ etc. A cartoon in the Rolling Stone which you will doubtless be getting of the author in bowler hat and cup of tea and Patagonian peak. ‘Home of the unicorn’ N.Y. Times – a Pepe Gonzalez figure with bagpipes. ‘Youthful Briton finds adventure in Harsh Land’ Youngstown Ohio Vindicator. The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (Boston Globe): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his Madeleine’ – ENFIN somebody’s got the point: I wrote off at once and told him so.

  Well, I hope Ali [Oxmanton] does come. I shall probably have Sunil [Sethi] here IF he can wheedle a ticket out of India Today; the whole thing sounds rather problematical, and I have sent off a cable for all of 1500 pesetas missing off one’s letter of the address. Will have to send another in the morning.

  At some stage this month I s
hall be going to Lisbon for a week, to try and inject some life into the Bahia section without actually going back.

  I have to say I wish I’d never started this bloody book, but it does crawl ahead pero muy lentamente.

  I simply can’t begin to advise you about the farm from here, because a. I have no idea whether you have had any conversation at all with your bone-headed family financial experts on the pros and cons b. whether or what you will have to pay in capital gains tax on the land i.e. in what proportion to the house etc. It seems raving to go into the blue (for you, not necessarily me) and hand out money to the bloodhounds of H.M.G. Financially, that is, if you want to stay in England, it would be better to have more land and less house, rather than vice versa, or I should say better land.

  My urgent requirement is a small base which I do not have to get into hock with mortgages: I do not want to have to make bread and butter doing journalism, because ultimately it corrodes.

  Have had to send the dog down to Curro. Nightmare of howling in the night. And as I predicted, the worst has happened, the rug and the dining table cover, crawling with ticks. Felt an itching in the groin the other day, lo! a pinkish grey balloon. The gatito has needless to say become extremely domesticado and constantly gets under my feet.

  Absolutely no news from Ronda. Am going to the coast for the weekend; a mixture of Bill Davis,500 Gerald [Brenan] and Janetta [Parladé]. Magouche off to the funeral of her friend Missie501 at Cadaques.

  I may very easily come back to Inglaterra, or at least to Paris in mid Oct. But all depends on the next three weeks, as to how the final haul, 40 pages shapes up. It’s going to be a very small book.

  love B

  PS Sunil’s just been to the Pondicherry ashram and concludes that the profundities of Sri Aurobindo502 are totally meaningless.

  To John Kasmin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 7 September 1978

  Dear K,

  Red letter day today: yours and the first batch of American reviews of In Patagonia to burn your eyes out. Not that there won’t be a stinker somewhere in the pipeline. One, by the staff writer on the Boston Globe, really got the hang of what it was about and put it down better than I could. It’s the review that pleased me most. But I must stop reading them. Paralysing!

  I know Worth Maltravers503 from my childhood and associate that part of the coast with unalloyed happiness. Felt a trickle of envy when I compared your cottage with the Green Hole of Glos, but this soon dissipated in a burst of joy for you. I was more than sceptical about that place in the la-di-da country round Banbury.

  From here there is no news. I am well, calm, a bit lonely and writing. The house lies on a beautiful clean dry hillside in ilexes and olives overlooking the Serrania de Ronda, but for all its palm court and hygienic glazed statuary it was little better than an electric oven in August. Better now and cooler breezes blowing. The book is shaping up pero muy lentamente. Enormous technical problems yet to be overcome. Going to be very strange. I had bargained for big dramatic set-pieces but these are all reduced to a few lines.

  A peasant couple called Curro and Incarna look after me and we are now all three glued to each other with dog-like devotion. He was being cheated on his raspberry crop by the wholesaler, and I found out he should be getting double the price. There’s a Chilean sculptor across the valley, a mad German below and Magouche and Xan Fielding about eight miles away. A friend from India is coming in a couple of weeks, also Alison Oxmanton on her way back to Algeria. I don’t know if E. will show up again. She has been in the US where her family are in the middle of one of their nightmarish brouhahas. Should the mother leave her huge unsaleable house and build, for half a million dollars, another large unsaleable house on the adjoining site? Not a subject that arouses sympathy in me.504

  . . . I left England in a particularly bruised condition. I long to live there, but in a situation that doesn’t get on top of me. You are right: the answer is to live alone. I was reflecting the other day that the people I really miss out here are, for some reason, my parents and you. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to get your letter.

  They say the weather’s wonderful through October. The best time for walking if you could squeeze a week in. There are endless off season cheap flights to Malaga, two hours by car.

  I’ll be here till the end of Oct, then see how far I’ve got on, and maybe hoof it to New York for a spell.

  What’s the name of your pal in Barcelona? I’ll be coming back through there to look up some Latin-American types.

  See you soon, love, B

  To Nigel Acheson

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | Monday 11 [September 1978]

  Dear N.

  Ay! I bleed for you. I had it very badly about twelve years ago: got it from a needle giving me an anti-histamine shot for a mosquito bite in Sicily: had it obviously much worse than you, for I would never have been able to compose such a letter. In convalescence I made a thorough study of Nerval and Baudelaire (two very suitable poets for the hepatitic) and conceived vague ideas of a literary future. In fact it changed my life: I suddenly had a horror of the so-called ART WORLD, and though I went on to be a Director of Sotheby’s everything about the firm filled me with claustrophobia and disgust.

  You have to rest: and let me tell you CHEW two cloves of garlic before you eat anything else in the morning. The best thing for purifying the blood – and for keeping ‘loved ones’ away.

  I agree: wherever I go, particularly in deserts, the image of that misty Gloucestershire valley passes before my eyes. But one should never go near it, except to recharge the IDEA of it once every two or three years.

  My plans are uncertain after mid-Oct: depends on how I progress over the next month. I don’t think I’ll be in this house as it’s far too expensive for one to rattle around in, and will be impossible to heat.

  I’ll write with news. This is a quick one to catch the post.

  As always, B

  To Christopher MacLehose505

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 11 September 1978

  Dear Christopher MacLehose,

  I’d very much like to see the Peter Matthiessen book.506 He’s a writer I follow with great interest, though I couldn’t take (despite some beautiful lines) the Zen-influenced novel of the turtle fishers. I’ll be at this address till the middle of next month.

  I take it you are publishing the book: do you want me to ask John Gross507 if I can review it?

  Yours ever, Bruce Chatwin

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 12 September 1978

  Dear E.,

  I’ve got masses of yellow pads. Bones508 brought me 20 hundred pages from New York in June. My size for the button-front jeans is 32 waist 33 leg. Sunil [Sethi] is on around the middle of the month: he hasn’t yet found out if he’s getting a lift on a jumbo of Air India going for an overhaul in Toulouse, but if not India Today are giving him his ticket. Ay! the floods. Haven’t heard a word since then.

  Progress pero muy lentamente. Have just been for the weekend to Janetta [Parladé]’s and had my lounge on the beach and swim. Feeling very relaxed and well. For some weeks I had terrible stomach upsets, which I have put down to coffee made in the machine. Anyway they’ve gone, but they were worrying as I was sick three times in the middle of the night.

  Magouche’s Susannah is here: I brought them up from Malaga and we called in on Gerald [Brenan].509 The bore is Xan: apparently when I came up with some more ‘Wind’ information, he took offence and thought I was trying to patronise him. Also resents my friendship with Magouche. I’ve tried my best to like him, gave Maro510 endless lectures about how stupid she was being but I’ve come to the conclusion she was right. He’s a silly, jealous A1 shit. He picks rows with M[agouche] the whole time and reduces her to a bag of nerves. She’s deeply in love with him (she’s crippled with the pinched sciatic nerve) and will to my mind not go without him. However. Sad about Hiram.511 You’re right:
in places like Provence, unless you have something specific to do, you just disintegrate. Same goes for here. Alistair Boyd has taken on a completely new lease of life since he got into the House of Lords.

  I bet they’ve chopped up the Mrs Gandhi piece: the sub-editor manque le moindre étincelle d’intelligence et du goût et d’humeur. I really am NOT going to write for them again.

  Can you check with my bank and D[eborah] Rogers what has and hasn’t been paid in. The statement runs up to August 7th with a credit for £1000. There should have been paid in the French advance, the Spanish advance, and £1000 or thereabouts from the Sunday Times. If all three have been paid in, then I’m far worse off than I thought, and will be running with an overdraft of around £1000. Never ends, does it.512

  Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out. Doesn’t mean to say they won’t come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant, Kipling’s Letters of Travel etc. People lose all sense of proportion.

  Kasmin’s cottage sounds a marvel. Why don’t you go and sniff round the land agents of that part of the Dorset coast. Just get in the car one day and go.

  Must go.

  love B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 16 September 1978

  Dear E.,

  Not much here either. Xannikins has gone off to climb in the Pyrenees and so everyone is much more relaxed. He is an area of LOW PRESSURE. Susannah513 and I climbed the plateau of Torecilla by full moon.