Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In the tearoom at Sotheby’s, there was a phrase, “doing a Bruce”. It meant wrapping up something in a bit of myth and making a story out of it.

  For Bruce in his first two years, Sotheby’s functioned as a cabinet of curiosities that was constantly replenished. To observe Hewett and Bruce together was, says one dealer, “like watching a young puppy with a silent block of marble”. Hewett said, “He was at a very impressionable age then. Coming into Antiquities, he was confronted by the whole gamut of civilisation. We catalogued, we sorted out what was rubbish, what was a fake and we decided what to illustrate.”

  A photograph shows Bruce holding an African mask against shelves stacked with a Greek pot, a Thai head, an New Guinea head, a Roman torso, an Assyrian relief, a fake Benin bronze. Having to make snap judgements on objects so diverse, Bruce’s connoisseurship developed at a great rate.

  Hewett said, “He was a good pupil, was willing to learn. He’d pick something up and say, ‘This is jolly good,’ and I’d say, ‘It is jolly good, but what is it?’ It might have been 50,000BC to the present day. And I’d say, ‘It’s Rumarian, 3rd millennium BC. Read Leonard Woolley’s book about Ur.’ I pushed him to read about everything. I’d send him to research on a piece we weren’t sure about – say, to the British Museum or the Ashmolean, wherever there were other examples. I’ve had very little experience of anyone cramming knowledge into such a short space of time. He was the quickest I’ve known.”

  One day, in a consignment of Japanese Netsuke carvings, Bruce picked out a little ivory figure carved like a crescent moon, of a man with his arms up. It was the same size and shape as the others, but Bruce identified it as Polynesian, something of great rarity. It sold for £600. On another occasion he went into a shop in Ludlow and ignoring everything else fixed on what seemed to be a walking stick: it was one of the flag-poles from a doge’s barge. The owner had no idea.

  Hewett said, “If you put ten things on a table, Bruce would pick out the best one. Basically, he had a strange thing, rather unfashionable now, which is called a good eye.”

  Brian Sewell says of it, “The eye is indefinable, but those who have it know so, and know it to be the instrument through which informed intuition works; it is connected with a knotting of the stomach and a clenching of the bowels; it may break a sweat on a man’s brow, or make him breathless as angina.” Sewell once witnessed an “eye” responding to a picture of scant quality. “‘If that’s a Romney, my cock’s a lettuce.’”

  He says, “Bruce would come into my room at Christie’s. ‘Gosh, isn’t that so, so beautiful,’ and it might be something I hadn’t noticed. He didn’t know what it was, when it was done, who did it; but he knew it had quality. He could bring it out of the mire.”

  He responded to the object, not its label. “He didn’t care whether it would be by Fra Angelico,” says Robert Erskine, then running the St George’s Gallery. “I would be interested in something which had a historical point to make. Bruce was not so much interested in the meaning. He knew things like a docket, but to put something, say, in an eighteenth-century context didn’t interest him. He’d see it frozen. His reaction was totally aesthetic.”

  In this Bruce modelled himself on Hewett. He believed that beauty was inherent in objects of great seriousness or of human endeavour and that things were genuine because he felt, intuitively, that they were so.

  Those lucky enough to have the eye could trade on it. Bruce wrote, “The Directors at Sotheby’s assumed that people like myself had private incomes to supplement our wretched salaries. What was I to do? Exist on air? I earned myself a little extra by trafficking in antiquities . . . Almost everyone in the art business was at it.”

  He bid at Sotheby’s under the name “Winchat”. (On 16 July 1962, for instance, Winchat paid £30 for an Attic marble funerary stele.) He told Jane Abdy that Wilson had arranged for him to have a credit account in order to buy, an arrangement she found “rather odd”. He bought more expensive items in partnership.

  Hewett was Bruce’s entrée to a circle of collectors on whom he would depend for his financial survival. The introductions were made in Hewett’s Park Street office or in the saleroom at Sotheby’s, around a horse-shoe table covered in green baize. This circle remained a constant factor in Bruce’s life. They dealt. They swapped objects, sometimes lovers, and they prided themselves on having “the eye”.

  Some had great wealth. The millionaire George Ortiz, whom Bruce called “Mighty Mouse”, was the wide-eyed and energetic grandson of the Bolivian tin magnate Simon Patino. Since 1949, Ortiz had been using his fortune to build a collection of art from the ancient world. Rich enough to rely on his maverick intuition alone, he bought objects he loved. He was responsive to a Benin bronze, a Corinthian helmet or an Easter Island canoe paddle – provided each object “took my breath away”. Ortiz’s Harvard room-mate was Cary Welch, the son of an architect of recital halls, who lived and taught in Boston. Welch shared many of Ortiz’s tastes, competed with him, and collected Indian miniatures and nomadic art. Thirdly, there was the Hon. Robert Erskine, a coin and antiquities dealer, who was “half-rich”. Bruce entered into an arrangement with Erskine, an Old Etonian whose father was Governor of Madras in the 1930s. Erskine put up the money, Bruce provided the Sotheby’s list of clients, and they shared the profit. The partnership proved so successful that when Bruce was made a director, he was told quite specifically to deal with Erskine no longer.

  At the head of the green baize horseshoe, controlling the market, sat John Hewett.

  Ted Lucie-Smith used to accompany Bruce to the Portobello Road on Saturdays. “When you look at the origins of Bruce’s taste, the much touted ‘eye’, you realise he wasn’t an intellectual. He was basically parroting and popularising borrowed ideas. He didn’t have a really solid education. He didn’t have the application, and he wasn’t sufficiently systematic to acquire a solid foundation even later. He was a maker of bower-birds’ nests, with ideas as well as with the objects he gathered around himself. He flourished best where aspects of Brancusi, say, intersected with aspects of ancient and ethnographic art.”

  Bruce’s ideas about objects, says Lucie-Smith, derived not only from André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire but from Ludwig Goldscheider’s Art without Epoch – “in particular Goldscheider’s refusal to ‘hierarchise’ art and his tendency to suggest that things drawn from popular culture and ‘high art’ objects could be equivalents.”

  Bruce’s aesthetic obsession compressed itself into the activity of seeing. He caught immediately uniqueness of form, whether of an ivory nose bone from the Solomons or a stainless-steel chair. He later transferred his focus on to people and to books. “He would look at this bottle,” said the writer Gregor von Rezzori, “in the same way as he looked at a person, a phrase.”

  In painting, he liked Piero della Francesca (above all his Resurrection), Altdorfer, Hercules Seghers and Turner’s watercolours. He did not like Rembrandt or modern art. “He was utterly blind to contemporary art,” says John Kasmin, the modern-art dealer. Among favourite twentieth-century artists were Braque, Matisse and Cézanne. His favourite Cézanne was an oil sketch of Mont St Victoire “with literally about ten brushstrokes on a plain white primed ground . . . reduced to almost Malevich-like abstraction.” It was, Bruce wrote, “one of the most breathtakingly beautiful paintings I have ever set eyes on.” He told Malraux that English art was at its best “when it is really English and its great artists, like Palmer and Blake, are lonely eccentrics”.

  His visual taste responded most intensely to tribal art and antiquities. Following Hewett’s lead, Bruce took to walking around with simple objects from the Antiquities shelves which fitted in his pockets: a Sumerian head, ¾ inches high, made of white shell from the third millennium BC, a Hawaian bone figure of a woman, a late Parthian coin . . .

  On Friday lunchtimes in the Blue Boar near Piccadilly, Bruce showed these off to a small group of Marlburians who worked in the City, among them Nick Spicer. “It was a
little ritual. We’d wear our old school tie. He’d bring the coin or his catalogue notes and talk to us as if we would be interested.” But their paths had diverged since the days when they bicycled to Silbury Hill. “I felt he was inhabiting a different world, giving us a gift we didn’t appreciate.”

  Bruce, in defiance of Sotheby’s rules, took many of these antiquities home. “He wanted to look at them longer,” says Welch.

  IX

  The Imps

  Interviewer: How long did it take you to become an expert on the Impressionists?

  BC: I should think about two days.

  —Adelaide, 1984

  AFTER LODGING FOR TWO MONTHS WITH HIS UNCLE AND AUNT in Ealing, Bruce moved to digs in St John’s Wood. Six months later, in the summer of 1959, he took a lease on a mews flat behind Hyde Park Corner. His chairman approved. Bruce, he told everyone, was the only person who lived within a mile of the office. The flat was three rooms over a garage where a mechanic tuned sports cars and across the street from the Horse Guards’ stables. Bruce painted the interior stark white and invited a lodger to pay half the rent. Anthony Spink, the future chairman, worked at the family firm of coin and medal dealers. He had been introduced to Bruce through an elderly cousin of Charles. He says of the flat, “There was a white-painted floor; a nasty blue carpet in the bedroom, which we shared to begin with; and a skylight. My mother thought we ought to have chintzes; but Bruce built a jousting tent in the sitting room and put his bed inside.”

  They rubbed along for a year, but had litde in common. “He gave the impression of being strongly squirearchical,” says Spink. “It would be ‘Warwickshire’, not Birmingham.” Once Spink brought a Canadian archaeologist back to the flat to find Bruce “flouncing around” in a dressing gown, standing over a blow-heater. “He wasn’t ever a person I felt totally at ease with.”

  The only friend Spink recalls Bruce inviting home was Ivry Guild. “She was here a lot.”

  Raulin’s sister was one of few people Bruce knew in London when he first arrived. After researching at the Victoria & Albert, he often turned up at Ivry’s house at 34 Boscobel Place. She says, “I never knew when he was coming. The doorbell rang and there he’d be, bright piercing eyes looking at me, completely sure of a welcome.” One day Ivry decided to do up her bedroom. Bruce took over. He chose a crazy French wallpaper, pale blue with enormous daisies. Then Ivry decided she could not afford it and they painted the room pink. “Whenever you talked to him, you were the most important person and whenever he was around, you felt awfully happy.”

  One weekend during the summer of 1959, Bruce and Jane Abdy stayed a weekend at the Cornish home of “the birdman in a blue fedora”. Robert Abdy was then courting Jane. Bruce, acting as chaperone, managed to spirit her off for a rare heart-to-heart. She says, “We walked in the large garden among French-sculptured nymphs and topiary. Bruce had a photograph of Ivry in his jacket pocket. He’d take out the photograph and say: ‘Isn’t she pretty? I want to marry her, but she’s four years older. What do I do, what do I do?’ I was Bruce’s agony aunt. Ivry was his first real love. He was madly in love and kept on saying: ‘Can I propose?’ But he was worried about this gap.”

  Abdy tried to reassure Bruce. Of course, it could work. The four years difference wouldn’t matter in time. But at Christabel Aberconway’s June party, Ivry met Col. Paul Freyberg, a Guards officer with a Lutyens house. Sad, worried, disappointed, Bruce turned to Abdy once more. “Paul has come along. Have I got a chance?” Again, Abdy urged him on.

  Oblivious to this drama, Ivry married in July 1960. As she drove to church, she saw Bruce by himself in the middle of the road at the end of the drive. He held up two paintings: “Ivry, these are your wedding presents.”

  Curiously, neither Ivry nor their mutual friend Robert Erskine suspected the nature of Bruce’s feelings. Erskine says, “I was not ever aware that Bruce was part of Ivry’s life.” Already, Bruce was compartmentalising his world. Not yet 20, he must have felt some need to connect, even if that initial step meant performing the rituals of courtship he observed around him. Lucie-Smith says, “Several women among those he made a play for or fancied were apparently totally unaware of him as a sexual being of any sort.”

  Another girl who was the object of Bruce’s admiration was Sarah Hunt, a student at the Courtauld. Starved of friends who knew about painting, Hunt, the daughter of a Harley Street doctor, fell in with Bruce not long after he started at Sotheby’s. They saw each other for lunch. Bruce took her to dances, to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Both were shy and gauche, and they shared an interest in Byzantine art. Hunt found him “not at all witty to talk to”. He did not seem to her suited to being a young man. “He had quite solemn, adult clothes for his age and looked extremely owlish, with a big head. He definitely got better looking.” There was an embarrassing episode when he tried to kiss her after a dance in the Chilterns, in front of a house on a hill.

  Hunt’s affections were spoken for by an engineering undergraduate at Cambridge. In May 1960, the month in which Ivry announced her engagement, Nigel Craig wrote to Hunt from King’s College: “Why were you so unkind to Bruce Chatwin? He wanted to go back with you, but you thought him too boring, too litde worth bothering with. But you don’t have to bother with him really. All you have to do is talk about nothing.”

  By summer, their friendship had faded. Hunt says, “It never occurred to me he could be of interest to anybody. I never thought about him since.” Looking back, she believes the one place where he felt secure was in his work. “He was growing in confidence by the week.”

  Bruce’s confidence was linked to a new responsibility for Impressionist sales.

  John Rickett was the administrative head of Modern Pictures. He had been a close friend of Wilson, but was not running the department with the emphasis Wilson had in mind. A large, moody man with unruly, gingerish hair and delicate hands, who played the harpsichord, Rickett was interested most in English pictures and obsessed in particular by the work of Richard Dadd. Ignoring him, Wilson used Bruce as a lever to split up Modern Pictures. He gave Bruce responsibility for cataloguing a group of 49 Matisse bronzes belonging to Mr and Mrs Theodor Ahrenberg of Stockholm. Bruce said, “There came a moment when the rather ancient cataloguer of the department was away and so I chipped in and I said, ‘Well, I’d better catalogue them.’ And I did. And then I was an instant expert. So it really took me the time it took to write the catalogue – which I think was one evening of my time – and then suddenly, absolutely overnight from knowing nothing at all, I was somehow acclaimed as an instant expert and had views. And then I had to start learning very fast, of course.”

  Peregrine Pollen recalled a certain amount of resentment that someone so junior had been given such an important collection to catalogue. But Bruce did an elegant job. From this time on, Wilson made Bruce responsible for cataloguing Impressionists. Rickett remained nominally in charge, but by October 1960, “Imps” was in effect a separate department answering to the chairman.

  * * *

  “Imps” was glamorous and identified itself with the world of fashion. Where dealers in Antiquities tended to be “a lot of Birmingham colonels who’d fought the Japanese”, Impressionists attracted Greek shipping money; also the presence of royalty and stars of stage and screen.

  Bruce’s secretary was Sue Goodhew, a pretty debutante who also worked for John Rickett. She says, “Our office was opposite the Cappuccino Café in St George’s Street. We used to watch the men go in and out of the tarts’ rooms above, and the tarts used to watch us typing.”

  A keen horsewoman, she was known as “Fidget” or “Corporal of Horse Goodhew” and reputed to have a string of boyfriends in the Life Guards known as “Goodhew’s Own”. Wilson liked to scurry around looking for the daughters of families with great possessions to work on the front desk: “Fidget” had landed her job through connections with the Earl of Lanesborough, whose pictures Sotheby’s sold.

  Goodhew says of Bruce, “
He was a volatile person to work for. One moment he was in good form. The next he was not.” One way to defer his dictation was to plead for an imitation of Noel Coward. “I would sit back while he sang ‘In a bar on the piccolo Marina . . .’ Sometimes we’d do a duet from A Room with a View, and he’d sing, ‘I’ve been cherishing through the perishing winter.’ In winter I’d have to wear gloves until my fingers were warm enough for typing.”

  Bruce would come in at 9 a.m. “We’d do the post together,” she says. “Obituaries would go round and if he knew them he’d write a letter of condolence.” The stock letter, drafted by Peter Wilson, asked the bereaved not to overlook Sotheby’s. “The catalogue will be a monument to your deceased wife/husband’s taste and judgement.”

  If Bruce had no lunch date they might eat a sandwich at the Cappuccino. “He’d tease me about my boyfriends. ‘Going out with the Cavalry tonight?”’ It did not cross her mind to include Bruce in her invitations home to Sutton Bonnington. “Never entered my head. I didn’t know he’d been to public school, but I realised he didn’t come from the same background. I couldn’t see him going back at the weekend to hunt.”

  Her attitude explained to Lucie-Smith why Bruce became so highly competitive in his new position. “He wanted to show the boys from Eton that he was better than they were and he was irritated that the Fionas on the front desk did not like him or take him seriously.”

  Goodhew remembers the sort of smart visitor with whom Bruce dealt on a daily basis. She would grab a file and walk back to gawk at Gregory Peck, Alain Delon, Omar Sharif, David Niven . . . “One lunch, I was in the Imps, totally alone eating cheese and pickle, and the doorbell rang at the St George’s Street entrance and I opened it and there was Elizabeth Taylor dressed from head to foot in leopard skin.”

  When there was an Evening Sale, Goodhew would wear a cocktail dress and show clients to their seats. “It was a very social time.” Sometimes she accompanied Bruce on a valuation. One hot day they drove to Essex to see a prospective client, Bruce singing Noel Coward all the way. “When we arrived, the man came to the door and looked in amazement at both of us.” Bruce, dressed in a flat French beret, denim shirt and jeans, seemed too young to know anything and sometimes it backfired. One French client told him: “Vous êtes trop jeune pour être expert.”