Bruce Chatwin
Page 22
While the expedition was assembled, Bruce made exploratory rambles. Returning from one walk, he discovered Nash had been offered three small boys and a bunch of grapes. The youths looked like “boys from Marlborough”, identically attired in pastel green pants, brown shawls and Chitrali caps. For the rest of their journey, they would be mobbed by boys, many with blond hair and blue eyes, which disconcerted Bruce. “One of them aged about 6 had his eyes very heavily painted with antimony and would shoot alluring sidelong glances. This had a very disturbing effect as he had in every other respect exactly the appearance of an English prep school boy.” Bruce tried to photograph one boy, but was made to feel acutely embarrassed. “There was an expression of deep resentment in his eyes. He obviously felt that we looked the same and knew not why the difference between us was so wide.”
At last, on 22 August, Bruce’s expedition to locate Admiral Furse’s parsley stood ready. Accompanied by three porters and a Turkik soldier called Ahmed they set off along a narrow gorge beside a fast-flowing stream full of large trout. They walked for four hours, the flower press humped on a porter’s shoulders in a winding sheet. Suddenly, outside a shuttered teahouse, there appeared a boy carrying his little sister. The girl was about two years old and dressed in a red frock decorated with little silver coins. “The whole of her stomach and thighs were a terrible, septic, pustulant mess,” wrote Bruce. “Her brother told me that she had been stung by hornets and there were no less than 20 bites below her waist, nearly all septic.”
Through his medicines Bruce seemed to gain his most direct access. “I did my best with the limited medicines I had and bandaged all the septic wounds with an antiseptic cream while the child screamed piercingly and I gave her brother an anti-histamine pill for her in case they swelled up again.” His treatment proved effective. When, five years later, Bruce returned to this valley with Peter Levi and Elizabeth, he was remembered with touching gratitude for saving the girl’s life. “The reservations of thousands of years break down if you carry medicine,” he realised. “The doctor is the unveiler.”
For lunch, the porters gathered wild cherries, pomegranates and tiny figs. “Having been reduced to the ultimate stage of diarrhoea four days ago, I now find I am almost totally congested.” Soon they reached the most propitious spot for the parsley, near the village of Wama. Leaving Nash with the men, Bruce climbed 100 feet up a mountain stream. “I collected a thistle-like plant which I hadn’t seen before, three exiguous rock plants, one of which was aromatic when crushed and two small sedges from the stream.” Then, while hunting for his specimen among small bushes of holly oak, Bruce fell and scraped the skin off his arm.
His injury signalled an abrupt end to the expedition, recorded in feeble pencil. “Awoke at 5 a.m. feeling terrible, arm swollen, bandages a smelly mess with temperature of 100, bites from black flies, oozing yellow fluid. Nothing to do but return.” In panic, worried that he might develop gangrene, Bruce set off by himself, leaving Nash to follow with the porters. He had failed to notice that Nash was himself feverish with dysentery. Miserable, on an empty stomach, Nash walked the 30 kilometres back to Kandeh, where the bus had dropped them. There, to his fury, he found Bruce seated in a chair of state under a tree, at the centre of a colourful crowd, “looking as fine as could be”.
Neither could wait to leave Afghanistan. On 27 August, they arrived at Kabul airport for a flight to Peshawar. Their departure was recorded by Nash.
“Insoluble problem with the customs official.
“CO: You cannot leave, sir; you have no exit visas.
“B: What is this, then, if it is not an exit visa? B. flourishes a piece of paper printed in Persian hieroglyphics.
“CO: Oh no sir, that is not an exit visa, that is a request from the tourist office to the police dept asking them to provide you with an exit visa.
D: J.C! What are you going to do about it then? That plane leaves in an hour and if it leaves without us, there will be hell.
“CO: You will have to get proper exit visa from the police, but today is Friday and the police office is shut. The next plane leaves on Wednesday!
“Explosion!
“B. disappears to rout the Police Dept out of bed, gets our visas stamped by an official in his pyjamas whose friendship was immediately won by B.’s vociferous complaints about the inefficiency of the Tourist Dept; and by saying that he is reporter from Time magazine and so would the officer please get the King on the telephone as he wished to lodge an official complaint and get the entire Tourist Dept sacked.”
Bruce’s bluff had worked, but the trip which had begun with such serious intent had ended shambolically. “We are leaving Afghanistan, not without a sensation of the utmost relief,” he wrote. They had not managed to get the cow parsley specimen and there was another worry. He had been hoping to join Elizabeth in Lebanon, had requested the Embassy in Kabul to relay any cables, but he had not heard from her.
XIV
The Chattys
When I got married, Bruce said: “That’s marvellous, that’s marvellous. Now it means you can travel.”
—James Fox
ONE EVENING IN 1963, JOHN RICKETT, THE DIRECTOR IN CHARGE of Pictures, invited Marcus Linell, who had worked alongside Bruce as porter, to dinner in Kensington Square.
“Who do you think is going to be next Chairman of Sotheby’s?” Rickett asked.
Linell replied without hesitation: “Bruce Chatwin.”
Bruce was then 23. The fact he was considered Chairman material at this age by his colleagues was noteworthy, but in the context of Wilson’s treatment of up-and-coming stars it was not the compliment it seemed. Wilson burned most of his favourites, including Rickett who, until the splitting of his department, had considered himself the front runner for the succession.
Bruce revealed his misgivings to Cary Welch. “Am given over to much private melancholy . . . as to my own future,” he wrote after Wilson’s audacious purchase of New York’s premier auction house, Parke-Bernet, in the summer of 1964. “It’s like a game of snakes and ladders and as far as Sotheby’s are concerned, I have slid down the snake to square one. This means that to go up the ladders again it will be a question of threats, imbecilic charm, insinuous manoeuvring and a better spy-ring. One day I shall kick the whole thing in the pants and retire to Crete. Sorry to be so devious – the details I’ll fill in when I see you . . . This is my ambition – BOTANIST written in my passport. The sale of works of art is the most unlovable profession in the world.”
Bruce’s disillusionment sharpened as he watched the man in charge of his department go, literally, mad.
The fact of John Rickett’s schizophrenia was not generally known outside Modern Pictures. It had first manifested itself with an intense preoccupation with the work of Richard Dadd, the Victorian artist who had axed his father to death in a railway carriage, believing him to be the devil. Rickett owned one Dadd and had written a paper on him. One day he surprised one of the secretaries with the declaration: “You know, Anne, I’m going to have a baby by Richard Dadd.”
Rickett lunched regularly at the Westbury Hotel, and the effect of alcohol with his medication multiplied his delusions. One lunchtime, he invited along Anne Thomson’s husband Paul, who worked for him in the Picture department. After lunch, Rickett picked up a sharp carving knife and said: “I’m going to kill the first person I see in Sotheby’s and I hope it’s Katherine Maclean [then Wilson’s personal assistant].”
He was not joking. A secretary who went into Rickett’s office one afternoon was alarmed to find him stabbing his desk and called a porter to remove the knife. This happened several times. Rickett once accosted Elizabeth Chanler with a knife, “but did not say what he wanted”. On another occasion, an injection had to be administered through his suit while Kenelm Digby-Jones held him down. Katherine Maclean wrote to Elizabeth: “Poor thing, I feel very sorry for him basically, but the awful thing is I find it hard not to get the shivers whenever I am left alone with him . . .”
Bruce’s misfortunes had multiplied from the moment he left Kabul. A postal strike prevented him from meeting Elizabeth in the Lebanon. “He never got my cables at all,” she complained to Gertrude. On his return to London, where he had leased Grosvenor Crescent Mews on condition he might store his belongings while in Afghanistan, he found the locks changed. Denied entry by the French photographer who had taken the lease, he was threatening to hire “two goons from Soho” to batter down the door when his father, the guarantor of the lease, stepped in. Bruce lost his christening mug, several drawings, all his books and his kitchen equipment. He moved into a small flat in Mount Street, a short walk from Sotheby’s.
At work, Wilson’s acquisition of Parke-Bernet demanded of Bruce a succession of transatlantic flights that exhausted him. “I felt sort of trapped by New York and having to turn up at 3 a.m. to get my post done.” He wrote: “However enthusiastic my response might be to works of art, however strong my desire to possess them, and however beguiling the atmosphere of the world’s largest auction house, I became convinced it [Sotheby’s] would drive me insane.”
Two important sales consumed his energies that autumn. On 16 and 17 November 1964, Sotheby’s held the sale of the Ernest Brummer collection of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities. Bruce had catalogued this collection with Elizabeth. An Impressionist sale, four days later, included Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses. Interviewed by the New York Times, Bruce promoted himself above Michel Strauss. “Bruce Chatwin, head of the Impressionist and Modern Painting Department of Sotheby’s, said Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ had a ‘profound’ influence on Picasso and Braque. He says the last comparable work to come on the market was ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’ in 1958 which sold for £222,000.”
The National Gallery in London acquired the painting for £500,000, once more a record. In a letter to Murray Bail, Bruce explained that the painting was then owned by Madame de Chaisemartin, “a deafening barrister, who specialised in the cases of poor Algerian immigrants on murder charges. I thought she was terrific. It was I . . . Je garde mes souvenirs . . . who set in motion the deal whereby the Grands Baigneuses, then hanging in the maids’ corridor, was bought by the National Gallery.” How he managed this is unclear.
By his own account, Bruce went blind after these sales. “I manufactured a nervous eye complaint, which I came to believe in and then suffered from. This was interpreted in many ways.” Integral to his myth, his blindness was said to precipitate his need to view “distant horizons”.
The initial symptoms were real enough, a flare-up of his 1955 complaint from the rugby pitch. He described the problem to Welch: “Am rather depressed because the focussing in my right eye has packed up. Apparently the result of over-doing it in America . . . Am not intending to return until I can SEE.” He had flown back from New York to Dublin, hired a car, driven to Donegal, and while sleeping in a four-poster bed, had put on the light and seen nothing – just a weak glow from the lamp. In the morning, one eye had recovered while the other remained foggy.
On 31 December 1964, Bruce visited the eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper. By now, the problem was not confined to his eyesight. “He described a multiplicity of symptoms,” says Trevor-Roper. “He had feelings of fatigue, discomfort and vague subjective unease. He not quite hallucinated: he fantasised. ‘When I look upward I feel brown clouds’.”
Trevor-Roper discovered a latent squint. The effort of trying to pull it straight had caused the stress. He ascribed Bruce’s condition to pressure from Wilson and the result of “a bright, sensitive rather neurotic young man trying to cut a dash”. He recommended Bruce give up concentrated work and get away from the office. Bruce told him, “I’d like to go away and write” – the first time he had vouchsafed such an ambition.
Trevor-Roper said, “If you can afford to take six months off, that’s what you must do. Go away and write.” He had designed an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, “staffed by hopeless Bulgarians”, and travelled every year to anglophone Africa, so perhaps the desert had emerged in their conversation as a choice of location.
In February 1965, Bruce set off for a long spell of recuperation in the Sudan.
Bruce made much of the damage to his sight, blaming it on the awfulness of Sotheby’s. After he left, he expressed a disgust for collectors whose only passion was to possess, for the dull weekends he had had to spend in their Long Island houses. “It was all to do with having and holding and hoarding and I became less and less impressed.” If they already owned a couple of Matisses, they were de facto interesting in the Wilson scheme. “In fact, they’re not that interesting at all.” Welch wrote to agree: “Collectors, after all, are the world’s least mature and yet hardest-driving types. They are also in 99 per cent of the cases horrible, corrupt human beings – wildly egotistical, selfish as all hell, ruthless, scheming, dishonest, and utterly miserable. Ugh. What hellish trash (except for the ones we know and like).”
“Things”, reflects the narrator in Utz, “are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.” The atmosphere of the art world conjured up for Bruce the image of the morgue. “In the end you felt you were working for a rather superior kind of funeral parlour,” he told Thubron. “To give you an idea as to how it was, each morning there came round the Times obituary column and it had to be ticked off by any of the partners to see who had died . . .” People would say: “‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,’ – and I’d look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth.” Then, as he told Thubron, warming to his theme, he developed sores, rather like stigmata, on his palms. “These works of art, however wonderful they may have been, were literally going to kill me. There and then.”
Bruce’s breakdown, which he laid at Sotheby’s door, was as much personal as professional and it involved more than one layer of distress. He conveyed something of this to Wilson’s assistant Kenelm Digby-Jones after collapsing on his way to Dorset during the same autumn.
Digby-Jones was taking Bruce “to do a job” at a private museum in Farnham, owned by George Pitt-Rivers, which housed the best collection of Benin bronzes in the country. The Pitt-Rivers “job” had already become a symbol of everything Bruce disliked about Peter Wilson’s Sotheby’s. On this day, however, Digby-Jones had no doubt as to what lay behind Bruce’s collapse and it had nothing to do with Benin bronzes.
On the way to the museum, Digby-Jones stopped at Heathrow to drop off his wife, who was flying to Paris. “I went to have a pee, came back – and there was Bruce buried in Ursula’s bosom, in floods of tears and shaking like a leaf.” Digby-Jones at once drove Bruce back to London to see a doctor. “He was in a bad way. It was genuine, no messing. He kept saying: ‘I’m in such a muddle, I don’t know what to do.’ He thought he was going blind. He said it was because he hated Sotheby’s. I knew it was a bit of that, but really it was a struggle with himself and the stress of his sexuality.”
Bruce’s relationship with Elizabeth, which had begun surreptitiously more than a year before, had reached a watershed. When he came back from Afghanistan, Bruce discovered that Elizabeth was making moves to leave Sotheby’s.
Elizabeth had never in this time considered herself faithfully attached to Bruce. “I went on seeing other people, although if that had got back to Bruce he would have been put off.” Nevertheless, her reluctance to leave him can be traced in the variety of jobs she considered and rejected from 1963 onwards. In September 1963, she was to take up a position at the Freer Gallery in Washington where she had worked as a volunteer. At the last minute she baulked at the prospect of having only two weeks’ holiday. Throughout 1964, her letters to Gertrude describe flirtations with the Freer, the Frick, a teaching project in south India. “What I really want to do is bum around with no time
limit and no fixed address.” This attitude exasperated her punctilious father. “You only seem to make plans of the most fluid kind and can change them more or less on the spur of the moment.” On 29 December 1964, two days before Bruce went to see Trevor-Roper for the first time, Elizabeth wrote to her mother with news of her latest project: to spend six months in Spain, filming black-winged kites.
Not holding out hopes for marriage – “You couldn’t bank on Bruce” – Elizabeth packed her trunk and gave away “Birdbrain”, who flew out of a window in Norfolk and froze to death. Clearly, unless Bruce acted he would lose her.
Like his Swedish friend, Percivald Bratt, in a time of personal crisis Bruce sought his solution in the desert. Wilson raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there’s something wrong with Bruce’s eyes, but I don’t know why he has to go to the Sudan.”
One answer lay with Gloria Taylor, Bruce’s old girlfriend, on whom Khartoum had exercised a cathartic spell. A three-week holiday in Africa had changed her life.
In October 1963, “Glor” had been with Robert Erskine to Egypt and the Sudan. One night they sat in the Muglani gardens where the Blue and White Niles met. There they awaited the arrival of a contact: Tahir, a diffident member of the Mahdi clan whose grandfather Siddig El Mahdi had won the Sudan’s independence from Britain. “Tahir arrived at midnight,” says Gloria, “an amazing vision wearing a white jellaba and shoes of white camel leather. He was 35, slim, blue-black, and he spoke the most beautiful English.” By the third day they were inseparable. Erskine came home on his own.
“I wondered why there was no resistance,” says Gloria. “Everyone just said, ‘Oh hello’, when they saw me. On his deathbed, the Imam had predicted: ‘Tahir will marry a foreigner and you’re all to accept her.’ When we went to meet his mother, she treated me like a long-lost friend.”