Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Gloria and Tahir married in December after a visit to England. In Kent they stayed with John Hewett. Gloria’s anxious father sent her brother, the actor Malcolm MacDowell, to check. “Malcolm rings him: ‘Are you sitting down, Dad? You know that phone you’re holding? Well, that’s the colour. As black as your phone’.”

  Bruce arrived in Khartoum on 5 February 1965. He had written to Gloria to say he needed bright, glaring light. He had brought Tahir a purple shirt recommended by David Niven after striking up a conversation with the actor in a shirt-maker’s in Jermyn Street. Bruce found Gloria heavily pregnant in a tiny flat with a huge, balustraded terrace beside the Mahdi palace. He stayed with them a week, sleeping on the terrace.

  Bruce longed, as Gloria had done, to hatch into something else. “We’d have long conversations about where he was going with his life,” she says. “He was trashing everything. ‘It’s burning me up. I can’t stand this much longer. I have to get an education’.” Tahir, who had studied at Cambridge, urged Bruce to go to university: it would discipline his thoughts.

  Bruce was restless after a week in Khartoum. “Couldn’t sit still for five minutes, our Bruce. Unless he was on a quest,” says Gloria. Then, at a wedding party, he met Abdul Monhim, a geologist who was leaving on an expedition to the Red Sea Hills to look for kaolin deposits the very next day. “I asked if I could go along and he said I could.”

  The journey was a “great turning point”. He had arrived in Khartoum glutted on the art world, on “women who sent their Renoirs to be relined as often as their faces”. Now he found himself in close quarters with someone who took pride in getting rid of everything he owned. The less Abdul Monhim had, the richer he became. “He was the utter swing of the pendulum, but I found him the most fascinating person that I’d ever met.”

  They headed on camels towards the Rift Valley, riding at a gallop through flat-topped acacia. Bruce discovered “the joy of going on and on”. The country was harsh, glinting rocks and shining gorges with white thorns. The biblical landscape recalled the engravings of his favourite Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers. When he found the rock that resembled the Eagle Stone in Derbyshire, he experienced a homecoming. “The word ‘homecoming’ in that sense is the idea of returning to some kind of original landscape.” Close to Ethiopia, he was riding through the Valley of Shadows. “It was, like so many things in life, completely accidental that we should have ended up there.”

  Here, in the Eastern Sudan, Bruce experienced his first taste of nomadic life. The tribe was the Beja, “the Fuzzy-Wuzzies of Kipling” – people who had been mentioned in the Egyptian annals 3,000 years ago. “They are sensationally idle, and truculent as well. Most of the morning for men is taken up by a fantastic mutual coiffure session.” The Beja had long curly hair that they anointed with goat’s grease. “The hair would contract at three in the afternoon and pour down their shoulders and by evening was a round fuzzy ball in which they could sleep.” They carried buff hides and wandered around without tents. “I was overwhelmed by the simplicity of the lives of those people and struck by the idea that you were much happier if you carried nothing with you.” Bruce told Michael Ignatieff: “They started my quest to know the secret of their irreverent and timeless vitality: why was it that nomad peoples have this amazing capacity to continue under the most adverse circumstances, while the empires come crashing down.”

  Bruce afterwards sought parallels for his desert epiphany in the example of two previous travellers to the Sudan. In 1930, Wilfred Thesiger had crossed the country of the Danakils. “The Danakil journey”, Bruce wrote in a review of Desert, Marsh and Mountain, “set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness.” On that dangerous journey, Thesiger had crossed the tracks of the other and earlier traveller: Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce came to identify with the French poet. In his mind their situations were similar. “As Rimbaud was passing through his ‘saison en enfer’, he realised that the Beast was winning. He made a last-ditch stand to avoid suicide or mental collapse, and took to the perpetual pilgrimage of the road.” In Bruce’s opinion, Rimbaud’s abrupt departure was not a failure: it was a cure. “Among the testicle-hunting Danakil in the leopard-coloured lands of Ethiopia, tracking his way ‘par des routes horribles rappelant l’horreur présumé des pays lunaires,’ a country of tearing thorns, black acacia trees, glinting schists, and shimmering white salt pans, he found himself again. He reaffirmed his identity, just as Proust found his in re-walking the ‘ways’ of childhood . . . In his search for mental calm, Rimbaud found that he was a small-time honest provincial bourgeois from Charleville. This is what he was. This he could not change.”

  After six weeks away, he returned to London by way of Crete and Athens from where, on 10 April, he wrote to his parents: “I shall return by sea and land as the aeroplane for CERTAIN does me no good. Eye took ten days to recover after KHARTOUM-ATHENS. Much better now, in fact am very fit.”

  Bruce’s camel ride in the Sudan not only opened his eyes to the world of the nomad. In the desert he reached a decision over his future with Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had not heard a word from Bruce while he was gone. On 24 February, she wrote to Gertrude: “I am going on this bird photo-graphing business fairly soon – maybe within the next three weeks.” But still she dragged her heels, reluctant to set out. Then at the end of April, her telephone rang at work. Bruce spoke in a whisper. “They don’t know I’m back, so don’t say anything. Can you have lunch?”

  She met him at his new flat in Mount Street. Looking sunburned and well, Bruce told her about the Sudan. Then he asked: “Do you want to come to Paris for Easter?”

  Bruce went ahead by train. Elizabeth drove him to the station, planning to follow by air. On the platform, he gave her a little grey leatherette box, not to be opened until the train had left. She opened it in her car. Inside, pale gold in colour, was a Greek electrum ring of the fifth century BC. The intaglio was a wounded lioness with her head thrown back, pulling a spear from her side. “Not entirely suitable as an engagement present,” he would much later write of it. “But I think it the loveliest Greek ring I ever saw.”

  Elizabeth was overjoyed. “It came from out of the blue. Usually people drop hints, but Bruce never did. I was very surprised that he was willing to be married. Only when he went into the desert did he change his outlook.” She had no doubt of the answer she would give him.

  Bruce waited at Le Bourget to meet her. The following day he took her to the Cabinet de Médailles in the Louvre. Here in this gigantic hall of curiosities, assembled by the Kings of France, Bruce proposed. Elizabeth was looking at some coins when Bruce said: “Do you want to keep the ring?” It was as cryptic as Amos’s proposal in On the Black Hill, when Amos, having shown Mary the farm he hopes to buy, slips an arm around her waist and says: “Could you live in this?”

  He had dithered to the last. In Khartoum, he had told Gloria that Elizabeth meant a lot to him, but he wasn’t going to get married. As late as 21 April a postcard to his parents spoke of a plan to spend Easter in Rhodes, then climb Mount Ida.

  It fell to Cary Welch to play a decisive role. Welch was older and could offer the advice which Bruce found it impossible to solicit from his father. Also Welch was married to Elizabeth’s cousin, Edith. “I knew Elizabeth to be very special, an admirable, good, flexible person, someone who could be depended on.”

  Over breakfast at the Cappuccino, Welch strongly encouraged him. He described Bruce as “a psychological nomad” and felt the stability of marriage would benefit him. “If ever I did anything that was crucial, it was when I gave him the real nudge which I think was necessary.”

  Shy by nature, private and keen not to be teased by the older Sotheby’s porters, Elizabeth kept news of their engagement to herself. One person Bruce told was Ivry. “The deed is done, and in about three months I’ll no longer be a free man. Secrecy is rather necessary for a bit, partly because we both find the word fiancé(e) difficult to pronounce with the ri
ght expression.”

  Gertrude and Bobby were kept in the dark until the last moment. Elizabeth informed them over the telephone during a discussion about her grandmother Daisy’s 103rd birthday celebrations.

  In Geneseo, the Chanlers were perplexed. They could not distinctly remember Bruce, whom they had met for an unremarkable weekend in Dublin in the middle of May when Elizabeth was already engaged. Gertrude was initially cautious, but Elizabeth allayed her mother’s fears. “Everything is perfectly lovely and we are very happy, so don’t worry about a thing. Bruce takes care of (al)most everything anyway.” By 22 June, Gertrude had adjusted to the news: “We are certainly glad we saw Bruce as it would be very queer to have to wait till he got over here! It is really so exciting & we are thrilled even though it is hard to seem enthusiastic over the transatlantic phone!”

  The Chanlers’ initial failure to recollect Bruce was rooted in Bobby’s dislike of the English. Gertrude, writing earlier in the year to Elizabeth, confessed that she had lost her taste for England “partly because Bobby doesn’t really seem to like it”. Well-established in Bobby’s psyche was the cautionary tale of his mother’s friend Consuelo Vanderbilt and Consuelo’s marriage to an English fortune-hunter – arranged as it happened by Robert Harding Milward. Elizabeth had an inkling of how her father might take the news. “Bobby didn’t like me to marry out of the US. He didn’t say so at the time, thank goodness. He said rather grumpily, ‘I suppose you’ll give up your citizenship?’ I said, ‘No’. But when my sister Felicity came to be an au pair here, they said to her: ‘Don’t marry an Englishman’.”

  Whatever was their true reaction, Elizabeth’s parents concealed it. Gertrude wrote to Margharita Chatwin: “We are so pleased that you like Elizabeth. We too are very pleased to have Bruce for a son-in-law as we liked him so much when we saw him in Ireland. At the time we did not realise that all this was so serious as we had been hearing Bruce’s name mentioned casually for some time. It is all very exciting etc.”

  Over one matter the Chanlers dug in their heels. Elizabeth was a practising Catholic. “One thing you must do”, Gertrude wrote to Elizabeth, “is see what can be done about Bruce getting the required religious instructions . . . This is all very important.” Bruce, she said, needed to know what he was letting himself in for, or else there might be grounds for annulment.

  “I do hope you will not worry about my not being a Catholic,” he replied to Gertrude. “I have always been brought up according to the Church of England, as were both my parents. A few relations of my grandfather’s generation were Catholic converts. I am absolutely willing, not to say anxious, that any of my children shall be brought up as Catholics, and I intend to talk to a great friend of mine Peter Levi who is a Jesuit. I know you’ll agree that it would be a great mistake to take steps in this direction just at this moment. All I can say is that at the time I left school I was influenced strongly by Catholicism and have an entirely open mind about the future.”

  Through Peter Levi he found a Jesuit priest to give Pre-Cana instruction, the sessions to take place alternately in Father Murray’s rooms off Mount Street and in Bruce’s apartment, conveniently nearby. “I’ve got a small flat in Mount Street just opposite the Connaught Hotel. We have decided we would prefer to live there for the time being rather than face a major upheaval just now. It’s a bit like a couple of state-rooms on a liner, but its advantages are its economy, cupboard space, living-in housekeeper in the basement, and the fact that it is 2 minutes flat from Sotheby’s.”

  Meanwhile, Bruce wondered how to address his prospective in-laws. “I haven’t an idea what to call you. I’ve discussed it for an hour, but [Elizabeth] has offered no constructive suggestion. I’m amazed by the elaborate detail of her letter. Not a word to tell you how happy we both are, and how much we look forward to the end of August and seeing you again.”

  When news of their engagement leaked out, their circle of friends were thunderstruck. “The idea of Bruce getting married seemed absolutely bananas,” says Howard Hodgkin. James Crathorne spoke for many within Sotheby’s. “Hearing Bruce was to marry Elizabeth was one of the most startling bits of information. Rather like Kennedy being assassinated, I remember where I was.” The astonishment extended even to close friends. “I thought Bruce wasn’t the marrying kind,” says Elizabeth’s flat-mate, Pattie Sullivan, who had supposed they were, at best, “buddies”. Robert Erskine learned about it as he walked through a square in Chelsea. Suddenly, he saw people looking up and heard someone yelling out of a top-floor window. “It was Bruce. He was practically falling out in his urgency to tell me. ‘Robert, I’m getting married!’”

  This surprised Erskine: it seemed so sudden. “I thought I knew him pretty well, but I had no idea that he had even a lady to think of getting married to. Elizabeth is splendid, though she is not apparently so. If Bruce was going to get married, I assumed it would be to a gorgeous blonde.”

  In Mrs Ford’s tearoom, there were, Hewett said, “one or two looks”. An extreme reaction was that which occurred halfway through a dinner party thrown by Paul and Anne Thomson. Bruce and Elizabeth announced their engagement. “I’ll never forget,” says Anne. “Paul positively spat his spaghetti out.”

  No one was more astonished than Peter Wilson, under whose nose the courtship had taken place. Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “We told Katherine and PCW last Friday & then ran. They were really flabbergasted.”

  On 12 July, the engagement was announced in the papers. Elizabeth flew to Boston to prepare for her wedding. Bruce wrote to Ivry: “We’re getting married in their family chapel on their estate which is at the back of beyond in New York State near the Canadian border.” He would follow six weeks later by boat.

  Elizabeth’s grand American connections were not abhorrent to Bruce. He talked “endlessly” to friends like Hugh Honour about her family. “One could tell he was happy she was very well born.” He told Hodgkin soon after their engagement that she had “more than a million” in the bank. Hodgkin says, “He didn’t marry her for money, but money did matter a lot to him.” This figure of a million had certainly not derived from Elizabeth, brought up by Bobby never to mention such matters. She says, “Bruce did say to me once: ‘Do you have a little money?’ I said, ‘It’s a little, that’s all it is.’ But we never discussed a sum. I’m sure he would have liked it to be more.” The legendary Chanler wealth, like the legendary Chanler Falls, had long since dried up.

  A part of him was taking refuge. Bruce worked in a world where homosexuality was not stigmatised, yet he came from a background which did not approve of homosexuality. This dilemma had driven him to Khartoum. He may have hoped, like Brian Sewell, that “homosexual behaviour is something you grow out of”, and that he could follow the model of his parents’ successful marriage. “He respected them more than anybody,” says Anne Thomson. “He didn’t want to let them down.” What he aspired to was something not too distant from Sue Goodhew’s horoscope ideal: a family life and a relationship that was public, comfortable and supportive. He believed the happiness that marriage and a family would bring might outweigh any sexual urges. It was his greatest luck to find Elizabeth Chanler.

  Bruce’s parents approved of his choice. “The thing about Elizabeth is she knows everything,” said Charles. Elizabeth was likewise enchanted by Charles and Margharita. “I knew Bruce was OK when I met his parents.”

  Bruce had told his parents that he was marrying Elizabeth because “she’s got a very good head for heights”. Only when pressed by his brother did he go further. Hugh put the question to Bruce while walking down Bond Street. “I asked why he was marrying Elizabeth after all the beautiful women he had known: Ivry, Samira, Gloria . . .” Bruce stopped in the street and replied: “To stop myself going mad.”

  Hugh understood Bruce to be saying, stormed by his nervous collapse: “This is my anchor.”

  Eleanor Macmillan was in the bathtub when she opened Elizabeth’s letter with the news. “I thought I’d drown from the joy o
f it all . . . Married – do you realise what you’re saying???”

  Elizabeth had not lightly entertained the idea of marriage to Bruce. “I had no expectations. Bruce said well before I married: ‘I will always want to go off by myself.’ So it was understood at the time and I was perfectly happy to accept that.” Since a young girl, she had made a promise to herself: never to be dependent on her spouse. When still at Fox Hollow School, she was shocked to hear how a close neighbour, Reverdy Wadsworth, had choked to death while eating in a steakhouse with his wife. “They’d never been separated . . . She went to pieces and I thought: ‘I must not be like that.’ You have to have something to fall back on. If we’d had children, that would have been a tie to fall back on and probably Bruce would have been different. Mind you, he’d have taken them off before you could say ‘knife’.”

  Elizabeth, too, may have hoped that marriage and a family would change things. “I knew Bruce was ambidextrous. He was never obvious about it and it embarrassed him that he had this tendency, but he wasn’t going to give in to it completely. Looking back, I think he was very uncomfortable at having got himself into this situation, but given his background he didn’t see any alternative, and he thought men living together completely unnatural. Once I said: ‘What about famous couples like Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears?’ Bruce said, ‘No, it’s still not right’.”

  Bruce’s “eye” was never better demonstrated than in his choice of a wife. They had a community of interest. Both had grown up on farms; loved art, travel, independence. Both had the Navy and steel in their blood and shared a way of looking at the world. Bruce was continually startled by Elizabeth’s originality and lack of self-consciousness: she was never moved by what people thought she ought to be doing or thinking. He admired her, needed her honesty and she made him laugh. “Do you normally keep your stockings in the ‘frig’?” he wrote once she had flown to America.