Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He provoked people inside the class and out. All students were required to spend four weeks of the year on an approved excavation. In March 1967, Bruce joined an army of diggers at the late neolithic ceremonial complex of Llandegai near Bangor, searching for changes in soil colours. It was a wet, messy site and the weather bitterly cold and snowy. Something Bruce said or did annoyed one of the workmen, a large, red-faced Liverpudlian. “He held Bruce down, his hands on his lapel, beating his head against an upturned wheelbarrow,” says Alex Tuckwell. “For a second we froze. But Bruce was unruffled: ‘Oh, I say, don’t be so childish’.” The site supervisor calmed the man down and Bruce shrugged off the incident, but the matter did not end there. Richard Langhorne observed through his field glasses a number of workmen turning a portable field toilet upside down, with Bruce inside.

  Four weeks into his first term, Bruce found a letter at the Archaeology Department addressed to him in pink and blue inks. It was from a strange cousin of Emma Tennant: the aesthete, Stephen. “I’m dedicating a poem to you in my new volume. It’s called ‘The Supreme Vision’.” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “One can only pray to God it will never be published.”

  To Bruce’s embarrassment, Tennant’s decorative envelopes continued to arrive throughout his first term at George Square. “Edinburgh must be very handsome in sombre autumn . . . you do sound studious. What period are you studying? Boadicea? Camelot? Constantine? Bion?” The letters stopped abruptly when Bruce thought to advise Tennant that he was married.

  He attended fifteen lectures a week: on the archaeology of the British Isles, European history, Sanskrit. In addition, he was expected to write four essays a term. The libraries stayed open until 7 p.m. and he worked until they closed. He was not going to be beaten by younger students. In July 1967, he received the Wardrop Prize “for the best first year’s work”.

  Bruce was fortunate to have as lecturer in his first year the Dark Age specialist Charles Thomas. It was Thomas who first excited Bruce’s interest in the Welsh settlement in Patagonia. He set essays on the pre-history of bicycles, scissors and trousers and encouraged Bruce to understand how far wrong we can go by making inferences out of material objects. In his first essay for Thomas, Bruce was asked to imagine himself an archaeologist of the year AD 6000 who had been dropped on a deserted St Giles. What was the nature and function of the building? From the banners and plaques dedicated to Highland regiments, Bruce deduced the grey stone High Kirk of Scotland to be rampantly military. The essay does not survive, but among his notes for it is a pencil sketch of a bronze plaque. Bruce’s drawing shows a sick-looking man lying on a couch with a feather in his hand: Saint-Gaudens’s relief of Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Eight years later Chatwin wrote a review of James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Stevenson. It is evident to anyone who knows the life that the two share many characteristics: the “dusty knapsack”, the penetrating eyes “brimful of banter”, the “captivating egotism”, the frequent glancing at their own reflections. Like Stevenson, Bruce had developed an infection which seemed to send him blind. They had, it seems, a similar manic laugh: Stevenson’s uncontrollable laughter could only be stopped by someone bending his fingers back. And they had the same effect on an audience. Exposed to the radiation of Stevenson’s character, wrote Pope-Hennessy, people remained captive for ever after.

  Stevenson’s life in Edinburgh especially intrigued Bruce. This “gaunt northern capital,” he wrote, was the key to understanding the Scot. “Edinburgh is a place of absolute contrast and paradox . . . In no other city in the British Isles do you feel to the same extent the oppressive weight of the past. Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox are a presence. The dead seem more alive than the living. There is a claustrophobic, coffin-like atmosphere that makes Glasgow, in comparison, seem a paradise of life and laughter. Moderate health is virtually unknown. Either people enjoy robust appetites, or they are ailing and require protection. Heady passions simmer below the surface. In winter the city slumbers all week in blue-faced rectitude, only to explode on Saturday evenings in an orgy of drink and violence and sex. In some quarters the pious must pick their way to church along pavements spattered with vomit and broken bottles.”

  In November 1966, Bruce bought a three-year lease for £7 a week on a flat on the Royal Mile. 234 Canongate was a nasty building with a good address, developed by the Edinburgh Corporation into apartments. Flat 6, up three flights of concrete steps, had views through small square windows over the gorse-grown Salisbury Crags of Arthur’s Seat. This was to be the Chatwins’ Edinburgh base for two years.

  Bruce ordered wall-to-wall coconut matting and filled the flat with furniture from Salvation Army shops. He and Elizabeth shared one of the two bedrooms. He invited another first-year student, Rowan Watson, as a lodger to share the costs.

  Watson was one of few students Bruce befriended. He had travelled and had spent nine months excavating Uthong, a seventh-century site in Thailand. Bruce had known his father – head of Chinese antiquities at the British Museum – and was aware that Watson was not enjoying himself at his digs.

  Watson lasted only a year at Edinburgh, finding the academic diet not concentrated enough, but he admired his landlord. “Bruce was like an older brother to me in a bloody awful year of my life.” Bruce lent Watson his dinner jacket for the Freshers’ Ball and cooked Mediterranean dishes with couscous and olive oil. Bruce’s dress impressed Watson as much as his cooking. He strode into lectures in jeans and ankle-high desert boots, and at the flat wore a nineteenth-century Dayak hat to study in. But his Sudanese jellaba provoked comment. “I remember coming back with some rather shaky students. They were amazed to see someone in a nightdress.”

  Bruce, who could cope with exotic places, could not cope with Edinburgh. At first he worked too hard to notice, but he came to agree with Stevenson that it possessed “one of the vilest climates under heaven”. In winter, the city fell dark at 3.30 p.m. and a gloom settled on the flat-fronted tenement buildings. For Stevenson, as for Chatwin, “there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence”.

  Bruce’s confirmation of a place at university had arrived on the same day as the contract for Holwell Farm was signed. Had he received his acceptance a few days earlier, Elizabeth believes, they would have redirected their efforts and bought a house in Edinburgh. “Now we have to cope with the house & a flat in Edinburgh and a million things,” she wrote to Gertrude.

  They had taken possession of Holwell Farm in the first week of May, renting a small lodge across the fields at Ozleworth Park while the house was redecorated. They spent three days scything nettles. Bruce hired a gardener and an architect. “I’m going to make that barn into a playroom,” Elizabeth told her neighbour, Brenda Tomlinson. She wrote to Gertrude: “Allowing for the worst, the architect said not to get upset if the house was only ready in the middle of November!!” It would be more than a year before they moved in.

  Elizabeth bore the brunt of this divided life. She stayed behind to prod the workmen during most of Bruce’s first term. “Everything takes FOREVER in that part of the world.” Five weeks to install a stove; the same time to connect the telephone in the lodge.

  The valley’s bitter climate was another concern. From November until February a hoar frost settled on the house. “It looked as if it had a spell on it.” As winter set in, she felt beleaguered. She wrote to Gertrude on 2 November, “I’m sitting here feeling more or less like an icicle.” Jackdaws rattled in the chimney and armies of flies came in from the cold. “They get into everywhere including the oven and I find them buzzing in my handbag all the time.” Sending Bruce’s love, she warned Gertrude that he would never be a reliable correspondent: “He hardly even writes to me . . . and then only scribbles notes giving orders.”

  “I still think that the 9 in. tiles would be nice in the dining room . . . They might look very well laid diagonally, but I’m not sure about that. I think you can get Dutch Delft copies with the little figures in the mi
ddle.” Three days later he worried about the pink exterior. “I also want to see about getting some crushed terracotta for painting the house. I think the Rokeby colour needs toning down a bit for Glos. Would the Victorian curtains be nice in the back bedroom?”

  Elizabeth supported Bruce in his decision, but she had expected a different life. During his first year, she shuttled back and forth from Ozleworth to Edinburgh in a grey Citroën grocer’s van which, like her, protested at the journey. “I’ve never hated a place like Edinburgh.”

  The Canongate flat was “as bad as could be . . .”. Pink panels decorated the outside of the building, which was entirely inhabited by English tenants. Inside, the rooms were ill proportioned and cheaply built, with undercoat only on the woodwork and doors that would not shut. A coke-fire back boiler took four hours to warm water for a bath. There were no hooks, shelves or rails. The toilet leaked.

  The city was in bleak contrast to swinging London. She found the people mean-spirited and primitive, with temperance in full blast. When she asked for salad in the North British Hotel, the waitress asked: “How do you do it?” The Italian in the local vegetable shop would break a £5 note for a penny. Edinburgh society was strait-laced, its boundaries tightly drawn and invitations limited to high tea. “Social life was women in tweed suits and terrible hats, with no style or life or movement,” says Elizabeth. “In winter no one entertained, simply hibernated.”

  The days were short, the weather cold with strong gales. “At one point there were gusts of up to 90 or 95 [m.p.h.] and sometimes you could hardly walk,” she wrote in March. “It’s quite exciting for a while, but not for weeks and weeks.”

  To occupy herself she started learning Russian. But as Piggott noted in his diary: “Elizabeth is angry and sulky here and . . . hates the whole business of his coming up as an undergraduate.”

  Bruce often visited Piggott in King Street when Elizabeth returned to Ozleworth. 20 December: “Bruce to dinner, smoked salmon and venison, ananas au cognac . . . I became bored as he stayed until 1.30 a.m. oh my God. I suppose he was enjoying himself, but oh when will the young realise that three hours is the ideal time to come and stay for a meal?” In February, Bruce invited himself to dinner again, “revealing all in the same breath and too obviously that Elizabeth had gone back to their Gloucestershire house and sounding rather gay and relieved about it.” Piggott wondered why he had never been asked to the Canongate. “All very odd.” He wondered how long the marriage would last. He also wondered whether Bruce “has homo, tendencies”. Penelope Betjeman, a mutual friend who talked to him during a ride in her pony trap, had divulged “much entertaining gossip on, inter alia, Bruce: certainly a ‘flaming homo’ says P.”

  The sexual climate in Edinburgh was no more tolerable than the weather. Bruce cut out from the Times and kept in his notebook an article reciting the response of the Church of Scotland to the 1967 Act implementing the Wolfenden Report. Homosexuality was a “grave and growing evil which had incurred God’s wrath in the past and would do so again”.

  It was at this time, in May 1967, that Bruce renewed his acquaintance with Andrew Batey, a young architectural student from California. They had met aboard the Statenden, on Bruce’s way to be married, when a dextrous bartender mixed them pousse-cafés and cocktails of coloured layers. Bruce’s experience moved him to propose in 1972 “the Batey story” to the director James Ivory. “My feelings are now totally numb and dispassionate. Quite good to start off on the France or some such liner with the seduction – for the hell of it – by a young, ravishing American of an older less ravishing Englishman (young don?) on his way to get married and the subsequent chaos.”

  Ivory agreed that it was “potentially wonderful material for a film”.

  Bruce was “very, very keen” on the willowy Batey, says Elizabeth. Their encounter on the ocean may explain why, in 1979, he told Bill Katz that while still on board the Statenden he had had second thoughts about going through with the marriage. He had sought out his father, who is supposed to have said: “If you think your mother and I have come all this way for nothing, you are sadly mistaken.”

  Bruce’s father did not recollect any change of heart. Nor could he recall Batey. But on the ship’s arrival in New York, Elizabeth’s former flat-mate Gillian Walker threw a cocktail party for Bruce in the Dakota building, and she remembered him. “Bruce had in tow some man he’d found on the boat. Even at the time it seemed a funny thing to do. He spent the night on some cushions.”

  When Gillian visited Elizabeth in Edinburgh two years later she was surprised to find Batey. “I remember going with Elizabeth for a walk and asking if she was happy and she said: ‘Yes’. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and I remember being quite startled and then thinking: ‘That’s Elizabeth.’ She makes a commitment to something and it’s private and is not judgmental. At some level she had accepted Bruce loved her and he had this relationship with her that was very important to both of them, and he had these gay affairs.”

  Batey visited Bruce in Edinburgh and Ozleworth, and pestered him to go travelling. “My friend Mr Batey wants to come and look at the architecture of Alvar Aalto,” Bruce wrote to Welch, “but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea as he’s wildly unreliable and unpunctual, and as I have work to do, it would be a distraction.”

  On 15 July, having barely settled in with Elizabeth at Holwell Farm, Bruce set off for Central Europe with Batey. He kept Elizabeth apprised. In Brussels, they failed to get into the Stocklett Collection. “Then we went to Aix and looked at Charlemagne and the Schatzkammer where there are some objects that nearly made me die, especially the engraving on the back of the cross of Lothan and Richard of Cornwall’s sceptre. We separated at Cologne after looking over that monstrous cathedral.” He planned to meet Batey again in Bulgaria once he had completed an excavation near Prague.

  On 17 August, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude: “Andrew left on Tuesday to join him in Sofia and they were then going to Turkey together.” This leg of their trip was not a success. To Bruce’s irritation, Batey was so beguiled by Chatwin’s contacts in Istanbul that he stayed put. “My Turkish friends almost ate him up entirely,” Bruce wrote to Gertrude, “and although he was supposed to come to the wilds of Anatolia with me he never left the city for five weeks. I warned him in advance that it would happen if he weren’t firm-minded and it did.”

  Batey hovered about the Chatwins until his marriage to a childhood sweetheart in October 1968. By then relations had soured. Batey was suspected of going off with too many things. (From Bruce he absconded with a blue faience Egyptian gaming piece; from Erskine, with a silver coin of Augustus that Batey gave to the doorman of the Ritz as a tip.) Batey’s impulses were “all too clear” to Welch who described it to Bruce as “a case of his being extremely, deeply upset by his ‘queer’ tendencies, which make him love you. His preoccupation with your possessions results in his wanting souvenirs. Things to him are equatable with love (as usual). As he dare not in fact love you, he loves your stuff which he must have. This is a kind of fetishism.”

  Piggott changed his mind about Elizabeth after staying overnight at Ozleworth. “She was very welcoming and kind and good fun and it may all have been shyness.” Bruce “ran around like a pleased dog”. But all was not well.

  February 5, 1968: “Bruce rang up and said he’d just bought some venison on impulse and would I come and eat it with him and Ruth if he could get hold of her.” Ruth Tringham, a red-haired Marxist, was a research fellow back after a year in Russia, where she had been the first westerner to excavate in Moldavia. She had bought the Chatwins’ Citroën van and remembered the negotiations principally for “this huge tension going on between them”.

  At the appointed hour Tringham and Piggott turned up, but, wrote Piggott, “Elizabeth had suddenly and unexpectedly returned and gone to bed (I suspect in anger rather than the alleged migraine) and so an unholy chill was in the air and though Bruce’s cooking was marvellous I didn’t stay late and I really felt
embarrassed. Bruce of course in a state of nervous volubility. He was like a small boy who in his parents’ absence has asked in some disreputable children he wasn’t supposed to play with, and had raided the larder for them. Poor Bruce. And so odd.”

  Magouche Fielding, an older friend, once asked Bruce directly: “Why can’t you give Elizabeth a baby?”

  Bruce replied awkwardly: “It’s very complicated.”

  They had married with the intention of soon starting a family. “I’d simply love to have a little boy by him,” Elizabeth had written. It was one reason for buying Ozleworth: “It was a nice place to bring up children because it’s so safe. We fully expected to have children, and talked about whether to have two or four.” Bruce had told Gertrude that they would grow up in the Catholic faith. By the end of 1967, Gertrude and Margharita were showing impatience for the moment when Elizabeth would be busy with “family responsibilities”.

  Elizabeth had been married a year and a half when she decided to submit herself for tests. They proved inconclusive. She described the treatment as “sloppy and unprofessional”. She never saw the same doctor twice, received no report. “It was in the dark days of not telling you anything.” The clinic wanted to test Bruce, but Elizabeth refused on the grounds that he was in the middle of exams. “He was never tested. So both of us spent the rest of our lives thinking it was oneself rather than the other.”

  The subject was very occasionally brought up. “Bruce was depressed that he didn’t have children. It was so difficult to discuss because he always thought it reflected on him. He probably had a low sperm count. I felt it was my fault, some hormonal imbalance. At least we didn’t blame each other. We did talk a little bit about adoption. But he said an adopted child always knows it’s not with its real mother. Neither of us were maternal or paternal enough to take on someone else’s child.”