Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  There seems little doubt that Bruce had entered marriage wanting children. “Life is empty without children,” he wrote in his notebook, adding a tick. He was good with children, able to see the world through their eyes. “I remember him best one Christmas when he tap-danced on the bubble wrap, making a tremendous amount of noise”, wrote Elizabeth’s niece, Alice. “He was showing us all how to pop them the fastest.” Without children he could remain the child, but he was sensitive about his childless state. In 1982, Melvyn Bragg interviewed him for The South Bank Show in a programme devoted to On the Black Hill. It struck Bragg that “childlessness, being at the end of the line, even sterility” was a big theme in the book. “Sterility is carrying asceticism a long way, isn’t it?” Uncharacteristically, Bruce was flummoxed. “I must say, I don’t know how to reply. Maybe you’ve got me.”

  Chatwin’s novel of childless twins shows empathy with a barren relationship. “Time in its healing circle had wiped away the pain and the anger, the shame and the sterility.” But references in his notebooks suggest he blamed himself. In the Niger in 1972 he wrote: “Nearly became a Catholic. Childlessness. Fault.”

  Bruce aestheticised his predicament, converting it into something rarefied and power-enhancing. Positive references to infertility run through his notebooks. “There is a distinct connection between brain esp. in the male and infertility.” Another entry quotes Francis Bacon: “The Noblest workes and Foundations have proceeded from childlesse Men.” To which Bruce adds: “Low fertility and rising intelligence. The position of the shamanic personality.”

  Infertility came to be connected in Bruce’s mind with the position of the shaman. In 1967 Bruce gave Lucie-Smith a copy of Andreas Lommel’s Shamanism – The Beginning of Art. The sterile shaman of West Africa exerted for Bruce a particular fascination. “He’s a sorcerer,” says a boy in a draft of The Viceroy of Ouidah. “He can’t make babies so he eats them.”

  He also linked infertility to the notion of escape: “Examine the possibility of sterility with bird . . . shed feathers, beating against a cage, internal fights and pecking in solitary confinement.” This sentiment was poignantly expressed in relation to himself in a paragraph of In Patagonia. Trudging the unused path from Harberton to Viamonte, Bruce comes face to face with a lone guanaco, an animal related to the llama.

  “He was a single male, his coat all muddied and his front gashed with scars. He had been in a fight and lost. Now he also was a sterile wanderer.”

  XVII

  A Season in Hell

  Sound scholarship

  Is one piece of luggage

  Too heavy for me

  To carry

  I am in a hurry

  And I travel light

  —BC, notebooks, Mauritania 1970

  ONE DAY IN MARCH, BRUCE HEARD ON ELIZABETH’S RADIO THE summons of the dolorous notes of the trumpet found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. The ancient sound, not heard for thousands of years, filled the Canongate flat. “I’m afraid he is itching to go away somewhere difficult and exotic and the US doesn’t count at all,” wrote Elizabeth. As Bruce said of Stevenson: “Samoa was the logical extension of a life in Edinburgh.” In the event, he went not to Samoa or Egypt but to Czechoslovakia. He considered Mongolia and Afghanistan, but then settled, for his summer’s excavation, on Zavist, 40 kilometres south of Prague.

  He reached the massive earthen fortifications on 20 July. His destination was a wooded Celtic hill fort directly overlooking the River Moldava. Also on the Zavist excavation was a 23-year-old Italian, “who is my new friend,” he wrote to Elizabeth.

  Maurizio Tosi was four years younger than Bruce, but a great deal more worldly. He had studied in Rome, had dug in Afghanistan, had met Che Guevara in Cuba and had been sent by the Italian communists to Auschwitz for intense training in anti-fascism. But “my communism was in a raging crisis,” says Tosi, who shared a room with Bruce at Zavist. In contrast, Bruce’s “interest in politics was zero”. Tosi forgot his troubles in women, “the top thought in my life”, and already had a girlfriend at the camp, with whom he would make love in the lunch breaks.

  After months pent up with archaeological minutiae, Bruce delighted in uncircumscribed narrative. “There is every reason why I should dislike Maurizio, but somehow I do not,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “He is over six and a half feet tall and indecendy fat. Despite the solid nature of Bohemian food he needs to be refilled every half-hour. In July he was awarded a doctorate at Rome University. His thesis, calculated to make me hate him, was on the close of the Indus Valley Civilisation and the coming of the Aryans. He got it all wrong, and used a number of inapplicable analogies about the movement of the Maya from Guatemala to Yucatan. Maurizio is never at a loss for some apparently brilliant remark about some obscure facet of Central European archaeology, but I fear that his knowledge is about as superficial as mine. He tells me he was once employed in smuggling microfilms from East to West Berlin. He is a man of many parts, an archaeologist of sorts, a smuggler, an International Socialist and also a self-styled great lover. Maurizio cannot talk about the stratigraphy of the Lower Quetta valley without finding two bulges that remind him of firm breasts.

  “He bent double, which for him is no mean feat, to kiss the hand of a ferocious Slav lady archaeologist. She was somewhat affronted, but in general it must be said he enjoys considerable success. He is engaged to a girl in Andover, ‘the Wessex bird’, as he calls her. This is not to say that Maurizio doesn’t have birds in any European town one cares to mention. The current object of his affections is Eva. ‘Eva, the first woman, she gave herself utterly to me.’ Eva is an enthusiastic, wide-hipped blonde with sparkling blue spectacles and buck teeth, who lives up the hill from Zavist with her refined but calculating mother, and I fear that Maurizio did not bargain for her as well. Mother and daughter work as a team, and they are determined to catch Herr Docktor Maurizio. Both have visions of a splendid Roman future, and Maurizio has built up such a baroque image of grandeur that it will be hard for him to dispel their illusions. He has already invited them to Rome. ‘Supposing they really come,’ he moans. ‘How would I explain it to my family – and the Roman bird?’ In the meantime Maurizio is eating them out of house and home – vast quantities of duck and dumplings, chocolate cake, red currant tarts and apricots. He sits on the sofa, and while mama presses her attentions and Eva ladles yet another spoonful of cherry jam down that ever open mouth, he contemplates himself in the mirror, occasionally inclining his head to admire that strange Roman profile. I cannot imagine how he will extract himself from the situation, especially as mama has specially rented a riverside cottage for the two lovers this weekend. Despite a lingering feeling that he may have made Eva pregnant, Maurizio faces the prospect of the final parting next week with equanimity. ‘It is very simple,’ he says. ‘I shall burst into tears, and when I cry who can be angry?”’

  Tosi remembers Chatwin’s arrival at Zavist. “I noticed this guy was interested in people.” Before the dig, they had dinner in a hotel, sitting on wooden benches while couples danced. “A young soldier, blond, reddish cheeks and a short, buttoned tunic was dancing primly with a girl and looking up so happily. Bruce said: ‘It’s extraordinary that someone can be happy with so little’.”

  Over the next week, Tosi observed Bruce in the field. “I could never foresee what was coming. He was doing nothing I expected. I spoke three or four languages and was involved in lots of political actions, but I could not compare with the wit and performing capacities and the culture, the knowledge that Bruce was able to express in a few minutes of conversation. That summer in Czechoslovakia, he was – or at least declared himself to be – an archaeologist. On the other hand, I cannot forget the sense of boredom he had any time we entered into the technicalities, the excavation, the survey work, the descriptive aspects of the site.”

  Tosi took him on his first visit to the site. “While strolling though the woods from the house to our excavations I went into the most detailed explanation of the fort
ification’s lay-out, but he kept on pointing to the trees, giving them precise names, never responding to my attempts at professional involvement. The same applied when I showed him the trench and sections. Bruce was much more amused by the snakes. Zavist was full of snakes.”

  At the end of each day Bruce and Maurizio went into Prague. They explored the old city, the synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, Rabbi Loew’s tomb, and they attended a wedding of yet another girlfriend of Maurizio’s. When the week’s dig was over, they parted: Maurizio for Afghanistan and East Iran; Bruce for Central Europe on a tour of museums in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey – and to join Batey. In a restaurant somewhere, he scribbled on the back of an envelope: “I have never known an orchestra with a greater capacity to shock. We have been running through Lehár waltzes and whenever we hit a high note it is like crossing a hump-back bridge, never fails to hit the wrong note.” On another page he made a pencil sketch of Holwell Farm, as if he is explaining to someone at dinner the house in which he lived. “Cotswold cute” and “charming pink” he wrote underneath the drawing. “Tout à fait tip-top noblesse d’Angleterre.” In the third week of September, he made his way home. “I’m in a horrid hot little room and I miss you,” he wrote to Elizabeth.

  While Bruce was away, Margharita had helped Elizabeth to decorate Holwell Farm. “I am full of admiration for the way she copes with everything,” Bruce’s mother wrote to Gertrude. For the exterior, Elizabeth had mixed a special ochre for the stucco using canisters of Winsor & Newton paint powder which the previous owner had left behind in the barn. In September, she took receipt of a double-boiler, another gift from Gertrude.

  Bruce arrived home with several French cheeses and a Kelim carpet, and threw himself into a week of handiwork. He stippled the bathroom. He erected osier hurdles as a windbreak for the vegetable garden. He collected fresh water in milk churns. On 4 October, he wrote to Gertrude before going up to Edinburgh: “The whole place has taken a terrific turn for the better and is becoming simply beautiful inside. The kitchen is the most pleasant I have ever known and I think we will almost live in it. I am in the middle of painting the study which will be ready before we go. I once learned a very good technique for colouring walls. You paint them with flat white oil, and then put a very thin layer of coloured wax glaze. This gives the walls a slightly transparent look. We are doing the study in golden ochre which sounds horrible but I think you’ll like it. The bathroom doors which I glazed green over grey blue are a great success. A painter friend of mine is seriously thinking of adopting the technique. The boiler at last works after its teething troubles and the whole place is remarkably warm and has dried out in a way I never thought it would.”

  Bruce started his second year at Edinburgh as the lone male in his course. The group of 41 first-year students had slimmed to seven: Bruce and six girls referred to by Piggott as “my foolish virgins”.

  Rowan Watson had abandoned his degree and Bruce did not seek another lodger. “We see mostly professors,” wrote Elizabeth to Gertrude.

  A blow was the departure of Charles Thomas to the chair at Leicester. No one was found to replace him to lecture in Dark Ages Archaeology and with his departure Bruce was stuck with Roman Britain.

  London friends came on fleeting visits, but matters did not improve. “Bruce continues to be steeped in gloom,” Elizabeth wrote in February 1968. “He says he is bored to tears here and doesn’t like anything and so doesn’t know what to do at all. I can’t even make out if he likes archaeology now – he says the way you have to study it takes all the romance out of it and all archaeologists are stuck in their own little ruts and aren’t interested in what the others are doing etc., etc. I think really it’s this place – he hasn’t anything to do except study.”

  As part of his second-year course, Bruce studied Fine Art under David Talbot Rice. What commended this course to Bruce was his tutor’s friendship with Robert Byron, Talbot Rice’s friend at Eton. It was Talbot Rice, after a visit to Constantinople in 1925, who planted in Byron an interest in Byzantine art. Together they had explored Mount Athos and collaborated in The Birth of Western Painting.

  Inasmuch as anyone filled the gap left by Charles Thomas, it was Professor David Talbot Rice and his wife, the historian Tamara. “She is a big Russian version of Penelope Betjeman,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth, “and he beams.”

  Eager to hear scraps about Byron, Bruce was a frequent visitor to their house in Nelson Street. The Sunday lunches, served with mulled wine, provided him with a social beacon, while Tamara considered Bruce a breath of fresh air. “I can picture him, elegant, neat, clean, attractively turned out, hair brushed, very definite in his movements, no hesitancy: if he wanted a book from the book case, he was at it before you knew.” She found him ambitious to distinguish himself, but reticent about his personal life – except for one or two vitriolic remarks about Sotheby’s. “He wasn’t a social climber, nor an intellectual climber. I always imagined he was lower middle-class. He was frightfully secretive over his parents. He said he came from Dursley, where his father was an engineer. He was so secretive I didn’t even know where he lived.” She got in touch with him through the Archaeology Department. “I couldn’t see this meteor staying four years at Edinburgh. I kept saying to David: ‘Will he last out?”’

  Tamara Talbot Rice was a Lithuanian Jew who had spent the bulk of her life in exile. Her stories were not confined to Byron’s wild shrieks and remorseless teasing, but ranged from Rasputin, whose coffin she had seen hijacked before her eyes in Sergevskaya Street, to Claude Monet with whom she used to sip honey-coloured tea, to her brother who had joined the Maquis. Tamara replaced Peter Wilson as Bruce’s favourite subject for impersonation. “Tamara and Tamara and Tamara . . .”

  Her childhood was one Bruce might have concocted for himself: the only daughter of a treasury official, she was brought up in St Petersburg and on two country estates. “Sometimes during Lent I was taken to a jeweller, generally Fabergé, to buy miniature Easter eggs to be worn as bracelets or necklace charms.”

  In 1918, she escaped from Russia on the last train using a false passport, reaching Stockholm in time for Christmas, pulled, so she claimed, behind reindeers under white skins in the snow. In Paris, she had worked in the fashion industry. At Oxford, she had known most of the Hypocrites’ Club, including Evelyn Waugh in the days when he was a cartoonist, and Robert Byron.

  Five days before she died, Tamara considered the differences between Chatwin and Byron: “Robert I inherited from David. I chose Bruce as a friend. But I never had a deep personal affection for him. I think it was not possible. I could have it with Evelyn, who could be maddening, or with Robert, but not with Bruce. He was very self-contained.” This self-containment, she felt, affected his work. “That’s the difference between him and Robert, whom passion activated in the first place. Bruce had no passion. It was all cerebral.”

  In 1935, Tamara had accompanied Byron back to Russia for a Congress on Persian art. In the Hermitage they had seen displayed the same frozen excavations from the Altai, the same tattooed skin, which had so entranced Bruce. It turned out that on her family’s estate of Volgovo on the middle reaches of the Volga “we had one or two nomadic burial mounds.” Tamara, wearing Harrods boots and a sealskin fur coat, proceeded with her tutor to excavate these sites. “We dug up bits of horse harnesses, nothing exciting.” But her tutor’s tales of how the Scythians ransacked the Crimea in the fourth century and how the Great Wall of China was built against the nomads cultivated a fascination which resulted in her book The Scythians, dedicated “to those who lived at Volgovo”, and continued to figure in her conversations with Bruce in Nelson Street. “He wanted to know: Where had the Ark begun? Had the Sarmattans been on Hadrian’s Wall? When did metal stirrups start?” Exactly as her husband had pointed Byron in the direction of Byzantine art, so Tamara led Bruce to his subject. “It was first through me that he came to be interested in nomads.”

  It might have come to nothing without the
paternalistic hand of Cary Welch, who in the winter of 1967 recommended Bruce to curate an exhibition devoted to the Nomadic Art of the Asian Steppes. Welch had collected this art – weapons, jewellery, horse-harnesses – from the age of 14 while still at boarding school with George Ortiz. He had persuaded the Asia House Gallery in New York to mount the first major exhibition to be called The Animal Style.

  Welch never believed that Bruce would make a good academic, but once he had introduced him to Piggott and the decision was made he gave his full support. Recalling the excitement that Bruce had shown over the frozen herdsman, he put his name forward when he heard that the exhibition’s principle curator, Emma Bunker, required an extra hand. “He was billed as a young scholar – and distant relative by marriage of Cary Welch – who, in spite of his captivating eccentricities was somewhat rational,” says Bunker, a young academic in Buddhist studies from Denver.

  The exhibition was not due to open until January 1970. Until that time Bruce was expected to use his Sotheby’s training to contact museums and collectors and to gather the best examples of nomadic art, essentially portable objects worn by mounted herdsmen who wandered the steppes of Asia and Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Bruce embraced a project that reflected a variety of his interests. There was the prospect of a book to coincide with the exhibition. Furthermore, there was the incentive of income. Asia House would pay travel expenses to the areas for which Bruce would hold responsibility: Thule and Eskimo, North Russia and Finland. “From the moment he became involved,” says Kasmin, “it marked the new Bruce.”

  That winter, on his way to Geneseo for Christmas with his in-laws, Bruce met Welch in Boston to discuss ideas. Welch agreed to loan several important bronze ornaments; so would Ortiz. In January, Bruce returned to Edinburgh with a noticeable spring in his step.