Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Bruce fled to Miranda Rothschild, a friend of Peter Levi. A tragic widow, she lived at Yarnton, a Jacobean manor house outside Oxford. Here Bruce and Miranda embarked on “an endless conversation”.

  Miranda, whose nickname was “Quail”, was an attractive, faint-voiced rebel with boyish looks and a taste for adventure. The sister of the banker Jacob Rothschild, she had fallen for an Algerian revolutionary. They married, had a daughter, and then in 1964 he was assassinated in Tunis. “I found him in a charnel pit.” She went to live in Athens, where she fell platonically in love with, among others, Peter Levi. She was sitting as usual in Flocca’s tearoom, plunging her cake into a glass of icy water, when she looked up and saw “a beautiful-looking Jesuit, like an icon, thin as hell. We fell platonically head over heels.” Levi could manage no more than “a mad flirtation”, but he wished to help her. Miranda needed nationality papers for her daughter. Levi persuaded her to return to England and introduced her to his best friend, Ian Watson. To facilitate the passport, she and Watson married. They were living together at Yarnton when Bruce turned up.

  “I was polishing Tudor glass and living on vodka and lime and baked beans,” says Miranda. “I was jolly bored and Bruce arrives on the scene with Peter Levi. He looked gorgeous, thin, a wheaty, bronzy colour and cold blue eyes. He was every Jewish girl’s dream and I was a plump, exceedingly neurotic widow with a name.” Miranda galvanised Bruce’s competitive streak. “Bruce felt if I had a girl I didn’t want,” says Peter Levi, “so should he.”

  Miranda left Watson in Yarnton and invited Bruce to stay at her mother’s house in London. At 27 Blomfield Road, Bruce sat on an ottoman reading aloud his nomad book while she listened from a four-poster. “He read to me constantly, it was his whole burning self-expression. I was starved of it. I was enclosed. I’d always been a nomad. I was married to an Arab and before that I’d lived in a desert in Israel, south of Sodom – appropriately enough.” She became a constructive audience in a period of self-doubt. “The main ingredient of our friendship was an intellectual passion. It was an attraction of opposites who had an idea in common. I’m listening and discussing and we love each other because of the nomad book. I’m part of the book.”

  Bruce and Miranda celebrated Christmas in Blomfield Road where they kissed in the woodshed. “It was like a first kiss, a bestowal. It had a mystic edge.” Bruce wrote to tell Elizabeth that he was going to spend four days with Miranda in Paris. He was drawn to her boyish looks. “Miranda has found out she has no female hormones!! and is turning into a man – imagine!” In fact, says Ian Watson, she so much resembled a boy that a year later when travelling through Afghanistan, she excited the chief of police in Mazar-i-Sharif into such a state that he machine-gunned the bottom of her house, shouting: “Let him out! Let him out!”

  Miranda was well aware of her androgynous attraction for Bruce and of the cachet of her pedigree. She found him an immensely talented but detached person whose emotional luggage had to be honed down to the single perfect accoutrement of a rucksack. “His ambivalence was his impetus. Sexually, Bruce was a polymorphous pervert. Think of the word ‘charming’. Think of the word ‘seduction’. Think of seduction as a driving force to conquer society, Vogue. He’s out to seduce everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.”

  In Paris, Miranda seduced Bruce. “It was my fault. I invited it,” she says. “I was love-lorn and I wanted something. But I didn’t want that. He was lust personified. It had nothing to do with anything else.” She describes an act of lovemaking of great speed and savagery, as if he wanted it to be over quickly. “It didn’t leave any taste at all, and I was surprised. I was lacerated as if by a Bengal tiger.” It never happened again. “And then came Akbar.”

  In March 1971, in response to an S.O.S. from Elizabeth, Bruce flew to Teheran to drive her back. Meanwhile, Gertrude had also received an urgent request. “It may sound very strange, so be prepared. I have brought with me a Pathan boy from Multan called Ghulam Akbar Khan.” She asked Gertrude to write a letter to the American Consul in Istanbul saying she would vouch for him. “I guarantee he is absolutely honest as the day is long & very kind & thoughtful. He looks rather like a gaucho from the Argentine & is very athletic & strong.”

  It was a chance encounter with Bruce and Elizabeth that changed Ghulam Akbar’s life. They had met him at the end of their Afghanistan trip with Peter Levi. Akbar had approached on his bicycle. He was 19 years old, from the Pakistan side of the border. His mother was dead.

  He corresponded with Elizabeth, who had met him again while driving her van home through Pakistan. Akbar asked to join her. “He has decided to come back to England (or at least Europe) with us & is marvellous company & as nice as can be, but can’t drive and speaks rather quaint English.”

  Akbar was not Elizabeth’s sole passenger. There were in addition: Simon, a chess-playing hippy with no driver’s licence, and three more quail. “They are supposed to sing, but don’t like the travelling and hardly utter.” Akbar, as a present for Bruce, had bought a hawk in a round cage that made the quail fearful. “He has to be supplied with little bits of raw meat all the time. I hope we never get out of reach of a butcher or the quail will be sacrificed.” The hawk subsequently escaped through the van’s sunroof.

  Elizabeth had reason to be grateful for Akbar’s presence. Outside a caviar port on the Caspian Sea, there was almost a repetition of the rape incident with Penelope Betjeman, whom she had left behind in India with the others. Elizabeth was walking on the bleak sand flats when an Iranian soldier approached with a bayonet. While Simon screamed hysterically that he had not got his shoes on, Akbar speaking his quaint English talked the soldier out of his purpose. “He did save my bacon.”

  On 7 April, the van arrived at the Oxmantowns’ house in Teheran where Elizabeth hoped to find her husband. Having cabled Bruce, she had heard nothing since February. “I hope he’ll be able to come to Teheran, but I suppose his back won’t be well enough. I certainly hope he’s turned the book in by now.”

  Bruce had arrived in Teheran a week earlier, on 29 March. This was the occasion when he borrowed an Embassy Land Rover and drove to Shiraz. “Saw the Qashgais on their spring migration, which was thrilling, and for five days filled a British Embassy Land Rover full of sheep, tribesmen, women suckling babies etc.,” he wrote to Welch. He described in The Songlines how at Pasagadae the nomads glued their eyes to the way ahead. While Bruce could not help looking at the huge domed tents, designed by the Paris firm of Jansen for the Shah’s celebration of 2,000 years of monarchy in June, the nomads swept past without a glance, their eyes blinkered to the horizon towards which they drove hundred upon hundred of separate herds.

  Bruce returned to Teheran to greet Elizabeth. “He waited, impatiently pacing around,” says Alison Oxmantown, “looking out for her with all the signs of one much in love and desperate to see her.” There followed several discussions about Akbar. Bruce was concerned about the responsibility of taking an innocent Muslim to Europe. Alison felt Elizabeth had picked him up as she would any stray and unhappy animal.

  Alison had just given birth to a daughter, Alicia. “It was spring and hot and Bruce walked up and down with our baby saying how it proved the point that humans were meant to be on the move and that moving babies don’t cry. Akbar, however, was dismayed that she was not being breastfed. He explained that even when he went to school and returned from the long walk, his mother, now feeding smaller children, would point him to a friendly sheep that he could suckle. We all thought of starting a coffee bar with sheep tied to the counter for a quick pint. When they left I kissed him – he was very good looking – and Bruce said, very sharply, that this would seduce him into the other world, which it did.”

  A week later, on 13 April, Bruce, Elizabeth and Akbar left Teheran, dropping Akbar in Corfu to sort out his Italian visa. “Either the quails or Akbar have to go,” Bruce told Elizabeth as they continued on to Rome to meet her parents. On 4 May in Ro
me, they received a desperate message from Akbar. He had reached Genoa. “But with very truble. I spend three days in Corfu. I next day get visa and reach to port but the ship was gone.” The Italian banks had refused to cash the cheque Elizabeth had given him to cover expenses. He begged her to send money to the Pakistan Embassy in Paris, the sole clue to his whereabouts,

  Bruce turned up in a state at Miranda Rothschild’s flat in the rue de Grenelle. “He was having a breakdown,” she says. “He was feeling so guilty. ‘Look Miranda, only you can do this. I know he wanted to get to Paris to meet us. Will you please find him?’ I took it on like an oath, out of love. He told me the last time he saw Akbar he had long black hair and was dressed in native costume. He now had to go back to Cold Comfort Farm.”

  Miranda looked up the address of the Pakistan Embassy. “I began to walk up and down the Champs Elysées to see if I could see a long-haired Afghan. I looked for a couple of days, six-and-a-half hours at a time. I like that kind of work. Suddenly I see this apparition, stinking of onions, tall, slim with raggedy-cut hair in a pudding basin. I go straight up: ‘You must be Akbar.’ He’d had to sell his hair to get money for his passage. He hadn’t eaten anything except onions for four days.”

  Akbar was living at a Youth Hostel at the Porte d’lvry. Every day he had walked to the Pakistan Embassy hoping to find Bruce and Elizabeth, nine miles each way, carrying his suitcase since on the first day at the hostel someone had stolen his shaving things.

  Miranda took Akbar back to the rue de Grenelle. Two weeks later Elizabeth visited. “Miranda is really being very good to him & making all sorts of efforts to get him a job and residence permit & so on,” she wrote to Gertrude. Miranda’s husband, already mistrustful of Bruce, was less than happy with Akbar, who struck him as “a good-looking idiot”. Back at Holwell, Elizabeth soon became aware of tensions. “Rang up Miranda and Ian who were most weird on the telephone . . . Ian said the whole thing is hopeless – I don’t know if he meant that in several ways or what. Apparently Akbar’s presence has caused a lot of trouble.”

  Bruce expressed his concern to Welch: “Elizabeth’s young Pakistani couldn’t get into England and is now stuck in France, where he is adopted by the Rothschilds as their latest amusement and a lot of talk about the Lost Tribes of Israel. We are prevented from talking to him on the phone so jealously is he guarded. Very irresponsible performance on the part of everybody.”

  The story continued to unfold out of Bruce’s orbit. “We became lovers,” says Miranda. “He told me he was a virgin, I was his first love, proper poetic stuff, and he wrote letters saying I’m his moonlit gazelle. He was horribly persuasive. I’d only ever been called a sturdy little pony before.” She had a yearning to see Afghanistan. She had wanted to accompany Levi on his trip with Bruce in 1969 and now returned with Akbar to the north-west frontier. “All my nomadism comes back. From a young earth mother with a small child I again became a wild tomboy, toting pistols on the frontier of Afghanistan with China. I wore native dress, slung with a pistol and cartridges. I rode wild stallions. My whole life changed.”

  Months later Miranda returned to Paris without Akbar. Ostracised, she passed her time in a bar opposite the Fontaine des Quatre Saisons. “Sans cesse from 10 a.m.” At her divorce, Akbar’s letters were read out in court. “Suddenly I get a letter from Bruce on blue paper, blue ink. My dear Miranda, I want to see you more than anything else in the world. I want you to forgive me more than anything else in the world. He comes to see me in Paris. He gives me a Mesopotamian duck-weight made of haematite. He’d affected my life to a tremendous extent. He owed me one.”

  On 14 May 1971, Bruce stood in Aspall Church in Suffolk and watched Prince William of Gloucester unveil a sculpture to Raulin Guild. “You must try and imagine that some invisible power has carried him off as he was,” Bruce had written to Raulin’s sister Ivry. “Open, fair, free-minded and ruthlessly honest.”

  The ceremony put his own life in relief. By 30, he hoped to have finished The Nomadic Alternative, but the journey to Teheran had “quite broken my train of thought, and after one day I am already shaking with the malaise of settlement”. He wrote to Welch from Holwell: “Oh to finish the book. I wrote the last sentence before I went away. Since when some ideas have evaporated and new ones have taken their place. Two, three perhaps four months of revision.”

  But in June, he could no longer tolerate Holwell. “The weather is so infinitely frightful that I have just decided to go to the South of France with my typewriter and E is going to follow later.”

  He spent the summer in the Basse Alpes, staying first in a remote hamlet owned by the artist Jeremy Fry. From Oppedette, he wrote to Elizabeth: “It’s quite beautiful and completely unspoiled. Not a tourist in sight, and any amount of crumbling farm houses to buy, my dear. High up, plenty of air and wind. One wouldn’t need a garden for the wild flowers are a treat, all wild briars and honeysuckle, my dear.” He suggested Elizabeth “up-sticks” and join him in another month.

  He lasted scarcely a fortnight on his own. The telephone had been cut off and he had no car. On 3 July he sent a telegram to James Ivory: DO COME BUT QUICK STOP HIRE CAR MARSEILLE. In a letter, he explained: “I do badly want to see you – for lots of reasons. Apart from the obvious one, I want to ask your advice.”

  Levi, firmly based in the poetic and spiritual worlds, now yielded to a mentor of wordlier inclinations, the American film director “Jungle Jim” Ivory.

  Ivory was a friend of Welch who five years before had proposed a film set in India, featuring the Beatles. (Welch had written to John Lennon saying Rain was the best Indian music since the time of Akbar.) The location of the film, about the Mughals, was to be the Red Fort in Delhi. “Also on the path of the Mughals would be a gang of international art dealer/thieves,” Welch wrote to Bruce. “Maybe [Hewett] would even play in the filum!” Welch had discussed the project with Ivory, who was “wild” about it. “If the idea comes off, I see you in it too.” There matters rested, but the prospect of making a film germinated in Bruce’s mind.

  Bruce had met Ivory in the autumn of 1969 at Hodgkin’s house near Bath. Bruce stood in the late afternoon with his back to the wall, looking at Ivory and not saying anything. Ivory, then preparing to make his fourth feature-film, Bombay Talkie, found him entertaining company: “he really did make you laugh”. In London, Ivory had visited Bruce’s studio in Kynance Mews. “He lived like a bachelor. One understood he was married. Elizabeth was there in the background most of the time and sometimes she came forward and was important to him, but they were not the usual kind of couple. He never referred to her contemptuously. He spoke of her like a friend, like another boy or man. She wasn’t a weight around his neck who would stop him having fun: she wasn’t that kind of wife.”

  Ivory arrived in Oppedette and stayed a week. The bleak little house lay on a bare treeless hillside. They made a trip to St Tropez, drove to Menerbes in the hope of seeing Dora Maar climb up the hill, and visited Stephen Spender in the Alpillas. Ivory says, “He was tearing a motor car apart and his hands were covered in black oil.” In the baking hothouse they slept on mattresses. “Then Bruce would say, ‘I have to work now’. I would sit on a big chair out in the sun, but very soon I’d see him walking around, not working. And that seemed to be the pattern.”

  Bruce’s aim in coming to France was, Elizabeth explained to Gertrude, “to try and finish getting the book organised and shortened.” But whenever Bruce talked to Ivory about nomads, “my eyes would glaze over. He had a thousand shiny bits of weird and unrelated historical facts which he would scatter.”

  Bruce promised Ivory: “Never never never will I write anything longer than a few pages. Never – at least for a very long time – will I try anything that demands RESEARCH.”

  The advice Bruce sought from Ivory had nothing to do with his book, but with cinema. “I have in the rough a story, which doesn’t really work as a novel because I have tried it. It is also a true story about someone I met by cha
nce . . . Do you think there might be something in it for you?”

  The story was “Rotting Fruit”, about the Matisse collector from Miami, and became the first of several ideas which Bruce now pitched to “Jungle Jim” as possible subjects for a film.

  Bruce’s interest in film-making was, like his musical based on Akhenaten, his volume of shaman poetry, his book on Afghanistan, a nine-day won-der. “Perhaps I was too stupid to understand that Bruce was serious about his film ideas while seeming to play them down or make a joke of them,” says Ivory. “It never occurred to me that he wasn’t being entertaining in his letters with preposterous plots and characters. When I read all his letters together I see – too late – that Bruce might have been in earnest. I must have seemed a poor friend, letting him down all the time.”

  Bruce furnished Ivory with one idea after another, to be developed as soon as he had finished The Nomadic Alternative. All seem based on experiences in his own life: his encounter with Andrew Batey (“That Andrew story is fascinating. Maybe we could do something”); the Willey Expedition in Afghanistan (“That really is worth a filum”); and a project that foreshadows Utz: “Once I’m through I’ll apply my febrile mind to the idea of the film about THINGS. Incidentally I have a splendidly macabre story about a compulsive collector of Cherry Blossom Boot Polish tins, set in North London between the wars, and ending with the most enigmatic death.” He even conceived a plan to film his nomad book. “ACTION in film is to my mind the answer. I’m afraid film without fast action is for me nearly a non-film. To me it’s the whole point of the medium. I am very keen to do something on the pilgrimage theme myself – the idea of finding oneself in movement. Any ideas?”