Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In the village of Azamgarh, two hours from Benares, Arnold and Bruce fell in with an Indian journalist who was starting out on India Today If Malraux had presented to Bruce a future image, Sunil Sethi was his younger self. He called him “the 23-yr-old whizz-kid of Indian journalism”.

  “I was sitting outside the hotel,” says Sethi, “eating this terribly spartan lunch when up drove a rickety white Ambassador car in a swirl of dust and out fell these two pink people. It was so incongruous. One was a very small lady with long white hair piled high in a grandmotherly way. The other was a very silly-looking, pink Englishman.

  “I said, ‘Can I help?’

  “He said, ‘We’re looking for some water, actually. This lady’s very sick. She is Eve Arnold.’

  “I said, ‘Oh, yes, I remember seeing your wonderful pictures of Joan Crawford.’ He just looked at me, his eyes growing wider and wider.”

  The hotel was full. Sethi gave up his room for Arnold while he and Bruce slept on the roof. They were blown about by a sandstorm, but this bothered neither of them. “We hit it off immediately. We just couldn’t stop talking,” says Sethi. “Furbank’s biography of Forster was out and we talked about that and who could write about India. I said: ‘Listen, Forster got it right’.” Sethi was impressed by Bruce’s range of knowledge. “He didn’t have a magpie mind. It was a classic nineteenth-century dilettante mind in the best sense. Conversations were made up of allusions, bits and pieces that came up not from a meat grinder but from some endless private jigsaw. He was always connecting, always playing with the truth in interesting ways. It was a personal joust.”

  Leaving Arnold to recuperate, they went back to Benares. Down one street Bruce pulled Sethi back. “Come here! Look at this!” Sethi supposed he had found a temple. “But it was just four chimney-sweep faces lit by sparks from the staves of iron they had thrust into the fire. Charcoalblackened iron-smiths, barely visible through a crumbling arch, amid the mad raucous colours of an Indian bazaar. It was always like that: ‘Let’s find out, let’s look at the view again, let’s look at the papers’.”

  Sethi, wrote Bruce, was “an exhilarating companion”. He became one of a few with whom Bruce chose to talk personally. “He was very, very insecure about confidences,” says Sethi. “But I was much younger and I was out of context to his whole world. Distance made it a very abiding relationship. It wouldn’t have lasted if we’d lived together in the same society.”

  Bruce appealed to the younger journalist to assist him in his endeavour. He told him: “Now you’ve got to help me figure this Mrs Gandhi out.”

  Bruce travelled for two months, from Cape Cormorin to the Himalayas. He then settled down in Spain to structure a long article. “A bitch to write – about a bitch,” he wrote to his parents. “I went very sympathetic to anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable, but in the end couldn’t dredge up one particle of sympathy for the woman . . . Even in the villains you can usually find something – but Mrs G is the essence of bathos.” He wrote to Welch how on the desk of her Assistant Private Secretary he had found a manual for ventriloquists called Mimicry and Mono-acting. “She’s far worse than you’d ever imagine. I was prepared to allow her at least a dimension of greatness, but all you find is a lying, scheming bitch. If she were really evil, that would be something. If she were really Indian, that also would be something . . . She charmed me at first, I have to admit. But I couldn’t stomach the pettiness of the lies. Her enemy Charan Singh summed her up when he said: ‘Mrs Gandhi is incapable of telling the truth, even by mistake’.”

  The Sunday Times had foreseen a different piece. “They hated it,” said Wyndham. “They wanted a foreign correspondent’s profile. I met Brian Moynihan at the lift. ‘They hate it, they hate it’.”

  In grand disdain, Bruce wrote to Sethi about the rows. “The copy came back scrawled all over: WELL? IS SHE COMING BACK OR ISN’T SHE? or WHAT IS THE POLITICAL SCENE? That kind of thing, with a request that I rewrite.

  “But why should I? Print or don’t print, but don’t bother me . . . Preferably, don’t print, because anyway I don’t like writing about people I don’t like.”

  On 26 July 1978 he wrote with more news. “The Wolf Boy article comes out next week in the Sunday Times Magazine. Of course they were much more pleased with that one than Mrs G. My slight rows over Mrs G (which I don’t want talked about) were concerned with the fact that I wrote down only what I saw, not what other people say.” As for the Sunday Times, “the whole thing seems to be on its last legs. Do you wonder in an organisation where Old Etonians have to trim their accents to Yorkshire when they go upstairs to the Editor, to cockney when they go downstairs to the print rooms?”

  On 12 September, Bruce wrote to Elizabeth: “I bet they’ve chopped up the Mrs Gandhi piece: the sub-editor manque le moindre étincelle d’intélligence et de goût et d’humeur. I really am NOT going to write for them again.”

  Bruce wrote to Sethi, “Resolution of the month: Never to write for newspapers.” As an awful warning and everything he wished neither of them to become, he held up the example of another journalist on the Sunday Times, Cyril Connolly. “I’ve really gone off him,” Bruce had written to Elizabeth after reading an article which “was silly egocentric drivel, but that is what goes down . . .” He considered Connolly “a rotten novelist” and was unable to read The Rock Pool. “However, The Unquiet Grave is a book I return to again and again, so brilliant yet so terribly indicative of the pitfalls of English literary life.”

  Under the heading “Quotation of the Month” he typed out for Sethi a cautionary Connolly paragraph. “The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence . . . All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing of films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment.”

  Given Sethi’s “unbearable curiosity” and his capacity to arrange characters on a written page, he should attempt at least one lasting masterpiece. “In a world where millions of hot-air-laden pages are printed annually, it becomes a duty to go, see and condense for future readers at some unseen date.” He offered the following, hard-earned advice: “I am not suggesting you walk out of India Today, but feel you have reached a point where journalism had taught you the necessary art of condensation and the technique of story-hunting, but as such had nothing to offer you.”

  Bruce also furnished Sethi with the reading list he might have wished for himself at that age. He slays the lions who had written about India. “India is the land of the short story. It will never have its War and Peace. Mr Scott’s opus is a tragic bore; Mrs Jabberwallah [sic] can’t write; R. K. Narayan isn’t good enough and Mr Naipaul is a pontificator . . . I like Passage to India, but believe that E. M. F. is a poor model, as Somerset Maugham is a lethal one. Forgive me for suggesting you go on a course of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Maupassant, Flaubert (especially Un Coeur Simple), Ivan Bunin (whom I’ll get for you), Turgenev, and among the Americans early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway, and Carson McCullers, especially The Ballad of the Sad Café.

  “I wouldn’t take too much notice of this: it does reveal my inability to come to terms with English literature in general, excepting of course the Elizabethans and the outsiders. But we have nothing in the C19th or C20th to beat the narrative drive of someone like Poe.

  “My latest passion is Racine, though heaven knows where it’s going to lead. But the past week has gone writing an introduction to another passion, the prose of Osip Mandelstam, the most important writer to be snuffed out by Stalin . . .”

  “Don’t leave it too late,” he urged Sethi. “I’ve left it far too late.”

  XXII

  “Gone to Patagonia”

  Don Bruce, he talked a lot, bastante.

  —Señora Eberhadt, Puerto Natales

  MAGNUS LINKLATER HAS NO RECOLLECTION OF THE TELEGRAM Bruce claimed to have sent the Sunday Times: GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS. The
telegram most likely took the form of a letter to Wyndham.

  The letter arrived on Wyndham’s desk in December 1974, postmarked Lima: “I have done what I threatened / I suddenly got fed up with N. Y. and ran away to South America / I have been staying with a cousin in Lima for the past week and am going tonight to Buenos Aires. I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia / I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up.”

  The story “could be marvellous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way”. It related to Charles Milward and to the piece of brontosaurus skin thrown out in the move from Brown’s Green to Stratford in 1961. Bruce had not stopped thinking of Patagonia: the safest place in the event of nuclear war, the place where he planned to escape from school, the habitat of several tribes he had studied for The Nomadic Alternative. The lectures at Edinburgh he most responded to were Charles Thomas’s on the Welsh in Chubut and on Charles Darwin’s shocked reaction to the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego. A meeting in December 1972 with the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray had rekindled Bruce’s “childhood infatuation” – after visiting Gray, he wrote to thank her for “the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years”. Gray, then 93, had on the wall of her Paris apartment two maps of Patagonia that she had painted in gouache. Bruce said: “That’s one of the places I’ve always wanted to go to.” It was Gray’s ambition too: if she were young again she would try to see Cape Horn. “Allez-y pour moi,” she said.

  When he finally set out, Elizabeth had had no idea he was making plans. “But that wasn’t the only time that I didn’t know what was going on in his head.” One day in September 1974, Bruce was in the bath at Holwell, chatting to Elizabeth, when Gertrude rang up to say that Bobby was ill and she had taken him to hospital. “Bruce had a funny sixth sense about lots of things,” says Elizabeth. “He said: ‘If you want to see your father alive, get on a plane tomorrow morning.’ He took me to the airport.” On 1 October, shortly after he had seen Elizabeth, Bobby had a stroke and died.

  Bruce flew out for the funeral and stayed on in Gertrude’s apartment in Fifth Avenue. He had $3,500 expenses from the Sunday Times in his pocket and was supposed to be writing a story on the Guggenheim family. But he felt at the end of his tether with the paper – “anyone would be after a short while”.

  Wyndham was also in New York. He and David King were drinking in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel when Bruce appeared, dressed like a Boy Scout in khaki shorts, rucksack on his back. “He said: ‘I’m off to Patagonia. Tell Magnus I’ll get in touch.’ Then he left.” Wyndham and King had another drink and an hour later, from a cab going down Broadway, they saw him striding along, talking to himself, and people looking back in a surprised fashion. “I had this feeling he would walk and walk until he reached Patagonia.”

  The literary agent Gillon Aitken had also met him in New York. He says, “The only subject on his mind was Milward’s story. He kept talking about Patagonia – and he talked so much about it that I said: ‘You must stop talking about it, you must go, go, go’.” On 2 November, “on the spur of the moment,” Bruce made a break for it.

  He flew first to Lima, in order to talk to Milward’s daughter. Monica Barnett was a former journalist who had started to put together Milward’s sea stories with the idea of publication. She was reluctant to turn Bruce loose on her father’s papers, among them a 258-page journal of his life at sea. While permitting him to make rough notes, she insisted that he did not remove this manuscript from the house.

  After Bruce’s visit, Monica rang up Margharita and was enthusiastic about her charming, unconventional second cousin. Margharita passed on the news to Elizabeth. “She said that Bruce was a fascinating young man & that I must be very proud of him. I am!”

  Bruce was riveted by Milward’s journal and the contents of his letter book, interleaved with photographs and postcards from Birmingham. “Charles Milward’s life strangely compacted into the mythic present,” he wrote in his notebook, and to Elizabeth: “I like my cousins enormously. Monica Barnett is exactly like Aunt Grace to look at. The diary of Charlie Milward is fantastic, even if it could never be printed in its present form. The story of the wreck, of Louis de Rougemont, of Indian massacres, of life at sea on the Cape Homers is exactly like something out of Conrad. Am going to Buenos Aires tonight.”

  Bruce arrived in Argentina on 12 December at one of the more unstable moments in its history. “It was like the latter days of the Roman Empire,” he told ABC radio. Perón had returned a year before, triggering a massacre at the airport, and had died shortly after. The Montonero guerrillas had begun their assault on the enfeebled government of his widow Isabel. The revolutionary atmosphere did not impair Bruce’s ability to gather contacts for his journey south, but he felt the tension. At dinner with the Braun-Menendez family, who had done a great deal to develop Patagonia in the late nineteenth century, a window slammed. “In all their minds this was an attack.” That winter, one of their cousins had been fatally wounded in the stomach during a kidnap attempt.

  Based at the Hotel Lancaster, Bruce responded to Jorge Luis Borges’s “almost endless city”, its wide cobbled streets, its wedding-cake architecture, its bookshops. “Buenos Aires is utterly bizarre,” he wrote to Elizabeth, “a combination of Paris and Madrid shorn of historical depth, with hallucinating avenidas flanked with lime trees, where not even the humblest housewife need forego the architectural aspirations of Marie-Antoinette. I have been mixing with Anglo-Argentines who have lost command of English and all knowledge of home and with some of the crustier Argentines who speak it far better than I do.”

  Among the latter was “my best friend here”, a 22-year-old writer, Jorge Torre Zavaleta, “who is absolutely enchanting and of a culture and sensitivity that has died out in Europe”. Bruce had met Jorge in a red brick chateau in Calle Centeno belonging to Jorge’s uncle, a former Argentinian foreign secretary. Jorge entered the library to find Bruce sitting in jeans on a red damask chair, legs apart, and talking about his project “as if he was in love”. At lunch, they sat beneath the striking portrait of a cowboy. Painted on leather in 1842 by a French artist called Monvoisin, it showed a recumbent gaucho in a cap and red chemise, holding a maté gourd to his bared chest. Bruce was taken by the dark face frothed with a black moustache and excitedly described the gaucho as an odalisque. Jorge had plenty of times sat beneath the same figure without it striking him in this way. Since that moment, he has only been able to see the gaucho as an odalisque. “Good observation is a kind of invention.”

  Jorge was a friend and reader to the blind Borges. He was trying to give up law and pursue a career as a writer against the wishes of his family. Bruce stood at a similar crossroads. Jorge invited him to the Jockey Club where they talked about books. “He spoke very little Spanish,” says Jorge, “and not with a good accent either, but I felt he had done a lot of homework.” Bruce’s excitement frankly mystified his host. Patagonia, to Jorge as to most porteños, was “a back alley where different cultures swirled about and rather a boring place”. It was fine for Scots and Germans, but Argentinians preferred to visit Scotland and Germany. “To me, Patagonia was just emptiness.”

  Bruce heard the same sentiment expressed at the Braun-Menendez’s house in Punta Arenas. “Here am I inundated with Patagonian literature and I hear from across the table in Spanish heavily larded with a German accent, ‘I doubt if there are five books on Patagonia’.”

  No one did more to overturn this perception than Bruce did. Over the next three and a half months he discovered Patagonia as a subject, and himself as a writer.

  Patagonia is not a precise region on the map. It is a vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometres of Argentina and Chile. The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora. Patagonia may also be described by its climate. The wind which blows w
ith terrific force from October to March made Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plane fly backward instead of forward.

  Travellers from Darwin onwards noted how this bleakness seized the imagination. Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself. The stern Welsh pioneer John Murray Thomas, trekking inland in July 1877, wrote in his fading pencil: “Last night dreamt of Harriett that we were in the bedroom. Had a nice kiss. Hardly a night passes but that I see her in my dreams.”

  In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: drinkers drink; the devout pray; the lonely grow lonelier, sometimes fatally. In Punta Arenas, Tom Jones was one of Charles Milward’s successors as British Consul. In his 1961 memoir A Patagonian Panorama, he wrote: “Whether it is the dreary and crude climate of Patagonia or the lonely life in the camp after the day’s work or remorse after a bout of hard drinking, I cannot say, but I have known, some very intimately, well over 20 people who have committed suicide.” Bruce would be moved most by the dreamers and adventurers whose dreams had failed them.

  The first sheep farmers arrived from the Falkland Islands in the late 1870s, but the temptation among their descendants to cling to the culture their forebears left behind remains fierce. Patagonia spans two nations; a good many of its inhabitants pass a life likewise divided, rebuilding the environment they have escaped. The more remote the valley, the more faithful the recreation of an original homeland. In Gaiman, the Welsh preserve their language and their hymns. In Rio Pico, the Germans plant lupins and cherry trees. In Sarmiento, the Boers continue to dry their biltong (of guanaco). Bruce wrote in his journal, “The further one gets from the great centres of civilisation, the more prevalent become the fanciful reconstructions of the world of Madame du Barry.”