XXVII
Oh, mais c’est du Flaubert!
He felt a slight pain in his chest. The pain came and went in twinges below his heart. It was not serious. This particular pain came when he was in England. It was his English pain. He greeted it as an old friend. It was the pain that told him to head south.
—From BC’s unpublished story, “November”
THE CHANGES IN HIS LIFE MAY BE REFLECTED IN BRUCE’S fictionalised life of de Souza: a generous man engaged in an abominable traffic, a reluctant exile who fought his natural good impulses to conduct his low life. “I wanted to show in the book how the fate of the slave trader is really rather the same as the fate of someone who might be an executive of Shell or a mining company, who’s originally a good man who gets bound up in the impossible economic system and then is actually dragged down by it.”
The changes also colour the difficult composition of The Viceroy of Ouidah. Bruce was tormented by the question of where to write his book. From now until the end of his life he was in search of what he described to Kasmin as “this mythical beast ‘the place to write in’”.
He had written to Kasmin from Bahia: “I think I’ll sit out the summer at the farm because this will need a lot of other men’s books if it’s to be anything – though I’m still taken with the story.” The prospect of Gloucestershire, however, filled him with dread. “As you know I find it very hard to work there,” he wrote to Elizabeth from Benin. He wrote to Kasmin of “the state of hysteria that comes over me at Holwell Farm”, and in a letter to Acheson explained how, “wherever I go, particularly in deserts, the image of that misty Gloucestershire valley passes before my eyes. But one should never go near it, except to recharge the IDEA of it once every two or three years.”
Once asked what he did in the country, Bruce said: “I just pace up and down and stand against the wall and I do this,” and he banged his head against a wall. One evening in London he had a sad encounter. “At the end of the Burlington Arcade a thin black boy in a black leather jacket was beating his white crash helmet with his head still in it against the lamppost. Then he hit his fist against the trashcan, bruising his knuckles. I asked what was the matter. He smiled sheepishly, wriggled, shuddered and said ‘Oh, I’m so fed up!’ I asked if I could help, but he said, ‘You can’t do nothing.’
“Coming back 5 minutes later across Piccadilly, police cars with hooting sirens were roaring up in the street. He had lobbed a brick through the jeweller’s window. A man with white hands was removing a diamond and enamel necklace off its grey velour neck stand. A couple from Chicago said: ‘He probably comes from Chicago. The blacks in Chicago carry on like that.’
“He had run off . . .”
Bruce felt a natural sympathy for the boy. He, too, had exhausted the alternatives. He was boxed in. Nothing in the end could relieve him, except the writing.
“Those of us who presume to write books would appear to fall into two categories,” Bruce wrote in an article for House and Garden. “The ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move. There are those like myself who are paralysed by ‘home’, for whom home is synonymous with writer’s block and who believe . . . that all will be well if only they were somewhere else.”
He would complete his second book in other people’s houses. “Bruce was very good at borrowing places to stay,” says Kasmin.
In May 1977, he rented Maschler’s cottage above Liantony. “It’s not far from Penelope [Betjeman] and he has bought a tiny Fiat for £500 to get around in, as it’s pretty remote,” wrote Elizabeth. “But it’s only an hour and 1/2 from here so we can get together when he needs a break.” No sooner was he installed than it began to rain. The downpour continued through June and July. The cottage leaked, the structure for the book eluded him. “The whole of last summer is like a bad dream to me,” he wrote to Elizabeth.
In October, Elizabeth drove him to Italy where he moved into a wing of Millington-Drake’s villa at Poggio al Pozzo. All was well to start with. “Flat is exactly what I wanted,” he wrote to Kasmin, “within bicycling distance of Siena on a south-facing hillside. Hope to recover from my summer of infinite frustrations.” The bare stone villa stood on a hilltop overlooking the oak- and pine-hills of Chianti. When Kasmin visited at Christmas he found it warm but short of windows and armchairs, with no “cosy reading corners”.
Millington-Drake charged Bruce £25 a week. He was by now accustomed to his guest: “He was a cuckoo, though he thought of himself as a nomad. When he came to stay, he settled in and made his nest in whatever part of the house he had been assigned; then, when it suited him, he would move on to another nest in someone else’s house. He expected to be fed. ‘What’s for lunch?’ he’d cry as he breezed in at half-past twelve. Occasionally, he would contribute a couple of bottles of champagne or, as a great treat, some wild rice. Then there was the telephone bill. He telephoned continually to his agent, his friends, to a young man he’d fallen in love with in Brazil. At the end of a visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about £4) saying he hadn’t used the ‘phone much.”
Bruce resumed work at Poggio in a brighter mood. “This is better than the Welsh Mountains,” he wrote to Wyndham. “Bare hills, bright light and most of the English gone back for the winter. I cycle to Siena for groceries and speak to shopkeepers in an incoherent mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin: they smile breezily and ask if I want peanuts.” Meanwhile, he was writing about the Dahomean coup. “Have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line. So it goes.”
He had started out confidently: “I know exactly what to do with the book: write it in one long stretch without even the favour of chapters,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present.
“I am beginning with the family celebrating their annual commemorative mass in the Church in Ouidah and retiring for the dinner in Sigbomey which means the Big House or Casa Grande in Fon . . . The scene is then set for his life and what a life! Cattle drover turned man drover who ends up the prisoner of the King of D and dies of rage at being trapped when all he wants to do is get out of Africa and retire to Bahia.”
Bruce’s talent was to dig up extraordinary facts and link them. “He was an intellectual gibbon who swung from connection to connection with incredible ease,” said a friend. His imagination, oddly, faltered at pure invention. He could enlarge and colour and improve his stories, but he could not make them up from scratch. After toiling a month on de Souza, he reached an impasse. “I had thought of giving it up when I was kicked out of Benin last winter,” he wrote to Welch. “Then thought that was weak-kneed and so I go on. I am in no position to judge how it will turn out.” He felt distracted by thoughts of Joao and, lately, of Donald. By December, rumours had reached Maschler. “Kas mentioned to me on the telephone today that you were a little depressed about progress on the new book and perhaps a little lonely as well? I don’t know how I can help except to tell you that my confidence in you is absolutely supreme. As I never cease to tell you In Patagonia is one of the best first books we’ve published for many a year and it’s no more than a beginning for you. That, I realise of course, only makes it the harder to follow in a way.”
In January, Bruce showed him the first 107 pages. Maschler was encouraging: “At its best . . . The Merchant of Ouidah goes way beyond In Patagonia in its qualities. And that’s quite something. I know you can get it right . . . When you are at the end we can really talk about structure.” He enclosed a £100 bill for Bruce’s expenses at his cottage in Wales. “Sorry it’s so much, but as you will see most of it is your telephone conversations!”
“You’ve got to steal wherever you can,” Bruce told James Fox, when Fox was having difficulty with the composition of White Mischief “You must go down to the London Library and look at the beginning of all the great books. No white knuckles. Don’t sit there gripping the rails in terror. Plunge in.”<
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After In Patagonia Bruce embraced a new set of authors. Attempting a more classical structure, he looked away from Mandelstam and Hemingway towards French writers – Balzac, Flaubert and Racine.
“We used to read Racine out loud together,” said Millington-Drake, who felt that Bruce had switched his ability to find antiques “to one of finding unusual characters”.
His neighbour Charles Tomlinson was responsible for much of his French (and other) reading. Tomlinson had pressed on him the notebooks of Philippe Jacottet and Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (“Of course, that’s the great book, you know,” Bruce told him later). But Bruce was most excited by Racine. “The greatest master of psychological realism in the world is Racine,” he told an interviewer in Australia, “and in a Racine play the characters are always doomed from the moment they open their mouths and yet they are still permitted the liberty by the author of hope and they are still permitted the illusion themselves that things are going to turn out differently from what they do and that sets off an essential tension in a story.”
In the summer of 1978 Bruce saw an open-air production of Phèdre in Paris with Peter Eyre. “He liked the purity and discipline of Racine, the tight mechanism of the plot, the way the characters express themselves by what they do rather than by what they say,” says Eyre. “I remember him saying that Racine’s vocabulary was a hundred times more compact than Shakespeare’s. He told me that in writing this book he was trying to apply the same classical discipline.”
Bruce’s admiration for Racine was quite soon unlimited. “I am very serious about Bajazet,” he wrote to Jonathan Miller, after studying the play for its prison atmosphere. “I believe there’s some way that Racine can be made to work for a non-French audience through being declaimed/intoned in the bravura passages with the help of music.” His enthusiasm would result, some years later, in a comical interview with a French journalist who asked him, when promoting The Viceroy of Ouidah in Paris, what he thought of Racine. “As an Englishman who comes from Stratford and thinks Racine’s infinitely better than Shakespeare, I was off.” After an interval, the lady interrupted in a puzzled, anguished voice: “Mais Racines?” She meant Alex Haley’s Roots.
Next to Racine, he admired Flaubert. One year into his book, Bruce wrote to Milow: “the Flaubertian conte is progressing pero muy lentamente. I might just manage to finish its hundred or so pages by the end of the year. What I had estimated at three months will be at least six, but that’s the usual story. Yet imagine the Chartreuse de Parme being written in eleven weeks [actually, 53 days] and packed off to the publisher without need of corrections! On the subject of Flaubert, read Un coeur simple, in French, or at least with a French text in hand. Best thing written in the 19th century – and ours?”
“Un coeur simple” is the first story of Trois Contes. Heartbreakingly unsentimental, it has the sweep of a Russian novel in miniature: an entire life hastened and condensed into 40 pages. Flaubert gave his Félicité a heart so pure that even after half a century she had nothing to confess. Bruce, by contrast, had chosen a man with everything to confess. He sought for The Viceroy of Ouidah the same pace, control and tone as Flaubert, but he found the technical problems colossal: “how to string so many disparate facts and ideas into the life of one man, and carry the reader sailing from page to page.” He wanted his book, like Trois Contes, to be extremely small. “I doubt if it’ll print up to much more than a hundred pages. But then I’ve never liked long books myself, so I don’t see why I should try and write them myself. Unless you’re Tolstoy, most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.”
When Bruce gave him his novel to read in typescript, Wyndham compared it to Salammbô and “Hérodias” in Trois Contes. “It’s a sadistic book in a way. There’s a heartlessness.” Writers like Colin Thubron wonder if this very quality that makes his books so powerful is, in the end, what holds him back and makes him fall short of his models. “His lack of heart is arguably a fault,” says Thubron, “but it is hard to see how his virtues could have co-existed. Maybe his extraordinary qualities depended on there being no heart.”
Bruce’s fascination was for visual surface, and in the process finding the inner by describing the outer. “At all costs stay dead pan,” he wrote to Bill Buford, the editor of Granta. The composer Kevin Volans says, “Bruce felt art and composition of the late twentieth century should be ‘pure description’. I told him what Morton Feldman once said to me: ‘In the twentieth century there is no such thing as background. Everything must be foreground.’ Bruce understood this. The author should not get in the way. His description should be totally direct. There must be no secondary material, nothing between him and the object. He was the Matisse of writers.” He once said: “A trick I learned, when writing something tragic and claustrophobic, is to write it from the outside as if you are just present at a tableau vivant.”
Thubron says, “What was underneath the surface spoke through the patina and he would in many ways leave that to happen without delving. Stylistically he was neutral – there were very few value judgements or value adjectives. But underneath he was moral. There was a tension between the mental passion, the intense intellectual involvement with what he was doing, and the coolness of the prose.” The effect, to Thubron, was of a cold dawn light. It reminded Sybille Bedford of a shipwreck by Watteau, and Bob Brain of a photograph of the Kasluk: a ship squashed in tinsel ice, lit from the back, everything gleaming for that moment, everything in silhouette with a corona around it, transformed by an icy radiance. “It was a style honed to survive,” says Thubron.
Flaubert offered a style, also a look. Bruce crafted each page to resemble the pages of his French master. He was concerned with the integrity, even the visual effect of the paragraphing. “His one-sentence paragraphs are very like Flaubert,” says Wyndham. He took infinite pains over the cover, the print. To Jonathan Cape’s designer he conveyed his preference for Bembo, smallish, lots of leading and small Roman numerals for the chapter openings. “He despised what English books looked like,” says Wyndham, to whom he gave a first edition of Trois Contes. “He loved the chaste white covers of the French.”
And he resorted to visual aids to break out of an impasse: “One quite useful technique – which I used for the fantastic compression necessary for The Viceroy – is to get a board with a huge sheet of graph paper, divided into squares. You then write the ‘synopsis’ sections on little cards and pin them on with drawing pins. You then have a flexible way of setting out the story with the possibility of change.”
Sunil Sethi stayed with Bruce while The Viceroy of Ouidah was being written. “His pens were always Mont Blanc; his notebook was always a moleskine from a place in Paris that no longer exists. His complexity comes out of this great fastidiousness. For Bruce to sit down was a great achievement. He was the mother of all grasshoppers. And he was only sitting down when he found the right book and a very comfortable chair, or he was reading his day’s work to you.” To ensure the clarity of each sentence, Bruce read out his books. Sethi says, “They have been read aloud, every word – sometimes to the point of high self-consciousness. The point was to see when you were getting bored.” When correcting the French proofs, Bruce stayed in Paris with Loulou de la Falaise. One night she and her husband lay in bed, kept awake by Bruce. He was reading his proofs aloud in the bath.
“Oh, mais c’est du Flaubert!”
To try to finish the book, Bruce rented a house in Ronda for five months: “an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentine architect who has run out of money.” He wrote in longhand on 20 yellow legal pads, refilling his Mont Blanc from two bottles of Asprey’s brown ink. But progress was slow. “Ow! the strains of composition and of keeping up the momentum,” he wrote to Wyndham. “How to eliminate the longueurs without eliminating the sense. Will never tackle a historical subject again.” The days were hot and lethargic and his self-doubt was “in full flood”. He wrote to Sethi: “Five hours
of work and I’m exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won’t; don’t like what I’ve already done: feel like burning the manuscript.
“I get up at sunrise at eight; over coffee I sit out on a semi-circular terrace, contemplate the mountains opposite, and the hideous glazed pottery busts of a nymph and the Infant Bacchus on the arched portico: then settle down to work. Four-and-a-half hours brings me to 12.30 and letter-writing time if I am to catch the post which closes at 2. I leave the house at I, bounce down the mountain in my little Fiat and zigzag up the other side of Ronda, which perches on the top of a sheer cliff and looks like an iced cake. I unlock the aluminium PO Box, usually empty and hurtle to the market, which also closes at 2. Twice I have had a fight with the local condessa (a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie) as to who shall have the last lettuce. Then to a bar in a side street which has magnificent tapas (hors d’oeuvres) which I make into lunch. The other day I had a raw clam and was violently sick in the middle of the night. The proprietor is a fantastical red-haired queen, with draperies of white flesh hanging from his upper arms. I have seen him smile once, when the bar was full of soldiers.
Bruce Chatwin Page 49