Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “He was definitely missing her,” says Robyn Davidson. “He constructed this story that he was semi-estranged and wanted to see her. I was surprised by the way he talked about her: with tremendous respect and affection. I got the idea of this very special relationship that wasn’t necessarily sexual or was; but certainly was a deep affection of souls. When I first met her I thought, as everyone else did: ‘How is it possible, these two completely unmatched people, and why?’ And in a quarter of an hour I moved from being dumbfounded at this ultimate mismatch into seeing she was the only sort of wife he could have had. She’s so real. He’d surround himself with all sorts of people and she’d be the constant. I think he absolutely loved her.”

  The way they got back together did not in fact begin with a judicious exchange of cables but a telephone call. Elizabeth received his call in Homer End. “He rings up. ‘I’ve been offered by Esquire to go anywhere I want. Where do you think?’ We discussed Japan, the South Pacific Islands, Nepal. He said he wanted to go to the mountains. So I said Nepal. I’d never been there.”

  He paid for his air fare to Katmandu by reading In Patagonia in six instalments for ABC radio. In the middle of April, Murray Bail drove him to the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. “I wanted to show him a world class view, seeing he had seen everything in the world. I stepped back for him to admire the view, as you do up there. He looked at it for a second and then turned to me: ‘What’s the date today? Next week I’ll be at the base camp of Everest’.”

  XXXII

  An Hour with Bruce Chatwin

  Everyone – especially those approaching 35 – has an idea that kills him in the end.

  —BC, Australian notebooks

  Their month in the Himalayas marked the beginning of Bruce’s rapprochement with Elizabeth. “We walked off and on for about 20 days,” she wrote to Gertrude. “We did see wonderful birds and animals and even what could be Yeti tracks!” Accompanied by three sherpas, a cook and three dzos (“which are a cross between a cow and a yak”), they climbed to 15,500 feet. “It was the most relaxing holiday I think I’ve ever had.”

  By returning to Elizabeth, Bruce would be able to write The Songlines. The next four years would be a dash to finish it against his gathering awareness that he was dying. He determined to complete the book before his illness was named and he incited everything in his character to work at double speed. “That book was an obsession too great for him, a monkey he carried around on his back,” says Rushdie. “His illness did him a favour, got him free of it. Otherwise, he would have gone on writing it for ten years.”

  Bruce returned from Nepal recovered from his “blood poisoning”, but with an unexplained lump on his hand. He fell sick again after his second visit to Australia in 1984. “He’s having a bad time with some horrid skin virus which attacks his face & his gums,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “I think it may be getting better now, but he’s not cheerful & says the book isn’t going well either.”

  From childhood Bruce had been prone to bronchial colds. These new symptoms put a chill in his heart. Nin Dutton drove him from Adelaide to Brisbane and recalled how, on the last leg of their four-day journey, he fell into a fearful melancholy. “He wouldn’t utter and he grumped and so I said, ‘Stop the car, I can’t stand it. Let’s play some music.’ He suddenly announced his mother was ill, which I didn’t believe for a moment.” The illness was his.

  Rushdie says, “He never allowed himself to be afraid in the company of his friends, but I saw it a few times in his face. He was so afraid of dying, he couldn’t speak his death sentence. He was in a state of great fear, shaking with terror.” Rushdie noted how, at the moment he became scared, Bruce went back to Elizabeth, abandoning homosexual activity and reconstructing the facade of family life. “He said to me he’d fallen in love with his wife. I felt it was genuine. How could it not be?”

  Elizabeth shared Bruce’s foreboding. “From the early 1980s I had the recurring feeling, not necessarily to do with our separation, that we didn’t have very long. It was no more definite than that and it could have been either of us.”

  Bruce’s presentiment of his mortality may explain his pressing desire to locate for himself the equivalent of an Aboriginal songline.

  “I come from the middle of England,” he said on a BBC programme. The people there might appear to be the most sedentary and entrenched in the British Isles, “but if you scratch their skin underneath you’ll find they’re burning wanderers”. On his return from Nepal, in June 1983, Bruce made a pilgrimage to Sheffield, Baslow and Stratford in order to reclaim parts of his childhood identity and the tracks he had followed with his grandfather. “I made the experiment of re-covering our walk to the Eagle Stone to tread a path I had not trodden for 40 years,” he wrote in his notebook. “But when I came onto the moor, I was lost.”

  All his life he had longed for connection, yet he disliked ritual and ceremony and he rejected his own duties towards wife, family, territory. There was no way he could possess for himself the coherent identity he perceived in Strehlow’s Aborigines because something in him insisted upon a perpetual unravelling of horizons, a continual reshaping of self. He would have to create for himself a fully realised written version of it, and, typically, he now combined the search for his own beginnings in Derbyshire with his investigations in Australia and the very origins of the species. “To understand human nature, you have to know the circumstances under which we became our species.”

  When in Kenya in 1982, Bruce had written to his parents of an encounter with Richard Leakey. “A few years ago he excavated the skull of a hominid – a near-man – dating from 1.5 million years together with his stone tools, and evidence of his camp-site. Leakey is a Kenyan MP, and even in the half talk we had – in between his visit to the Prime Minister and his work as head of the National Museum – I felt that we saw eye to eye on an astonishing number of points. The fact that he picked up on so many of the same references as I did with the nomad book encourages me to take it up again.”

  It was in the course of his research that Bruce’s attention was drawn to a newly published book by the director of the Transvaal Museum, the palaeontologist and naturalist Bob Brain. “Bruce telephoned to say he had read The Hunters or the Hunted? and wanted to come and talk.”

  Once we were all nomads. Nomadic existence was peaceful. That is what Brain had proved at the Swartkrans cave, working at “the point where man becomes man”. His new book provided Bruce with the last piece of his puzzle. It had the same impact on him as Songs of Central Australia.

  In January 1984, Bruce escaped the gloom of a Welsh winter and paused in South Africa on his way back to Australia. On 2 February, he discovered with Brain the charred antelope bone. He was moved to write to Gertrude for the first time in several years: “As Lib may have told you, I came to talk to a man who wrote a book about the Earliest Man, and I’ve had perhaps the most stimulating discussions in my life. Prof. Brain has, for the past 20 years, been excavating a cave near Johannesburg in which you find at the lower level (Date: around 2 million years) a situation in which the ancestors of Man were literally dragged there and eaten by an extinct giant cat called dinofelis. Then in the upper level, Man (the First) suddenly takes control and the Beast is banished.

  “The only way to inhabit a cave, which is also inhabited by predators, is to deter them with fire. And though archaeologists have been hunting for fire in Prehistoric Africa for 30 years now, the earliest hearth they could find was only 70,000 years old. On the one day I visited Brain’s cave, at Swartkrans, I remembered how nice it would be to discover the human use of fire in the cave. Half an hour later, we excavated a bit of blackened bone. Brain, who is a most undemonstrative man, said: ‘That bone is remarkably suggestive!’ – which indeed it was. It turns out I was present at the uncovering of a human hearth, probably dated around 1,200,000 years old. The earliest by 700,000 years.”

  The most stimulating discussions in my life. The substance of their discussion would become
a vital component of The Songlines. “The Beast is the heart of the book,” Bruce told Thubron.

  Brain had stuck patiently to his task and had been rewarded. He represented everything that Bruce would like to have been but by temperament could not be. Moved by Brain’s modesty, the scale of his achievement, Bruce sent a postcard to Wyndham. Brain “should be given a Nobel Prize on the spot”.

  Something in Bruce loosened in the presence of Brain, “a man of infinite gentleness and patience”. In the resonance of their findings, Bruce slipped into a reflective mood. He gathered in the strands of his life.

  He was meant to be writing a travel article to pay for his detour. He had flown to South Africa with Kasmin. They spent February visiting Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. In the Kalahari he bought a footstool for Jasper, but his thoughts kept returning to his childhood. One night he dreamed fondly of his parents, dancing in the moonlight in evening dress. Beside the Zambesi, “which appeared to be blowing back upstream,” he sat on a log and looked at what was once a District Commissioner’s house with its mosquito screen and terraced gardens gone to seed. “To think that I in my schoolboy dreams, pictured such a place as the place in which I would spend my life, in khaki shorts, with Shakespeare and Shelley, dreaming of a leafy Warwickshire which no longer existed.”

  These thoughts ran concurrently with his struggle to synthesise the mysteries offered up by Strehlow and Brain. “Black mood. Cross with all the world,” he wrote in his notebook on Mount Omei. His alternating introspection and compulsive theorising began to create fissures between him and Kasmin.

  The Observer had commissioned Bruce to write “My Kind of Town”. “It was a question of finding a town which rapidly could become his favourite town,” says Kasmin. Bruce had looked at the map and selected Molepole in Botswana, apparently the largest village in Africa. Kasmin’s diary for 8 February records their arrival. “At the little hotel we shared a big hall with 40 or so solemn and abstemious blacks, conference of southern schoolteachers . . . Molepole was enormous but no centre at all . . . The highway is tarmac super new. Plenty of cars – Toyota land cruisers, BMW, Merc, Rovers etc. Not a single typically African jalopy.”

  “It was so deeply unlovable we had to find another town,” says Kasmin. With their options narrowed, Bruce chose Luderitz, within striking distance on the coast of Namibia

  Luderitz turned out to be a nondescript mining town. “There’s a lot of friction between us,” Kasmin wrote on 26 February. “His way of swapping ‘facts’ with ill-informed members of the public irritates me. He has so many diverse opinions & theories about realpolitick – goodness knows how he adds them up in any consistent pattern. At this relatively low point (in relationship) I brood on his driving – frequently vague so the car wanders to the verge, and then his use of the mirror – at each glance he is riveted by his own image & adjusts his facial expression while we wobble again . . . somehow we get into no real trouble.”

  Bruce was irritating his loyal friend, he was dreaming of his parents, he was unable to hammer out a structure, he was ill with a mysterious virus. He alluded to his difficulties in an ABC interview a few weeks later in Adelaide. “There is a point at which my African research and my Australian research tie up and I am damned if I know how I’m going to put them down on to paper.” He had “vague ideas floating in my head and I can’t formulate them at the moment”. His search for the point at which all these ideas converged would, he suspected, “drive me mad”.

  Holed up in the Mellys’ medieval tower on the Usk, he had written to Bail: “Australia, I find, even on the most superficial level, is extremely difficult to describe.” Ever since leaving Australia in April 1983, Bruce had longed to make another foray into the desert near Alice Springs. “Aboriginal Australia was – and still is – one of the world’s most astonishing phenomena – the anthropologists and linguists are still only scratching the surface.”

  One reason for his return was to spend more time on an Aboriginal reservation. On 14 January 1984, he wrote to Petronella: “What do you think the chances of being able to arrange a trip up to Kintore? I missed the chance of going out of sheer stupidity and regret it.” Receiving no answer, he wrote to Lydia Livingstone, a friend in Sydney. “Thinking of you often if not always. And now, next week, I take the first leg of my return journey towards you – if somewhat obliquely – just to Johannesburg and the Kalahari desert – then on March 2 to Sydney.”

  An invitation to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival was his excuse to go back. “They wrote to me the other day, and said that ‘since I fit into no known category’ they are going to programme ‘An Hour with Bruce Chatwin’. Lord save us! What shall I say?”

  Bruce viewed the literary world through the same prism as he had viewed Sotheby’s and Edinburgh. There were times when he was curious and eager to learn from it, for he had come late to writing and this made him vulnerable to flattery: he once told Emma Tennant “George Steiner adores my book – and mummy loves yours”. Yet he shrank from the pack. “I agree with you about the London literati,” he wrote to Bail. “The only possible use I can think of for a spaceship would be to take them out of our orbit – but then more would grow! . . . The review of [Thomas Bernhard’s] Concrete by some arse was enough to bring one to the passport-burning stage. But then England, unlike Ireland, Scotland or Wales, is an utterly barbarian country.” About the only prejudice Enzensberger found in Bruce was “his sincere disgust of England”. He professed to hate the London publishing scene and coped with it either by disappearing or by celebrating its absurdities. “There have been some frightfully funny incidents here,” he told Bail. “The best is that Virago Press were about to publish an astonishing new ‘find’, a novel by a young Pakistani girl called Rahita Khan or something like it, with some quite sexy scenes between Pakistani girls and white boys: all very suitable to bring ‘literature’ to Britain’s Asiatic community, all set for a big promotion etc., when it was discovered that Rahita Khan was an Anglican clergyman in Brighton called the Rev. Toby Forward! Great?”

  However good he was at promoting the public persona of Bruce Chatwin, he was a private person. In his literary life, as elsewhere, he ran away from his growing reputation even as he was attracted to it. “I’m fed up with being a soi-disant ‘writer’,” he wrote to a friend in Adelaide. “It’s my experience that the moment one starts being a writer, everything dries up.”

  In October 1983, he had appeared on BBC television with Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa in a discussion about South American literature. He wrote, “Llosa and I share some of the same ground, in that we have both written about a Brazilian village called Uaua: we were even there in the same month. I thought it’d be rather a good thing to chat about the dreariness of Uaua: but he thought otherwise, and the moment the cameras were turned on him, he turned from being lively and entertaining into the WRITER-AS-PUBLIC-FIGURE. Of course, we both dutifully held our tongues when the Magus of BA appeared, and any attempt to have a chat thereafter was drowned in a flow of beautiful 17th-century English and beautiful Castilian verse.” As Borges waited to come on stage, he overheard Bruce extolling him on the monitor: “You can’t go anywhere without packing a Borges. It’s like taking your toothbrush.” Borges responded: “How unhygienic.”

  Bruce was relieved to discover that his friend Salman Rushdie had also been invited to the Adelaide Festival.

  Rushdie says, “I fitted into his compartment ‘My literary life’.” He had first met Bruce in Cambridge at a dinner for George Steiner. Upon learning that Bruce had come from Scotland, Steiner asked if he had been with John Updike at the Edinburgh Literary Festival. Confronted with a bona fide European intellectual, Bruce reached for his Man of Action hat. “I said (realising my fantastic error before I actually said it): ‘No, I’ve been doing something much more atavistic. Shooting stags!’ – which, I’m afraid, was true. It had the most terrible effect; and I’m sure that no matter what I say and do, he’ll look on me, in his heart of hearts, as a murdere
r. Be that as it may, I’ve shot stags since I was a boy. And though I say it, I’m a good clean shot – when it comes to stags, and nothing else.”

  This was not quite true. The good clean shot was delivered by his friend David Heathcoat-Amory at Glenfernate. At the critical moment, with the stag in range, Bruce had refused to take the rifle and pushed it away. “No, I’d like you to shoot it,” he told his companion.

  When Rushdie learned of Bruce’s plan to revisit Alice Springs, he asked if he might travel with him. “I said to Bruce: ‘What would make it worth while for me to go all the way to Australia is if I were able to come with you into the centre and look around a bit.’ I thought it would be a wonderful short-cut into the reality of that, to me, completely unknown world.” Bruce was willing and they arranged to spend a week together in Central Australia after the Festival was over.

  Bruce arrived from Africa on 4 March and for a hectic week he mingled with Thomas Keneally, Angela Carter, D. M. Thomas. He dined with Kath Strehlow. He planned with Nin Dutton a drive from Adelaide to Brisbane in order to see more of the outback. And he introduced Rushdie to Geoff Bagshaw, whom Bruce had met in a caravan in Haasts Bluff a year before reading Midnight’s Children. Bagshaw, an old friend of Petronella, afterwards wrote to her. “Bruce, Salman Rushdie and I had a very pleasant lunch in a sunshine-bathed park the other day. As you would expect Rushdie is a very interesting man.” It was from Bagshaw that Bruce learned that Petronella had moved to America.

  The poet Pam Bell, who had seen Bruce last in New York, met him in one of the large tents. “He was wandering around in that caged-tiger sort of way, an animal on the prowl, restless.” Bruce had just watched Vladimir Ashkenazy rehearse Beethoven. “He was excited because Ashkenazy had told the violinist that Beethoven was in love at the time with a woman called Teresa and she must imagine, in playing, the word Teresa, Teresa, Teresa.”