Bruce, like Leigh Fermor, hated the classification of travel writer. “He was a writer who happened to travel. He was writing to prove or further some idea, like the songlines.” Leigh Fermor could tell what a burden the novel had become from their discussions in Joan’s kitchen where Bruce took turns to cook dinner. “One always had the idea he was going to devote his life to a really tremendous book on nomadism which didn’t see the light of day. He would like to have unravelled everything about humanity. He was engaged in a sincere fumbling. It was an imaginative peregrination, taking a Nijinsky leap into history. The Songlines covered a lot of the ground. He wrote it all out at Kardamyli – and he suddenly tore it in half: he wasn’t happy about the narrative in Australia.”
One afternoon Leigh Fermor visited Bruce. “The room was total chaos, like the leaves of Vallombrosa. He was elated. He had thrown the pages everywhere. ‘I’ve suddenly seen the light. I know how to write this book’.”
He had decided to change its shape a third time after a long telephone conversation with Sifton. “He had a powerful argument he wanted to make about the origins of human culture,” she says. “But whenever he tried to make it, the result read like a pseudo-academic ex-poet who wished to be a social scientist. I discouraged him from the sequential. I thought it ought to be intuitive and poetic rather than logical. I said: ‘Instead of considering the notebooks as a problem, why not consider them as part of the solution? Why don’t you just use them?”
He did indeed incorporate his notebooks into the text. “His moleskines came to the rescue,” says Leigh Fermor. “They gave it a kind of keel.”
XXXIV
There is a God
And I will be a monk on Mount Athos.
—The Station, Robert Byron
FIVE MONTHS OF SUN AND WIND RESTORED HIM. THERE WAS no visible sign at Kardamyli that he was ill. He was a picture of fitness, windsurfing across the bay in an elegant wet-suit. He was still Gregor von Rezzori’s “‘Golden Boy’ . . . In his eyes the Aegean, the wind of a long road in his close-cropped blond hair.”
In May, a week after his 45th birthday, Bruce set out to fulfil a boyhood ambition: to visit Mount Athos. He had wanted to see the Holy Mountain since reading The Station at school. Robert Byron’s account of his 1927 visit with Talbot Rice was a eulogy to this sacred, all-male enclave: “To anyone who has sojourned beneath the Holy Mountain, there cannot but have come an intensification of his impulse to indefinable, unanalysable emotion.” Byron was atheist; the monastic republic had been dedicated to Orthodoxy since the ninth century. And yet, wrote Lees-Milne, “his entrenched aesthetic principles responded to the mystical abracadabra of the Orthodox Church’s ritual.”
Cary Welch in 1953 had hired a caique, stopping off at each monastery to listen to the services. “After two hours of chanting suddenly this thing occurred, of short duration, but astounding. Two monks achieved a mystical soaring height, like Couperin’s Third Tenebrae Service.” Welch recalled that sound when in 1964 he had a vision of St Francis. “I was in bed one morning in Channing Street. It was a classic trite flash of light. I felt my brain and heart joined and I was amplified ten times. There was a lot of chirping of birds and a wonderful sense of innocence and paradise.” The vision was Giotto’s fresco of St Francis with the birds.
Of his friends, Lees-Milne and the artist Derek Hill were annual pilgrims. Bruce importuned both to take him. Lees-Milne records in August, 1980: “No, Bruce, I said, you can’t. Was I fear rather bossy. Would not let him open roof of car. Bruce asked me if I had known Robert Byron. Able to say, yes . . . He admired Robert’s writing, but says the strained jokiness of that generation embarrasses him.”
Next, Bruce asked Hill, who had visited Mount Athos 15 times. Hill was a friend of the Abbot at Chilandari monastery, who could facilitate their permits. Finally in 1985 Hill agreed to accompany Bruce. “I was slightly apprehensive because he was a great complainer. I thought he’d find the monks smelly or the beds hard or that the loos stank. But it was a revelation to him and it altered his life too late.”
Bruce and Hill arrived at the frontier village of Ouranoupolis, the Gate of Heaven, on 21 May. They bought provisions for four days and the following morning joined a group of noisy German tourists on the boat to Daphne. The wind blew offshore and the waves glittered as they headed towards the faint grey outline of the mountain.
A fortnight before his visit to Athos, Bruce wrote to Bail: “Athos is obviously another atavistic wonder.”
Bruce did not impress friends as religious. “There was never, not a word talked about God,” says Leigh Fermor, reflecting on their conversations over five months. “I’d always assumed he was agnostic or atheist. Religion was understood to be a corollary to his attitude to life. Everything had a physical or natural explanation.” Bruce once told Charles Tomlinson: “What we want is not more belief, it’s more scepticism.” He wrote: “My whole life has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavour of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific.”
As a 15-year-old, Bruce had made a journey to Rome to visit the Pope. Before his wedding, he took religious instruction from Father Murray. “Nearly became a Catholic,” he wrote in his notebook. Then, just before they were married, the priest at Geneseo gave Elizabeth the leaflet explaining why she should not marry a non-Catholic. “That put Bruce off for ever,” says Elizabeth. Thereafter, his religious faith became subsumed in his nomadic theory: he believed that movement made religion redundant and only when people settled did they need it. “Some form of religion is the brain’s system of putting a brake upon change,” is an entry from his Benin notebook in 1972. “Religion is a travel guide for settlers.” The nearest thing he had to religion was his theory of restlessness. Just as he was a nomad de luxe, so he was an ascetic de luxe. His London apartments were decorated with religious artefacts to resemble a Greek cell, but his response to organised religion was dictated by aesthetic consideration. “He turned it into a costume drama,” says Elizabeth, who had never abandoned Catholicism and went to church once a week. “When I wanted to buy an old priory, he said: ‘I can walk around in robes’.”
Since his illness in Java there were signs of a sea-change. One entry in his journal reads: “The search for nomads is a quest for God.” Another, “religion is a technique for arriving at the moment of death at the right time.” In April 1983, while recuperating with Elizabeth in Nepal, his thoughts had turned to a man’s athos “in the Greek sense of abode or dwelling place – the root of all his behaviour for good or bad, his character, everything that pertained to him”.
On the boat, as the balconies came into view on the girth of the mountain, Bruce remembered, and jotted down, an anecdote about an Athonite priest: “Paddy [Leigh Fermor] says that one story about Fr N tells of how some grand French people found the old hermit in his cell and were surprised to be asked in perfect French ‘Where do you live in Paris?’
“‘Faubourg St Honoré.’
“‘A quel numéro?’
“‘Tel et tel.’
“‘Ah!’ says he, ‘à deux portes de mon bottier’ [bootmaker].”
They landed in Daphne at 4 p.m. and had lunch with Father Mitrophan, “who says he allows his chest to get wet with rain in winter and never has a cold”. Even now, one suspects, part of the appeal was the abbot’s worldliness, not his lack of it.
In the days ahead, Bruce met several who retained a stylish engagement with what they had left behind. On the path next day, walking towards Caryes, he spoke with a Greek American novice who wanted to talk about Hampstead, knew all about the Grand Duchess Ella. Another pilgrim was a Serbian cavalry colonel, a royalist who complained about the “battements du coeur” and “had written a book on the iniquities of Winston Churchill”. At Chilandari Bruce came face to face with a young man from his own background. Father Damian was “a sweet freckle-faced novice” who had been born in, of all places, Barnt Green and apprenticed at the Milward needle factory in Redditch, �
�an experience which gave him his monastic vocation.” It was Father Damian who showed him round the chapels.
“Bruce got up at 5.30 every morning and went to services,” says Derek Hill. Deeply preoccupied with Aboriginal songlines, Bruce was susceptible to the incantations which had so moved Welch. The Kyrie eleison, chanted hundreds of times, cast a spell. During one service at Chilandari, Bruce turned on a group of noisy tourists. “I made a scene, demanding hushes at once and interrupting the service.”
He responded to his physical surroundings: the bees in the magnolia, the Russian icons, “the nose-pink hermitage” of St Basil. One afternoon after his usual maté (mistaken by the cook for hashish), he walked to the monastery of Stavronikita once painted by Edward Lear. After St Basil’s, this was Derek Hill’s favourite place in Athos. Bruce entered through an arch of grapes carved from wood, but round about there grew grapes that tasted of strawberries. “The most beautiful sight of all was an iron cross on a rock by the sea.” Whether moved by the rich liturgical worship, or the tradition of mystical prayer or the unbroken continuity with the past, he then wrote: “There must be a God.”
Beyond this entry in his journal, Bruce was silent and he felt the desire to be consoled by silence. “He didn’t talk about it, but I knew by his whole bearing it had affected him,” says Hill. “I think it hit him like a bomb.”
Hill had known Bruce for 20 years. He had no doubt that as Bruce looked down on that iron cross in the waves he had a spiritual experience that unfroze something in him. “All he could say was: ‘I had no idea.’ He took it very seriously,” says Elizabeth.
On 8 June, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “Mt Athos was a great success. He loved it and was totally captivated, so I’m really glad he went. Derek did a pencil portrait of B. which he is giving us. It’s just done on a piece of stiff card like you put in an envelope with photos. Anyhow it’s quite good, except for the mouth & D. says that is the classic remark about a portrait. But I think he can change it.”
XXXV
India
I’m completely out of touch, which is, as you know, the way I like to be.
—BC to Deborah Rogers
HE HAD BEEN AWAY SEVEN MONTHS WHEN, IN JULY 1985, HE returned home across the Channel. “Catarrh started in the Pas-de-Calais,” he wrote to Rogers.
It was an important homecoming. Elizabeth held her breath. “He settled right down with his books, shifting from room to room: the library, the living room, the small living room. After he had been here for a bit he had 50 books by his bedside. He said: ‘It’s not possible’, and I said: ‘It is. There are 50 books’ – all things he was reading concurrently. Then he said he wanted to work in the kitchen. I said, ‘No’, because that’s where I had the radio on and the cats.”
His cold worsened through the autumn. “I went wind-surfing on a crummy little reservoir near Oxford, and my hand was white and numb after ten minutes,” he told Leigh Fermor. “But what I miss most are the mountains! The country round here is tolerably attractive, immaculately kept: but then you keep running up against the cooling towers of the Didcot power-station; the antennae of Greenham Common; the nuclear installations at Harwell – all of which give me the feelings of claustrophobia.”
How was he going to finish the book in these inhospitable conditions? Fearing a lung collapse, he accepted a commission from the New York Times to write an article on the American botanist Joseph Rock, who had lived in Yunnan. The paper agreed to “stump up” flights for him and Elizabeth to Hong Kong and China. He decided to winter with her afterwards in Katmandu.
In early December, Elizabeth came from Yunnan to Nepal ahead of him to arrange the house, but in Katmandu a disaster greeted her. “The house we were promised: an Englishman’s house with servants and sofas, in the country etc fell through,” Bruce wrote to his parents. “E was then offered a cottage orné, in a garden admittedly right in the heart of the city, not far from the Royal Palace. She had to furnish it etc, which all cost money; and when I arrived from Hong Kong, I had, I have to say, misgivings . . .” The house was empty except for two foam rubber mattresses. “My biggest worry,” wrote Elizabeth, “is that it may prove to be rather noisy here for B. It varies from day to day, but sometimes it’s pretty bad, hammering from new buildings nearby, awful Hindi movie music blaring at top level, hooting motorcycles & cars & other times shrieking children . . .” That was not all. “The house, it turned out, was sitting in a pool of pollution,” wrote Bruce, “plus the fact that over the wall was the city shit-house, plus the fact that they burned the shit and other refuse at night so that the fumes would settle in our throats. All I can say is that it brought back a kind of bronchial misery I associate with Stirling Road in the winter of ’47.” Still searching for its origins in something benign, he was set on locating his illness in his childhood tendency for flu.
Elizabeth had also caught bronchitis – “which for her is very unusual”. They became iller and iller until Kasmin, who had joined them in Nepal for Christmas, insisted that they abandon Katmandu and fly at once to India.
“To Benares (because the planes to Delhi were frill) where we sat by the Burning Ghats and inhaled a different kind of smell,” Bruce wrote to his parents. “You literally stand within, say, 15 feet, of half a dozen burning corpses: and after you get used to the smell – though I with my cold, could hardly smell a thing – it all seems perfectly natural and harmonious. We then drove to Delhi along the Grand Trunk Road (all planes and trains booked) in a taxi. I hoped to show Kas the Martinière, which is an enormous ‘French’ 18th-century chateau, now a boy’s school, but since the fog was such that we couldn’t see the bonnet of the car, there seemed little point. On to Delhi where we stayed with my pal, Sunil Sethi . . . now the editor of the Indian Mail. He has a new and beautiful wife: all very soignée.”
Sethi was aware of Bruce’s routine from Ronda. In Sethi’s Delhi apartment, Bruce began bashing on the typewriter at 8 a.m. – at 12.30 lunch, “simply cooked rice and dal or kedgeree with a slight flavouring of cumin – sick people’s food”; at 3 p.m. a huge, brisk wander.
“He had this whole thing athletes and politicians have about keeping yourself fit, the tightening of the body before you really tighten your mind. He was obsessed by a Gandhian diet of frugality. Indira Gandhi was like that. She said to him: ‘You know the trick is to change your underpants three times a day and drink gallons of lime water. Eventually you phase yourself out.’
“Like her, he believed that minimum food is good for the body. He hated heavy sauces – it was the same with art or books, he was awfully particular. He was on a constant search, as if for an elixir, for the final preservative of youth. He couldn’t pass a mirror without looking for crow’s feet. And there was an element of parody. His search for shampoos! He was always talking about herbal Indian cures and trying out shampoos and I’d say, ‘You foolish man, you’ve hardly got any hair left’.”
In Delhi, Kasmin left them and they were joined by Murray and Margaret Bail. Bruce had looked forward to this meeting for a year.
Just as he preferred to think of Eaton Place as empty, so Bruce liked to think of himself as someone who travelled light, with only a brown leather rucksack. Made for him by a saddler in Cirencester, this was a copy of a rucksack belonging to the French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, whom Bruce had sat next to on a plane.
But travelling with Bruce in India, says Bail, was “like travelling with Garbo”. Bruce’s luggage included 40 kilos excess baggage in books. There was also the typewriter, the card index, the champagne, the muesli, the pills, the hats, the boots, the grey suits, the pyjamas. “His amount of luggage was really colossal,” says Bail. “We needed a driver.”
On the platform at the British-built station, Bruce was entranced by the rivets, girders and steam-engines still in operation from the Raj. “The railway station reminded him of home. He was at home and not at home.” Bail was mildly surprised to look down from his bunk on the train to Jodhpur to see “Bruce’s bum
in the moonlight: he was getting into his pyjamas, like at boarding school.”
When he arrived at Jodhpur, Bruce wrote a note to “Bapji”, the Maharaja of Jodhpur whom he had met with James Ivory at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969. “The palace in Jodhpur is the last great ruler’s palace to be built anywhere,” he wrote to his parents. “At least as large as Buckingham Palace and completed, finally, in 1949. My friend H. H. (or Bapji), a totally wonderful character, replied to my note at once, saying he was overcome with his 40th birthday celebrations. Would we come for a drink now? This minute? Which we did: to find him also entertaining a real lunatic, the Belgian ambassador to Iran.” Bruce now enlisted the Maharajah’s help to find a place where he and Murray might peacefully work. “I said I was looking for somewhere to write, and Bapji immediately proposed a cottage in a mango orchard laid out by his grandparents at a place called Ranakpur, about 75 miles away.”
The simple green hunting lodge at Ranakpur sounded more wonderful than it was. “The first stab at this mythical beast, ‘the place to write in’, was a dud,” Bruce wrote to Kasmin. The climate was dry, but the swimming pool empty and every day tourists staying in one of Bapji’s hotels were liable to swoop on the place for lunch. “The servants would slope around in shorts and cook too much and haunt us for leftovers,” says Margaret Bail.
Nor was there anywhere for Bruce to spread his books. He and Bail sat at card-tables under the trees, ten yards apart, and from time to time Bruce read out Arkady’s dialogue for correction. “He’d call out, ‘Does this sound Australian enough?’ or ‘Does this sound right to you?’ and I’d say, ‘No, no, no, that’s not crude enough’.” Bruce was grateful for his adjustments. “Murray was a great help with Australianisms,” he wrote to Kasmin. “What one can’t help feeling is the degree to which English has been Americanised, compared to ‘Australian’. I’ve always thought that Australian writing, on a page, looks a little archaic: now I’m beginning to realize why.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 61