Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  One day Bruce came to Bail’s room in some agitation. “He said he couldn’t describe the songline. I said ‘Why don’t you break ranks and do diagrams, like Stendhal in his autobiography?’”

  Four months before he delivered his manuscript, Bruce was still unable to articulate its central image.

  After a fortnight the Bails departed for Udaipur. “I cried when Elizabeth and I said goodbye,” says Margaret Bail. When she had first met Bruce, in Sydney, she had thought him “the most charming man I’d ever met”, but it irritated her the way both husbands had left their wives to make the travel arrangements, “do all the practical things”, while they sat under trees. “I think all writers are shits.”

  Murray Bail remarked on the difficulty Bruce experienced in saying goodbye. “I said, ‘We’ll see each other soon.’ But Bruce had to switch to an object. He examined a glass ball he held in his hand and decided to comment on the facets of light on it. ‘Have a look at this extraordinary bit of glass I’ve found’.”

  A century before, Bruce’s great-grandfather, Julius Alfred, had designed a palace of glass for an Indian Maharaja. Bruce was delighted with the turn of events that now supplied him with his own version of a Maharaja’s palace. Though not glass, it reflected everything which until this point he had been unable to take in.

  At Bapji Jodhpur’s three-day birthday party (“the maharanee choked solid with diamonds and emeralds; all the courtiers in whirligig Rajasthani turbans and real white jodhpurs”) Bruce met Manvendra Singh, “a total charmer” who was to provide his Shangri-la.

  A mixture of courtier and landowner, Singh was almost the same age as Bruce, yet, he wrote to Bail, “he represents the male world of my father in his absolute fairness and tireless, unostentatious work for others”. To Diana Melly, he wrote: “He is the ‘identical twin’ likeness to my father.”

  In a letter to his father, Bruce explained how he secured his writer’s paradise: “I did my usual babble [to Singh] about finding a place to write in, and he said, ‘I think I have the place’. He had, too. Although he lives four days a week in town, he has his family fort, a building going back to the sixteenth century, around a courtyard with neem trees and a lawn, its outer walls lapped by a lake with little islands, temples on them etc. The rooms we occupy are a self-contained flat, blue-washed, with nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian furniture, photos of maharajas, and a never-ending procession of birds. The country is flattish, and almost semi-desert; and since there was no monsoon last year, the situation is quite grim. But the lake, which is filled from a canal, is one of the only tanks in the region, and the stopping off place for all the migrants on their way to or from Siberia. Almost within arm’s reach are ducks, spoonbills, egrets, storks, cranes, herons, bee-eaters, a dazzling kingfisher which sits in the nearest tree. Each morning brings something new. Tea arrives with the sun. Siesta. Walk. More work. Then in the evening you hear the muezzin being called from the Mosque, and incredible bangings and trumpetings from the Krishna Temple, then silence.

  “I have the most charming study to work in, and work I do.”

  Bruce and Elizabeth spent two months as guests in the wing of the red fort at Rohet. “One is so well looked after, and above all, CALM,” he wrote to Sethi. He conveyed to Kasmin a life of Arcadian languor: “A cool blue study overlooking the garden. A saloon with ancestral portraits. bedroom giving out onto the terrace. Unbelievably beautiful girls who come with hot water, with real coffee, with papayas, with a mango milkshake. In short, I’m really feeling quite contented. The cold and cough has been hard to shake off. A dry cough always is. But thanks to an ayurvedic cough preparation, it really does seem to be on the wane. Today was Republic Day, with Mrs Chatwin on hand to present the prize to the volleyball team, and sweeties to 500 schoolchildren.” He wrote to Melly: “I’ve not seen her happier or more cheerful in 20 years (the time we’ve been married!). I even think she is coming round to the fact that those houses, and that particular way of life, are as bad for her as for me.”

  Waited on hand and foot, he slowly recovered his health. “I adore it here. Lunch yesterday, for example, consisted of a light little bustard curry, a puree of peas, another of aubergine and coriander, yoghurt, and a kind of wholemeal bread the size of a potato and baked in ashes. A sadhu with a knotted beard down to his kneecaps has occupied the shrine a stone’s throw from my balcony; and after a few puffs of his ganja I found myself reciting, in Sanskrit, some stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita. I work away for eight hours at a stretch, go for cycle rides in the cool of the evening, and come back to Proust.”

  Not only did he enjoy his immobility, but his spirits continued to mend. “Well, I have to say the Fort is a real piece of luck,” he wrote to the Bails a month later. “We couldn’t be happier here. There is just enough going on, either in the courtyard or by the lake, to arouse and interest, and not too much to distract me . . . E. is off to Bombay to see her friends for a week: but I refuse to budge. It is ironic that this book of mine, which is a passionate defence of wandering, as opposed to sedentary habits, should involve its author in a more or less limpet-like existence . . . As for my own ‘Awful Mess,’ I’ve now got to the critical stage in which there is a sudden shift from Australia, in order to answer Pascal’s assertion about the man sitting quietly in a room. If it comes off, then I’m on the downward stretch.”

  Here Elizabeth came to the rescue. One day at Homer End she had produced a huge loose-leaf folder bulging with pages: the manuscript of the nomad book that Margharita had rescued. Bruce believed he had thrown this away. “He started mining it,” says Elizabeth.

  Taking a hammer to the manuscript, Bruce reduced The Nomadic Alternative to a narrative rubble. The Songlines would be, in part, the story of his fieldwork. Borrowing the patchwork structure from two commonplace books – Cyril Connolly’s Palinurus: The Unquiet Grave and Edith Sitwell’s anthology, Planet and Glow-Worm – Bruce reworked his fictionalised journey in Australia into a collage of quotation and diary. “I’ve had a terrible time with the ‘Australian’ book: have torn up 3 successive drafts: only to find . . . that the only way is the ‘cut-up’ method,” he wrote to Calasso, the intended recipient of Letter from Marble Bar. He told Leigh Fermor: “I’ve decided the only thing to do is to let it run its own course and shove everything in . . . I’ve been casting back over my old notebooks, and have managed to find a place for things like this:

  Djang, Cameroon

  There are two hotels in Djang: the Hotel Windsor and, on the opposite side of the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor.

  Or:

  Gorée, Senegal

  On the terrace of the restaurant a fat French bourgeois couple are guzzling their fruits-de-mer. Their dachshund, leashed to the woman’s chair, keeps jumping up in the hope of being fed.

  – Taisez-vous, Romeo! C’est I’entracte.”

  Had he not been ill, Bruce may never have decided on this bold “experiment”, but it was the only way through what amounted to a 17-year writer’s block.

  On 6 March 1986, the Chatwins left Rohet. “Elizabeth has to get back to her lambing,” he wrote to Nin Dutton. “The past week has really been too hot. It would be fine if I didn’t have something critical to do. But it’s too hot to take exercise, and the mind starts to go soggy too. So I’m taking her to Delhi and then going for the rest of the month and most of April to a guest-house we’ve heard of not far from Simla.”

  Bruce completed his first draft of The Songlines at The Retreat at Bhimtal, a bungalow beside a lake in the mountainous region near the Nepalese border. He described it to Kasmin: “Old English tea plantation now run as a hotel guest house by Czech adventurer type, ex-inhabitant of Punta Arenas in Chile, refugee from Germany in the 1930s for having thrown a knife at Hitler.” He had the house to himself, with a veranda and a rosa banksiae clambering over it and a view of wheatfields. The only other person he saw was a holy man. “On the mountain above lives a charming sadhu, the father of the Forest, whose business it is to protect th
e trees,” he wrote to Elizabeth. “Old Smetacek has gone to Germany for four months. Sounds an incredible character . . . This is Jim Corbett country and as I’m writing about man-eaters I appear to have landed in the right spot. Below the sadhu’s cave there is a leopard lair, but the animal is supposed to be very friendly.”

  On 10 April, Bruce wrote another contented letter. “It’s still very nice here, but the heat increases each day with hot dusty winds coming from the plain. I’ve done some very good work. The cut-up method does actually solve the problem. I’ve just been writing the tramp and the Arctic tern.” He planned to celebrate the final chapter with a trek. He had hired three porters, bought the provisions and saddled up, when he was shocked to read, in the Times of India, a leader headed “Journey to the Beginning”.

  “What was this? Betjeman? . . . Field-Marshal Lord Chetwode? . . . dismounted from her pony on the Jalori pass? . . . and had gone to sleep for ever? The paragraph was a most sensitive piece of prose, but I could not finish it. The porter found me wetting the newspaper with tears. I had to go to her.”

  At the news of Penelope Betjeman’s death, while leading a trek in the Western Himalayas, Bruce dropped everything. He paid off his porters, gave them the provisions and as fast as he could made his way to Kulu for the funeral. He had known Betjeman for 20 years. She was a close friend of Elizabeth and had supported both through the rockiest time of their marriage. In Wales, she had become “a sort of mother to me”. Once at a children’s party in the Black Mountains she sent Bruce into her woods to imitate the fire-breathing New House dragon. “You’re meant to be a dragon, not a wolf,” she had told him crossly when she came upon him growling behind a tree.

  He approached her pyre in a bushy glade below Khanag. “Felt dazed,” he wrote. “Chestnuts in first leaf. The pyre built over the stream. Remains of her padded parka in the charcoal. Little white flecks of charred bone. Threw on a couple of violets. Warm hazy sun. Mild headache.”

  On 24 April, he described her funeral to Leigh Fermor: “Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carried her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the River Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with the Buddhist mantra, O the flower of the lotus. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oak-leaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.

  “The doctor, who was with her on the trek, gave ‘heart-attack’ as the cause of death: but the word ‘attack’ is far too strong for what happened. If ever there was a ‘natural death’, this was it. All morning she was in the best of spirits – although people in the party said she was already beginning to dread going back to England. Around 10, she called in on her favourite Pahari temple. The priest, who knows her, welcomed her to join in the pujas. She received the blessing and then rode on towards a place called Khanag. There she dismounted to rest, laughed (and scolded) at her pony which had strayed into a wheat field, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.

  “Although it’s nowhere finished, I had – only two days before – been writing the final chapters of the book: of how Aborigines, when they feel death close, will make a kind of pilgrimage (sometimes a distance of thousands of miles) back to their ‘conception site’, their ‘centre’, the place where they belong. In the middle of nowhere in the desert I was taken to see three very old Aborigines, happily waiting to die on three metal bedsteads, side by side in the shade of an ironwood tree.”

  Only to Elizabeth did he describe what happened to him as he walked from Betjeman’s pyre. As he sat, pausing for breath at the top of the Jalori pass, an old sadhu sitting outside a shrine had asked to tell his fortune. “The man looked at his palm and blanched, would not say anything,” says Elizabeth. “Bruce said he got a terrible intimation of mortality.” When he had first arrived at Bhimtal, he had effortlessly jogged around the lake. By the end of his visit the run winded him.

  XXXVI

  An A1 Medical Curiosity

  You may know the characters are absolutely doomed to some fate, but the characters themselves must be allowed to hope.

  BC to NS

  HOMER END. THE NAME HAS THE RING OF A LONG VOYAGE OVER, of cliffs in sight. One hot day in early August 1986, Elizabeth drove Bruce to Reading. “On the way back B had a horrible attack when he started to go blue & was just gasping,” she wrote to Gertrude.

  Since his return home in May, he had suffered from night sweats and asthma. More recently, he had developed a hoarse voice and noticed “some vague skin lumps”. He wondered if he had picked up an Indian amoeba from the drinking water in Rohet, if he had an “allergy to dust”, or if it might be something to do with the iron-oxide in the paint, specially ordered from Sweden, with which Robyn Davidson and Hugh, two weeks before, had decorated the house.

  This condition worsened by the day. “He can only go for little slow walks & is always cold & sits wrapped up with a heater on all the time,” Elizabeth wrote. “He’s very weak & looks awful & sleeps a lot. He’s only got a tiny bit more of the book to do.”

  The last third of the manuscript was the “common-place book” of quotations, meditations and vignettes. “I put this into shape on sweltering summer days, wrapped in shawls, shivering with cold in front of the kitchen stove. It was a race for time.” Early in August, 17 years and three months after signing the initial contract, Bruce finished his book, “which to all the publishers’ distaste I insist on calling a novel”. He had a new title The Songlines, but was still not happy with what he judged to be an “incoherent first draft”. It was, he told Colin Thubron, “the first draft of the last gasp”. But his attitude was: “I’m going to finish the book because I said I would do so and I’m a trouper and then I’ll have time to be ill.”

  Too weak to work with her on the book in New York, he telephoned Elisabeth Sifton at Viking. “The first thing he said on the phone was ‘Elisabeth, I’m dying’.” It was very presumptuous, but could she come to Zurich? “Mark up what you think and meet me there.” On 17 August, he flew to Switzerland, taking his watercolours. Before Sifton arrived he intended to go up into the mountains to paint, “thinking that a combination of mountain air and walks would revive me, and that first rate medicine was always at hand,” he wrote to Bail. “Fat chance! The next thing I knew, on my first day in Zurich, was that I could hardly walk along the street.”

  On 18 August, he was admitted to a clinic in Mühlebachstraße, anaemic and dehydrated. “He was in a considerably reduced state,” the Swiss doctor wrote in his report. “Weight 66.0 kilos, constantly coughing and with acute diarrhoea.” On 20 August, Bruce was X-rayed and serological tests were performed for Malaria parasites, Bilharziosis, Brucella, Treponema pallida, Listeria, Toxoplasma. Dr Keller, unable to determine the cause of the anaemia, recommended a diet of poached fish.

  Bruce had booked Elisabeth Sifton into his hotel, The Opera. “Part of me was in despair,” she says. “A lot of the manuscript was in chaos. The notebooks were not in the right place. They were not well-proportioned. We made a plan to meet every morning and discuss the book until he was too tired. But our meetings degenerated into long conversations about life and I couldn’t get him to focus. He was distracted by his terrors. Propped up on pillows he would tell me stories with his eyes blazing, full of vim and roaring with laughter. ‘My dear, I’ve had this amazing dream.’ And then he’d be too weak to move. He didn’t finish off a single page – as he had done in my presence with On the Black Hill. He’d look at my marks and say, ‘Yes, yes, next point’.”

  She was with him five days. In a Swiss vegetarian restaurant he nearly fainted. She walked him up the hill to the clinic. “One day he gave me, wrapped up, a stool specimen, which I was to carry to the doctor. ‘It’s not AIDS or anything,’ he said, reassuring me’.” After five days, another concern became her foremost one. “He wasn’t telling
anyone he was so ill. I was the only person who knew. He told me: ‘Now I must get well, you can go now.’ I refused to leave until he telephoned Elizabeth.”

  In Homer End, Elizabeth was growing nervous. “Nothing from Bruce . . .” she wrote to Gertrude on 26 August. “Don’t know if I should worry or not, but of course I do.”

  Elizabeth flew out on 1 September. She found Bruce in his hotel bed, unable to move. “One minute he was freezing cold, the next he had terrible sweats. He needed endless towels to dry him off. He could not make red corpuscles and was dying right there and then.” He had thought of going to the desert to die. He had tried to arrange visas for Mauritania and Mali, had managed to sit upright in a booth for a photograph. He wanted to curl up in the corner like a dog, he said. On 5 September he returned to the clinic, running a temperature of 39°C. “The doctor did endless tests and finally called me into his office by myself.”

  Dr Keller had received the results of the lab tests. While there was no evidence of a chronic infectious disease, the findings suggested “a severe immunodeficiency syndrome”. The tests were negative, except one, high-lighted in a yellow marker: “HTLV-111-Virus-Antikörper / HIV positiv!”

  “Did you have any idea?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth.

  “But didn’t you mind?” said Dr Keller. “Your husband having all these affairs?”

  “I’d have minded more if he’d gone off with a woman. These people were never a threat.”

  Dr Keller then informed Bruce, who had already guessed. The doctor urgently recommended that he return to England and go to a hospital there.

  Elizabeth contacted her GP to arrange for an ambulance to meet them at Heathrow. “We barely got him out of the plane. He couldn’t stand properly and was catatonic.” On 12 September, 3.34 p.m., Bruce was admitted to the John Warin emergency ward in Oxford’s Churchill Hospital. He was identified simply as “an HIV positive 46-year-old travel writer”. From this day on, he would be forced to submit to the unsparing taxonomy of the medical profession.