A fortnight after seeing her cabinet of sacred tjuringas, he was in Alice Springs. One of his conversations with Petronella Vaarzon-Morel concerned a man in Prague who was ruled by his possessions. “It was ticking over in his mind.”
Dr Just died in the mid-1970s, but the fate of his collection remained a mystery. In 1982, Bruce visited Prague’s National Museum of Decorative Arts to ask about the Meissen. It was closed, but a woman came downstairs, took him into the street and asked him if he knew where it was. When museum staff went to Just’s apartment it was empty. Kate Foster never heard of any part of his collection reappearing.
At the end of July 1987, with two-thirds of his “Hoffmann-like tale” complete, Bruce and Elizabeth drove to Prague in his 2CV. “My legs . . . are still liable to go lilac and blue in the cold,” he wrote to Nin Dutton, but he looked and felt much better. On his visa he described himself as “farmer”.
As Utz’s narrator found upon his return to Prague, “it was a city at the end of its tether”. In Prague they met Barbara Epstein, editor of the New York Review of Books. “The Czechs were totally cut off from the west,” says Epstein. “You’d go into a bookshop – and no Kafka. [Václav] Havel was in prison and there was a funny feeling of not wanting to get into trouble. It was very delicate who you saw.”
“Bruce loved to imagine we were being followed,” says Elizabeth.
One night they had dinner with the novelist Ivan Klima who was working as a window-cleaner and messenger boy. Proud of his status as a writer, Klima told Bruce that people were touchingly nice when they gave him messages.
Elizabeth took Bruce to several of the places described in Utz. They attended another wedding with a pregnant bride. They visited Rabbi Loew’s house-like grave. They walked in the Jewish cemetery where he had walked with Maurizio, through the forest of dark-pink stones. And they visited No. 5 Siroka, a pale building with tall bay windows which overlooked the cemetery.*
Bruce’s notebook for the week is spare in detail: “Smells of dustbins . . . posters for holidays in USSR . . . lights in a ballet school . . . crumpled sycamore leaves . . . childishness of art collecting.” What stood out from the drabness were the galvanised dustbins that the Prague municipality every day emptied onto a mountain of rubbish visible from the city. Bruce had noticed these great grey bins in Dr Just’s former foyer. “That’s what gave him the idea for what might have happened to the collection,” says Elizabeth.
At the Yalta hotel, they were woken up every night at three in the morning by huge rubbish lorries. In his notebook, Bruce compares the double-action leverage to “a praying mantis devouring its mate. Double gulp. The masher inside. The flashing orange light. Lift dustbin up. Tipped it into maw.”
In the novel, Bruce raises the possibility that into that maw Utz had tipped his Meissen.
“I’m unimpressed with the new,” Bruce told Michael Ignatieff in an interview for Granta in 1987. “Most advances in literature strike me as being advances into a cul-de-sac.” In Utz, Bruce rescued his own past. He also recovered a culture like Dr Orlik’s permafrosted mammoths. On display in Utz’s cabinets during the Cold War is the history of Middle Europe – before it was swept away “by revolution and the tramp of armies”.
The novel is a catalogue of the recondite, the arcane, the forgotten. On Eastern Europe he had consulted Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “In Utz one element I recognised is the old patterns which have been put into deep-freeze and somehow survived: partly frayed, partly shopworn and impoverished, but still there.” Utz is a short novel, yet Bruce scatters names into it like seed: Cellini, Montezuma, Noah, Tycho Brahé, Kepler, Arcimboldo, Marx, Stalin, the brothers Grimm, Rothschild, Kropotkin, Goering, Titian, Klement Gottwald, Picasso, Matisse, Mies van der Rohe, Horace Walpole, Johannes Bottger, Marie Antoinette, Buddha, Chekhov, Charlie Chaplin, Stefan Zweig, Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, Basilius Valentinus, Nebuchadnezzar, Baudelaire, even Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Bruce himself pokes fun at this roll-call in the book – “names that meant not much more to Utz than a list of railway stations from Ventimiglia to Bari”. But to some it was pedantry at the expense of meaning, an intellectual shorthand “worthy of a television quiz”. After Utz was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the satirical magazine Private Eye ran their “Annual Cut-Out-’n’-Keep Guide” to the front-runners. This included Tutsi-Frutsi by Bruce Hatpin: “Wry, evocative, sensitive account of a Viennese ice-cream collector who fills his cavernous flat in Marxist Prague with hundreds of different flavoured ice-creams. One day he wakes up and finds that they have all melted. As the Daily Telegraph commented: ‘Tutsi-Frutsi is a wry, evocative novella in which ice-cream collecting is used as a paradigm for man’s insatiable urge to eternalise the transient.’ Checkwin is of course best known for his award-winning cult novel Tramlines, which shows how the ancient Incas invented trams. An insatiable nomad, he lives in Notting Hill like everybody else.”
In Prague, the reception was different. Bruce spent a short time in Czechoslovakia (two weeks in three visits over 20 years), but he presented an authentic picture recognisable to Central Europeans. They trusted him, submitting to his world and to his knowledge. At Prague University, Dr Martin Hilsky lectures in English literature, with a special interest in the portrayal of the new Czech Republic in foreign literatures. “I would say that Utz is certainly the best book, and the only book that captures the essence of Prague, by an English writer. He has penetrated into the atmosphere of the city. You can follow the geography. I didn’t notice one mistake.” Of the scores of books written at the time about Eastern Europe, including novels by John Updike and Philip Roth, so many seemed to Hilsky overtly political. “It’s a journalistic platitude to say you need your enemy. What I really admired about Chatwin is that he did not make Utz a hero. His portrait of a Czech intellectual is very sensitive. He says the Czech propensity to bend before a superior power is not a sign of weakness. I thought that brilliant. There are many people like Utz, who survived Hitler and Stalin, yet who are not morally inferior.”
When he first read Utz, in 1989, Hilsky became suspicious of his reaction. “I said to myself: ‘You like Bruce Chatwin’s book so much that you do not realise it is self-flattery. It is a myth you like too much.’ It is honest to doubt your feeling, but I have come out with the feeling that, yes, it is a great book 100 per cent.”
* * *
Late on in Utz the reader is surprised to learn that Marta, the quiet woman who serves as Utz’s housekeeper and whom we first meet scrubbing potatoes on a Meissen dish, is his wife. To many, the Chatwin marriage had this covert quality. As with Utz, Bruce’s affirmation of his married life was belated.
Both Utz and The Songlines end with scenes of reconciliation. Marta, the carpenter’s daughter who loves her ganders, harks back to Jean the Barn, but in her capacity for a “spontaneous overflow of healthy animal spirits” there are deep traces of Elizabeth – as there are of Bruce in Utz. Every April, Utz would leave Prague for Vichy: “By April . . . he felt acute claustrophobia, from having spent the winter months in close proximity to the adoring Marta . . . Before leaving, he would make a resolution never, ever, to return.” After a month away, “he would then bolt for home like a man pursued by demons”. Elizabeth shared with Marta an endurance, a patience and Cordelia’s unasking love. In all of Utz’s affairs, the regular flow of sopranos through his bed, “there was never a hint of reproach on her part. Nor on his the least acknowledgement that she had ever been inconvenienced.”
In Love Undetectable, Andrew Sullivan, an HIV-positive and openly homosexual writer, asks what can be purchased from the horror of AIDS: “Plagues and wars do this to people. They force them to ask more fundamental questions of who they are and what they want . . . Out of cathartic necessity and loss and endurance comes, at least for a while, a desire to turn these things into something constructive, to appease the trauma by some tangible residue that can give meaning and dignity to what has happened.”
Bruce’s insistenc
e on Utz’s romantic and redemptive gesture, “outwitting everyone until, finally, he finds his Columbine,” is fuelled by the same desire for a second chance: to spend what was left of the light on something constructive. Near the end of the novel, Utz and Marta marry. “And from that hour they passed their days in passionate adoration of each other.”
In the darkest days of their separation, when Elizabeth was selling Holwell, Pattie Sullivan had acted as a messenger between them. “When I was involved in these transactions, I had a sense Bruce cared about Elizabeth and that in the end they would be reconciled.” Bruce’s illness enabled that reconciliation. His “eye” had singled Elizabeth out, but possessing her he had travelled away from her: ill, he was forced to see that perhaps he had been travelling to find what had been there, within his reach, all along.
“Bruce was a bit shaky,” says Barbara Epstein, watching him with Elizabeth in Prague. “But Elizabeth just let it be. They were very close at that point.” Elizabeth felt it too. “We were certainly closer than we had been for a long time.”
“Elizabeth is being marvellous,” Bruce wrote to Nin Dutton after his discharge from the Churchill. Just as she had eleven years before on Fisher’s Island, she created the conditions for him to write in the south of France. “Have been giving B large doses of VTC,” she wrote to Gertrude, “& it seems to have had a fantastic effect on his legs which are working much more normally.” One night Hugh Honour stayed with the Chatwins in Seillans. It moved Honour to see the way they behaved towards each other. “Elizabeth exuded this atmosphere: ‘Here we are, this is another tough journey we’re on, a trek in the Himalayas, Bruce has slipped down, but soon he’ll be better’.”
Passing through London that summer, the Chatwins dined with the Erskines. Robert and Lindy Erskine, too, were affected by the “loving, very genuine look of compassion” Bruce gave Elizabeth. Erskine says: “I remember Bruce sitting in this chair saying: ‘This disease is awful, but it has enabled me to rediscover my wife,’ and he said this with a passion that surprised me. It was almost as though the whole thing had been put off since their early marriage. He indicated there had been a coolness and it was now patched up. One can be cynical and say he fell in love with his nurse. But I thought that was real, real, real. It wasn’t someone saying: ‘I’m terribly fond of my nurse because she looks after me so well.’ And it was so surprising because Bruce didn’t speak of his feelings, didn’t let on.”
Other friends detected Bruce’s desire to begin again. “When he was very ill, he came in a wheelchair to lunch,” says Emma Tennant. “We put a special table on the ground floor. I said: ‘Elizabeth is looking terrific and I’m not quite sure what she makes me think of.’ Bruce said: ‘She looks American. Now can you see what I saw?’”
Cary and Edith Welch, who had sailed with the Chatwins on their honeymoon, saw them in Curzon Street where the Welches had rented a flat. “Elizabeth was trying to help Bruce and he looked up at her with such love and devotion: it was quite an uplifting aura,” says Edith. “The whole thing was happy, even though he was being wheeled in and out.”
This sense that Bruce had broken through to another shore and had accepted that he was part of a couple was recognised by his German publisher, Michael Krüger. In December 1987, Bruce travelled with Elizabeth to Munich. They went with Krüger to the Franziskaner beer hall. Krüger had last encountered Bruce on Lindos with Kasmin and Rezzori. “After Greece, when he was the most beautiful looking gentleman in the world, he looked pale and funny. His skin was dry and his hands had changed totally.” This was the first occasion Krüger had met Elizabeth. “Suddenly, I knew she existed. After that, she was always in the picture.” It seemed to Krüger that Bruce’s illness had prematurely delivered him into the kind of happiness that comes with being old. In Greece, it had looked as if Bruce might never grow up at all, but suddenly, in a few months, he had moved from adolescence to slippered contemplation. “This illness meant a deletion of sexuality, of hunger,” says Krüger. “This barrier was gone and he could meet her in a very different way. No more running away or making his words a curtain. I had the impression of an old couple sitting there. After all the battle of life they would be together. For the first time I had the idea that he was a husband and Elizabeth was his wife. I had the impression of a wonderful couple like Ovid’s Philomen and Baucis.”
In one of his last letters, Bruce wrote to Gertrude: “Elizabeth and I have not had an easy marriage, but it survives everything because neither of us have loved anyone else.”
XXXVIII
A Cosmic Book
“Are you a traveller by profession?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What are you by profession?”
“I suppose I’m a writer, so-called.”
—BC interviewed on ABC radio
THE SONGLINES WAS PUBLISHED ON 25 JUNE 1987. IT WAS HIS testament and he dedicated it to Elizabeth.
A week before publication, he slipped back into England to fulfil the publicity schedule arranged by Jonathan Cape. In the construction of the Chatwin legend, Bruce could be a reliable labourer. On 9 April he had written to Nin Dutton: “One thing is certain, I must be out of England when the book comes out in June. I hate all the publishing hoo-haa and, as I’ve discovered to my cost, you can’t give one interview without opening the floodgates . . .” Between 17 June and 22 June, however, he submitted to 14 newspaper and television interviews. “He was brisk about promotion and understood what a best-selling author has to do,” says Shirley Conran, who had the chance to observe Bruce on his author tour in New York and Toronto. “Somehow Bruce came across as unworldly. He was very worldly. It was not part of his personality, but his background.” Shirley was conscious, too, of his tough business side. “Most authors can’t read their royalty statements. He could.”
Within Jonathan Cape, there had been confusion over how to market the book. Bruce was adamant: he did not wish to be regarded as a travel-writer. If The Songlines was marketed as a travel-book, it would be slotted in the travel section beside “the Cyclades Islands on $5 a day”. On the other hand, “in literature it would be beside Chaucer.” The Songlines was fiction. (“A lot of this is fiction, a lot of this is made up,” he told Thubron, who was one of his interviewers. “But it’s made up in order to make a story real”.) He had explained his position in a broadcast interview to ABC in Australia. “Look at the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, Madame Bovary. Every incident is a compilation of various things. Flaubert researched and researched. Very little is invented. The borderline between fiction and non-fiction is to my mind extremely arbitrary, and invented by publishers.”
When The Songlines was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, Bruce issued a statement: “The journey it describes is an invented journey, it is not a travel book in the generally accepted sense. To avoid any possible confusion, I must ask to withdraw it from the shortlist.” Tom Maschler, writing to Gillon Aitken, Bruce’s new agent, was glad of the attention: “Not many authors write books which are candidates simultaneously for non-fiction and fiction awards!”
The Songlines transformed him, as John Ryle wrote, “from a cult writer to a bestseller”. Most newspapers singled the book out, illustrating their review with the photograph of a younger, healthy-looking Bruce. Reports of a mysterious Chinese fungal infection gave him allure. While losing none of his back-packer appeal, he strode into the realm of literary respectability.
If his publishers had fretted over the genre, critics and readers welcomed a misfit who dodged the usual categories. His harlequin tricks annoyed some, who complained that he had set up an intellectual apparatus he could not support, and had failed to give the Aborigines their due voice. Many more cheered the violation of a conventional novel structure and the sheer scale of his ambition. The Australian author Shirley Hazzard wrote to him: “Reading your Songlines again, I thought it one of those works destined to alter the plane of thought from which an important theme has long been surveyed an
d discussed. Things can never again be quite the same as they were ante-B.C.”
Bruce’s ebullience, his obsessional vitality, his very intense intellectual involvement combine in The Songlines to produce, in Colin Thubron’s words, “his most considerable book, and the one most central to his personality and interests”. It may not succeed on its original terms, but what it does achieve, as fiction, is to allow the world into the songlines. “I can’t say I believe the songlines literally,” says Thubron. “Maybe any third-year anthropology student could shoot it to bits, but what’s wonderful is the passion with which Bruce approaches it, his love of it, the way he writes it, the imagery, so that it involves you while you are in it, you inhabit it.”
Thomas Keneally had watched Bruce and Rushdie check out of their hotel in Adelaide to go to Alice Springs. “I thought at the time this dotty Brit is going to go crazy out there and this Indian prince is going to be a bit more ambiguous about it.” Keneally judges The Songlines to be “a cosmic book”, although he found an overripe sentimentality in Arkady’s marriage to Marian. (As did several others, Keneally shrank from the figure of Marian striding around the outback in soaked rags.) “Australians were raised to think that at the heart of Australia there was a dead heart. Australia is not European-sensibility friendly and it took a mad desert freak like Chatwin, a sort of literary T. E. Lawrence, to go to places like that. To realise that far from Australia having a dead heart, there was a map, there had always been a map. It’s a dangerous thing to say, but I think he did Aboriginal Australia a service. If there were ten books I had to set every Ozzie to read not for the sake of nationalism but for the sake of coming to terms with who we are on earth, The Songlines would be one of them.” Keneally responded to Bruce’s hopefulness. “The evidence in the cave meant we had not crushed each other’s skulls at every conceivable opportunity over food, women, whatever, but we were in fact the ones who were preyed upon by a sabre-tooth tiger. I don’t know how scientifically reliable it was, but I was willing to take it as a hopeful fable for human kind, a fortifying myth.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 65