Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  What also surprised friends about his illness was the way he became more himself. A new strain of sweetness entered his observations – an enjoyment of simple pleasures.

  Propped up in bed in the Churchill, he registered in his notebook an uncomplicated satisfaction with life. “Last night Sister Patterson came in and gave me one of her ‘healing touch’ massages. She really does make me believe in the ‘laying on’ of hands. Afterwards I felt completely relaxed . . . After she massaged my hands, she flicks her own as if she were casting out demons . . . This time the oil smelled of something I knew perfectly well, lemony. But I was so perfectly happy I forgot to ask her.”

  Once he had finished Utz, he threw himself into editing his journalism. He helped me – by no means a close friend – with my first novel. He understood immediately how to make it better and asked me to dedicate it to him. In his notebook he alluded to future projects. He wanted to write a book on healing. In hospital, he read a small-printed Bible from which he marked passages that seemed consistent with his pilgrimage, including a verse from Saint Mark: “And he ordained twelve that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to paradise. And to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out devils.” Thrilled by the description of the Boanerges as “the sons of Thunder”, he wrote: “That’s it. Now I know where to start. The title can be everything.”

  “The Sons of Thunder” was not his only idea for a book. “There are so many things I want to do,” he told Elizabeth. An essay on Jünger; an introduction to Songs of Central Australia; another to Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues. Like Ravel, he felt he had only just begun. He spoke to Volans of a triptych of stories after Flaubert’s Trois Contes, “one set in Ireland in the days of Irish kings”. To Michael Oppitz he spoke of plans for a novel on the anthropologist Joseph Rock. He told Barbara Bailey of an idea for a novel set in a South African village, exploring the gossip and jealousies. “He was coming out to do it,” says Bailey. “It was on his schedule.”

  None of these projects materialised, but he did begin work on a novel.

  The idea had been with him since he met Elizabeth’s family in the 1960s. The story once again reflected his sympathy for old people. On 29 February, he wrote to Nin Dutton: “I’ve started something new: which will probably fail, utterly, for being too ambitious. I have a scene in which an utterly beguiling American woman in her early ’70s – courageous to the point of camping alone in Wyoming – takes her picnic lunch into Central Park and is mugged by a black kid. That’s how it appears to be, except that she soon has her attacker sitting beside her, using her knife not his to cut up the chicken, and there follows a long animated discussion in which he refuses $50 but accepts $10.” The incident was based on one of Gertrude’s friends in Rock Creek Park, Washington. “I hope you will like her as a character because I have called her Ninette and have hauled in a bit of you. The whole book is way into the future and may take years to write.”

  The scene was from his “Russian novel”. He had talked about this to Tom Maschler who wrote to him: “Perhaps this will be . . . the ‘international’ novel (Russian, France, etc) you have spoken of. If you recall, that is the book which I told you would be an enormous commercial breakthrough in addition to being great literature.”

  On a walk through Central Park in 1981, Bruce had discussed the plot with his American editor Elisabeth Sifton. The novel would weave in three cities – Paris, Moscow and New York/Washington (“he surely didn’t want London”). More significantly, it appeared to be Bruce’s attempt to fictionalise his wife’s Jamesian family. Late in the day, he was going to turn his gleeful, transforming gaze on his wife: he was taking Elizabeth for his subject, not as a Czech servant girl but as an American aristocrat and, in the process, attempting to celebrate what, originally, had drawn them together.

  The novel, entitled Lydia Livingstone, was intended first and foremost as a love story. To write it, he planned to move to Paris and learn Russian. When Rushdie pointed out, “There are some love stories in Russian literature,” Bruce was unperturbed: “Oh yes, but they’re quite different.”

  Bruce told Elizabeth that the novel was partly based on Louise de Vilmorin’s daughter, Helena, who had imported to New York at great expense and with extreme difficulty a Russian artist with whom she had fallen madly in love. He arrived with his mother and other hangers-on and she was suddenly saddled with an enormous contingent. Lydia Livingstone was the name of a young film agent Bruce had met on his first visit to Sydney. On 4 June 1983 he had written to her: “both Mr [James] Fox and I agreed that the best thing in Australia is Lydia Livingstone.”

  There is no doubt in Rushdie’s mind that Bruce’s Russian novel would have enriched his reputation, and that the breakthrough would have come about through his willingness to write, at last, about love. “He was a warm person, but wrote a cold prose,” says Rushdie. “I can’t fault his technical decision not to talk about himself. He made the decision to keep the whole side of his sexual and emotional being out of his work. In the complete works of Bruce Chatwin there is not a loving fuck. But find the thing that is missing in a writer’s work and that is the answer to the writer. The answer to the riddle of Bruce was the absence of love in his work and that incredibly important aspect of human life he’d put a curtain round. I hoped that one day if he would drop that curtain and admit what he was like and write from his whole self then we would have a colossal novel.”

  For Rushdie, what was missing in Bruce’s writing was the admission of Bruce’s own real nature. “The thing that he concealed from all of us and that he kept in compartments, essentially his sexuality, is concealed completely. That’s the creature at the perimeter prowling around. All this fantastic entertainment and language and originality and erudition and display is a kind of hedge against not letting in the truth. The writing might have become astonishing if he had.”

  In his last months, Bruce began to reveal a person who was a great deal warmer and more emotional than his prose suggested. Peter Adam once accused him of not showing his heart in his books. Bruce shrugged it off with a smile, saying: “The heart is there, come on look for it. It is not with the best sentiments that we write the best literature.”

  He certainly gave the promise of heart. He was, as Hodgkin says, “someone people fell in love with immediately. In a way that is the most important – and, finally, creative thing about him.” Rosy Hall, who met him at a Chanler family wedding in 1986, wrote to Bruce’s mother-in-law: “I can honestly say he truly exceeded all my expectations. Adjectives cannot describe him completely. I can truthfully say he captivated my heart and my soul.”

  He buoyed people up, was a thoughtful and loyal friend. “He knew how to piss on friendships and drive you into the ground, but he was there in the end,” says Sethi. “He never let a friendship die, he knew how to keep it.” In 1971 Tilo von Watzdorf’s father died in a train crash. “I learned at Sotheby’s and went home,” he says. “Bruce stayed with me from afternoon till late at night. He was better than family. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been with anyone else.”

  He could be generous. He knew what to give and thought about his gifts. He gave to Emma Tennant a pair of gold lion-head earrings from Mycenae, 3,000 BC. He gave to Anne Thomson Elizabeth David cooking-pots. “My best presents have come from Bruce,” she says. “He only liked the best.” In Sydney, Pam Bell received, out of the blue, a box of lapsang souchong from Paris. “He made me feel that for some minutes he had cared about me. People very often say they have thought of you. With Bruce you really did believe it.”

  He could be generous with his time. Self-absorbed, he was still able to think carefully about other people’s work in progress. He helped James Fox with the structure of White Mischief. “He said: ‘You’re going to come down and we’re going to talk about it.” He encouraged Bill Buford in his first book Among the Thugs. “Can I take a strong personal interest in the manuscript? . . . I think there are ways of slightly toughening up the syntax and voc
abulary. I could show you what I mean when we meet.” When Patrick Woodcock came out of hospital, he telephoned him to say he was going to bring supper. Woodcock says, “He brought enough food for 25.”

  Hodgkin says, “One of the things which puzzles me looking back is how much I loved him. I find it very hard to see why. He was seriously cold.” Yet to call him cold-hearted or snobbish or narcissistic – all of which he appeared on the surface – is to watch him fall between the floorboards. His good qualities outweighed the bad. No matter how irritating Bruce could be, there was something touching and fresh about him. His friends might bitch and mock, but they adored him. “He was a source of more pleasure and more amusement and provocation than any friend I’ve ever had,” says David Sulzberger.

  There are signs that Bruce at the end of his life was finding it in himself to reciprocate. He was beginning to unite the bits of his universe and break down those compartments that had been useful to him in living his life. It was noticeable, for instance, how eager he was to introduce his friends not only to each other but, for the first time, to his wife and family. “He was a great pigeon-holer until the end,” said John Hewett. “Then he let his guard down and everyone was introduced. One was amazed at how much affection he felt. You had to go through a shower of knives before. Now he was incredibly sweet.”

  Friends like Stella Wilkinson were affected by the surfacing of a vulnerability that may always have existed but had not always revealed itself. “You put his shoes on him and it was as if he appreciated it, as if at last he was letting you touch him. You may not have thought you liked him, but when he was dying you realised, in fact, you loved him.”

  One night Robyn Davidson was staying at Homer End, “a bloody mess” after the end of her relationship with Rushdie. “Bruce showed me his little Inuit seal and I said it was one of the most enchanting things I had seen. When he came to say goodnight he put the seal in my hand, curled my fingers over it and said, ‘You can play with it tonight’.”

  Bruce spent March and April in and out of the Churchill. He was permanently on the telephone, explaining his illness as “an impossibly rare bone disease” or “undiagnosed malaria”, and summoning friends to his bedside. Though his behaviour was growing odder, it did so gradually enough for most of them not to notice. They took his actions at face value: it was Bruce a little louder, a little brighter, a little more Bruce-like. But there were others who recognised the cause of his frequent illness and erratic behaviour. Lees-Milne had suspected a year before. “Feb 4th, 1987. Pat Trevor-Roper told me that Sheridan Dufferin and Bruce Chatwin and Ian MacCallum all have AIDS; that they might seem to recover from some mild ailment, only to get another, but when a serious attack of pneumonia or such assailed them, then they would go under. Very terrible. Derek Hill, now rather proprietary of Bruce, denies it in his case, and tells Pat that Bruce caught a mysterious and rare disease from bathing in the South Seas too close to a whale, or some such nonsense.”

  Bruce’s refusal to make a public statement fuelled the speculation. There had been a period, after his collapse in Switzerland, when he spoke openly about his illness to a select group including Francis Wyndham and Christopher Gibbs. In his last year, a need to confess without risk did lead him to tell several others, like the young Australian gallery-owner Rebecca Hossack, but these confidants tended to be people he did not know well. By contrast, he was unable to speak privately to his family or to those with whom he might be in daily contact. “He never admitted it to me,” says Shirley Conran. “I thought it was polite to accept whatever he said, but I knew it didn’t add up. I thought it was sad he didn’t come out and say: ‘I’m dying of this thing.’ In a way, he didn’t think he was dying, and I’m glad it came as a surprise.”

  The force of his denial persuaded a majority that his illness was what he claimed it to be. But it launched him into an elaborate game of charades, the fear of which showed in his features. His terror was apparent to Jane Abdy, to whom, aged 19, he had confessed his first love in Cornwall. “I was in Ebury Street in a taxi when I saw Bruce in a loden coat. I was about to lower the window when I saw this incredible expression on his face, as if he’d seen the statue of Commendatore in Don Giovanni rising up to take him down to hell. If I’d said anything he wouldn’t have heard. He was absorbed in his own horror.”

  People who loved him did what they always did with Bruce and did not ask questions. In his presence, they behaved as though everything was normal. But on centre stage, the illness which he could not bear to name was ravaging him. Gregor von Rezzori, who had called him the Golden Boy, now described Bruce’s “sapphire-blue visionary’s eyes glittering fanatically in a boyish Anglo-Saxon head that had already become a skull. (It was poignant how his youthful curls had thinned. Damp with fever like the down on the skull of a new-hatched chick)”.

  In fact, by the end of February the fungus had infected Bruce’s brain and he was suffering from a toxic brain syndrome which began to manifest itself in hypomania. It impaired his ability to think and act rationally while sparing his verbal fluency and his ability to beguile. His non-stop talk, his grandiose schemes, his unrestrained buying sprees, threw those around him into turmoil.

  At the same time, his hypomania made him a concentrate of himself: someone funny, private, romantic, persuasive who believed fiercely in his own stories. A full-blown self.

  “Dear Gertrude, I need your help. I’d prefer to tell you the details in person, but I have indeed been hammered over the past two years and I hope I have been hammered by God. The fact is that I made the leap into Faith.”

  On 6 May 1988 Bruce wrote a long letter to Gertrude in which he appears to be trying to fulfil every expectation she may have had of a son-in-law. He reiterated his love for Elizabeth and spoke of their joint finances and plans for the future. Much of the content was fantastical.

  “If ever I had a regret, it is that I could not have become a monk – an idea which kept occurring to me in the cauchemar of Sotheby’s . . . God willing, it seems possible that I could become a lay brother. This does not mean that I would cease to write. I have been gifted with the pen and will continue to the best of my ability. I have been doing very well. My income for this tax year from April the first is around $600,000. But I want none of it for myself. If I were alone in the world I would hope to give it away to the sick. I do have responsibilities: to Elizabeth, to my parents and to Hugh. I have devoted certain royalties to my charity, The Radcliffe Memorial Trust, which is run by the man who saved my life. But I must be prevented from giving too much away.

  “It does seem that my inexplicable fever was malaria: the temperature returned to normal nine hours after taking anti-malarial pills. You can imagine what 3½ months of raging fever has done to the system. But I don’t regret a second of it.

  “My grey matter functioned perfectly and I took a number of most rational decisions. I am entirely concerned with the matter of healing . . . I hope to divide my life into four parts: a. religious instruction b. learning about disease c. learning to heal d. the rest of the time free to give my undivided attention to Elizabeth and the house. A tall order, but with God’s help not impossible.”

  He could not do this work, he told his mother-in-law, if he was fettered to possessions. “I have envied and grasped at possessions, but they are very bad for me. I want to be free of them.” He wished to give Elizabeth all he had in the form of a trust. “I have never known the extent of her capital, but I believe I would increase her existing assets by at least twice if all mine were totted up.” The real difficulty was to get her to spend money on herself. “She said it is in her Iselin blood. She is retentive of possessions, whereas I have always thought that by giving or dispersing, you attract more.”

  In his final paragraph he asked Gertrude to buy Elizabeth a horse. “I have been very worried that she is over-exhausting herself and might make herself ill: a. by the strain of looking after me (not easy!) b. by the house, the cooking and the garden. c. most exhausting of all b
y the sheep. She loves the sheep but, literally, they tear her apart. I think she needs a horse instead and stabling when she goes to India or with me to the sun. It’s wonderful riding country all around and the field is big enough for a horse and a donkey.”

  Gertrude, who wondered if he was suffering from “manic depression”, showed the letter to her eldest son John. “Ma, I have very carefully read Bruce’s letter twice. I am glad he has come to some sort of conclusion as to what he is going to do, but obviously some of it is a pure fantasy. His marriage to Lib is a fantasy . . . If they had a true marriage it is not his money, or her money, but our money. It belongs to both of them.” John did not consider “the horse routine” a good idea at all. “I don’t think Lib really wants to get into that kind of life and she does love her sheep.”

  On 17 May, Bruce returned to the subject of the horse. “The horse! Obviously she has to be an Arab mare, not perhaps up to competition standard, but breedable.” He suggested to Gertrude that they both went Dutch on the purchase and upkeep (“with the proviso of “a ‘safety-net’ so that the horse doesn’t have to be sold for ‘economic reasons’”). Otherwise, he was on the mend. “I get better by the day . . . The nerves should heal entirely within five years.”

  Eleven days after writing this, Bruce was back in the Churchill for an emergency blood transfusion. He had lost the feeling in his legs, which he referred to as “my little boys”. He was frightened they were not there, wanted to see them. “Profound loss of walking ability,” noted his report. From now on he would be “wheelchair dependent”. He had believed that walking was a way to cure ills. The refusal of his “unruly boys” to respond to his call brought home to him that at last he was no longer the spry, youthful explorer. He told Elizabeth: “If I can’t walk I can’t write.”

  Rimbaud had written a century before: “I am entirely paralysed.” Over the summer, Bruce increasingly identified with the hero of Volans’s opera: the Rimbaud of the piercing blue eyes, the gang rape in the Paris commune, the flight to Africa, the religious conversion, the poet, who “makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses”. But as the opera progressed, Volans noticed that the correspondences were growing more and more uncomfortable. “Bruce wanted Aida as he got sicker. ‘We must have camels and sand dunes.’ Later on, he decided he was the only person who could play the role of Rimbaud. I had to invent reasons he wouldn’t like – six week rehearsals etc. – without saying the obvious one. He couldn’t sing.”