Under the Sun

by Bruce Chatwin

  I for one am not too sad about the big dhurry not selling. I feel that at some point it can be used.

  I’ve enough yellow pads to be going on with and don’t really want foolscap size, as it will bulge out of my loose-leaf folders.

  The gatito has discovered all four palm pots for use as its W.C. The place is beginning to stink of cat shit and buzzing with bluebottles. But the headboard of the bed has become the nest of a most elusive mouse. So there you are! Trapped as usual.

  Gave the Magouche ménage a most fruity meal: an anchoiade of figs, anchovies and garlic (delicious); salad of leeks in uncooked tomato sauce with basil, oil and lemon juice (also delicious) and a monumental Moroccan tajine of chicken and quinces and almonds and dates and roasted sesame seeds. Also raspberries. That fearsome mother of Magouche expected next week. Sunil [Sethi] having frightful time extracting himself from the floods. Expect [him] to be here next week.

  Love

  Bruce

  When at last Sunil Sethi arrived in Ronda he found Chatwin in a state of extreme anxiety over his book. ‘He thought this was the end. He kept describing a scene – day after day – when de Souza and Ghézo make a blood pact. He couldn’t get it right. He’d crumple the paper with his hand and get very angry, saying “Am I a one-track pony?” ’

  Chatwin returned to London at the end of October with de Souza’s story still unresolved. Less than a fortnight later, he found a ‘cubby-hole’ in Albany, a former maid’s room which he sublet from Christopher Gibbs. No sooner had he arranged for an architect to convert it than on 9 December he flew to New York, to spend the winter there with Donald Richards. Among those he mingled with were Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, Edmund White, John Richardson and Jacqueline Onassis, the latter introduced to him by Cary Welch. Of this period, Robin Lane Fox remembers: ‘I’d heard he’d become the plaything of every grand American woman in sight.’

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  66 East 79th Street | New York | 11 February 1979

  Dear Maxine,

  . . . Life in New York highly social. Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis514 to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells,515 and my God she’s fly. Far more subtle than any American woman I’ve ever met. A man called Charles Rosen,516 who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating about the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned on him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: ‘Yes, of course, you can see it all in the Titian portrait.’

  Also hilarious dinner with the Erteguns, Iris Love517, the Turkish Foreign Minister and the representative in America of Mr Greater Turkey himself: am lunching with him at the U.N. tomorrow. His conversations start: ‘Look at my skull and you will see that, really, I am a Hittite.’

  Have written my piece for Geo Magazine and got paid three thousand for it. Have been interviewed for New York Times. ‘Mr Chatwin looks like a schoolboy and his eyes light up with a schoolboy’s enthusiasm etc . . .’ despite the fact that both [legs] looked like lumps of raw meat after being cut open by Dr Espy.518

  Kasmin marvellously well behaved in Haiti519 – as he had to be because the silly ass went out into a carnival crowd – despite my warning – with a wallet containing 800 bucks in cash and travellers’ cheques, and we were knocked over by four transvestites wearing Fidel Castro masks and relieved of it. I paid thereafter. Mad about Haiti.

  Apparently this week my photo is published large on the cover of the Barrytown Explorer. Unbelievable letters about In Patagonia from Chanler Chapman.520 ‘A whiff of aconite, the deadliest of poisons, a tale more heartless than King Lear etc.’

  But the BIG NEWS is this. We rang up Mr Shawn’s521 secretary on the New Yorker to see if he would like to see Mr Chatwin. She replied: ‘But surely it is Mr Chatwin who would like to see Mr Shawn?’ However, when Mr Chatwin was finally, after a positively Byzantine series of manoeuvres, ushered into Mr Shawn’s pure, intellectually Bauhaus office he rose and said it was nice to meet a New Yorker writer who had never written for the New Yorker. The upshot was a commission to do my Chekhovian trip through eastern Europe directly I finish Mr da S[ouza] plus as many thousand dollars as I need.

  Jane Kramer522 and her husband were in a fearful motor smash between Ronda and Malaga when we were there. Crapanzano nearly died of an embolism at Malaga airport waiting to go to Switzerland. And that dreadful man whom we met at the Zuluetas was instrumental in having their daughter abandoned, aged seven in a rough tourist hotel downtown, where she almost got lost.

  But the Albany523 is ready to begin work and as the workmen are on hand I suppose I must go back. Kassl has found me a flat in Covent Garden for two months while the work goes on (at £75 a week) but that is the price. I am really rather undecided. I have to say that I would like to spend about five months of the year in New York rather than London, and or even Paris. The trouble is laying out all that rent. I imagine the best would be to buy a cooperative, but the small places are v. difficult to find.

  Love

  B

  To Clarence Brown524

  Postcard, Christo’s Wrapped Walk Ways 1977-8, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri (15,000 square yards of silk over 4.5 km of walkways) | L6 Albany | London | 21 March 1979

  Why you should get this of all postcards is beyond me: it’s the only one that happens to be lying around. Best, Bruce Chatwin

  To Charles Chatwin

  Postcard, Jean Baptiste Chardin’s Pipes and Drinking Vessels | Vaucluse | France | 4 April 1979

  I inspected Bonnieux – and concluded it was in far too tricky condition to buy; could be an endless structural headache not what we want. The Paris one was – on reflection – just that much too small: a rare pied à terre and nothing more.

  Chardin evidently loved his drinking cup:525 it crops up again and again in the paintings. Bruce

  In April, Chatwin received a letter from Osip Mandelstam’s translator, Clarence Brown, who asked ‘with a certain trepidation’ whether Chatwin was aware ‘that the spirit of OM seems to peep out from behind this or that phrase or stroke of portraiture or landscape.’ Brown also suggested that In Patagonia was not second but third in a fascinating succession – ‘for Mandelstam’s title alone makes it clear that he was very mindful of Pushkin’s Journey to Erzerum.’

  To Clarence Brown

  as from Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 14 April 1979

  Dear Clarence Brown,

  Coming from you – of all people – that was indeed a gratifying letter. I owe you an enormous debt.

  A friend gave me a copy of your translation of The Noise of Time when it first appeared. It set me off to ‘discover’ [Isaac] Babel and the others. Soon afterwards I started to write.

  Of course Journey to Armenia was the biggest single ingredient – more so even than met the eye. Perhaps too much so – ‘skull-white cabbages etc’ (O that mad Veraschagin in the Tretyakov!) But one bit of plagiarism was quite unintentional (though indicative of the degree to which I had steeped myself in the Journey) Not until after I had passed the final proofs did I realise I had lifted ‘the accordion of his forehead’ straight. I rang up the copy editor in a panic. She said it was too late and, besides, all writers were cribbers.

  You must by now be viewing the O[sip] M[andelstam] translation industry with a rather jaundiced eye. But for what it’s worth – and at the risk of being a bore – I’d like to put it on record that you are surely the finest translator out of Russian alive; that you have a most finely tuned ear for the cadence of a sentence; that your literal translations of M[andelstam]’s poems are far better than the work of the versifiers, and, lastly that you are TOO MODEST.

  In an ideal world you would be appointed generalissimo in charge of vetting all translations from the Russian; one only has to think of the horrors of the so-called Oxford Chekhov.

  To my shame I don’t read Russian and one day will have to go t
o the Berlitz. I know vaguely of Pushkin’s Erzerum and, obviously, want to know more. No translation, I suppose?

  Do give my very best to Richard McKane526 and to Ted Weiss527 if you see him. Also could you drop me a quick card at this address, saying whether you will be around Princeton on May 23rd?

  I am working here, but vaguely tempted to come and get my prize.528 If you were about, it would be an added inducement.529

  as ever, Bruce Chatwin

  To Valerian Freyberg

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [Easter Sunday 1979]

  Dear Valerian,

  Your mother tells me you like shells. I used to have a collection of shells. During the war when I was three my father brought me a huge conch from Panama. He said you could hear the wind and the waves of the Caribbean Sea if you put your ear up close. I decided that my shell was a woman and we called her MONA, though I don’t know why.

  You can’t hear the Indian Ocean in this shell, but I think the design is very beautiful and I chose it for you. The white things look like mountains, don’t they?

  When I come back to England in June, I’ll come and take you out from school. I think we must find you a book on shells. If you promise to collect them and look after them, it would be lovely for me, because when I go round the world, I can find more shells and send them to you.

  With love from your affectionate godfather

  Bruce

  To Peter Adam530

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | Easter Sunday | 3 May 1979

  Quick card to say hello. Stuck on Tuscan hillside trying to plough my way through to finish 30 pages of manuscript but must have finished 150 of them.531

  To John Fleming and Hugh Honour532

  L.6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 11 May 1979

  Dear John and Hugh,

  Back in London with a belated thanks for – as usual – a lovely time with you both. By far the best house I know in Italy! I’ll be back in the solitude of Chianti in about three weeks.

  In the meantime, C. Gibbs still has the Duchesse de Berry’s Granet,533 measurements on the back. It has a whopping Chatsworth frame made up from bits of late 17th century English moulding which I think makes it look marvellous. He wants about £5-6,000 for it, but is absolutely open to the idea of a swap. Apparently the National Gallery of Wales are nibbling at it, but I wonder whether they have the nous much love, Bruce

  One of several Anglo-Argentines who objected to the depiction of British estancia owners in In Patagonia was Millicent Jane Saunders. She took particular exception to Chatwin’s ‘false description’ of her late husband, ‘a highly respected Patagonian’. On p.195 Chatwin had interviewed an elderly Chilean: ‘He had worked twenty years on the estancia and now he was going to die. He remembered Mr Sandars, the manager, who died and was buried at sea. He did not like Mr Sandars. He was a hard man, a despotic man . . .’

  To Millicent Jane Saunders

  L6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 27 September 1979

  Dear Mrs Saunders,

  . . . I deeply regret that you should have been upset by Chapter 94 of my book In Patagonia. I think, however, you will appreciate the circumstances under which it was written. I was simply recording the words of a dying Chilean peon. He said that the manager of his estancia had been a Mr Sandars (my spelling), who had been buried at sea, who was an ‘hombre duro e despotico’ (his words), though he remembered him in a favourable light compared to what came after under the Allende regime and later. Having lived, as I did, in peons’ quarters all over Patagonia, it was the most common thing in the world to hear men grousing about their employers in that kind of language, usually as we sat around the maté kettle.

  My business was to record what people said. I did not, I can assure you, intend to pass any judgement on a man about whom I knew nothing, and whose name, apparently, I did not know how to spell.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bruce Chatwin

  To Peter Adam

  L6 Albany | Piccadilly | London | 15 February 1980

  Have gone to New York for 10 days but will phone on return. xxx Bruce

  Chatwin was in New York to work with Jim Silberman, his American editor, on The Viceroy of Ouidah, as his book was to be called. Previous titles he had considered were: Dom Francisco , The Elephant, The Brazilian, Skin for Skin, The Merchant of Ouidah. He had rewritten and typed out half a dozen drafts, changing Francisco de Souza’s name to Francisco da Silva. What had commenced as the history of a Brazilian slave-trader was now a novel. An introductory paragraph composed for Silberman, and later deleted, shows that Chatwin had found it impossible to transform de Souza’s life into a biography: ‘. . . when I tried to fit these pieces into a narrative, each fact seemed to contradict each other fact. The story gave out at the critical points and, with a mixture of relief and despair, I decided to write a work of the imagination. I changed the names of the principal characters, having a prejudice against making historical figures say things they did not say, or do things they did not do.And having changed the names, I was then free to borrow, to combine, to juggle with dates, to invent new characters and new situations – to such an extent that even I can hardly disentangle the real from the invented.’

  To Jim Silberman

  [19 February 1980]534

  Jim,

  I haven’t looked it over.

  Parts I-II and III are I think as the Cape editor and I think they should be with most (!) of your suggestions incorporated.

  Parts IV & V are my final retype but not yet edited by Cape’s.

  There are 2 small parts which I want to rewrite anyway. Please anyway be FIERCE over these final sections because they have had far less going over than the first 3.

  The book is not a novel but a TALE (?)

  ?A Tale of Two Continents?

  See you Tuesday,

  Bruce

  To Francis Steegmuller535

  L6 Albany (top) | Piccadilly | London | 21 March 1980

  Dear Francis,

  You can certainly borrow, not rent the above, but I feel I must warn you of the drawbacks. It is not a flat, in the English sense of the term, but a one-room garçonnière such as one might find in the Cinquième. My tastes are also rather Spartan. It has a kind of kitchen, a minuscule shower and basin, but the lavatory is out on the landing. It has a painted Directoire bed, 3ft 6in wide – and definitely for Francis: sharing with anyone not recommended. It has a smaller, also Directoire, steel lit-de-camp, which can be made into a bed, though it serves as a sofa. In this Shirley would have to sleep. I have, on occasions, and found it small but possible.

  Otherwise, there are a Jacob chair, a Régence chair, a table, a telephone, the King of Hawaii’s bedsheet with a design of fishes (framed), a Sienese cross, and a Mughal miniature.

  You will feel very cramped. I discourage visitors, but if you’re prepared to put up with it, it can be yours from the 5th to the 11th.

  I cannot rent it to you, because I pay no rent myself, and only have it on a friendly basis. You would have to pay my cleaning lady, Mrs Robinson, who comes on Mondays and Thursdays. You would also obviously monitor all phone calls and pay those. If you then wanted to give me a present – a bottle or two of champagne never refused – that would be up to you . . .

  If I am up that week, I can easily find a billet and it will only be for a night. I have started writing about my Welsh peasants, if that’s the right word for them, and don’t need interruptions.

  As always,

  love to Shirley, Bruce

  On 3 April 1980 The New York Review of Books published a letter from Dieter Zimmer in response to Chatwin’s review, on 6 December 1979, of Konrad Lorenz’s The Year of the Greylag Goose. ‘Mr Chatwin’s central statement seems to be this: “His [Lorenz’s] message is that all human behavior is biologically determined.” Now no matter how long I look at this sentence, I am not sure I understand what it is meant to say. I am perfectly sure, however, that if it is meant to say what it seems to say it is altogether wro
ng. I suspect that there is some fundamental misunderstanding here which blurred Mr Chatwin’s picture of Lorenz.’ Chatwin was given a right of reply in the same issue.

  To the New York Review of Books

  I do not agree. The Year of the Greylag Goose is not a ‘friendly and harmless picture volume’, but a sugar-coated pill. The exquisite photographs merely served Lorenz with a vehicle to air, yet again, a philosophical credo that may have changed in tone, but never in substance, since his successful application for membership of the Nazi Party (No. 6,170,554) eight weeks after the Anschluss on May 1, 1938. For this detail, as well as an assessment of Lorenz’s contribution to racial biology, readers are referred to the brilliant series of papers by Professor Theo Kalikow of Southeastern Massachusetts University (the latest being: Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938-1943 in Naturwissenschaft und Techniken Dritten Reich, edited by Mehrtens and Richter, Suhrkamp, 1980.)

  One should never minimise Lorenz’s capacity to charm the public – or influence events. It remains for future historians of ideas to document the impact of On Aggression on our own times. For just as, in 1942, the biologists confirmed Hitler in his belief that the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem concurred with his Duty to the Creator, so in the 1960s the notion of ‘ritualised’, limited combats seems to have lulled certain strategists (and apologists) of the Vietnam war into a belief that they were answering the Call of Nature.