Under the Sun

by Bruce Chatwin

  The second point is this. Deborah Rogers never made it clear to me the question of the ‘agent of record’: in fact, it was the first I’d ever heard of it. Surely we should agree that if, for any reason either of us wished to terminate the agreement, then the ‘agency of record’ should not continue beyond a fixed term, say, three years or five. To agree this between ourselves would, I feel, give a certain leverage with DR/GB. It is obviously very messy for me to be having to deal with two agencies.836

  As always

  Bruce

  To Murray Bail

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 8 February 1988

  My dear Murray,

  So we went to the West Indies for a holiday: I honestly can’t spare the time to come your way this winter. Besides, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that, unless someone pays you to go club class, air travel (for more than 3 hours) has already become impossible. We went first to a pair of islands called Les Saintes, off Guadaloupe which are peopled by a very strange clan of mestizo Indian-negro-Breton fishermen. Most striking to look at. Proud, disdainful, not giving one inch to tourists like ourselves: the girls wearing a kind of tutu, the boys with blond hair in rasta-plaits. Nothing happened to interrupt our days of sleeping or taking a boat to the coral reefs except for the ludicrous incident when squatting in the bush I inadvertently let my balls brush against a plant which is the toxic plant of the West Indies.837 And since we were on our way to Mass, the agony of standing in church was indescribable. I hope you’ll forgive my invoking your name as a possible reviewer for the Botany Bay book to the Los Angeles Times review section. I didn’t feel I could take it in, knowing so little of the history.

  Has The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta come your way? A tremendous evocation of place – the place being the town of Nuoro in Eastern Sardinia. I read it ages ago in French because it’s published by my Italian publisher. Also, at the age of 19 I went alone on a walking tour of Eastern Sardinia. It was terrifying to walk at dusk up the main street of Orgolos, the legendary ‘home’ of the Sardinian bandit, looking for a bed and having every door slammed in one’s face. One pal G[eorge] S[teiner] reviewed it for the New Yorker, but I don’t think he really got the measure of it. Yes. I’ve known the Musil838 for some time. Very marvellous! I may, at any minute, be off to the Sudan on some mildly nefarious business.839 That is, if I recover from a bad bout of flu (I am recovering!).

  I wish I could give up writing, don’t you? More and more this book business tempts me into silence. There have been some frightfully funny incidents here: the best is that Virago Press were about to publish as an astonishing new ‘find’ a novel by a young Pakistani girl called Rahila Khan840 or something like it, with some quite sexy scenes between Pakistani girls and white boys: all very suitable to bring ‘literature ’ to Britain’s Asiatic community, all set for a big promotion etc. – when it was discovered that Rahila Khan was an Anglican clergyman in Brighton called the Rev Toby Forward! Great?

  Next, at the Whitbread Prize there were 3 categories, the best novel, the best first novel, the best biography. The best book of the 3 was, at the beery businessman’s dinner, then judged to be the winner.

  The three were:

  1. My friend Francis Wyndham who treated the whole affair with wonderful panache.

  2. A paraplegic (or something worse) who had overcome his disability to write a book841 – and was of course declared the winner.

  3. Ian McEwan842, who, when given a hard-luck slap on the back by one of the organisers, said: ‘Next year there’ll be a man with an iron lung.’

  Much love to you both, B & E

  The categorisation of his own book troubled Chatwin, who, feeling that he must defend and protect the status of The Songlines as a novel, asked Tom Maschler to issue this statement.

  To Tom Maschler

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 8 February 1988

  I am most honoured to be nominated for the Thomas Cook Travel Award; but The Songlines has been published as fiction on both sides of the Atlantic . . . 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 from the shortlist.

  To Cary Welch

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 22 February 1988

  My dear Cary,

  Either we’ll have met in London by the time you get this – or else it’ll have to be thought of as an interim letter. I have just sent off to agents, publishers etc a new work: the theme? Art-collecting – or rather the convolutions of a man who gets stuck behind the Iron Curtain and will do anything to save the collection until one day . . .

  The book was my response to convalescence last year: I had thought I’d use that time to read and re-read all the great Russian novels. Instead, hardly able to hold a pen, I launched forth on my story: a tale of Marxist Czechoslovakia conceived in the spirit and style of the Rococo. God knows how people will receive it.

  My book The Songlines, which as you may be aware was written, the last third of it, in semi-hallucination,843 has brought me a host of new friends from ‘every quarter’. But the latest is a simply astonishing person. He is called Kevin Volans844, an Anglo South-African composer – and composer of genius – who has gone into the field in Africa rather as Brahms or Dvorak went looking for folksongs. He has filled his head with the sounds of the veldt, with Zulu chant, the shepherds pipes echoing across the valleys of Lesotho – and without in any way being ‘ethnic’ he has produced an entirely new modern music that also makes me think of Schubert. He is the favourite composer of the Kronos Quartet, who, it would appear are the best string quartet in America for modern music. Unfortunately, their record of Kevin’s work entitled ‘White Man Sleeps’, which is a huge hit in the U.S. omits the 4th movement which is so utterly transporting that one gasps with wonder.

  Anyway this is to me one of the really nice things that’s happened to me. The longer I live the more anarchic my attitude to institutions. In the end the people who run them are professional time-wasters. I think you survived the Met845 for quite long enough: for what should and could be a rewarding task ends up a drudgery. One has to be free to pursue one’s loonier concerns. The New Hampshire retreat sounds heavenly. I do have reason for visiting your neck of the woods sometime in the foreseeable future: but I’m completely befuddled by the dates. My current interest is the astonishing revival of Orthodoxy in Russia. I don’t know if you know but I now think of myself as orthodox and will be going back at some point to Athos to stay with my Serbian friends at the monastery of Chilandari846 . . . but this is beside the point. I find myself prey to indecision as to where to go next. Rephrasing Cyril Connolly, one could say ‘Inside every traveller an anchorite is longing to stay put.’

  Forgive this rather rambling scrawl. E. and I went to some islands off Guadaloupe for a swimming holiday but alas we both came back with a horrible stomach bug which has affected my liver in a pseudohepatitis. 847

  Feeling better today,

  Much love B

  To Murray Bail

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [February 1988]

  My dear Murray,

  . . . Thanks for sending us the Australian short stories.848 Why you’ve not put yourself in it is beyond my comprehension. I’ll talk to you about them one day – I like Murnane: but so often, in the others, there is an evenness of texture which I find rather disturbing. I won’t go on now.

  We’re off on a world tour – I hope! – and the air ticket may bring us to Sydney in March.

  Love as always. B

  To Ninette Dutton

  Homer End | Ipden | Oxford | 29 February 1988

  Dearest Nin,

  Sorry for the protracted silence. Time has flown with astonishing rapidity. The first news is that I finished and edited a new book: the title UTZ. Tout court! Anyhow it seems to have caught the imagination of the publisher because we’re suddenly inundated with money which we don’t really want. My temperament tells me to give it away: but
that’s not so easy. And it’s certainly a change from being on the deadline. I’ve also 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 70’s – 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. This incident is based on the experience of one of my mother-in-law’s friends in Rock Creek Park, Washington.849 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.

  Otherwise . . . E. and I went away snorkelling in the West Indies. We only had 2½ weeks and really that is not enough for Australia. Even so, the flights from Paris to Martinique were gruelling – and we both came down with a mysterious virus that laid us out nearly cold for a couple of weeks. Banish the thought that holidays in the sun are therapeutic!

  Cyril Connolly’s most famous aphorism is: ‘Inside every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out’. How about this one? ‘Inside every traveller an anchorite is longing to stay put.’

  Murray [Bail] has had a great success with his book of Australian Stories: though I can’t see why yours should not have been included. Much less flat than the usual ones!

  Lots of love to you, Bruce

  To Nicholas Shakespeare

  Churchill Hospital | Oxford | [March 1988]

  Dear Nick,

  One quite useful technique – which I used for the fantastic compression necessary for The Viceroy – is to get a board with a huge sheet of graph paper divided into squares. You can write the ‘synopsis’ sections on little cards and pin them on with drawing pins. You then have a flexible way of setting out the story with the possibility of change.

  Much love,

  B

  Better! Keep your fingers crossed.

  On 8 March 1988 Tom Maschler passed on to Maggie Traugott at Cape this note from Chatwin. ‘Bruce was, frankly, disappointed by your blurb for UTZ since he felt you did not really get to the heart and content of the book.’

  To Tom Maschler

  No idea of the illusionist city of Prague.

  No idea of the ‘private ’ world of Utz’s little figures was a strategy for blocking out the horrors of the 20th century; that the porcelains were real, the horrors so much flim-flam.

  No indication of the technique which allows the reader an insight into the fictional process (or how a storyteller sets about it).

  One of the principle themes of the book is that Old Europe survives.

  Marta epitomises the fact that the techniques of political indoctrination fail and are bound to fail.

  No idea that Utz identifies himself as Harlequin, the Trickster, and runs his own private commedia – outwitting everyone until, finally, he finds his Columbine

  No idea of the Jewish element. Utz is ¼ Jewish – or of the somewhat subversive notion that the collecting of images, ie art-collecting is inimical to Jahweh – which is why the Jews have always been so good at it.

  Art collecting = idol-worship = blasphemy against the created world of God.

  To Harriet Harvey-Wood

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 5 May 1988

  Dear Harriet Harvey-Wood,

  It’s no good. I’ve been in hospital on and off for 3 months a. with an ordinary stomach disorder of the tropics b. with undiagnosed malaria (temperature of 106°) caught on the famous trip to Ghana [in March 1987].

  I simply can’t face any engagements and have work to do.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bruce Chatwin

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OXFORD AND FRANCE: 1988-9

  Since his return from Guadaloupe, Chatwin had been spending more time in the Churchill Hospital. Dr Juel-Jensen, who had retired in November, wrote in his last report that Chatwin’s P24 antigen was positive again. ‘I fear that all is not well.’ Chatwin’s new doctor, David Warrell, recorded that Bruce had explosive diarrhoea, no appetite and complained of pains in his spleen. On 12 March 1988 Chatwin was taken off Ketoconzacole. Two weeks later, the fungus returned with new virulence, this time for good. Seventeen months after the possibility was first raised, a skin biopsy indicated that the spots on his face were ‘highly suspicious’ of Kaposi’s sarcoma. On 29 April one of the specialists in the John Warin ward described Chatwin as a ‘very nice 47-year-old travel writer with AIDS.’ It had taken twenty months to establish once and for all what the clinic had initially suspected.

  The fungus infected his brain. Chatwin 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 (which would require him to be sectioned), his wish to convert to the Greek Orthodox faith, his charitable trusts, 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.

  To Gertrude Chanler

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 6 May 1988

  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. Elizabeth and I have not had an easy marriage, but it survives everything because neither of us have loved anyone else. 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. I’d explain to you one day why I could never join the Catholic Church,850 since I believe that the churches of the Eastern Rite are the True Church. I have recently learned that there is no contradiction between the Anglican and Orthodox. 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 $600,000.851 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 (whose instability since his motor accident has always worried me). 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. There is no point in setting out to write a book about healing. If a book has to be born, it will be born. Nor is there any point to the enterprise unless one knows what to heal and how, and actually does the healing oneself – even if this means changing the bedpans of the terminally ill.

  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. There’s no point either in becoming a martyr. Because of my bronchial and circulation problems Elizabeth and I would have to spend most of the winter in a mild climate but I do not intend to buy a house.

  I cannot do this work if I am fettered to possessions. I have envied and grasped at possessions but they are very bad for me. I want to be free of them. I don’t want to land Elizabeth with extra burdens, but I do want to give
her all I have in the form of a breakable trust with the proviso that it stay on this side of the Atlantic and the residue go to medicine. I shall make several presents to close friends and that will be that.

  She is not fully aware of this yet, and she would, of course, have to hand me out lumps of pocket money, for books, air fares, etc. 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.

  But you know how frugal she is. She said it is in her Iselin blood.852 She is retentive of possessions whereas I have always thought that by giving or dispersing, you attract more. The real difficulty is to get her to spend money on herself.853 Everything frivolous becomes an extravagance.

  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 by 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. There would be nothing better to unwind her than to ride a few miles each day. This will all cost money. I will give her all I have, but she still might hesitate. Can you help?