Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Family Tree 2 pieces

  Christopher Gibbs and Kasmin are here for the weekend and there is a sudden call to walk to the Hodgkins for lunch four hours away. And this letter which might have gone on for some pages more is coming to an abrupt halt.

  love B

  On 2 June 1971 Welch wrote to Chatwin: ‘Maori piece arrived yesterday . . . I cannot understand why I am so fortunate as to have it. After all I did nothing to deserve it other than a. encourage you to buy it and b. tell you I’d buy it if you could not sell it at a profit. But why is the art market so stupid as not to realise that this piece & its marvellous companions are the only things of their marvellous sort outside of New Zealand. As such they are of the utmost importance – not to mention their beauty.’

  To Cary Welch

  Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 11 June 1971

  Dear C.,

  The weather is so infinitely frightful that I have just decided to go to the South of France with my typewriter and E is going to follow later.

  As I told you the £3,000 for the Maori is going to be used on a flat in London for me. But I am also owed about £700 in August and at the moment am flat broke. Would it be asking too much for you to send me (or rather Elizabeth because she has an external account) £300 or $800 to keep me going through the summer?

  Many thanks if you can.

  love Bruce

  In France Chatwin had rented a house in a village belonging to his Gloucestershire neighbour, Jeremy Fry.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | 22 June [1971]

  Dear E.,

  Have just arrived and been out on a long walk for my first day. I had no idea about this stretch of country. It’s quite beautiful and completely unspoiled. Not a tourist in sight, and any amount of crumbling farm houses to buy, my dear. High up, plenty of air and wind. One wouldn’t need a garden for the wild flowers are a treat, all wild briars and honeysuckle, my dear. The restaurant, if one and a half tables qualifies as a restaurant, serves a perfectly decent meal for ten francs. The village is quintessenially FRY,329 with any amount of ingenious gadgets which don’t quite work. The famous phone has been enlevé as he didn’t pay the bill.

  Madame Luc at the café says she knows of someone who has a hameau (whatever that may mean under the circumstances) which may or may not be to let during August. If so, would you like to up-sticks and come here during August. If not, we must think again. One couldn’t live here all the year round without going slightly potty, but I do think it would be well worth while looking for a rough house. It’s far nicer than Natasha Spender’s330 and all that Basse Provence part, and it doesn’t take any more than an hour to get here by car from Avignon and the Paris sleeper.

  Love B

  To James Ivory

  Postcard Apt church | Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | France | 3 July 1971

  Come, do come, but quickly. I have this place which is incidentally a whole village all to myself till 17th-18th July. After that I must station myself elsewhere. It is remote and beautiful, high on a mountain. The phone has been cut off. I have no car. Neighbours fetch me to dinner occasionally, or I walk to the shop ½ hr away. So if you come you must hire a car. Fly to Marseilles and come here. Then we’re mobile and you won’t be bored. If you have my telegram, we will have talked on phone. If not leave message with Telephone Publique at Oppedette. Have tried twice with no success.

  Or a message with HIRAM WINTERBOTHAM RUSTREL 2

  To James Ivory

  Oppedette | France | 3 July 1971

  DO COME BUT QUICK STOP HIRE CAR MARSEILLE STOP CABLE OPPEDETTE LOVE BRUCE

  To James Ivory

  Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | 12 July 1971

  Dear Jim,

  Have just intercepted your letter. The postman calls every other day so I have it one day earlier. I have rented another house from the 18th c/o Jean-Claude Roché, Aubenas-les-Alpes, Haute Provence. Tel 1. Aubenas. He is a great expert on birdsong and periodically leaves for Patagonia or the Galapagos to record the dawn chorus. Very unusual for a Frenchman to have an enthusiasm. The father was a famous old art collector called Henri-Pierre Roché331 who knew Picasso in the good old days of 1910 and wrote Jules et Jim. The snag to this one is that Mrs C[hatwin] wants to come to France. I have told her the 25th would be the right date. This could be delayed a bit but not much. Do please try and come after the 19th for a few days. You can always fly on to Tangier from Marseille. Perhaps I could go to Tangier too, but that might be a bad idea until I negotiate a cheque from Edith’s for something I sold Cary (note the order of progression: the Dahlink is paying). And money matters take a horribly long time in France. Also I am very very anxious about getting this book done. I know myself too well. Once in Morocco the footsteps lead to another horizon. I am a bum and I do not believe in work of any kind.

  But I do badly want to see you – for lots of reasons. Apart from the obvious one, I want to ask your advice. I have in the rough a story, which doesn’t really work as a novel because I have tried it. It is also a true story about someone I met by chance. I have a goût de monstres but this was the best ever and I ended up feeling the deepest compassion for him. He was a real estate agent in slum property in down-town Miami; each year he spent his entire income on coming to London as Cinderella from the Ball. His letters to me are great pieces of Americana; unfortunately they are in Glos. To my knowledge – and you will probably be able to correct me – nobody has ever dealt compassionately with the idea of going to Miami to die. Also visually Miami is surely the most extravagantly beautiful example of holiday camp horror in America. I called my story ‘Rotting Fruit ’.332 Do you think there might be something in it for you?

  When you get this can you cable me at Oppedette and at Aubenas when you will be at a particular number in London and I will call you? But if I have to make an expedition of six kilometres to the phone box it isn’t worth the bother and find you not there. You should also allow that you’ll be at least one hour in the same place, because the lines have a tendency to whistle for half an hour.

  Love, B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | Tuesday 15 July 1971

  Dear E.,

  So the cheque came OK thank God! I have endorsed it and it is for you to pay into your external account FOR ME, but you can use it if it gets you out of a fix. I would like you to have your bank send me £100 to a bank of their choice in Apt, Vaucluse, by cable and fairly quick. I have about £30 odd still left but don’t want to get stuck at all, and to inform me at once WHAT BANK.

  Now the house. A couple I met with Hiram Wintherbotham333 are called the Rochés, father was a famous old art collector and author of Jules et Jim. Jean-Claude is the greatest expert in France certainly on birdsong and has a chateau rigged up as a recording studio.334 He is renting me his mother’s house two rooms all mod con when I want it till the 18th or so of August and even then it’s not the end of the world because there is apparently bound to be something else.

  I suggest you come around the 23rd or so with a car plus another typewriter as I suspect there will be typing to do, and the two large Oxford dictionaries and some money – enough money – mine if not yours and also the New Yorker article about Chomsky335 which I left behind. It’s not coming along too badly at all. At least I know how to do it.

  . . . Jungle Jim Ivory wrote saying he wants to come to France and I’ve asked him here only if he brings a car. You can if you want buy a car with that money of mine, but I don’t particularly want to own it. Did anything happen with my flute delivery from Parke-Bernet? If so please bring it with you, WELL WRAPPED. Also I suspect that Rogers and Co will have sent me a bill for the shipping of the Maori. Should be about £30. Please pay it.

  Still quite beautiful up here. Never gets too hot. No mistral but a breeze. Apparently its freezing in winter but always bright.

  love, B

 
; P.S. Did you know, my dear, that Chatwin means ‘a spiralling ascent’ in Old English?

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | Tuesday [July 1971]

  Dear E.,

  Further to the phone call of today. I have a card from Charlotte today saying that the Max Ernst fetched £6500 which by my calculation should bring in about £150 or a bit less, and then there is Porter Chandler’s Picasso which I don’t know the price of. Plus the cheque from Cary [Welch] which if you haven’t received it by now you should be calling the alarm, by cabling me at Aubenas or phoning there. Will you then please do the following for me – buy and bring with you if he’s there the little Plains Indian female figurine from K J[ohn]H[ewett]. The price I believe he quoted at me was £220 or so. Don’t pay more and if he asks you say he’d better speak to me about it.

  I go with Hiram [Winterbotham] to Douglas Cooper’s336 for dinner on Thursday and hope on Friday morning that the money will have arrived at the Société Général in Apt, that is if your confounded bank don’t muck the whole thing up as usual. Otherwise I want and need nothing but perhaps a few more clothes. Rather low on shirts. Plus the things mentioned in my last letter.

  See you, love B

  Very nice American couple here! Jane Kaplan or something like that. On permanent staff of New Yorker.

  Ivory duly rented a car and stayed for a week at Oppedette. ‘We had a very good time together, driving around, meeting Bruce’s friends (people like Stephen Spender). We went to see a sort of gay encampment of rich Englishmen who had bought a whole village on a mountaintop, including the deconsecrated church. He took me to Ménerbes for the first time (most likely in the hope of spotting Dora Maar climbing up the hill) and we went to St Tropez. We slept on mattresses on the floor of the rather bleak little house he’d rented, which was baking hot. Everything was fine, but the thought of Elizabeth driving across France at that time to join him, as she said she would, and maybe walking in on us some morning made him nervous. Eventually, reluctantly, I had to leave to join some American friends in Morocco.’

  To James Ivory

  c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 2 August 1971

  Dear Jim,

  No alarm calls so we presume all is well. By the time this letter reaches London you will probably be in New York. I had a note from a friend asking me to meet him in Marseilles which arrived eight days after the sending, and two days after he’d gone. I look forward to your acerbic comments on the riff-raff life in Tangier. Did you meet someone called Yves Vidal, known commonly as Ma Vidal, who owns some castle that sounds tasteless and hideous and is or is not normally for sale at a million dollars. All meubles en matĭere plastique.

  We have had the Mistral for four solid days and I have had a solid stomach ache. The house has become like a gas oven. Really, he might have had more sense than to plonk it on a south facing hill with a nice stretch of gleaming gravel to reflect the heat into the house. I doubt that Mummy will leave her apartment in Neuilly often to fry in these rooms.

  Despite the heat and stomach I have gone racing on with the book. Forty pages have been done since you left. I do hope it’s not all nonsense. I have also finished Mr C337 I must confess with rising exasperation over the chapters on the minorities. I am afraid that like so many intelligent people he has fallen victim to a complaint called Aryan Nonsense. The mysterious blond brutes have an uncanny way of unhinging people’s common sense.

  I will leave here on the 18th or so and then go for eight days to Porto Ercole to see some old friends,338 then back to England with the manuscript I hope pretty well intact. Never never never will I write anything longer than a few pages. Never – at least for a very long time – will I try anything that demands RESEARCH. I think on that day we were all under a cloud. You were anxious. I was anxious and I hadn’t thought what I was going to be. Quite an emotional crisis, but it passed. What’s to be done? America not before the 15th Sept. but I have really no idea. All depends on Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Anyhow I miss you.339

  love, B

  One of several film ideas that Chatwin pitched to Ivory was an episode from his 1969 Afghanistan trip. On 25 June 1969 Chatwin had dined in Kabul with Peter Willey, a major in the Territorial Army and senior housemaster at Wellington College who was leading a team of former pupils to the northern province of Badakhshan to make a study for the Anti-Slavery Society. It reminded Chatwin of a mission to Kabul in 1841 by a Society for the Suppression of Vice among the Uzbeks. He wrote in his notebook: ‘They are, if the whole story bears credence, investigating the bond relationship between the growers of opium and Indian hemp and those who control the market. This constitutes a master-slave relationship. [The Anti-Slavery Society] has therefore provided funds and button microphones, and miniature cameras. The expedition lives on corned beef.’

  To James Ivory

  c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 12 August 1971

  Dear J.

  O my! that housemaster. As I have written to the Times in high dudgeon and irony – so high they won’t publish it – no spectacle, not even the Angel Gabriel on a trip, was more bizarre than one puffy public school master followed by three of the most exquisitely dressed and pretty and flirtatious boys, one with boots and marginally more masculine than the other two with handbags, as they picked their way delicately from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of the Exterior to the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Culture and finally when the Afghan government had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to be investigated, least of all by an ex-British army exmajor, the party dropped in on the PM to be shown the door, first of all quite politely and then really rather rudely. The major, believe it or not, is the self-appointed expert on the Old Man and the Mountain and the hashashins,340 and his real motive in attempting to queue barge his way into the northern province of Badakhshan was to try and contact a group of Ismailis who live there. To do this he invented a great yarn to [the] head of the Anti-Slavery Society of London and presumably Ltd., because it must be a profit-making institution, about the slave markets of Afghanistan. As I first heard it, the original slaves to be investigated were Czech and Hungarian women, enslaved in Bulgaria, traded in Afghanistan with officers in the Chinese Army for Opium. As that tale wore rather thin and to justify Major Gordon341 the expenses, not only for the air tickets, but also for the button-microphones and miniature cameras, and tins of corned beef and the packet soups he had so generously provided (one couldn’t expect boys that delicate and attractive to eat the native food), they found the slaves in the bazaars of Kabul, because Kabul was where the Afghans said the expedition must remain and remain it did.

  My Dear, it was funny, very funny. And that really is worth a filum. Or maybe we might incorporate it. My mind has been on my book. O God that book, now lurching into the final chapter and letting off heavy ordnance at random, thereby probably murdering it myself. E and I are going to the observatory this afternoon so that I can get a little celestial guidance and this letter as you can see is being ripped off at an alarming rate.

  She THE FINANCIAL MASTER-MIND whose mind works only in terms of the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh says you owe HER not me, the sum of 128 dollars – what a hideous expense that tiddly little car was, and then apparently the ticket came to more than we had imagined, because when we went to settle in Manosque the man said he was some short. Can you possibly send it to E direct at Holwell Farm?

  The house at Aubenas is now filled at nights with little black flies that you can neither see nor hear.

  Will be in touch as soon as ever I can.

  xx B

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 23 August 1971

  Have had 2 very entertaining days with the Mayoress if that’s what she can be called – of Marseilles. Am going to Italy for 8 days then return. All but the last 10 pages are done. What a relief when it’s ov
er! Bruce