Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I can fly Varig very easily direct to Portugal and want just a snuff around Lisbon for a few days. Perhaps we could meet in the Hotel Seite Aix in Cintra – the most beautiful looking hotel in the world. One night wouldn’t break the bank.

  Next day.

  All this is, as I said on the phone, rather dependant on future timing, posts etc. and whether any startling development occurs. In any case I’ll phone you from wherever on the 26th/27th to find out how things are . . .

  In haste. xxx x B

  At last, in early March, Cape’s proofs of In Patagonia arrived from England.

  To Belinda Foster-Melliar

  c/o British Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 9 March 1977

  Dear Belinda Foster-Melliar,

  Many thanks for your letter which got stuck in the post between Rio and Bahia – 2 weeks instead of two days and was unstuck for me by a gypsy cabocla or fortune teller who prophesied, after a certain amount of greasing, that it would arrive today – which it did.

  Answer to your queries:

  P41. He was white, sickly white. We might even put in ‘unhealthy white body.’ Persians pride themselves on their whiteness anyway. Aryan = Iran = fair . . .

  P133 Don’t like either. What about this? ‘When he had to retire, he couldn’t face the coop of England and had sought his own camp taking with him 2500 sheep and “my man Gomez.”’

  . . . P278 Don’t know what ‘at night’ is doing here at all. Should read: ‘He came back to breakfast . . .’

  MacLennan. I simply can’t do without a ref book in Glos. My impression is MacLennan. Is that a Scottish name at all? The name is taken from an Argentine book which may well have got it wrong . . .

  I hope this is comprehensible and I do apologise for the delay.

  Yrs ever, Bruce Chatwin

  My love to Susannah.437 Say I’m a bad correspondent.

  PS Please confirm by cable that you have received this. Then my mind will be at rest.

  PPS Don’t really care too much for dedications.

  To Francis Wyndham

  c/o Price Waterhouse | 63 Praca Machada Assis | Recife | Brazil | 10 March 1977

  Dear Francis,

  Do you still have any clout on the magazine? Or is it not worth bothering with?

  The matter is this: In 2 weeks I’ll be in Recife where there is a most interesting man: Its bishop Dom Hélder Camara438 who is a. perhaps the greatest expert in the world on the problems of the urban poor (The Brazilian N.E. being a testing ground like Bangladesh) b. an anti-Marxist of the Far Left c. with Sister Cecilia439 of Calcutta the nearest thing to being a saint and who will probably be canonised at once when he dies.

  He is, I have to add, much lionised by certain New York ladies, who gave me his stuff to read. Also Oriana Fallaci440 has already interviewed him. But as far as I can judge, his position is one for which I have the greatest possible admiration. The Camaras were (and are) great sugar moghuls with old slave plantations in Pernambuco.

  Let me know by cable what you think. If the magazine proves hopeless perhaps the paper might take something. I imagine, Recife being a colossal city, that I could get a reasonably decent colour photo of him. The money I can arrange through the above company, but we’ll have to pay them back.

  Otherwise Brazil is rather lowering. People in Rio cowed and lacking in personality.

  As always, B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Juazeiro | Rio Sao Francisco | Brazil | 11 March 1977

  Dear E,

  The last letter was posted in a rush. I am now on my longdelayed tour of the north-east. The arid cactus and thornbush country that stretches from Bahia to the Amazon. I am making for San Luis de Marañón which is almost up to Belem, and is where Queen Agontimé of Dahomey was sold into slavery and brought back by de Souza. I know exactly what to do with the book: write it in one long stretch without even the favour of chapters. Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present. I am beginning with the family celebrating their annual commemorative mass in the Church in Ouidah and retiring for the dinner in Simbodji which means the Big House or Casa Grande in Fon. None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa. The scene is then set for his life and what a life! Cattle drover turned man drover who ends up the prisoner of the King of D[ahomey] and dies of rage at being trapped when all he wants to do is get out of Africa and retire to Bahia. I hadn’t quite realised we had got as far as March 11. However, I’ll ring up as planned on the 26th probably from Recife. But I may want to try and get an interview with the Bishop Hélder Camara for the old Times (if they’ll have it).441 He is the greatest world expert on the problems of the urban poor and the nearest thing to being a saint. He and Sister Cecilia of Calcutta are in fact the 2 who are up for immediate canonisation.

  Re Spain: I don’t think I can make Rio before say April 8-10. Don’t want to stay more than a day or so and there are flights every day to Lisbon and Madrid. The best thing might be for you to ring Margaret Mee442 again and say where you are.

  All this depends on what happens here.

  Lots of love

  B

  PS Please have my typewriter repaired xxx B

  This is the only letter that Chatwin wrote to his father independently of Margharita; an apology for having caused him great pain. Hugh says: ‘I remember Charles speaking to Margharita and me in his drawing-room: “This all happened a very long time ago and it was quite wrong of Bruce to drag the matter up, upsetting our elderly relatives, again.” ’

  To Charles Chatwin

  8 Gloucester Gate | London | 20 September 1977

  Dear Charles,

  Of course, the footnote about Robert Harding443 can be cut out of the paperback.

  I had attached a lot of importance to it at the time, but now see that it is rather superfluous. It’s terribly difficult to get such things in perspective when you’re close to them.

  The trouble is that he, your grandfather, became one of my childhood obsessions, ever since I discovered that court suit (and dressed up in it), in the red spotted trunk at Brown’s Green. I felt that his vertical rise and fall somehow offset Charley’s horizontal wandering.

  Anyway I am sorry.

  as always,

  B

  After their times together in France and Oregon, Chatwin saw less of James Ivory. ‘I went down one time to Holwell Farm,’ Ivory remembers. ‘Strolling about with him in a long upstairs hall with polished floorboards he privately told me that he had given up homosexuality – that he didn’t have those feelings anymore.’ Ho wever, at a wedding in Long Hanborough in June 1977 Chatwin met Donald Richards, a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker who had arrived with the artist Keith Milow. ‘I introduced brown-eyed Donald to blue-eyed Bruce and their eyes met,’ says Milow. ‘Something seemed to click which I was not prepared for.’ Before, Chatwin had had passing affairs with men. ‘This was the first time he’d committed his life to a man,’ said Teddy Millington-Drake. ‘Bruce was infatuated with him.’ No correspondence survives of their relationship, which lasted five years, save for a postcard from Richards two months after their meeting: ‘I long to see you, so I can relax, and tell you everything. Rest assured I do look forward to that. Meanwhile take care, and keep writing, with my love XXXX D.’

  In October 1977 Chatwin drove with Elizabeth through Switzerland and Austria (‘bought the inevitable loden coats and had two thrilling days in the Ost-Ture romping round in the snow’) to Siena, where he had rented from Millington-Drake the annexe at Poggio al Pozzo in order to begin writing The Viceroy of Ouidah. ‘When he came to stay,’ wrote Millington-Drake, ‘he settled in and made his nest in whatever part of the house he had been assigned; then when it suited him, he would move on to another nest in someone else’s house. He expected to be fed: “What’s for lunch?” he wo
uld cry as he breezed in at half-past twelve. Occasionally he would contribute a couple of bottles of champagne or, as a great treat, some wild rice. Then there was the telephone bill. He telephoned continually to his agent, his friends, to a young man he’d fallen in love with in Brazil. At the end of the visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about £4), saying he hadn’t used the ’phone much. But his friends didn’t mind because we were so fond of him, though he was selfish and self-centred like most artists are.’

  To David King444

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]

  Dear King,

  On leaving England we moved to Geneva and stayed with my friend George Ortiz. I played with his little girl Graziella aged 5 and now the only trace of her is a chloroform soaked rag left in a falsely registered car abandoned near the French border. The real nightmare of being rich is that even if you gave away every cent, no one would believe you and you’d then have nothing to protect yourself with. G[eorge] O[rtiz] is innocence at large and that this should happen to him monstrous.445

  Otherwise we didn’t have too bad a time in Austria and I am quite well installed here. In Florence yesterday we met the Director of the Karlsruhe Museum who said that anti-Hitler jokes during the war were exceedingly funny. An example: Hitler, as everyone knew, would sometimes grovel on the floor in a rage and bite the carpet. The story: Hitler goes to a big store in Berlin and buys a new carpet with a very thick pile. The salesgirl says: Mein Fuhrer, will you take it away or eat it now?

  Drop me a line to say how it goes with T[om]M[aschler]

  as always, Bruce

  In Patagonia was published in England on 14 October 1977 with an initial print run of 4, 000 copies. Paul Theroux was one of the first enthusiastic reviewers, writing in The Times. ‘He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and strange and seldom visited like the Land where the Jumblies live.’

  To Francis Wyndham

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | about the 20th Oct. [1977]

  Dear Francis,

  This is better than the Welsh mountains. Bare hills, bright light and most of the English gone back for the winter. I cycle to Siena for groceries and speak to shopkeepers in an incoherent mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin; they smile breezily and ask if I want peanuts.

  [John] Stefanidis is here and says the doctors have taken Violet446 off some drug and that she’s much better – and going out to lunch! I am so glad. It would be wonderful if she could go on as she was.

  The two of them have gone for lunch at Lord Lambton’s447 new papal villa, bristling with statues. I have stayed behind to write the bit about the Dahomean coup, have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line. So it goes. I am also holding the fort for the arrival of guests: Mme Lillaz and Mme Picasso,448 no less.

  So far I have seen the reviews in The Times and Observer. Not at all bad. Gratifying, in fact. Neither quite got the hang of it – or what the brontosaurus stands for. Who is Nicholas Wollaston?449

  I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you . . .

  As always, Bruce

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 24 October 1977

  Dear E.,

  I appear to have lost two library books belonging to the Museum of Mankind. They are Money Kyrle The Meaning of Sacrifice (green) and Donald Pierson Negroes in Brazil (beige). God knows what happened. As I remember it, I went through them in the Library itself, found only a few things of interest, and left them, without however getting back my borrowing slip. Could you a. check at the farm? (I know they are not at Carney).450 b. check to make sure I didn’t return them to the London Library by mistake?

  The whole of last summer is like a bad dream to me.451

  love,

  B

  P.S. Can you ask Pat Trevor-Roper to send 3 Betnesol N eye drops. Winter’s supply. B

  On 17 October Chatwin’s father posted a batch of reviews. ‘My reaction to them – worthy recognition of a lot of endeavour & hard work put in by you, and a full appreciation that the book is, to my mind, completely free of any padding . . . Thank you for your very understanding note before you left in reply to my letter.’

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]

  Many thanks for the enclosures. Tom Maschler sent others with the news that we have an enthusiastic American publisher and several offers for foreign translations. Eh! Hiu! Bruce

  To John [Michell]

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 29 October 1977

  Dear John,

  Many thanks for your card.

  The pianist! Ah! The pianist!

  E. Hemingway, who knew a thing of two though it’s fashionable to put him down, said if you take something OUT of a piece of writing it always shows. What I took OUT of that story was the head falling backwards at the end of the mazurka, automatically with no hint of it before, and lifting him off the piano stool into the bedroom.

  But that is off the record and should be torn up.

  Reviews rather good, the ones I’ve seen so far. All rather missing the point, but gratifying all the same. Nightmare interview with the Guardian. He had somewhere done his homework on my Sotheby period, which I was more than anxious to suppress. I suppose it can’t be helped. But I will never give an interview again, nor will I interview anybody. (He says!).

  Much love,

  Bruce.

  On 19 October Welch wrote praising In Patagonia. ‘Perhaps I particularly like it because it has the qualities I find in Mughal pictures: extraordinary portraiture, very deep and psychological, superb technically, with all sorts of enrichments.’

  To Cary Welch

  Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 5 November 1977

  Dear C.,

  What a welcome letter! I hadn’t thought of In Patagonia in terms of Mughal Art but the connection exists. The Babur-Nama452 has influenced me greatly in what I write. With the possible exception of Isaac Babel,453 I know of no writer capable of such economic portraits of people. What I love is the clear, staccato line with a fantastical flourish at the end.

  I must fish out my first piece of ‘writing’. It was on the masterfully described descent of Omar Sheikh Mirza (is that what Babur’s father was called?) from his pigeon loft.454

  Such directness in Babur, Such awesome GAPS. I haven’t got my Miss Beveridge here, otherwise there would be quotations. So there you are!

  Is there anything else in Indian literature as good? I once bought Abu’l Faz’l455 but sold it; it didn’t have the same effect. Perhaps it’s to do with their having being in Turki. I have often suspected the Turkish languages of having wonderful reserves of expression. It comes out in a lot of Russian literature.

  So far the critics have been very complimentary, but the FORM of the book seems to have puzzled them (as I suspect it did the publisher). There’s a lot of talk of ‘unclassifiable prose’, ‘a mosaic’, ‘a tapestry’, a ‘jigsaw’, a ‘collage’ etc. but no one has seen that it is a modern WONDER VOYAGE: the Piece of Brontosaurus is the essential ingredient of the quest. Patagonia, as the farthest place to which Man walked from his origins on foot, is a symbol as well as a country. I think the photographs were a mistake. If it gets reprinted I’m going to have them out.456

  Tom Maschler writes today that we have at last found a ‘really enthusiastic American publisher’457 but doesn’t say who. I suppose it’s the agent’s business to tell me.

  The days pass with the landscape of Southern Tuscany spread out before me. In human terms it’s all rather dreary. I don’t speak Italian: for every one word I master in Italian, I feel I’m massacring twenty in Spanish.

  Unfortunately the book I’m writing has to be a novel: the story is wonderful, but the facts are too few and contradictory to permit any other form. I had thought of giving it up when I was kicked out of Benin last winter. Then thought that was weak-kneed a
nd so I go on. I am in no position to judge how it will turn out.

  I haven’t rung up the Tiz [George Ortiz] yet. When I did so there was a recorded announcement; so I imagined they didn’t want callers. We were in the house a week before, and presumably being watched. It does seem uncanny that I said there were no kidnappings in Switzerland yet, and she gave me a look of despair and said YET.458

  I can’t think the H[oward]H[odgkin]459 situation is all that painful. The trouble is that it got out of hand. In the English ‘art world’ his became the most publicised private life of the century, and he didn’t know how to handle it. When everyone else overdramatises your life, it inevitably becomes more dramatic.

  What are your plans? I have said I will go to Afghanistan to watch horse-games on the Oxus Plain in March-April. Will you let me know if you are ever contemplating an Indian visit alone? I do want to go to India, but I want to find it for myself or be helped by really expert hands such as yours.

  What’s Jungle Jim’s filum?

  as always B

  To Deborah Rogers