Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  So, on Monday, stuck in bed at 10am on a bright sunny morning, Tom Maschler my publisher rang to say that In Patagonia had won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (previous winners include Evelyn Waugh and Dom Moraes!). So I stopped mooning and pulled myself together. Not that I am normally a mooner, but I have discovered I am far less hard-boiled than I thought.

  Of course, In Patagonia isn’t meant to be a travel book, but only you and the T.L.S. reviewer had the wit to see that, while I have been so browbeaten by people saying it is a travel book that I half came to believe it – or believed that I had failed in my purpose – to write an allegorical journey on the classic pattern (narrator goes in search of beast etc). Thank you for ‘a matter of multiple passions resolving into a final simplicity.’

  Then there were rows at the Sunday Times. I felt the only way to tackle the woman was to do it obliquely, elliptically. How can any European presume to pontificate about India? Vainly, I tried to describe what I saw and left the readers to make up their minds. The copy came back scrawled all over: WELL? IS SHE COMING BACK OR ISN’T SHE or WHAT IS THE POLITICAL SCENE? That kind of thing, with a request that I rewrite.

  But why should I? Print or don’t print, but don’t bother me. That has been my attitude over the past week. Preferably, don’t print, because anyway I don’t like writing about people I don’t like.

  English newspapers are dreadful. Unreadable, so why should one presume to write for them? The besetting sin of all English writers is their fatal attraction for periodicals, their fascination for reviews, and their passion for bickering in print.

  Resolution of the month: Never to write for newspapers.

  Quotation of the Month (from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave):

  ‘The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their new book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them creating anything different.

  ‘All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing of films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, so it should not be undertaken . . .’

  But what about the rent and drink bills? When the bills of his Horizon mounted to intolerable proportions, he sold himself to the Sunday Times and died there.

  I am not suggesting you walk out of India Today, but feel you have reached a point where journalism has taught you the necessary art of condensation and the technique of story-hunting, but as such has nothing to offer you. Nor am I suggesting you abandon your project on the dynasties of the demagogues (though that is grandiose and journalistic): but with your particular gifts, with your passion for India (though you needn’t confine yourself to India); with your unbearable curiosity into the motivations of people; with your capacity to arrange characters on a written page; you should be able to produce at least one lasting masterpiece. Don’t leave it too late. I’ve left it far too late.

  India is the land of the short story. It will never have its War and Peace. Mr Scott’s opus472 is a tragic bore; Mrs Jabberwallah473 can’t write; R. K. Narayan474 isn’t good enough and Mr Naipaul475 is a pontificator. Nor am I suggesting that you go out like the young Kipling with his notebook. But in a world where millions of hot-air-laden pages are printed annually, it becomes a duty to go, see and condense for future readers at some unseen date.

  I like Passage to India but believe that E.M.F[orster] is a poor model, as Somerset Maugham is a lethal one. Forgive me for suggesting you go on a course of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Maupassant, Flaubert (especially Un Coeur Simple) Ivan Bunin476 (whom I’ll get for you) Turgenev, and among the Americans early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway, and Carson McCullers especially The Ballad of the Sad Café.

  I wouldn’t take too much notice of this: it does reveal my inability to come to terms with English literature in general, excepting of course the Elizabethans and the outsiders. But we have nothing in the 19th or 20th Century to beat the narrative drive of someone like Poe.

  My latest passion is Racine, though heaven knows where it’s going to lead. But the past week has gone writing an introduction to another passion, the prose of Osip Mandelstam,477 the most important writer to be snuffed out by Stalin. Consider this, written at the time of the purge:

  ‘The bourgeois is of course more innocent than the proletarian, closer to the uterine world, to the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherubim. In Russia there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and the scarcity had a bad effect on the digestion of authentic revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie in its innocent aspect must be preserved, entertained with amateur sports, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.’

  Do try and come here – for or preferably not for The Sunday Times. If you can wangle a cheap ticket, I can fix you some money, not much, say £400, and you can pay me back some time in India.

  But I, I warn you, have had quite enough of Le Tombeau Vert for the present. Nor can I face the idea of your country in the monsoon when I have work (sic) to do. I have chosen to go to the Spanish Pyrenees (Pray God, they are as I remember them) to hole up in some cheap hotel, with Racine, Flaubert and a manuscript. And probably to stare at blank sheets of paper!

  I MAY not come back until the end of September, but you of course would be welcome wherever I am. A card (allow 10 days) or a cable to here will reach me, but I will try and furnish some kind of address.

  with love – as always

  Bruce

  Please forgive this rather chaotic letter written in the small hours of the morning.

  To Desmond Morris

  as from: Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 2 July 1978

  Dear Desmond Morris,

  I can’t thank you enough for your help over the wolf child piece. Corrections noted and passed on to the Sunday Times.

  Though I say it myself, the photo of Shamdev the Wolf Boy in the arms of his rescuer is rather amazing. I think it will be out in about three weeks.

  Best wishes, Bruce Chatwin

  To John Kasmin

  Barcelona | Spain | 10 July 1978

  I ate the Hawthornden Prize at the restaurant of Michel Guérard.478 Not what it’s cracked up to be. My cuisine minceur seemed at least to taste more than his. Have been running the bulls in Pamplona. Now hopefully down to work. B

  In the summer of 1978 Chatwin returned to Ronda, renting the former summerhouse of a convent.

  To Sunil Sethi

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | July 26 1978

  My dear S.,

  I write also at once, but yours, alas, has had a hard time reaching me. Don’t give a thought to your self-doubt: mine is in full flood. The last month has been a wearisome frittering away of time, unenjoyable, expensive, unproductive. I have at last found a place to hole up in, an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentine architect who has run out of money. BUT I FRY. I feel hotter here than in Benares. Five hours of work and I’m exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won’t; don’t like what I’ve already done: feel like burning the manuscript.

  No. I wasn’t being dishonest about Someone [Donald Richards] . . . yet the fact is I have left England feeling exceptionally bruised, bruised not the least by some of my closest friends, who use my obvious discomfiture to turn it into heartless gossip. There is something horribly claustrophobic about my country and yet, like you, I cannot get used to the life of exile.

  Yes. Cyril Connolly was a rotten novelist. He was also extremely nasty to me. The dreaded Widow Orwell479 first introduced me to him, saying
: ‘You two must get to know each other. You’re both so interested in . . . er . . . the truth.’ ‘Oh?’ said Connolly, ‘and what particular aspect of the truth are you interested in?’ However, the Unquiet Grave is a book I return to again and again, so brilliant yet so terribly indicative of the pitfalls of English literary life.

  Yes. Of course Mandelstam, in poetry, but more so in prose, is one of my gods. I have just written an introduction – a memory of his widow480 – to his Journey to Armenia. I have had you sent a copy of the magazine in which it has appeared, though I haven’t seen it yet and dread the mistakes. Don’t be too put off by its ridiculous name – BANANAS. It was started by a friend of mine481 as a one-issue joke to put down a rival, the New Review. The first issue was so successful, she got an Arts Council grant and now she’s stuck with the name.

  No. I don’t think I’ll go to Australia in the winter. Someone is Australian and the point is somehow missing. I am supposed to go to New York in October, that is, if this piece of mediocrity is done with. But after that, in theory at least, I’m free to float. I have a number of short stories to finish: then I want to travel for a couple of years, trying to put all my efforts into that form. I feel that Eastern (Post-Marxist) Europe would provide wonderful material.

  Yes. Of course I’ll go on a journey with you. Where? India? Further West or Further East? With nothing but ourselves? No impediments? No ‘other men’s books’? Only notebooks.

  The Wolf Boy article comes out next week in the Sunday Times Magazine. Of course they were much more pleased with that one than Mrs G[andhi]. My slight rows over Mrs G (which I don’t want talked about) were concerned with the fact that I wrote down only what I saw, not what other people say. They seemed to want a lot of opinion, of hot air, of pontificating. All I wanted to do was to get down some of the woman’s banality. When I read it to people, it was complete news to them. Most Westerners picture her as a cunning, devious schemer only (which of course she is) without getting a glimmer of her fatuous side. Anyway, unless it comes out soon, events will have superceded it. What’s happening? I do hope the prosecutions aren’t a panic move only. It’d be dreadful to have her back.

  No. My smile would not be cryptic or dismissing, but open, cheerful and rather hopeful. I do wish you were here – or I there?

  Let me know your plans. The trouble with London, for me, is that I have absolutely nowhere to stay.

  XXXXXX B

  PS If you know of anyone going to Kerala, can they bring some of the plain cotton lunghis – with coloured stripes.

  To Sunil Sethi

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | [July 1978]

  Dear S.,

  The last letter was scribbled off in indecent haste: I doubt this one will be much better. The technical problems of letter writing here are as follows: I get up at sunrise at eight; over coffee I sit out on a semicircular terrace, contemplate the mountains opposite, and the hideous glazed pottery busts of a nymph and the Infant Bacchus on the arched portico: then settle down to work. Four and a half hours brings me to 12.30 and letter writing time if I am to catch the post which closes at 2. I leave the house at 1, bounce down the mountain in my little Fiat and zig-zag up the other side of Ronda, which perches on the top of a sheer cliff and looks like an iced cake. I unlock the aluminium PO Box, usually empty and hurtle to the market, which also closes at 2. Twice I have had a fight with the local condessa (a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie) as to who shall have the last lettuce. Then to a bar in a side street which has magnificent tapas (hors d’oeuvres) which I make into lunch. The other day I had a raw clam and was violently sick in the middle of the night. The proprietor is a fantastical, red haired queen, with draperies of white flesh hanging from his upper arms. I have seen him smile once, when the bar was full of soldiers.

  Then usually I go for a swim at the pool of a friend called Magouche Phillips. She is an old friend, magnificent, stylish, the daughter of a US Admiral: her name was once Agnes MacGruder, that is, until she worked for Edgar Snow’s ‘Support Mao’ campaign in New York in the ’forties, met the painter Arshile Gorky and married him. She still lives off the contents of the studio, is haunted by Gorky’s suicide and quarrels frantically with all but one of her four daughters. One of these is married to the son of Stephen Spender, lives in Tuscany and is the most dangerous gossip I know (though I love her). Matthew Spender, a painter, has the mentality of an over-opinionated curate. A second daughter is married to a Chinese nature-freak in New York: a third (not by Gorky) to a really tiresome ‘hope’ of British philosophy: the fourth is an angel who will be here next month.

  So the afternoon is usually spent bellyaching about Magouche’s children. Then I look in on two peasants who keep the house, Curro and Incarna, who keep me in onions, raspberries, cucumbers. They live in a spotless white house shaded by walnut trees in the bottom of the valley. Then I try to work for another three hours, but can rarely get much done other than prepare notes for the next day.

  After that cook dinner. Last night disgusting experiment with spices bought in Morocco. Then read Flaubert, Racine or Turgenev if I’m up to it: Maupassant or Babel if my eyes start to flutter.

  Will you please cable me if any of your European plans are crystallising? Sorry to be insistent, but one or two people may be imploding on me and you are emphatically first on the list. As I have said, all you have to do to get here is to go to my travel agent, John Ferer, 54 Shepherd Market, London WI and they will get you the ticket for Malaga, but you must say if you want to go back from there by plane or train, which takes some time, but is not a hardship, via Madrid and Paris. You must also think, enquire whether you need visas for Spain etc. I imagine you do: some Moroccans were kicked off the boat at Tangier for not having them.

  Also you must tell me if you want me to write one of those shameful TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN letters to cope with the UK customs. HH of Jodpur482 had a terrible time getting through immigration: a lot of sneering ‘Oh! Yes’s?’ when he tried to give them the Eton and King’s number. Going with anyone through the British customs makes me writhe with shame.

  What I mean by a Kerala lunghi (I think I mean a Calicut lunghi) is a piece of plain white thin cotton about five feet by four with plain coloured bands two inches deep or less, preferably green, running along the upper and lower edges and set in from the sides. Also a pair of those Gujarati sandals, English size 9½-10, but don’t bother with anything else. My shirt, made up from the Benares tussore, should be ready by the time I reach London.

  And now it’s one already and I must think of going. Today I am salesman for Curro’s raspberries to the ex-patriate colony. I seem to be able to get him twice what the wholesaler gives him: the English ladies will settle down this evening to making raspberry jam.

  Have procrastinated about what to say next for five minutes and I must go.

  all love, B

  To Keith Milow

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | [summer 1978]

  My dear K.,483

  Your letter came on a morning when I was quite unable to work: the Levante is blowing hot, white wind from the Sahara and my head is spinning. Added to the horrors of a meal in Ronda last night which gave me a liver attack.

  Otherwise all is well: the Flaubertian conte is progressing pero muy lentamente. I might just manage to finish its hundred or so pages by the end of the year. What I had estimated at three months will be at least six, but that’s the usual story. Yet imagine the Chartreuse de Parme484 being written in eleven weeks and packed off to the publisher without need of corrections!

  On the subject of Flaubert, read Un Coeur Simple, in French, or at least with a French text in hand. Best thing written in the 19th century – and ours?

  Don’t quite know what to do when the lease of this house runs out in late October. Whether to gruel on, or seek a change of scene. I had hoped to be in NY by November 1st. Hope dashed.

  I too am impatient to see the crosses: there is no doubt in my mind you are the best artist o
f your generation in England: that those concrete crosses had the look of real grandeur (in the best sense); and that if (and I hope you’ll forgive this) you keep away from all the slick and sleazy techniques of the photographer’s studio, you have the makings of a great artist. So there! Don’t flap too much about the critics either – and never try to please them – and don’t even complain about them (it isn’t worth it). The function of an artist is to work for a) himself b) to leave something memorable for the future, to shore up the ruins. Fuck the rest of them! However, I confess to a sneaking pleasure by a card I got yesterday from Jan Morris485 saying that my description of the Welsh in Patagonia ‘actually moved him/her to tears’.

  I also confess to wearing a blue shirt belonging to you: you’ll get it back one day.

  Give my love to Kynaston486 and say I’ll hope to see him soon. Anyone else there as well.

  all love, Bruce

  To Ivry Freyberg

  Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 26 July 1978

  Many thanks for enthusiastic note. Came at a good moment when I was in an impasse with the new book. Oh! what a mess! Have rented exquisite neo-classical pavilion on beautiful hillside, elegantissimo, but this week have been frying. Wish you could come here. Masses of room. Much love to all especially the godson, B