Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Page 29
To Alison Oxmanton
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 26 July 1978
My dear Ali,
I hope this catches you at Birr: E. said you’d be there the whole of August. I am sitting out the summer writing about your old stamping ground, Dahomey,487 on a beautiful Andalucian hillside. The house – pavilion, I should say – that I have rented belongs to an Argentine friend of your friend Christopher Balfour, whose name figures prominently in the visitor’s book. I do wish you’d come and put in a few days here on your way back to Algiers. It really isn’t too far round – and none at all if you go by land and across the Straits.
I’m going to try and come and visit you during the winter, for a protracted stay, if you don’t mind (you don’t have to put me up). I have always been fascinated by the country of Camus, and some years ago I did a story for the Sunday Times about an Algerian who murdered a bus conductor in Marseilles.488 At the time it put me in quite good odour with the regime, despite the bad things I said about it, for my full outrage was directed at the French and in particular the City and Mayor of Marseilles. Algiers is one of the oddest places I’ve ever been, but full of literary possibilities, and the fact that you are now there makes it all the more inviting.
Perhaps we could take a trip to the South?
All my best to Brendan and the Rosses, and do let me know if you’re passing. Planes can be met from Malaga.
Much love, Bruce
To Derek Hill
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 1 August 1978
On the strength of a rather meagre Argentine royalty I’ve rented a Neo-Classical pavilion of great elegance on the hillside opposite Ronda. Slogging away slowly at a book. E has gone to Geneseo to try and restrain Gertrude from building a large sub-Lutyens mansion which would be another Sweet Briar Farm but much more expensive. Do come here. Much love, Bruce
To Francis Wyndham
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 1 August 1978
Dear Francis,
After a nightmarish week in the Pyrenees, humid valleys screaming with French children, I spent all the money I’ve got renting a Neo-Classical ‘pavillion’ on a high, dry hillside.
Mr da Silva is once again progressing – or at least moving forward – though it’s hard to predict what the end result will be. Looking back on the past few, extremely frustrating months – I can see they weren’t quite so weird after all. I do have slightly clearer ideas about how it should be.
I’m completely out of touch here: no phone, no newspapers: BUT somebody told me last night that the Sunday Times is in full crisis. I can’t say I’m too surprised – or for that matter sorry. But do let me know what’s happening. Also when and if Mrs Gandhi is coming out.
I am going to stick it out here until October at least: by which time I’ll either be finished or in need of a change. After that, who knows/Australia?
Peter Eyre489 and I had a lovely evening in Paris seeing a bad production of Phèdre in the open air. In a Hotel in the Marais. A lunch with Sonia Orwell. My God, she’s brittle. I hope I didn’t offend when I suggested that English lawyers always take you for a ride.
As always, Bruce
Of course, if there were any logic in the world, you, James and Chloe490 would take advantage of cheap flights to Malaga and come here for a holiday. There are three deluxe bedrooms. B
To Margharita Chatwin
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 17 August 1978
Dear M.,
Often I can’t think what I’m doing in this overelaborate house: it has fountains, potted palms, arcades, some hideous statuary, a wonderful view and every comfort but electricity. The last wouldn’t matter if the days weren’t so hot and lethargic. I feel quite lively at night. I’ve tried working to the light of a butagas lamp, but the thing overheats so much you’re back where you started, feeling lethargic again.
Nevertheless, I believe the book may be finished one day. This, I might say, I have [not] believed before: so that is already an advance. The technical problems have been for me so colossal: how to string so many disparate facts and ideas into the life of one man, and carry the reader sailing from page to page. It will also be extremely small. I doubt if it’ll print up to much more than a hundred pages. But then I’ve never liked long books myself, so I don’t see why I should try and write them myself. Unless you’re Tolstoy, most of the ‘great books’ of the world should have been cut in half.
The American reviews of In Patagonia are coming through and, so far, are much the same as the English. Who knows? I might even make some money. In the Pop Magazine ‘Rolling Stone’ there is a cartoon of the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat.
After bellyaching about the Mrs Gandhi article, the editor of the Sunday Times magazine now says he likes it enormously. So where are you? It’ll be out on August 30th or thereabouts, cut to ribbons I have no doubt, and I bet there’s a printer’s strike as well. The whole thing seems to be on its last legs. Do you wonder in an organisation where Old Etonians have to trim their accents to Yorkshire when they go upstairs to the Editor, to cockney when they go downstairs to the printing rooms?
Magouche Phillips and Xan Fielding491 are here, about six miles away. I go and swim in the pool. There are a couple called Zulueta, he the son of the Foreign Minister in the Republic and a great expert on the anopheles mosquito: she English, rather a bluestocking but most agreeable. Otherwise society in Ronda revolves around the penniless Lord Kilmarnock and his wife the ex-Mrs Kingsley Amis; two Americans who are the Spirit of Lake Tahoe: another called Mr Finkel . . . with many extra syllables . . . stein: a German called Siegfried: a memsahib lady called Grace: a Chilean sculptor and the local Condessa who is a Southern Rhodesian called Faffie.
God knows what will result from Elizabeth’s American trip: the Chanlers all seem at sixes and sevens and plainly need something to DO.
Fares to Malaga aren’t expensive and it costs nothing to live here. Would you think of coming out in September?
much love, B
Following the coup in Benin, Chatwin had found himself on the same flight to South America as Nigel Acheson, a teacher at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro. Over the next two months, Acheson had become Chatwin’s host and guide in Brazil.
To Nigel Acheson
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 25 August 1978
My dear N.,
Nice talking to you. I thought Much Birch492 might have its effect and have thought of the good lady mixing her China and Indian and shaking her head sadly over her son.
I’m not entirely sure I approve of feeding Joao493 with Black Magic, unless he was going to the gym as he promised. To my eternal regret there has been a six month silence now. My replies in Portuguese were quite inadequate, both in literary and emotional content, to this kind of thing:
‘Tenho pensado muito em voce de dia de noite a toda hora nao me esquece I do my love my beautiful, tenho vontade de te abracer te beijar sentir o seu corpe que tanto bem me faz. Quando esta frio eu penso em sair de casa a sua procure para me esquentar aquecer meu corpo com o seu calor, mas logo me lembre que e impossivel te encontrar pois voce esta tao longe de mim.494’
– which for rhythm and poetic expression could almost come out of the Song of Songs.
Ah! the geographical impossibility of passion!
Plans: I’d adore you to come here, and if in September you wanted to go to Lisbon, I have some research (minor odds and ends, like what would a Lt. Colonel in the Portuguese Army be wearing in the tropics in 1875?) – and of course YOU, if you wouldn’t mind, would be an enormous help.
I would even pay the ticket as a research fee, so that honour would be satisfied all round. Let me know if you can make it and I’ll send you a cheque.
The only minor complication is the possibility of the arrival of a friend from India: the 23 yr old whizz-kid of Indian journalism, whom I want to take around a bit. The three of us in my tiny car might
make rather an ill-assorted group. The chances are, however, that he won’t scrape up the money for the fare. Getting to Europe for an Indian is tantamount to disposing of a real fortune.
How is your Television project coming along?495 Watch out for those people! They are professional time-wasters and you must get them to pay researchers’ fees. Incidentally, I think you’re quite barmey to have anything to do with films or articles. Your Iquique material and the family connections are the stuff of a marvellous novel. And you should sit down, hack it into a rough form and then go out again to fill out the details.
Cable me and I’ll ring you. But do state a time because I have to book the call.
As always, B
To Francis Wyndham
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 2 September 1978
The sizzling heat seems to be over and Mr da Silva advances ‘pero lentamente’. Might get finished one day. Ow! the strains of composition and of keeping up the momentum. How to eliminate the longueurs without eliminating the sense. Will never tackle a historical subject again. Saw Julian Jebb496 last week.
Much love Bruce
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 2 September 1978
Yes. A bitch to write – about a bitch. I went very sympathetic to anyone who attempted to govern the ungovernable, but in the end couldn’t dredge up one particle of sympathy for the woman. A pity: I don’t like writing about people I dislike. Even in the villains you can usually find something – but Mrs G[andhi] is the essence of bathos. XXX B Atalante497 my FAVOURITE movie
To Elizabeth Chatwin
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 6 September 1978
Dear E.,
We were cut off in the middle of the call: no warning of course.
The letter from Whinney Murray,498 dated 1970, makes no sense to me at all. I propose to ignore it: if they come back yawling for money, I shall say that I had NO income for that year, and what was more, the accountant’s bill but swallowed up the free-of-tax grant on which I was supposed to live.
I was 14 weeks at Teddy’s: at £25 per week that makes £350 in rent: I don’t think I paid quite that but with telephone calls etc.499 we’ll put in for that amount. Enclosed is a cheque for £400 to tide you over the next week or two: I suppose I can afford it: I’ve now completely lost count of what I have and what I owe. We’ll just have to hope and pray that money does come from Messrs. Summit Books. The reviews (I have a huge batch of them) are simply extraordinary. New York Times’ ‘Most praised book of the Season’ etc. A cartoon in the Rolling Stone which you will doubtless be getting of the author in bowler hat and cup of tea and Patagonian peak. ‘Home of the unicorn’ N.Y. Times – a Pepe Gonzalez figure with bagpipes. ‘Youthful Briton finds adventure in Harsh Land’ Youngstown Ohio Vindicator. The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (Boston Globe): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his Madeleine’ – ENFIN somebody’s got the point: I wrote off at once and told him so.
Well, I hope Ali [Oxmanton] does come. I shall probably have Sunil [Sethi] here IF he can wheedle a ticket out of India Today; the whole thing sounds rather problematical, and I have sent off a cable for all of 1500 pesetas missing off one’s letter of the address. Will have to send another in the morning.
At some stage this month I shall be going to Lisbon for a week, to try and inject some life into the Bahia section without actually going back.
I have to say I wish I’d never started this bloody book, but it does crawl ahead pero muy lentamente.
I simply can’t begin to advise you about the farm from here, because a. I have no idea whether you have had any conversation at all with your bone-headed family financial experts on the pros and cons b. whether or what you will have to pay in capital gains tax on the land i.e. in what proportion to the house etc. It seems raving to go into the blue (for you, not necessarily me) and hand out money to the bloodhounds of H.M.G. Financially, that is, if you want to stay in England, it would be better to have more land and less house, rather than vice versa, or I should say better land.
My urgent requirement is a small base which I do not have to get into hock with mortgages: I do not want to have to make bread and butter doing journalism, because ultimately it corrodes.
Have had to send the dog down to Curro. Nightmare of howling in the night. And as I predicted, the worst has happened, the rug and the dining table cover, crawling with ticks. Felt an itching in the groin the other day, lo! a pinkish grey balloon. The gatito has needless to say become extremely domesticado and constantly gets under my feet.
Absolutely no news from Ronda. Am going to the coast for the weekend; a mixture of Bill Davis,500 Gerald [Brenan] and Janetta [Parladé]. Magouche off to the funeral of her friend Missie501 at Cadaques.
I may very easily come back to Inglaterra, or at least to Paris in mid Oct. But all depends on the next three weeks, as to how the final haul, 40 pages shapes up. It’s going to be a very small book.
love B
PS Sunil’s just been to the Pondicherry ashram and concludes that the profundities of Sri Aurobindo502 are totally meaningless.
To John Kasmin
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | 7 September 1978
Dear K,
Red letter day today: yours and the first batch of American reviews of In Patagonia to burn your eyes out. Not that there won’t be a stinker somewhere in the pipeline. One, by the staff writer on the Boston Globe, really got the hang of what it was about and put it down better than I could. It’s the review that pleased me most. But I must stop reading them. Paralysing!
I know Worth Maltravers503 from my childhood and associate that part of the coast with unalloyed happiness. Felt a trickle of envy when I compared your cottage with the Green Hole of Glos, but this soon dissipated in a burst of joy for you. I was more than sceptical about that place in the la-di-da country round Banbury.
From here there is no news. I am well, calm, a bit lonely and writing. The house lies on a beautiful clean dry hillside in ilexes and olives overlooking the Serrania de Ronda, but for all its palm court and hygienic glazed statuary it was little better than an electric oven in August. Better now and cooler breezes blowing. The book is shaping up pero muy lentamente. Enormous technical problems yet to be overcome. Going to be very strange. I had bargained for big dramatic set-pieces but these are all reduced to a few lines.
A peasant couple called Curro and Incarna look after me and we are now all three glued to each other with dog-like devotion. He was being cheated on his raspberry crop by the wholesaler, and I found out he should be getting double the price. There’s a Chilean sculptor across the valley, a mad German below and Magouche and Xan Fielding about eight miles away. A friend from India is coming in a couple of weeks, also Alison Oxmanton on her way back to Algeria. I don’t know if E. will show up again. She has been in the US where her family are in the middle of one of their nightmarish brouhahas. Should the mother leave her huge unsaleable house and build, for half a million dollars, another large unsaleable house on the adjoining site? Not a subject that arouses sympathy in me.504
. . . I left England in a particularly bruised condition. I long to live there, but in a situation that doesn’t get on top of me. You are right: the answer is to live alone. I was reflecting the other day that the people I really miss out here are, for some reason, my parents and you. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to get your letter.
They say the weather’s wonderful through October. The best time for walking if you could squeeze a week in. There are endless off season cheap flights to Malaga, two hours by car.
I’ll be here till the end of Oct, then see how far I’ve got on, and maybe hoof it to New York for a spell.
What’s the name of your pal in Barcelona? I’ll be coming back through there to look up some Latin-American types.
See you soon, love, B
To Nigel Acheson
Apartado 73 | Ronda | Malaga | Spain | Monday 11 [September 1978]
Dear N.
Ay! I bleed for you. I had it very badly about twelve years ago: got it from a needle giving me an anti-histamine shot for a mosquito bite in Sicily: had it obviously much worse than you, for I would never have been able to compose such a letter. In convalescence I made a thorough study of Nerval and Baudelaire (two very suitable poets for the hepatitic) and conceived vague ideas of a literary future. In fact it changed my life: I suddenly had a horror of the so-called ART WORLD, and though I went on to be a Director of Sotheby’s everything about the firm filled me with claustrophobia and disgust.
You have to rest: and let me tell you CHEW two cloves of garlic before you eat anything else in the morning. The best thing for purifying the blood – and for keeping ‘loved ones’ away.
I agree: wherever I go, particularly in deserts, the image of that misty Gloucestershire valley passes before my eyes. But one should never go near it, except to recharge the IDEA of it once every two or three years.