Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The most beautiful Cézanne in the world is to my mind Henry McIllhenny’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne, a tiny picture by comparison with others, but . . . He is a nice, tough, open-minded man, who likes Australia a lot, and has of course recently sold the wonderful, but very conventional still-life to pay for his yacht. I wonder whether it would be worth putting some kind of proposal to him: that eventually etc, in return for keeping it now, and in return for X dollars now and Y later, he might even like the idea of it ending up in Canberra. Instead, that is, of Philadelphia, which is of course bursting with Cézannes.

  Poor Madame de Chaisemartin680. In my day she was quite a character: a defending barrister, who specialised in the cases of poor Algerian immigrants on murder charges. I thought she was terrific. It was I . . . Je garde mes souvenirs . . . who set in motion the deal whereby the Grandes Baigneuses, then hanging in the maid’s corridor, was bought by the National Gallery.

  What am I reading here? I have the Sinyavsky, in French, but cannot finish it. Abram Terz to the fore, and less of Sinyavsky. Brilliant flashes, but on the whole, unacceptable lumps of fantasy. Don’t know anything about The Case of Mr Crump.681 The Plains I like a lot. Strangely Germanic in tone; but then I have thought that the Germanic suits Australia very well. I’d love to see what else he does. That’s a real voice for you. Otherwise, three novels of [Italo] Svevo682 who I’d never read before; The Idiot, which I last read in the Sahara; Michel Tournier, who is obviously inventive but I now think is far too kitsch; Dialogues of Plato, to see how you express ideas in dialogue (The answer is, ‘I don’t’) plus the usual array of technical and scientific stuff. I have a new friend in Michael Ignatieff,683 a Canadian-Russian, whose grandfather was Education Minister in the Duma. You might like to look at his essays published by Chatto, The Needs of Strangers. Otherwise, I am completely out of it . . . They were trying to get me to write something on the sinking of the Belgrano. I had a go, but was so disgusted by what I’d written – bellelettristic outpouring on events I knew nothing about, that I gave up – to everyone’s annoyance. I wouldn’t mind a glance at the S[hirley] H[azzard] Lecture;684 I agree with you, the days of the pontificateur are over.

  It’s getting dark and a bit cold on my terrace; the bats are out, the sea is calm and grey, and there is a lurid orange line along the horizon.

  As always, B

  PS Let me know about India

  Whew! The S[alman] R[ushdie]685 drama. Give them my love if you see them. I may have put my foot in it: because when he was in London, with his wife, I gave my congratulations etc when, in fact, he was leaving for Australia then and there.

  To Diana Melly

  c/o Leigh Fermor | Kardamyli | Messinia | Greece | [March 1985]

  Dearest Diana,

  Lovely to get your card. I couldn’t think who would be writing from the Lygon Arms. Shades of my great-aunts686 who would go to paint watercolours in the Cotswolds!

  The weather here is alternatively lovely and tempestuous. But my room is always warm and, in a way, I rather welcome a storm. From the window I can watch the cypresses lashing about and the frothing waves a hundred yards away. After a storm though, I begin to get a bit chesty: but then everyone else does, so I’m not alone. I now realise the full enormity of this book, which seems to stretch before me like an endless tunnel. The only thing to do is press on regardless without looking back even, and then – only then – see if one can sort out the mess. It may take years.

  I’m glad I came here. The winter in England is going to do me in, and I simply cannot summon up the concentration for a big work. They were after me the other day to write a piece for Granta on the Belgrano. I spent four days or so, fretting, getting unbelievably angry, and writing such drivel that, in the end, I had to give up. I cannot write about what I cannot know. The only letters I seem to get are from Australians: they’re wonderful correspondents, as indeed they have to be. My great friend Nin Dutton is coming over in the summer, and I hope to spend some time with her in Prague. Otherwise, the only date is Midsummer’s Night in Finland, where I have to make some kind of speech. The trouble is that this place fills up around the middle of May: so I will have to find somewhere else. Maybe Patmos even?

  I know it’s bad of me, but I’m not really inclined to leave Greece. I wish you’d come here in late April . . . Let me know because I’ll have to make sure there’s space. I’m sure there is.

  Love to everyone. XXXB

  PS I’m writing to Tom Maschler to see if he’ll send me a copy/proof of Francis [Wyndham]’s book.687

  On 4 February Tom Maschler had written asking to know when Chatwin might complete his manuscript. ‘I assume it is the book we talked about! i.e. in shorthand AFRICA.’

  To Tom Maschler

  c/o Leigh Fermor | Kardarmyli | Messinia | Greece | 1 March 1985

  My dear Tom,

  Lovely to hear from you. I’m stuck in here for at least another three or four months. In fact, the only date I have at present is in Finland, on Midsummer’s Night, where I have to make some kind of speech. Otherwise, I don’t intend to do another thing but write this long (How I dread the word ‘long’!) book. Should we say it’s longer than anything I’ve attempted before. It is, I suppose, a novel: though of a very strange kind; but as I have the most unbelievable difficulty slotting all the bits in, I’d really rather not talk about it. One thing I’m sure of, is that it won’t be ready for publication this autumn. The fatal trap, I’ve discovered, is to think one is a ‘writer’ and to go in for all the paraphernalia that surrounds writerdom. So for what it’s worth, I’m keeping things a bit close to my chest.

  I’d love to see a proof of Francis [Wyndham]’s stories (or novel) depending on which way one looks at it. If you have one handy, you couldn’t put it in the post. He’s terrifically bucked by the care and trouble you’ve taken, and I know that all his friends must be very grateful to you.

  Directly I have something to show – which will be when I dare go over what exists and do a re-write – I’ll of course send it on to you.

  as always Bruce

  To Ninette Dutton

  c/o Leigh Fermor | Kardamyli | Messinia | Greece | 1 March 1985

  Dearest Nin,

  Well, I was a saying to myself ‘why don’t I go trotting off to the post office and see if there’s a letter from Nin,’ and Joan Leigh Fermor knocks on the door and says, ‘I’ve been to get your post’ and there was a letter from Nin. Well, this is good news, about the trip.

  I’d dearly love to go to Prague with you, but May 31st is a wee bit early. I’m not that keen to leave Greece so soon. On the other hand it could be that I won’t be able to bear Greece another moment (unlikely!). The only fixed date I have for the whole of the summer is Midsummer’s Night, in the arctic circle (or near it), in Finland – which does mean that I will be drifting round London and/or Paris in the 10 days or so before. I may not go to London – or for that matter to England – for the whole of next year. I have a US advance and fee from teaching at a US university in the Fall, and may very easily take what they call a tax-year. I can’t promise it, quite, but can you signal if you want to borrow the London flat? There is somebody in it, on the understanding that he’ll get out if I need it. But before even moving in that direction, the question is whether you want it. London is a nightmare of expense in June; and I wouldn’t dream of staying in a hotel.

  But if I didn’t see you in England, we could have a fine time in Paris. This book is real Slow-Boat-department (how wonderful that yours is done!) but I do have a sense of it now and it does move in a more or less orderly progression. I was torn, terribly, by my decision not to come back to Oz this winter. But I think it was wise.

  Foreign perspectives are often the best. I have a lovely room here: a view of olives and cypresses and the sea. Most days are clear and lovely, but tonight we have a Siberian tempest, and I have to run the gauntlet of 300 yards of muddy path in drenching rain, to go and cook Circassian chicken for Philip Sherrard,688 exp
ert on Greek poetry, with a wife who drones on about the Golden Section in Greek Art.

  Next day. As I wrote the sentence above there was a knock on the door and it was Philip Sherrard who had lost the stupid wife in the storm and was afraid she was at the bottom of a ravine. We had to go out with torches, but she had taken refuge in a chapel and was subdued for most of the evening. He, on the other hand, was not: he banged on and on about what was in my book? What was my definition of a nomad? And so on. It then turned out he was a creationist, who seriously (I think) believed in 4004BC as the date of all things. At that point I clammed up: ‘There is one thing with which one simply cannot cope,’ Konrad Lorenz once said to me, ‘and that is plain stupidity.’

  They went this morning and I have spent the day at my typewriter in the company of my Cistercian monk (or his fictional equivalent) on the beach north of Broome.

  I may come to live in Greece: or at least have a hideout here. It’s wonderfully anonymous in the winter, especially, and in the winter the cheapest bucket-shop fares to Australia are via Olympic Airways from Athens.

  All my love to you and Tisi (it took ages for my postcard to get there!).

  xx Bruce

  On 21 March 1985 Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote to Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire: ‘We’ve got a fellow-writer called Bruce Chatwin staying, very nice, tremendous know-all, reminds me of a couplet by O Goldsmith.

  And still they gazed and still the wonder grew

  That one small head could carry all he knew.

  ‘He’s a great pal of Jackie Onassis.’

  Deborah Devonshire replied on 4 April: ‘Bruce Chatwin! OH how unfair you knowing him. He wrote a book (if it’s the fellow I think it is) which I so adored I’ve never really felt like another.

  ‘How ghoul if he’s a know-all, but I wd like just to see & smell him to see for myself. Or is it like meeting royal people & actors, better not?’

  (They did meet, eventually, at a Thai restaurant in Fulham.)

  To Murray Bail

  Hotel Theano | Kardamyli | Messinia | Greece | [April 1985]

  Dear Murray,

  This’ll have to be a quick one since Paddy and Joan [Leigh Fermor] and I are going on an expedition to Arcadia and I want to catch the post.

  Many thanks for the Shiva N[aipaul] piece689 which I read without agreeing with it. The white Land Council heavies are, as you said, ludicrous in their pretensions and self-deceit: I ran up against the biggest operator in the business who had got an Aboriginal Council to buy him a plane. Of course S[hiva] N[aipaul] should never have been banned: but reading his piece you end up thinking he actually wanted to be banned in order to air his particular prejudice. The Land Rights Movement is not all bad; not all doomed; things do go better when they get back to the outstations. Instead of adopting a high-and-mighty tone about the historical process etc he should have discovered what incredibly artful dodgers they are. Aboriginal Australia was – and still is – one of the world’s most astonishing phenomena – the anthropologists and linguists are still only scratching the surface.

  Enough of that! My news – and this is DEAD secret for you alone! – is that I have been offered a trusteeship of the London Nat Gall – following in your footsteps!690 In fact, honoured though I may be etc, I think I shall turn it down. The idea of being present for at least 8 meetings a year in London fills me with terrible despair. My only reason for embarking on such a thing would be literary . . .!

  I know, from reproductions, that Afternoon in Naples [by Cézanne]! Idiots! Why didn’t they buy a sketch?

  I’m leaving here in the weekend and going to a friend’s house in Spetsai691. Then quite an adventure to stay with the Abbot of Chilandari monastery on Mount Athos for 2 weeks. Derek Hill is taking me – and has been every year for the past 15. Athos is obviously another atavistic wonder – then E. and I may drive to Finland via Hungary, Poland etc.692

  All this depends on the progress of work between now and June. I now have a huge pile of paper – which has to all get under control.

  Letters from now on best to Homer End, Ipsden, Oxford.

  Funny I was thinking of Nov 7 for Delhi.

  Much love to Margaret and yourself. B

  To Pam Bell

  Spetsai | Greece | 12 May 1985

  All well. Adored your letter as always, but am so inundated and fatigued by words that I can’t face anything grander than a p.c. – even to those I love the best. Greece in springtime is glorious but vaguely lethargic. Tomorrow I shall be halfway to 90!693 An ‘Australian’ book inches forward – para by para.

  Much love B

  A week after his 45th birthday Chatwin set out to fulfil a boyhood ambition: to visit Mount Athos. In 1980 he had wanted to come with James Lees-Milne (‘No, Bruce, I said, you can’t’) who had known intimately Chatwin’s boyhood hero, Robert Byron. Along with The Road to Oxiana, The Station was one of Chatwin’s ‘sacred’ texts: Byron’s account of his 1926 sojourn on this 30-mile-long Greek peninsula – the spiritual centre of Orthodox Christianity – in the company of David Talbot Rice, Chatwin’s art tutor at Edinburgh. Next, Chatwin turned to Derek Hill who had visited Athos 15 times. On 21 May they arrived at the small port of Ouranoupolis from where ferries depart for the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Daphni, below Mount Athos.

  To Pam Bell

  Mount Athos | Greece | May 1985

  Strange to relate, the evening after I had posted the previous p/c, I found myself in the frontier village of Athos, Ouranoupolis, having dinner with an Austrian lady who lives there: the companion of an aged Mrs Loch694 (born NanKivell). Her name Hanchin – something like that!695 She began to describe what she thought one of the most beautiful places in the world – the lake, the mountains – and do you know where it was . . . where she had stayed with Eileen Bell696 etc. XXX B

  To Francis and Shirley Steegmuller

  Postcard, Stavronikita Monastery|On Athos, but as from 77 Eaton Place | 5 June 1985

  I think of you often. Am having a fearful battle with my ‘Australian’ book. Really very difficult – and the end by no means in sight. I daren’t go back, either, in case I am tempted to tear the whole thing up. Any chance of seeing you in London or Paris/Aug/Sept. Then I am supposed to teach at Vassar but will probably chicken out.

  To Susan Sontag

  Postcard, fresco of Last Supper at Stavronikita Monastery | Mount Athos | Greece | 5 June 1985

  Sorry to have missed you in London: but as you see, I’ve been out of the world a bit. Not too seriously! I’ll be coming to NY in the Fall. As always, Bruce

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  Chilandari | Mount Athos | Greece | 6 June 1985

  Among the stranger coincidences is the fact that the vintner, a wonderful Medieval character, Father Damian used to work at Brinton’s:697 a young novice – also of Serbian origin – was born in Barnt Green698 and was apprenticed at Milwards in Redditch:699 an experience that gave him his monastic vocation. XX Bruce

  One entry in Chatwin’s notebooks read: ‘The search for nomads is a quest for God.’ Staying on Mount Athos at the Serbian monastery of Chilandari – where his former professor David Talbot Rice had felt at his happiest – Chatwin woke up at 5.30 every morning and attended services. One afternoon, he walked to the monastery of Stavronikita once painted by Edward Lear. ‘The most beautiful sight of all was an iron cross on a rock by the sea.’ Whether moved by the rich liturgical worship or the tradition of mystical prayer or the unbroken continuity with the past, he then wrote: ‘There must be a God.’ The significance of his experience was later recorded by James Lees-Milne in his diary on 14 February 1990. ‘Derek Hill . . . talked of his visit to Mount Athos with Bruce Chatwin, who was so moved by the experience that he could not write about it.’ Elizabeth says, ‘When he came back, he said to me: “I had no idea it could be like that.” It wasn’t like his other voyages of discovery. It was completely internal.’ The inner change wrought on the white ledge below Stavronikita, the impact of that si
mple rusted metal cross, would result, three years later, in a firm desire to be received into the Orthodox Church.

  To Murray Bail

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 9 July 1985

  Greece in summer very bad for work. A mistake! The sun and wind destroy the brain cells at an incredible rate. Nonetheless, we do, I take it, still have our date in India. As always B

  To Deborah Rogers

  Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 27 July 1985

  Just got back. Catarrh started in the Pas-de-Calais.