Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Page 47
To Anne-Marie Mykyta
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 21 October 1987
My dearest Anne-Marie,
A. Thank you for buying it, let alone finishing it. B. for your charming last line. I’ve been in the wars recently, with an impossible malady picked up in W China – but I’m quite well again
Forgive the haste. I have a mountain of mail to catch up. All my love to you, Bruce
To Harriet Harvey-Wood829
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 22 October 1987
Dear Harriet Harvey-Wood,
Of course, I’d be interested in coming but I haven’t a clue where I’ll be next July. What’s the latest I can let you know?
Yours ever, Bruce Chatwin
To Harriet Harvey-Wood
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 22 November 1987
Dear Harriet Harvey-Wood,
Forgive me, I can’t remember if I’ve replied to your letter of Oct 27 or not. Ach! The disorganisation! Yes: Do please be in touch around May: then I’ll know better how the land lies.
As ever, Bruce Chatwin
To Murray Bail
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 11 December 1987
My dear Murray,
Well, it was good to get a glimpse of you. I agree with you about the London literati: the only possible use I can think of for a spaceship would be to take them out of our orbit – but then more would grow!
Salman and I had a rather thick time of it recently vis-à-vis changing our agent. Tremendous hullabaloo in the press! But it seems to have simmered down now. In the old days, writers – ‘so-called’ – were thought to be neurotic, self-obsessed, primadonna-ish people, forever suffering from ‘blocks’, emotional problems etc. and agents were calm hard-working people who would sort out their problems. Now the Tables are turned. The ‘writers’ simply sit down and write their books and, as an additional burden, have to cope with hopelessly neurotic publicity-seeking agents who think nothing of airing their neuroses, and their business! to the press. However, as I said, it’s simmering down, and I, for what it’s worth, yesterday, finished a novel. Quite a carry on! The title – Utz simple as that! The most that can be said for it is that it was designed as an entertainment to carry me through those rather beleaguered months. Admittedly, it does bear very little relation to anything I’ve ever done. A kind of Middle European fairy-story – with some savage digs at the art business! We shall see . . .
I had a very odd week in Paris, at a conference for Russian and other dissidents who, regrettably nowadays seem to perform the role of clown for people who wish their anti-Marxist views confirmed. If you think that Mr Gorbachev has things to contend with from the Old Bolshevik Guard, that is nothing to the New Guard. There is in Russia a political ‘secret ’ society called Pamiat (which means ‘remembrance ’). It has a million signed up members in Moscow alone: and what it wants to remember are the virtues of Russian soil, the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian facial features etc as opposed to slit-eyes, hook noses and other aberrations of human nature. It wants to raise the Russian Church to Khomeini-ite levels of fanaticism, and is, among other things, anti-industrial, anti-nuclear, ecological etc.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,830 who went to Russia recently, says that, at a reception, he spoke to a full Russian general at the Kremlin who was wearing on his finger a cameo insignia of Nicholas II with the eagles. Such people think of Stalin as a Jewish-puppet, you must realise. Anyhow, it all puts a new slant on things . . . I’m going to have a go at seeing what I can do to write a Russian novel . . .831
On the other hand, I’m dying to get away to a sunny place where I can swim. I almost went to Madagascar for a magazine. I’ve always thought I might like Madagascar – and could call in on Zanzibar. But I couldn’t get away until the book was done, and now it’s the rainy season and I didn’t feel like slewing around in red mud.
My love to you and Margaret
And from Elizabeth.
To Colin Thubron
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 7 January 1988
Forgive me for being a bit slow in the uptake about Behind the Wall.832 I was up to my gills in a new book and – well, you know how it is – one reads nothing that isn’t immediately useful for the work in hand! Absolutely first rate! I know it so much less well than you: but every word rang true. The claustrophobia of that society: also its reserves of wisdom. I have a mildly different ‘take’ on Russia, but in China I was with you every step of the way.
E. & I are going on our first proper holiday: to an island off Guadaloupe – for 15 days. As always, Bruce.
To J. Howard Woolmer
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 7 January 1988
Dear Howard,
How kind to send the Cormac McCarthys.833 I’ve read The Orchard Keeper which is splendid, and am taking Suttree with me to the Caribbean next week. Hope we’ll meet again soon.
I’m sorry for the scrappy note – I’ve got a month of correspondence to wade through before lunch. As ever, Bruce.
To Susannah Clapp
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [January 1988]
My dearest Susannah,
I haven’t been able to raise you on the phone today. Never mind. We’re off to Guadaloupe, no less. For a couple of weeks swimming. It’s one of the cheapest places to fly to, because it’s part of metropolitan France and the fares are subsidised. We’re booked to fly back on the 25th, but may, depending on various imponderables, go down to the South of France. I left the car in a garage for repairs on October 15, saying I’d be back the next day – and now look!
Gillon Aitken will have sent over a copy of the Utz annotated by Michael Ignatieff. I don’t agree with everything he says but most of it I do. I jotted down my reactions in the margin and would love it if you’d take a squint.834
I want to show it, too, to my friend Diana Phipps835 who is a Czech – and had first hand memories of Prague until 1949 when she and her family left – to Vichy! (except that they went to Paris instead). One of the few facts I have about my model for Utz is that he did go annually to Vichy – until 1968.
Much love, B
To Gillon Aitken
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 8 January 1988
Dear Gillon,
. . . While I’m away can you think over the following.
For the benefit of all concerned, we should get onto paper a formal agreement between ourselves. We have not yet finally agreed on the rates of commission. I’m easy about this. I have always thought that the 20% European sales is a bit stiff, but I would have your guidance on this point. Seeing that Salman [Rusdhie] and I came, as it were, as a package, I wonder if I could have the same terms as him. Or whether we could agree on a flat rate of commission to cover the US, the UK and abroad. As things are going, there may, in the future, be separate agreements with the ex-Commonwealth etc. Anyway, it won’t be a problem between us.
The second point is this. Deborah Rogers never made it clear to me the question of the ‘agent of record’: in fact, it was the first I’d ever heard of it. Surely we should agree that if, for any reason either of us wished to terminate the agreement, then the ‘agency of record’ should not continue beyond a fixed term, say, three years or five. To agree this between ourselves would, I feel, give a certain leverage with DR/GB. It is obviously very messy for me to be having to deal with two agencies.836
As always
Bruce
To Murray Bail
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 8 February 1988
My dear Murray,
So we went to the West Indies for a holiday: I honestly can’t spare the time to come your way this winter. Besides, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that, unless someone pays you to go club class, air travel (for more than 3 hours) has already become impossible. We went first to a pair of islands called Les Saintes, off Guadaloupe which are peopled by a very strange clan of mestizo Indian-negro-Breton fishermen. Most striking to look at. Proud, disdainful, not giving one inch to tourists like ourselves
: the girls wearing a kind of tutu, the boys with blond hair in rasta-plaits. Nothing happened to interrupt our days of sleeping or taking a boat to the coral reefs except for the ludicrous incident when squatting in the bush I inadvertently let my balls brush against a plant which is the toxic plant of the West Indies.837 And since we were on our way to Mass, the agony of standing in church was indescribable. I hope you’ll forgive my invoking your name as a possible reviewer for the Botany Bay book to the Los Angeles Times review section. I didn’t feel I could take it in, knowing so little of the history.
Has The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta come your way? A tremendous evocation of place – the place being the town of Nuoro in Eastern Sardinia. I read it ages ago in French because it’s published by my Italian publisher. Also, at the age of 19 I went alone on a walking tour of Eastern Sardinia. It was terrifying to walk at dusk up the main street of Orgolos, the legendary ‘home’ of the Sardinian bandit, looking for a bed and having every door slammed in one’s face. One pal G[eorge] S[teiner] reviewed it for the New Yorker, but I don’t think he really got the measure of it. Yes. I’ve known the Musil838 for some time. Very marvellous! I may, at any minute, be off to the Sudan on some mildly nefarious business.839 That is, if I recover from a bad bout of flu (I am recovering!).
I wish I could give up writing, don’t you? More and more this book business tempts me into silence. There have been some frightfully funny incidents here: the best is that Virago Press were about to publish as an astonishing new ‘find’ a novel by a young Pakistani girl called Rahila Khan840 or something like it, with some quite sexy scenes between Pakistani girls and white boys: all very suitable to bring ‘literature ’ to Britain’s Asiatic community, all set for a big promotion etc. – when it was discovered that Rahila Khan was an Anglican clergyman in Brighton called the Rev Toby Forward! Great?
Next, at the Whitbread Prize there were 3 categories, the best novel, the best first novel, the best biography. The best book of the 3 was, at the beery businessman’s dinner, then judged to be the winner.
The three were:
1. My friend Francis Wyndham who treated the whole affair with wonderful panache.
2. A paraplegic (or something worse) who had overcome his disability to write a book841 – and was of course declared the winner.
3. Ian McEwan842, who, when given a hard-luck slap on the back by one of the organisers, said: ‘Next year there’ll be a man with an iron lung.’
Much love to you both, B & E
The categorisation of his own book troubled Chatwin, who, feeling that he must defend and protect the status of The Songlines as a novel, asked Tom Maschler to issue this statement.
To Tom Maschler
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 8 February 1988
I am most honoured to be nominated for the Thomas Cook Travel Award; but The Songlines has been published as fiction on both sides of the Atlantic . . . The journey it describes is an invented journey, it is not a travel book in the generally accepted sense. To avoid any possible confusion, I must ask to withdraw from the shortlist.
To Cary Welch
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 22 February 1988
My dear Cary,
Either we’ll have met in London by the time you get this – or else it’ll have to be thought of as an interim letter. I have just sent off to agents, publishers etc a new work: the theme? Art-collecting – or rather the convolutions of a man who gets stuck behind the Iron Curtain and will do anything to save the collection until one day . . .
The book was my response to convalescence last year: I had thought I’d use that time to read and re-read all the great Russian novels. Instead, hardly able to hold a pen, I launched forth on my story: a tale of Marxist Czechoslovakia conceived in the spirit and style of the Rococo. God knows how people will receive it.
My book The Songlines, which as you may be aware was written, the last third of it, in semi-hallucination,843 has brought me a host of new friends from ‘every quarter’. But the latest is a simply astonishing person. He is called Kevin Volans844, an Anglo South-African composer – and composer of genius – who has gone into the field in Africa rather as Brahms or Dvorak went looking for folksongs. He has filled his head with the sounds of the veldt, with Zulu chant, the shepherds pipes echoing across the valleys of Lesotho – and without in any way being ‘ethnic’ he has produced an entirely new modern music that also makes me think of Schubert. He is the favourite composer of the Kronos Quartet, who, it would appear are the best string quartet in America for modern music. Unfortunately, their record of Kevin’s work entitled ‘White Man Sleeps’, which is a huge hit in the U.S. omits the 4th movement which is so utterly transporting that one gasps with wonder.
Anyway this is to me one of the really nice things that’s happened to me. The longer I live the more anarchic my attitude to institutions. In the end the people who run them are professional time-wasters. I think you survived the Met845 for quite long enough: for what should and could be a rewarding task ends up a drudgery. One has to be free to pursue one’s loonier concerns. The New Hampshire retreat sounds heavenly. I do have reason for visiting your neck of the woods sometime in the foreseeable future: but I’m completely befuddled by the dates. My current interest is the astonishing revival of Orthodoxy in Russia. I don’t know if you know but I now think of myself as orthodox and will be going back at some point to Athos to stay with my Serbian friends at the monastery of Chilandari846 . . . but this is beside the point. I find myself prey to indecision as to where to go next. Rephrasing Cyril Connolly, one could say ‘Inside every traveller an anchorite is longing to stay put.’
Forgive this rather rambling scrawl. E. and I went to some islands off Guadaloupe for a swimming holiday but alas we both came back with a horrible stomach bug which has affected my liver in a pseudohepatitis. 847
Feeling better today,
Much love B
To Murray Bail
Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [February 1988]
My dear Murray,
. . . Thanks for sending us the Australian short stories.848 Why you’ve not put yourself in it is beyond my comprehension. I’ll talk to you about them one day – I like Murnane: but so often, in the others, there is an evenness of texture which I find rather disturbing. I won’t go on now.
We’re off on a world tour – I hope! – and the air ticket may bring us to Sydney in March.
Love as always. B
To Ninette Dutton
Homer End | Ipden | Oxford | 29 February 1988
Dearest Nin,
Sorry for the protracted silence. Time has flown with astonishing rapidity. The first news is that I finished and edited a new book: the title UTZ. Tout court! Anyhow it seems to have caught the imagination of the publisher because we’re suddenly inundated with money which we don’t really want. My temperament tells me to give it away: but that’s not so easy. And it’s certainly a change from being on the deadline. I’ve also started something new: which will probably fail, utterly, for being too ambitious. I have a scene in which an utterly beguiling American woman in her early 70’s – courageous to the point of camping alone in Wyoming – takes her picnic lunch into Central Park and is mugged by a black kid. That’s how it appears to be, except that she soon has her attacker sitting beside her, using her knife not his to cut up the chicken, and there follows a long animated discussion in which he refuses $50 but accepts $10. This incident is based on the experience of one of my mother-in-law’s friends in Rock Creek Park, Washington.849 I hope you will like her as a character because I have called her Ninette and have hauled in a bit of you. The whole book is way into the future and may take years to write.
Otherwise . . . E. and I went away snorkelling in the West Indies. We only had 2½ weeks and really that is not enough for Australia. Even so, the flights from Paris to Martinique were gruelling – and we both came down with a mysterious virus that laid us out nearly cold for a couple of weeks. Banish the thought that holidays in the su
n are therapeutic!
Cyril Connolly’s most famous aphorism is: ‘Inside every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out’. How about this one? ‘Inside every traveller an anchorite is longing to stay put.’
Murray [Bail] has had a great success with his book of Australian Stories: though I can’t see why yours should not have been included. Much less flat than the usual ones!
Lots of love to you, Bruce
To Nicholas Shakespeare
Churchill Hospital | Oxford | [March 1988]
Dear Nick,
One quite useful technique – which I used for the fantastic compression necessary for The Viceroy – is to get a board with a huge sheet of graph paper divided into squares. You can write the ‘synopsis’ sections on little cards and pin them on with drawing pins. You then have a flexible way of setting out the story with the possibility of change.
Much love,