Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  88 Philippa Chatwin, daughter of Charles’s late brother Humphrey.

  89 E.C.: ‘A great big cast-iron range that was not used in summer; it was lit without opening the flue and smoked like mad.’

  90 A panel of Tory Island off the Irish West Coast where Hill used to paint.

  91 E.C.: ‘We were staying in my mother’s flat in New York and decided to give a party. My father came and got drunk. I found the whole thing mortifying: he said to one lady in trousers, “Do you always go out in the evening dressed like that?”’

  92 Edgar Louis Vanderstegen (‘Teddy’) Millington-Drake (1932-94), painter and son of Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, British Minister in Montevideo at the time of the scuttling of the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in 1939. Chatwin stayed with him at his houses in Greece and Italy, and towards the end of his life said that Teddy was one of two men he had loved. E.C.: ‘Raulin Guild was probably the other.’

  93 Hewett owned a farm in Kent.

  94 Not until February 1966, after several false starts, would the Chatwins find Holwell Farm, a pink seventeenth-century house set in 47 acres near Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire. Gertrude advanced £17,000 as a wedding present for them to buy it.

  95 In the summer Wilson had at last appointed Chatwin a director, not with a vote as he had expected, but one of nine new subsidiary directors without voting rights. A new tax law meant that the partnership would not come into effect until the following April, by which time Chatwin had made the decision to leave Sotheby’s.

  96 E.C.: ‘There was a time when we all kept our stockings in the fridge. Word got about that if nylon was left out it would ladder quicker, so you put it in the fridge and it supposedly lasted longer.’

  97 Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965) founder of Helena Rubinstein cosmetics.

  98 E.C.: ‘They didn’t give me anything except my board and a little suede evening bag.’

  99 Judith Small, American dealer. E.C.: ‘They did marry and had a daughter, but divorced.’

  100 Porter Chandler had given a party in New York.

  101 London dealer in Indian art.

  102 E.C.: ‘I was enrolled at Edinburgh in a Russian course and language lab.’

  103 Stuart Piggott (1910-96) held the Abercromby Chair of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Chatwin had known of Piggott at Marlborough for his excavations of West Kennet Long Barrow. At the time of their meeting he had just published Ancient Europe, which included an illustration of Welch’s Siberian plaque. On 15 July, after inviting Chatwin to lunch, Piggott wrote in his diary: ‘Bruce C. very good value and should be a pleasure to teach.’

  104 E.C.: ‘He did, but it was only £275. We spent £8 a week on food.’

  105 They had taken possession of Holwell on 9 May.

  106 He was not allowed to have dealings once he became a partner.

  107 The Chatwins would not, in fact, move in until the following July.

  108 Gertrude had loaned half of the £6,500 that Chatwin needed to buy his shares.

  109 I.F: ‘Raulin shot himself in a totally uncharacteristic moment of aberration rather than allow himself to be sent back to a nursing home near Woodbridge. I don’t think anything has hit me as badly as that hit me. He was like Bruce, a man of magic.’

  110 Burnley Building Society, for the £4,000 mortgage on Holwell Farm – to rewire, reroof, put down floors and replace the beams.

  111 Mogul, jade-handled. E.C.: ‘He wanted to sell it.’

  112 Felicity Nicolson, who had taken over from Chatwin as head of Antiquities. E.C. to her mother, 13 December 1965: ‘She is a very small person, with a gloomy sort of face, but is really terribly nice and rather funny, as well as very clever.’

  113 Chief accountant, later chief executive of Sotheby’s, who was one of those furious over Chatwin’s resignation.

  114 For the kitchen.

  115 Hon. Edward (‘Eddie’) Gathorne-Hardy (1901-78), botanist; known by Francis Partridge as ‘wicked old Eddie’. Chatwin had met him with Allen Bole in Crete.

  116 Peter Davis (1918-92), botanist, expert on the flora of the Middle East and author of the multi-volume Flora of Turkey.

  117 Brother of Chatwin’s former lodger Anthony Spink; he lived at 11 George Square.

  118 Elizabeth’s parents came and stayed in the North British Hotel. ‘My father had late onset diabetes which meant he had to eat at regular hours.’

  119 Tamara Talbot Rice (1904-93), Leo Tolstoy’s god-daughter and author of The Scythians. ‘It was first through me that Bruce came to be interested in nomads.’ She had fled St Petersburg in 1918, pulled, so she claimed, behind reindeer under white skins in the snow. In 1927 she married David Talbot Rice (1903-72), art historian and Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University. His friendship at Eton with Robert Byron, pointing Byron in the direction of Byzantine art, drew Chatwin as part of his second-year course to study Fine Art under him. Byron described him as a sedate heron ‘sober always, even in insobriety’.

  120 Hon. Penelope Chetwode (1910-86), daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, m. 1933 John Betjeman; traveller in and writer on India. E.C. to her mother, 5 April, 1966: ‘She is sort of nuts but lots of fun and crazy about horses. She practically always rides everywhere even to dinner and takes the dog along. The whole performance is a scream. She has straight grey hair with bangs and is very round with an extraordinary voice & is also crazy about Indian architecture.’

  121 Simon Sainsbury (1930-2006), collector and philanthropist. Chatwin had had a brief romance with him in the early 1960s.

  122 Intense ochre red.

  123 Bought in Edinburgh.

  124 A neighbouring National Trust farm tenant had applied for permission to build a house on a corner of the Chatwins’ field. E.C.: ‘I had cards printed up and got friends to sign them whenever his application went in.’

  125 On 6 November 1966 Tennant addressed a letter to Chatwin in pink and green inks: ‘My dear Bruce, Your enchanting letter gives me joy. Please give my greeting to Peter Davis. Could I go on taking Art News Bruce? I do so love it. I’m dedicating a poem to you in my new volume. It’s called the Supreme Vision.’

  126 Nebraska novelist (1873-1947), known for her depictions of prairie life.

  127 E.C.: ‘Derek was always telling us, “Keep an eye out for Wemyss.” His house in Donegal was full of Wemyss ware, even with large pigs sitting up like a dog.’

  128 Hermes magnifying glass in the shape of an eye. E. C.: ‘Bruce is lying: he thought it a ridiculous present.’

  129 Alvilde Lees-Milne (1909-94), gardening expert m. 1951 James Lees-Milne (1908 – 97), architectural historian and diarist; they lived at Alderley Grange near Ozleworth.

  130 E.C.: ‘Jewish son of famous equestrienne who escaped from Germany, married a Minnesota mining heiress and bought a beautiful Palladian house near Malmesbury, Easton Grey.’

  131 English interior designer (1929-98), author of On Living – with Taste (1968).

  132 Vaynol Park, estate belonging to Sir Michael Duff.

  133 Alexey Kosygin (1904-80), Soviet Premier 1964-80.

  134 Wardrop Prize ‘for the best first year’s work’.

  135 Andrew Bache had been at Old Hall.

  136 American architect (b.1944).

  137 Fernand Legros (1931-83) art dealer and former ballet dancer who sold forgeries of Elmyr de Hory. Legros and de Hory had recently been charged with fraud and jailed.

  138 John Betjeman was not made Poet Laureate till 1972.

  139 Elizabeth’s brother John was getting married to Sheila Welch.

  140 Bliss Collection of pre-Colombian art at Dumbarton Oaks.

  141 Palais Stocklet, Brussels.

  142 Rudolf Habelt, bookseller.

  143 Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) German archaeologist.

  144 The Fritzdorfer gold cup is the oldest gold cup in Germany. The Rillaton gold cup was excavated from Bodmin Moor in Cornwall in 1837. Lost soon after, it turned up years later in George V’s
dressing room as a receptacle for his collar studs.

  145 E.C.: ‘They’d been incredibly nasty because he was English.’

  146 Adam Kraft (1455-1509) German sculptor.

  147 Edinburgh dealer.

  148 Emilia and Evzen Plesl took him along in their Skoda from Prague.

  149 E.C: ‘In 1987 we went back to see it.’

  150 Maurizio Tosi (b. 1944), Italian archaeologist.

  151 Giuseppe Tucci (1894 – 1984), Italian scholar in Tibetan and Buddhist studies.

  152 Danubian Neolithic settlement 40 miles east of Prague.

  153 This wedding became the funeral scene in Chatwin’s 1988 novel Utz.

  154 E.C.: ‘I didn’t see Istanbul till 1970.’

  155 Judith Nash.

  156 On 27 March 1967 Welch had written: ‘Dear Prewz, About to buy a very early Sassanian dish, 8 in dia., very heavy, so alive and stunning in quality that it just has to be bought. The subject is a REAL DISH: a fertility goddess who makes me believe in them. She dances in her buff and blue with great bodily vitality. She waves a sash overhead, and is accompanied by two big birds (peacocks?). Her face is so alive and benelovent that it might be a portrait.’

  157 Bill Trammel, a naval friend of Admiral Chanler, as was the US Consul Betty Carp, who never left Turkey. E.C.: ‘My father was here in the 1920s and tempted to stay.’

  158 Cary Welch, also sent by Chatwin to Carp, reported back that she had invited him to ‘a six-Princer dinner’.

  159 Notebook, 29 August 1967: ‘I am not too thrilled with Turkey. Today it has occurred to me what is missing – a sense of the absurd. Stung by a wasp in the lorry.’

  160 Welch had pitched to his friend the director James Ivory a film on the Mughals featuring the Beatles. (Welch had heard ‘Rain’ and written to John Lennon saying it was the best Indian music since the time of Akbar). He wrote to Chatwin: ‘Also on the path of the Mughals would be a gang of international art dealer-thieves . . . If the idea comes off, I see you in it too.’ Ivory, apparently, was ‘wild about the idea’.

  161 Charles Thomas (b.1928) had lectured in archaeology at Edinburgh since 1957. He first excited Chatwin in Darwin’s visit to the Yaghans of Patagonia. Chatwin was now stuck with studying Roman Britain. E.C.: ‘This was a blow. He wanted to do the Dark Ages.’

  162 Anthony Huxley, Flowers in Greece: an outline of the Flora (1964).

  163 H.C.: ‘That telepathic thing, we both had with our mother. A year later, the girl I was in love with announced that she was going to marry one of my friends, and my mother shot up in bed. “Something’s happened to Hugh, something’s happened to Hugh.” ’

  164 The finals of professional surveying exams. Hugh was a chartered auctioneer and estate agent for Grimley & Son in Birmingham.

  165 E.C.: ‘Sotheby’s sent us there. The heads belonged to an old lady whose grandfather had brought them back from the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897. She remembered them being put in the yard in Galloway and hosed down and blood coming off and the yard running red.’

  166 The Dorak Affair (Michael Joseph, 1967) by Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor. The story of the Dorak hoard concerned the British archaeologist James Mellaart, and described the kind of hunt which, until now, had thrilled Chatwin. Mellaart had earned his reputation in Turkey where he had dug up the world’s first mirrors, polished chunks of volcanic glass. In the summer of 1958, as Chatwin prepared to join Sotheby’s, Mellaart claimed to have met a young woman called Anna Papastrati while travelling to Izmir by train. ‘She was very attractive,’ Mellaart said, ‘in a tarty sort of way.’ On her wrist was a solid gold, prehistoric bracelet. ‘She said she’d got lots like it at home and asked if I would like to see them.’ Mellaart went to her house in Izmir, 217 Kazim Dirik Street, where lapis, obsidian and fluted gold objects glinted in cotton wool in a chest of drawers. Mellaart understood them to be relics of the Yortan culture. He wanted to take photographs, but she would only allow him to draw them. In November 1959 his drawings were published across four pages of The Ilustrated London News under the headline: ‘The Royal Treasure of Dorak – a first and exclusive report of a clandestine excavation which led to the most important discovery since the Royal Tombs of Ur’. His reputation declined soon afterwards. Attempts to track down the woman proved fruitless. Mellaart was either a dupe, or trying to dupe. Chatwin, touched for his expert opinion, knew about the site of Hacilar where Mellaart had excavated. Once, the authors of The Dorak Affair quoted him saying, ‘a dealer came in with a box of stuff from Hacilar. You know, pots and the usual goddesses. He left them with us until the date of the auction. One day one of our men was shifting the stuff and he dropped it. Well, that’s enough to make anyone go cold, but funnily enough it didn’t turn out that way. We had a look at one of the broken goddesses and it had got pink dental plaster under the armpits . . .’ The authors noted that the experience of working for Sotheby’s had somehow ‘soured’ Chatwin.

  167 A gloomy painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 93) of moonlit autumn leaves. E.C.: ‘£150 pounds would keep us going for months.’

  168 H.C.: ‘I took six months off and decided to go to London, to the chartered surveyors, Weatherall, Green and Smith, where I remained for 20 years.’

  169 C.W.: ‘I did.’

  170 Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, New York.

  171 James MacCracken, a young hippy painter from Detroit, whom Welch had discovered in Boston.

  172 Elizabeth. Edith Welch was also called this.

  173 E.C.: ‘He didn’t have to drive from Edinburgh to Holwell in a 2CV which had no heater.’

  174 Peter Avery (1923-2008) British historian of Persia.

  175 Stuart Piggott.

  176 A Phrygian cloak pin made of gold and electrum that Chatwin and Welch had seen at John Klejman’s gallery in New York. C.W. to B.C, 11 January 1968: ‘The climax came when [Mr Young of BMFA] took out some tweezers, reached into a little crevice, and plucked out something that he put on a slide. He then whisked the slide over to a powerful microscope and looked and looked and looked. I asked what was happening. “I think I’ve found a piece of ancient silk,” he said. “Something left over from when it was last worn.”’

  177 Heuneburg-Museum at Hundersingen on the Danube.

  178 Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glyn (b.1937), architectural historian, Christie’s representative in Ireland.

  179 E.C.: ‘He was continually not introducing me to people. He kept them in separate compartments.’

  180 Italian film director and actor (1901 – 74).

  181 Of the family who made Crabbie’s Green Ginger Wine; Hill used to stay with her when in Edinbugh. E.C.: ‘If I go to a pub and someone says “What do you want?” I’ll have green ginger wine on the rocks.’

  182 A tiny Chardin oil, La Lavendeuse; Bobby put it behind the door.

  183 Elizabeth’s solicitor.

  184 Ruth Tringham, lecturer in archaeology. R.T.: ‘The bottom fell out of it after a year.’

  185 Barbara Murray, cousin of Elizabeth’s uncle Porter Chandler, lived outside Edinburgh.

  186 Roger Wollcott-Behnke, journalist on Daily Telegraph magazine. E.C.: ‘An American friend I’d known since I arrived in London. If you weren’t careful, he’d come and lodge and never go. A perfect mimic and talented in lots of ways, he had folie de grandeur and died of liver cancer when he was in his early thirties.’