306 Lady Dorothy (‘Coote’) Lygon (1912 – 2000); 4th d. of 7th Earl Beauchamp: ‘I was working at Christie’s in Old Masters, making a card index based on early picture sales. I was on the second floor at Blomfield Road, Bruce on the first. He had a beautiful brown silk robe which he said he had bought from nomads in Central Africa. I was very jealous of it. It had voluminous, big sleeves, so he’d put his hands up the opposite sleeve and keep himself warm.’
307 Pale blue silk in geometrical squares and triangles; it had belonged to the Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
308 Arthur Bamber Gascoigne (b.1935), author and broadcaster; m. 1963 Christina Ditchburn. The Great Moghuls is still in print.
309 Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 – 1970), Italian modernist poet.
310 Neighbours on spur of the valley.
311 Alun Gwynne-Jones (b.1919), Minister in Foreign Office 1964-70; Baron Chalfont from 1964.
312 Dealer. E.C.: ‘We lost the boomerang when we moved.’
313 Keeper of Indian and South-East Asian art at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
314 E.C.: ‘Penelope had lost her camera. The reason we went so slowly is because she would say, “I want the evening light” and spend two nights in every place.’
315 E.C.: ‘An Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 that I found in Hyderabad. It had quite a lot of holes from silverfish.’
316 Made of wood and bone and lacquer. E.C.: ‘I bought them.’
317 Susanna Chancellor m. 1958 Nicholas Johnston (b.1929) architect.
318 On 20 January 1971, 200,000 British postal workers began a seven-week strike.
319 Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross (1904-76), author, broadcaster, specialist in the Ottoman Empire. ‘The dearest old thing in the world,’ according to James Lees-Milne.
320 Her wrist.
321 Chatwin’s article on Lorenz did not appear in the New York Review of Books until December 1979. He was to interview Lorenz in July 1974 for the Sunday Times magazine at his home in Altenberg outside Vienna.
322 Gloria El-Fadil el Mahdi, Chatwin’s former girlfriend; her son Sedig (Chatwin’s godson); and Da’ad Boumaza, Miranda’s daughter.
323 Arshile Gorky (1904 – 48), Armenian-born painter and Magouche’s first husband.
324 Introductory commission.
325 Michel Straus had worked at Sotheby’s with Chatwin in the Impressionist Department.
326 Miranda Rothschild. She and Akbar became lovers.
327 Décoration océanienne, André Portier and François Poncetton (1931).
328 John Elliott, New York dealer.
329 Jeremy Fry (1924 – 2005), artist, inventor, philanthropist.
330 Natasha Litvin (b.1919), pianist, m. 1941 poet Stephen Spender; had a house at Les Baux. From Chatwin’s notebook: ‘A description of the Stephen Spenders. Il y aura chez lui des personnes qui vous connaissez parait-il trés bien, la femme joue au piano et écrit un livre sur les sensations auditives. L’homme est peintre. J’ai oublié le nom . . . J-Claude-Roché.’
331 Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959), Dadaist whose semi-autobiographical novel Jules et Jim was filmed in 1962 by François Truffaut.
332 ‘Rotting Fruit’ exists in rough draft, but not the letters. Edward Lucie-Smith heard it several times over ‘and laughed till I was nearly sick each time I heard it . . . There was going to be a mausoleum in which this rich American was going to be buried with his Mom, with a “bronze dog” reposing at their feet.’
333 Hiram Winterbotham (1908-90), Glos textile manufacturer, who changed his name to inherit the business of Hunt & Winterbotham in Old Bond Street; had moved to France, near Apt, with his ex-guardsman servant.
334 Roché recorded birdsong that he sold commercially on cassettes. Requiring someone to say the names in English, he asked Chatwin – whose voice enunciates the names of 406 separate species.
335 Noam Chomsky (b.1928), American linguist and political activist.
336 Douglas Cooper (1911 – 84), heir to Australian sheep-dip fortune and Cubist art collector who lived at Château de Castille.
337 Chatwin is probably referring here to Lorenz, not Chomsky. His long 1971 article ‘Excavating Lorenz’ was never published; although he reworked many of its ideas into his 1979 review of Lorenz’s The Year of the Greylag Goose for the New York Review of Books.
338 Thilo von Watzdorf, whose mother owned L’Annunziata in Porto Ercole.
339 Ivory wrote to Chatwin on 6 September 1971: ‘A young man asked me more or less out of the blue what place I would choose to live in for a year (you couldn’t leave) and comprising an acre. I said in the south of France, thinking of Aubenas and its environs . . . you can see from this reply how fondly I recall my week with you in that perfect countryside.’
340 Peter Willey, Castles of the Assassins (1962).
341 Actually, Colonel Patrick Montgomery. The Anti-Slavery Society published Willey’s report Drugs and Slavery in July 1971.
342 Felicity Chanler was marrying Steve Young.
343 Chatwin never sold the cape.
344 From the Miami collector (see p. 193).
345 E.C.: ‘He was a wonderful guest, but a terrible host. He forgot to pass the bread around, he got the people he wanted to sit next to him and never bothered with anyone else, he never helped – and then he’d disappear and someone would say “Where’s Bruce?” and he’d gone to write.’
346 J.I.: ‘Perhaps I was too stupid to understand that Bruce was serious about his film ideas, while seeming to play them down or making a joke of them. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t just being entertaining in his letters, in the same way that Cary [Welch] always was, with preposterous plots and characters. When I read all his letters together, I see – too late – that Bruce might have been in earnest. I must have seemed like a poor friend, letting him down all the time.’
347 St James’s Club, 106 Piccadilly, also home of Dilettanti Society, with separate room devoted solely to backgammon. Chatwin never did join the Traveller’s Club.
348 M.R.: ‘Suddenly l get a letter from Bruce – blue paper, blue ink, Mont Blanc pen, very permeable: My dear M, I want to see you more than anything else in the world. I want you to forgive me more than anything else in the world. Yours B.’ Blaming himself for bringing Akbar into her life – resulting in Miranda and Iain Watson divorcing, with Akbar’s letters being read out in court – Chatwin went to see her in Paris. ‘He gives me a Mesopotamian duck-weight made of haematite. He’d affected my life to a tremendous extent. He owed me one.’
349 Brion Gysin (1916-86), English painter, poet, and inventor of cut-up technique used by William Burroughs (1914-97), American novelist and prominent member of the Beat Generation.
350 Chatwin had found a flat off the King’s Road, 8 Sloane Avenue Mansions.
351 Nigel Greenwood (1941-2004), dealer.
352 Character in 1924 novel by P. C. Wren who leaves Britain to join the French Foreign Legion.
353 ‘The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions,’ History Today, 22 May 1972.
354 ‘Milk’ was published in the London Magazine, August 1977.
355 Notebooks: ‘Barmou, Niger. A Hausa boy, after listing the attractions of his village
– You have seen the “grand omosexuel?”
– No
– You want to?
– Absolutely not!
This person turns out to be a tough, moustachioed Frenchman from Lyon, ex-Foreign Legion, a borer of artesian wells, builder of police-posts and village schools, who travels around in a Land Rover with eight spindly black boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty.
These all take turns to sleep with him.– And when I need a white one, he says, there’s always the Peace Corps.’
356 E.C.: ‘I thought his moustache was fine, but everyone hated it.’
357 Ronald Colman (1891-1958) actor, known as ‘the English Valentino’.
358 E.C.: ‘I was telephoned by customs. “What do you think is in here? It says CLOTHES.”
I said my husband had left here in winter clothes and obviously didn’t need them. They never opened it. They’d have had a fit if they’d seen the lion’s eardrum.’
359 Chatwin was Ivory’s guest in Cannes on 8 May 1972 for the opening of Savages.
360 J.I. to B.C. 12 January 1972: ‘I told a friend of mine . . . that story of your friend Andrew Batey, as best I could recall it, and he was fascinated and also thought it was potentially wonderful material for a film.’
361 Ultra Violet (b.1935), convent-educated French actress, notorious for wearing torn vintage mauve dresses and colouring her hair with cranberry juice.
362 Ivory’s 54-minute documentary, broadcast on the BBC on 1 April 1972, about Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) who four years after independence dedicated his first book to the British. J.I. to B.C., 12 January 1972: ‘He’s quite incomprehensible, but that, I firmly believe, is half the film’s charm.’
363 A.B.: ‘I just imagine a Merchant-Ivory re-make of Death in Venice – my Tadzio (they found the real one – he died in Warsaw in 1986) to Bruce’s Aschenbach – in German with English Subtitles.’
364 E.C.: ‘A lovely idea, but a complete fantasy.’
365 The glass-fronted God Box was the only one of the three that he kept. E.C.:’He never talked about it, never explained. It was completely personal. I honestly don’t know what it meant. Magic, I suppose.’
366 The 25-minute documentary for Vaughan Films, with Erskine’s voiceover, was lost while being hawked around European film companies.
367 Chatwin did once come across the caretaker at Lake of the Woods, Charlie Van, who reported back to Ivory: ‘I saw this guy back in the woods a ways, hiking. And this son-of-a-bitch was stark naked, except for his big hiking boots, going along like he was in a nudist colony and owned the place. I shouted Hey you! and he turned around . . . And you won’t believe this, but he’d tied some flowers round his pecker.’
368 In 1943, Lieutenant-Commander Charles Chatwin RNVR had crossed North America by Canadian Pacific Railway to pick up a large new mine-sweeper at the naval base, under Britain’s ‘Lend-Lease’ arrangement with the USA.
369 George Oppen (1908-84), American Objectivist poet, married to Mary Colby.
370 Robert Duncan (1919-88), American San Francisco Renaissance poet.
371 Kasmin had a house in the Dordogne.
372 P.L.: ‘My name was on a list. I was at the British School of Archaeology in Athens and had been helping to get Greek citizens out who wanted to escape. I was arrested in Corfu and sent out.’
373 The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan (1972).
374 Chatwin never wrote the profile, but something else came of his interview. In Gray’s salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache. ‘“I’ve always wanted to go there,” I said. “So have I,” she added. “Go there for me.”’ From ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia – The Making of a Writer,’ New York Times Book Review, 2 August 1983.
375 Alan Irvine, curator of an exhibition of Gray’s work, Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design, staged at the Heinz Gallery of the RIBA, 8 January-23 March 1973.
376 When Gray died, Chatwin tried and failed to persuade the Victoria & Albert to buy her room intact. In March 2009 a 24-inch tall wooden and leather chair that she designed was sold at auction for £22 million.
377 David Rogers. Paul Getty and Ralph Dutton were Valerian’s other godparents.
378 Stella Astor (b.1949) m. 1974 Martin Wilkinson. They lived at The Cwm in Shropshire.
379 Janetta Woolley (b.1922) m. to Dr Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit; Robert Kee 1948-50; Derek Jackson 1951-6; 1971 to Jaime Parladé, Marques de Apesteguia, Spanish architect; lived at Tramores on the lower slopes of the Ronda mountains. She had worked for Horizon.
380 The banner carried in battle by Muhammad Ahmad (1844-85), Sudanese leader who in 1881 proclaimed himself the Mahdi, leading an uprising that culminated with the fall of Khartoum. Gloria Taylor had married his grandson, Tahir.
381 Cyril Connolly (1903-74), English critic. Almost his last piece for the Sunday Times magazine was Cooking for Love on the Andalusian cookery of Janetta Parladé, ‘a phenomenon of our time it would take too long to describe . . . the pleasantest and most stimulating companion that an artist could hope for, one who would drive you to Ankor at the drop of a map’.
382 Richard Timewell, head of Furniture at Sotheby’s, had a house in Tangier.
383 Alasdair Boyd (b.1927) 7th Baron Kilmarnock, married to Hilary (‘Hilly’) Bardwell. Her first husband, the novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-95), came to live with them at the end of his life.
384 Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport (1903-89), Conservative MP, and his American wife Lenette.
385 The salmon was transported back to Fiva strapped to an oar.
386 Princess Marie-Gabrielle (‘Mariga’) von Urach (1932-89) m. 1954-83 to Desmond Guinness. E.C.: ‘She’d inherited from her suffragette aunt these log cabins in the woods north of Oslo. We were there several days. We had to pay to go up in a helicopter onto the glacier – and there she was, walking around in a parasol and long dress.’
387 William Whitelaw (1918-99) Conservative Secretary of State for Employment who confronted the National Union of Mineworkers over pay demands.
388 E.C.: ‘The expense was staggering. I even had milk out of a cow and had to pay for it.’
389 ‘The Guggenheim Saga,’ Sunday Times magazine, 23 November 1975.
390 Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006), New-York based Turkish founder of Atlantic Records.
391 At 9.40pm on 15 February 1898 the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbour with the loss of 2 officers and 258 men. Hugh Thomas writes in Cuba (1971): ‘One story suggests that she was blown up by a mine planted by a US millionaire and eccentric, William Astor Chanler . . . already engaged in gun-running to Cuba.’ Thomas blames the explosion on new gunpowder needed for heavier guns.
392 Washington home of Elizabeth’s diplomat grandfather Irwin Laughlin.
393 Argentine short-story writer and essayist.
394 EC: ‘Jorge came on a freighter to New York with three friends, sons of estancieros, one of whom owned the site of the W. H. Hudson story El Ombu. He spent the entire day looking all over New York for dulce de leche for me.’
395 On Saturday 14 December 1974 the IRA threw a bomb through the window of the King’s Arms.
396 Thomas Bridges’s great-grandson, Tommy Goodall (b.1933), continues to manage Estancia Harberton with his wife, American biologist Rae Natalie Prosser.
397 Roberts ran the museum in Gaiman in Welsh Patagonia.
398 A friend of Sally Westminster.
399 Chatwin was staying with Diana Porras when some men appeared on the skyline above and looked down, arms folded, motionless. ‘Who are they?’ Mrs Porras: ‘Our future murderers.’
400 E.C.: ‘I brought all this stuff and never used it because the camper was equipped.’
401 Maria Reiche (1903-98), German-born archaeologist. ‘The Riddle of the Pampa’, Sunday Times magazine, 26 October 1975.
402 Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930), E.C.’s eccentric great-uncle, muralist and painter of screens, briefly married to Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri.
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin Page 60