Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  498 Chatwin’s accountants, now Ernst & Whinney.

  499 On 27 January 1978 Tom Maschler had asked Chatwin for £100 for bills that had accumulated at Carney. ‘Sorry it’s so much but as you will see most of it is your telephone conversations!’

  500 Social-climbing New Yorker and ex-drinking partner of Ernest Hemingway.

  501 Princess Marie (‘Missie’) Vassiltchikov (1917-78), author of Berlin Diaries 1940-45.

  502 Indian philosopher (1872-1950) who founded an ashram in his name.

  503 Kasmin had bought a mason’s cottage in a gulley surrounded by footpaths on the Dorset coast.

  504 Gertrude did decide to sell the main house in Geneseo and build another one.

  505 Editor-in-chief, Collins Harvill.

  506 The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, American writer (b.1927); his previous book had been the novel Far Tortuga (1975) about nine men schooner-fishing for green turtles in the Caribbean.

  507 Editor, 1974-81, Times Literary Supplement.

  508 David Sulzberger; nicknamed Smallbones after a ‘young scamp’ in Milward’s journal (‘about 12 years of age, about 4 feet nothing,’ who ‘was exceptionally clever and could pick up anything almost at once . . . but he was a perfect little devil to handle, and he would do anything to humbug anyone in authority over him’). D.S: ‘Bruce was very envious of, and kept using, my American legal pads, longer than A4, which I bought from the Coop in Harvard Square, Massachusetts.’

  509 After his initial enthusiasm, Brenan had tired of his verbal ping-pong with Chatwin. ‘He is a man enclosed like an insect in a tight coating of chitin – totally insensitive, needs to talk all the time,’ Brenan wrote to V. S. Pritchett on 24 October 1978. ‘I can’t say I really like him – an egotistical little boy – yet his energy was impressive.’

  510 Maro Gorky (b.1943) artist m. 1962 Matthew Spender (b.1945), writer and sculptor.

  511 Hiram Winterbotham had had a stroke and was in a wheelchair.

  512 E.C.: ‘He would pay all these bills and say “I’ve no money left,” and I would feel desperate about it. I had my tiny quarterly allowance of £250 from Mellon, a trust set up by my mother in 1958, and it was already spoken for.’

  513 Magouche’s daughter.

  514 Jacqueline Bouvier (1929-94); m. 1st 1953 John F. Kennedy, President of United States, 1961-3; 2nd 1968 Aristotle Onassis (1906-75). Notebooks: ‘She came in: in black gold pyjama pants, looking wonderful. The whisper is conspiratorial, not affected. The whisper of a naughty child egging you on to do something mildly wicked. To behave badly without being rude.’

  515 John Russell (1919-2008), art critic of the New York Times.

  516 Charles Rosen (b.1927), pianist, music theorist and critic.

  517 New York socialite.

  518 In November, he had had varicose veins removed from his legs at St Mary’s Paddington.

  519 In January Chatwin had travelled to Haiti with Kasmin.

  520 Chanler Chapman, E.C.’s father’s first cousin. On 3 January 1979 he wrote to Elizabeth’s mother from his hospital bed in Rhinebeck: ‘This morning at 4 a.m. I finished In Patagonia. It’s a savage sour book with a vengeance built on a wilderness of horror, terrible climate. The pages are loaded with hatred. I stuck with it because of the wellbalanced pen of Bruce Chatwin. He practically never gives way to journalism. When he does allow 3 or 4 words of wonderfully keen observation to take fire and make a whole page fly, he does it with the unconcern of a man lifting a piece of bread to his lips. There is a compulsion that comes from the bowels of death. Darned tiresome but somehow Chatwin makes it significant. I’m proud of Elizabeth for marrying Bruce. Give her my love.’

  521 William Shawn, editor of New Yorker 1952-87, did not after all take a single one of Chatwin’s offerings. On June 24 1980 he rejected The Viceroy of Ouidah – ‘We did not think it quite worked out as fiction we could publish’; in 1982 Shawn also turned down On The Black Hill as ‘too episodic’, none of the episodes seeming to amount to short stories.

  522 Jane Kramer, European correspondent for New Yorker and partner of Vincent Crapanzano, professor of anthropology at New York City University.

  523 The arrangement barely endured two years. On 15 December 1980 Chatwin received a letter from Lt.-Col. Chetwynd-Talbot, secretary of Albany, in reply to his request for a more permanent apartment. ‘Some of what you say . . . is quite honestly, best forgotten. In telling me that Christopher Gibbs has lent you his top room for two years, you convict him of a breach of his lease with Peterhouse . . . On page 2 you urge me to connive in others breaking their leases! In any case, the top rooms, all part of their sets below, belong to different Proprietors and are not the property of the Trustees. So that, I fear, is that!’

  524 Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton and biographer and translator of Osip Mandelstam.

  525 E.C.: ‘I had given Bruce a silver drinking cup for Christmas. When in Peru with my mother, he was bowled over when she pulled out one from a fitted leather case.’

  526 Australian-born poet (b.1947).

  527 Theodore Weiss (1916-2003), American poet and literary critic.

  528 The 1979 E. M. Forster Award, a $20,000 grant to fund a period of travel in the United States.

  529 Notebook, May 1979: ‘Princeton. Visit to Clarence Brown: liked him but not a success. Waste of time for him I fear. Lack of communication. Both exceptionally nervous . . . I signed his copy of In Pat. But forgot to ask him to sign Journey to A. Was he offended? Came out of lunch with a decided spell of jitters . . . Not at all good at talking about my work with other writers.’

  530 Documentary-maker, author and longstanding friend of Eileen Gray whose biography he would write (1988). Chatwin had a brief involvement with Adam at this time.

  531 Chatwin delivered the manuscript to Tom Maschler in the summer. On 14 November Maschler paid an advance of £2,500.

  532 British art historians and life partners who lived in the Villa Marchiò above Lucca. They had first met Chatwin in Venice.

  533 A huge interior of a Capucine convent in Rome, by the French painter François Marius Granet (1775-1849). H.H.: ‘It was too big to fit into our little house.’

  534 On 15 February Silberman had agreed an advance of $15,000.

  535 American Flaubert scholar (1904-94) m. 1963 Shirley Hazzard (b.1931), Sydney-born novelist.

  536 Slogan in 1950s for Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States 1953-61.

  537 Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), British explorer and travel writer. He met Chatwin once at the Hampshire home of Adrian House. ‘He turned up and talked all through lunch and dinner and he sat outside my bedroom door and kept me awake talking and I rather wished he’d gone to bed.’

  538 Eve Arnold (b.1912), American photographer; she took the photos for Chatwin’s articles on Mrs Gandhi and André Malraux.

  539 Donald Richie (b.1924), American-born director and writer on Japanese cinema.

  540 Paul Theroux (b.1941), American travel-writer and novelist.

  541 John Hunt (1910-98), leader of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest and president of Royal Geographical Society.

  542 The Late Show, BBC2, 8 March 1979.

  543 E.C.: ‘I was furious with him, totally fed up and exasperated that he took me for granted. He brought down David Nash, but had never communicated to me (a) he was coming (b) he was bringing David, (c) never mind finding out any arrangements I’d made. I wrote to him and said “You’d better not come here till I tell you. I don’t want you around, please.”

  544 Elisabeth Sifton, editor-in-chief of Viking Penguin.

  545 Asha Puthli, lively pop and blues singer from Bombay who appeared naked in the Merchant-Ivory film Savages.

  546 Akbar (‘Dumpy’) Ahmed, politician and school friend of Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay.

  547 Catholic and reclusive short story writer (1925-64) from the American South who died of lupus.

  548 I.F.: ‘We gave a huge dinner
party for 110 people. Bruce and Diana Cooper were photographed together in Vogue.’

  549 It has not been possible to trace the identity of this photographer or his photograph. E.C.: ‘The only photographs I know that Bruce bought were a little sepia print of wheat and a print by Edward Sheriff Curtis [1868-1952] of Kwakiutle dancers in Alaska.’

  550 Edward Steichen (1879-1973), American photographer.

  551 Homer End, Ipsden. Built as a school in the 1930s by the artist Eric Kennington, who had illustrated Seven Pillars of Wisdom for T. E. Lawrence. In the autumn of 1974 the author and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer (b.1940) wrote his first book there, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, also published by Tom Maschler. E.C.: ‘Bruce did like the house when he saw it. It was light and not very big.’

  552 Stella’s mother, Ana Inez Carcano, m. 1944-72 Hon. John Jacob Astor.

  553 He never travelled to either place.

  554 E.C. had sold Holwell Farm for £170,000 and bought Homer End for £150,000. ‘I gave Bruce $50,000 from the sale to buy the flat in Eaton Place. He thought that that should be his share.’

  555 American novelist and short-story writer (1909-2001).

  556 The ruins of a Cistercian monastery in North Wales founded in 1164.

  557 French novelist (b.1924) who retold the Robinson Crusoe story in his first book Friday and Robinson (1967). Les Météores (Gemini) was published in 1975.

  558 Rene Zazzo, Les Jumeaux, le Couple et la Personne (1960).

  559 Ten cannabis plants, nearly six feet high, were eventually discovered by the Welsh police. Chatwin smoked pot on occasion, if someone else produced it. From his shortlived diary, 12 December 1969: ‘Hashish before going to bed. Light-headed.’ In Take a Girl Like Me Diana Melly writes: ‘Bruce stayed with me on and off for five years and never even made a cup of tea, although he did occasionally boil up some rather disgusting-smelling Mexican leaves [actually, Argentine maté] into a brew which he said gave him energy – not something I thought he lacked, rather he fizzed with it.’ E.C.: ‘He’d suddenly come down from the top floor and say, “Where’s the coffee?” or “What’s for lunch?” He wanted to be waited on all the time.’

  560 A lamp designed by King, six feet high, one foot square, with a 25 watt lightbulb sunk into the top shedding a faint glow. Chatwin wanted to paint it dull grey; King refused.

  561 E.C.: ‘He spent two days. We moved in, slept on the floor and mattresses with the movers from Holwell Farm. Bruce tore the dark brown ribbed moiré wallpaper off the little sitting room to make one room habitable. He relined and painted it pale buttercup. Next day, he pulled off the black and white paisley wallpaper and sea-grass in the big room. Then he went away. He didn’t carry any objects in, not a thing.’

  562 Chatwin had lunch with Sifton in London on 20 October and agreed to leave Jim Silberman and go with her to Viking in America. On 26 October she offered an advance of $50,000 for On the Black Hill. In the UK, Cape paid an advance of £7,500.

  563 Gerald Hingley of Wragge’s, Chatwin’s lawyer in Birmingham.

  564 Kenyan paleoanthropologist (b.1944).

  565 Danish author, also known as Isak Dinesen (1885-1962); her books include Out of Africa.

  566 Joan Saunders of Writers’ and Speakers’ Research, a literary researcher whom he shared with Patrick Leigh Fermor. In January 1981 she had sent Chatwin a list of Air Crashes and Women Fliers.

  567 American author and political activist (1933-2004).

  568 In Chinatown. S.S.: ‘Bruce was the only person I knew whom I could invite to a hakka – fried intestines and toe-nails.’

  569 Robert Calasso (b.1941), Italian author and Chatwin’s publisher at Adelphi.

  570 The Day of Judgement, posthumous novel by Salvatore Satta (1902-75) set in nineteenth-century Sardinia; it was published in English in 1987.

  571 Cambridge-based critic and philosopher (b.1929).

  572 In a speech at the New York Town Hall on 6 February 1982 to protest against the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, Sontag had said ‘Communism is . . . Fascism with a human face’ – drawing boos and shouts from the audience, and accusations that she had betrayed her radical ideas.

  573 Chairman of Jonathan Cape.

  574 ‘The young men’, Betjeman called them.

  575 Bickerton was the eldest son of the disgraced solicitor, Robert Harding Milward; he was in the Broken Hill gold rush, badly gassed in the First World War and ended his days living ‘rather rakishly’ in Broadway.

  576 ABC radio producer from Sydney; she had visited Chatwin in Albany in January 1980.

  577 Sontag replied on 11 July 1982: ‘I loved the stamp on your last letter [commemorating Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, and his 1906 creation HMS Dreadnought]. The vivid, curiously Negroid head of Lord Fishersomething (part of the name inked out by the postmark); his pale Dreadnought riding in the background; and a miniature grey silhouette of the Queen as Girl, hanging in the upper left. Worthy of Donald Evans, which shows once again that you know . . . I’m off for ten days – all quite unexpected – to Kiev. My only justification is that I’ve never been to the Soviet Onion and I want to smell it, and it’s only ten days. I look forward to your visit toward the end of August with impatience.’

  578 George Weidenfeld, British publisher (b.1919).

  579 Mimar Sinan(1489-1588), Ottoman architect of Suleiman Mosque in Istanbul.

  580 The first mention of a novel which Chatwin did not begin until 1988, of which but a fragment exists.

  581 For the Observer magazine, ‘Great Rivers of the World: The Volga’, June 1984.

  582 V.S. Pritchett reviewed On the Black Hill in the New York Review of Books, 20 January 1983.

  583 Penelope Tree (b.1950), Anglo-American model photographed by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton and David Bailey. She had lived in Sydney since 1974 m. to Ricky Fataar, South African musician who briefly played for the Beach Boys.

  584 Childhood friends who had emigrated to Australia.

  585 Bailey in the London Evening Standard had called On the Black Hill ‘a curiously coarse-grained book . . . The writing is rife with cliché . . . At its worst it suggests Mary Webb on a very off day.’

  586 Australian television producer with whom Chatwin stayed on Bondi Beach.

  587 Altie Karper, Sifton’s assistant at Viking.

  588 Theodor George Henry (‘Ted’) Strehlow (1908-78), anthropologist who grew up speaking Aranda on the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg, where his father was pastor, and made it his life’s work to record ‘in notebooks, on tape and on film the songs and ceremonies of the passing order’. The Aboriginals considered Strehlow to be a member of their people and, controversially, entrusted him with the responsibility of safeguarding their sacred objects and ceremonies. In May 1978 he caused outrage when he sold photographs of secret ceremonies to Stern magazine which were syndicated to the Australian weekly People. He suffered a cardiac arrest four months later. Chatwin wrote in The Songlines: ‘Strehlow died at his desk in 1978, a broken man.’

  589 Thomas had researched ITV’s The South Bank Show on Chatwin, aired on 7 November 1982.