Anatomy of Restlessness (2 page)

 

I lost teddy bears without a whimper, yet clung tenaciously to three precious possessions: a wooden camel known as Laura, brought by my father from the Cairo bazaar; a West Indian conch shell called Mona, in whose glorious pink mouth I could hear the wish-wash of the ocean; and a book. The book was
The Fisherman's Saint
, an account of Sir Wilfred Grenfell's mission work on the coast of Labrador. I still have it. On the title page is written: ‘To Bruce on his 3rd Birthday from the postman at Filey. For when he grows up.' I imagined the book must contain some wonderful secret (which it did not), and it maddened me to have to wait all those years. The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, ‘I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, ‘How do you spell telephone wires?'

 

My first job, while staying in Stratford-on-Avon with my greataunts Janie and Gracie, in 1944, was to be the self-appointed guide to Shakespeare's monument and tomb in the church. The price was threepence ago. Most of my customers were G.I.'s. Not that I knew who Shakespeare was, except that he was somehow associated with the red brick theatre from whose balcony I would chuck old crusts to the swans. Yet, long before I could read, Aunt Gracie had taught me to recite the lines engraved on the tombslab:

The aunts were spinsters. Janie, the elder and wittier, was an artist. As a young woman she'd lived on Capri and drawn sketches of naked boys. She remembered seeing Maxim Gorki, possibly even Lenin; and in Paris she'd been to a party in the studio of Kees Van Dongen, the Dutch painter. During the Great War she worked, I believe, as a nurse. Perhaps the deaths of so many beautiful youths moved her to paint the canvases of St Sebastian that lay in racks around her studio. She was a tireless reader of modem fiction. Later, she would tell me that American writers wrote better, cleaner English than the English themselves. One day she looked up from her book and said, ‘What a wonderful word “arse” is!' – and for the first time I heard the name Ernest Hemingway.

Aunt Gracie was very emotional and very deaf. Her great friend (and my passion!) was the Irish writer Eleanor Doorly, through whom she met members of the Dublin Circle. Her approach to literature was entirely romantic. On summer days we used to sit and read by the Avon. Across the stream was a bank called Wire Brake, which, so she swore, was Shakespeare's bank whereon the wild thyme blew – though I found only nettles and brambles. We read Whitman's ‘Song of Myself from an anthology of poetry called
The Open Road
. We read ‘The Windhover' of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and we read from Eleanor Doorly's book on Marie Curie. The story of Curie's self-inflicted radium bums affected me greatly. I also wonder if Aunt Gracie was the last Victorian to threaten a child with the spectre of Bonaparte.

One evening, when I'd misbehaved in the bath, she cried, ‘Stop that, or Boney will get you!' – and then drew on a piece of paper a dreadful black bicorn hat on legs. Sometime later, in a nightmare, I met the hat outside Hall's Croft, the home of Shakespeare's daughter, and it opened like a furry clamshell and swallowed me.

 

I remember, too, the aunts having a lively discussion as to whether
Measure for Measure
was suitable entertainment for a six-year-old. They decided no harm could come of it – and from that matinee on I was hooked. The Stratford theatre kept the back row of stalls unreserved until the day of the performance, and I would cycle through the dawn to make sure of getting a seat. I saw most of the great productions of the late 40s and 50s—with the Oliviers, Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Paul Robeson as Othello – and these constitute for me the Shakespeare of all time. Having lived the plays as a boy, I can now scarcely sit through one without a sensation of loss.

 

By 1949 the hard times were over, and one evening my father proudly drove home from work in a new car. Next day he took my brother and me for a spin. On the edge of an escarpment he stopped, pointed to a range of grey hills in the west and then said, ‘Let's go on into Wales.' We slept the night in the car, in Radnorshire, to the sound of a mountain stream. At sunrise there was a heavy dew, and the sheep were all around us. I suppose the result of this trip is the novel I've recently published,
On the Black Hill.

 

At boarding school I was an addict of atlases and was always being ostracised for telling tall stories. Every boy had to be a ‘little Conservative', though I never understood – then as now – the motivations of the English class system. Nor why, on Guy Fawkes Day of 1949, the masters encouraged us to burn on a bonfire an effigy of the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. I was sad for Mr Atlee, and never, even in my capitalist phase, was I able to vote Conservative.

 

The Chatwins, coming as they did from the heart of England, were fanatical sailors. The names of their boats were the
Aireymouse,
the
Dozmaree,
the
Greebe
, the
Nereid
and, finally, the
Sunquest
, an 18-ton Bermudian sloop built in the 30s to sail around the world. We only sailed as far as Brittany, and once to Spain. I hated the actual sailing, for I was always horribly seasick – and yet I persevered. After reading an account of the effect of the H-bomb on Britain, my ‘life-plan' was to sail away to a South Sea island and never come back.

 

The first grown-up book I read from cover to cover was Captain Joshua Slocum's
Sailing Alone around the World
. This was followed by John C. Voss's
The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss
, by Melville's
Omoo
and
Typee
, then Richard Henry Dana and Jack London. Perhaps from these writers I got a taste for Yankee plain style? I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

 

One summer when I was thirteen I went alone to Sweden to talk English to a boy of my age whose family lived in a lovely eighteenth-century house by a lake. The boy and I had nothing in common. But his Uncle Percival was a delightful old gentleman, always dressed in a white smock and sun hat, with whom I would walk through the birch forest gathering mushrooms or row to an island to see the nesting ospreys. He lived in a log cabin lit by crystal chandeliers. He had travelled in Czarist Russia. He made me read Chekhov in Constance Garnett's translation, also Duff Cooper's biography of Talleyrand.

 

The great English novelists were left unread, but were heard, very much heard –
Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice—
on gramophone records, in plummy English voices, as I lay in the Birmingham eye hospital with partial paralysis of the optic nerve-a psychosomatic condition probably brought on by Marlborough College, where I was considered to be a dimwit and dreamer. I tried to learn Latin and Greek and was bottom of every class. There was, however, an excellent school library, and I seem in retrospect to have come away quite well read. I loved everything French—painting, furniture, poetry, history, food—and, of course, I was haunted by the career of Paul Gauguin. For my seventeenth birthday the owner of the town bookshop gave me a copy of Edith Sitwell's anthology, Planet
and Glow-worm,
a collection of texts for insomniacs, to which I can trace a number of literary fixtures – Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud, Li Po and other Chinese ‘wanderers', Blake and Mad Kit Smart, the encapsulated biographies of John Aubrey and the seventeenth-century prose music of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.

For a time I went along with the suggestion that I follow the family tradition and train as an architect; but, because I was innumerate, my chances of passing the exams were remote. My parents gently squashed my ambition to go on the stage. Finally, in December 1958, since my talents were so obviously ‘visual', I started work as a porter at Messrs Sotheby and Co., Fine Art Auctioneers, of Bond Street, at wages of £6 a week.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculpture. I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered Before long, I was an instant expert, flying here and there to pronounce, with unbelieveable arrogance, on the value or authenticity of works of art. I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake. We sold the collection of Somerset Maugham, who, at dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, told a story about a temple boy, himself and a baby elephant. On Park Avenue, a woman slammed the door in my face, shouting, ‘I'm not showing my Renoir to a sixteen-year-old kid.'

 

The high points of my fine arts career were:

In the summer holidays I travelled east, as far as Afghanistan, and wondered if I was capable of writing an article on Islamic architecture. But something was wrong. I began to feel that things, however beautiful, can also be malign. The atmosphere of the Art World reminded me of the morgue. ‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,' they'd say—and I'd look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth. Or people would compliment me on my ‘eye,' and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out. After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half blind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons? Africa, perhaps? The chairman of Sotheby's said, ‘I'm sure there is something wrong with Bruce's eyes but I can't think why he has to go to Africa.'

I went to the Sudan. On camel and foot I trekked through the Red Sea hills and found some unrecorded cave paintings. My nomad guide was a hadendoa, one of Kipling's ‘fuzzy-wuzzies'. He carried a sword, a purse and a pot of scented goat's grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate ; and by the time I returned to England a mood of fierce iconoclasm had set in.

Not that I turned into a picture slasher. But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. I quit my job and enrolled as a first-year student of archaeology at Edinburgh University.

My studies in that grim northern city were not a success. I enjoyed a year of Sanskrit. By contrast, archaeology seemed a dismal discipline – a story of technical glories interrupted by catastrophe, whereas the great figures of history were invisible. In the Cairo Museum you could find statues of pharaohs by the million. But where was the face of Moses. One day, while excavating a Bronze-Age burial, I was about to brush the earth off a skeleton, and the old line came back to haunt me:

For the second time I quit.

 

Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of ‘Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory ‘drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this ‘drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers – Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis – had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.

The book grew and grew; and as it grew it became less and less intelligible to its author. It even contained a diatribe against the act of writing itself Finally, when the manuscript was typed, it was so obviously unpublishable that, for the third time, I gave up.

Penniless, depressed, a total failure at the age of thirty-three, I had a phone call from Francis Wyndham of the
Sunday Times
magazine, a man of outstanding literary judgement, whom I hardly knew. Would I, he asked, like a small job as an adviser on the arts? ‘Yes,' I said.

We soon forgot about the arts, and under Francis's guidance I took on every kind of article. I wrote about Algerian migrant workers, the couturier Madeleine Vionnet and the Great Wall of China. I interviewed André Malraux on what General de Gaulle thought of England; and in Moscow I visited Nadezhda Mandelstam.

She lay on her bed, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, gritting a song of triumph between her blackened teeth. Her work was done. She had published, abroad it was true, but her words would one day come home. She looked at the thrillers I'd been told to take her and sneered: ‘
Romans policiers!
Next time, bring me some real trash!' But when she saw the pots of orange marmalade, her mouth cracked into a smile: ‘Marmalade, my dear, it is my childhood!'

Each time I came back with a story, Francis Wyndham encouraged, criticised, edited and managed to convince me that I should, after all, try my hand at another book. His greatest gift was permission to continue.

One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache.