Under the Sun (20 page)

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | [Winter 1969]

 

Dear Peter,

I have just found a piece of paper on which is scrawled in your handwriting ‘The 9th Century Mosque at Balkh, the Lion Throne, 4 copies of the horse photo.' The horse photo I trust you now have. In enlargement you really do have a savage look . . .

I shall be going to America immediately after Christmas to devote myself to many forms of Oriental art and, worse, people devoted to Oriental Art. Thence I shall go to Morocco, I suppose to devote myself to Orientals, if such they can be called in the Far West.

Very interesting the use of the word ‘nomad ' as a term of abuse in the Sharon Tate murder case.
²²²
‘A band of hate oriented 20th century nomads' is as bad a condemnation as one can get. I have written two chapters of my book. Then I decided they were boring. So they will have to be rewritten. If only I didn't have an argument to follow. Arguments are fatal. One always forgets what they're about.

Love, Bruce

PS Try and come here before you go.

 

Late in 1969, at Howard Hodgkin's house near Bath, Chatwin met the American film director James Ivory. A friend of Cary Welch, who nicknamed him ‘Jungle Jim', Ivory was preparing to make his fourth feature film,
‘Bombay Talkie'.

9 Kynance Mews
²²³
| London | December 8 1969

 

 

Dear Jim,

I have just returned to a grey London from the country, where I have written a chapter of my book, and decided on the train that the whole thing must be rewritten. This evening I am spending with someone called Galt MacDermott who wrote the music of
Hair
. In a moment of enthusiasm, or rather infatuated by a member of the cast,
²²⁴
I wrote a scenario for a musical one bright spring day. It has been languishing around ever since, but now sparks from elsewhere, scriptwriters, lyric writers and musicians. What a performance! The Living Theatre. And furthermore lunch with Noel Coward on Friday. I'm a sucker for theatrical camp. Hence the Mongol outfit.

Alas I am gradually being railroaded into going to New York after Christmas, to the extent that I have just reserved the tickets. I have this wretched Asia House Exhibition, shared with two supermale ladies, who are sharpening their knives. Other forms of torture are being greased and oiled for the intrepid English amateur who has dared plant his unwary feet on the hallowed ground of American scholarship. I received the official invitation to meet myself in the presence of Mrs Rockefeller; this has its comic implications. Charmed to meet myself but nobody else. The opening of the show is for the 14th, and I will possibly linger on for some days after. I intend to go to Morocco, and then possibly to Mauretania, one of the great unknowns. I'd vastly prefer to come your way, and go to the south, but immediate financial prospects are not that favourable for the enterprise.

I went to the Kervorkian Sale of miniatures,
²²⁵
and fiddled around with low bids on some of the grander numbers. I came away with a Jahanghir period picture of an Arctic Tern,
²²⁶
the bird that has the longest migration of any species. It is like the best of the animal painting of the period, but a bit rubbed. Beautiful clear line of the wing and tail feathers. Your Basawan
²²⁷
sounds wonderful. You can always find things wherever you go. Two days in the auction room brought back a flood of gruesome memories. The nervous anxiety of the bidder's face as he or she waits to see if she can afford to take some desirable thing home to play with. Like old men in nightclubs deciding whether they can really afford to pay that much for a whore. But things are so much better. You can sell them, touch 'em up at any time of the day, and they don't answer back. H[oward] H[odgkin] came to dinner the other night and told me that he and Kasmin
²²⁸
acquired some Devgarh pictures which sounds fine. I am perhaps going to try and buy one.

One day I want to make a really long and slow trip right across Asia, by the most obscure frontier posts and along the least frequented routes. I would write the whole thing into a semi-imaginary picaresque journey, which is a form that has always appealed to me. Have you ever read a weird book called
The Asiatics
by Frederick Prokosch,
²²⁹
a bit hammy in parts, but really quite interesting. It would be a way for me to incorporate all my fragmented diaries of episodes of my travels. I have always thought that an archaeological fraud film has possibilities. I was once very closely involved in one, which in reality was far more fantastic than anything one could ever write. It had everything from the Persian Royal Family, Armenian ladies in Beirut, American Museum directors, and a leprous-faced recluse living in the Place Vendome, writing and rewriting an imaginary biography of the young Michelangelo.

Till January 8th I'll be in the country. Holwell Farm.

Do write. I had a good time too.

Bruce

9 Kynance Mews|London|8 January 1970

 

Off on Thursday morning with Penelope Betjeman to New York
²³⁰
. . . So the machinations of Sir Noel
²³¹
worked—I'm really glad. Think of all the theatrical knights one has never heard of – let alone seen. love, B

 

‘Bruce Chatwyn [
sic
] is obviously a lively-minded and contentious young man, not afraid to take a swipe at all the ethnologists within reach and some out of it . . . His sample chapter is all over the place but I am inclined to think that it would be better to give him his head for the moment and let him do his own disciplining as he goes along, which I have a hunch he will, cutting out the wilder digressions and more outrageous statements, which only damage the impression made by his more sensible ideas. He sets out to explain the wandering urge in man, which is an interesting basis for a book, and if he keeps his eye on the subject he may produce a rather good book.'

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 9 April 1970

 

Found your letter on arrival back from Mauretania – probably the most pleasant country on earth in which to travel. Had intended writing about it for travel magazines etc but how could one write for the
public
about a place where police are non-existent as well as passport controls? Nothing but blue men walking through orange and purple landscapes and a few left over Spanish who run their settlements as brothels for imported Senegalese. Should be here in the summer unless I go to rent a little house in Patmos to write in June/July. Will inform. Flat let in London.
²³²
Money exhausted by journey. Love B

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 21 May 1970

 

Dear Jim,

Letters from you and Cary [Welch] today. A good post. Cary in fine form having, he says, bought a farm in New Hampshire, where the Welches can retire to and grow vegetables if the WORST COMES TO THE WORST as many people seem to be predicting in America right now: though in the unlikely event of that happening, I dare say there would be hordes of hungry barbarians in flashy clothes, probably on horseback,
²³³
who would dig into their radish patch with their swords (ammunition being no longer available). Small quick crops of quick growing things like cress would be all that would have time to grow before the hordes swept down again. The key to the whole thing surely is that book
The Making of the President
;
²³⁴
nothing is more violence inducing than a sense of individual powerlessness.

You must be bloody hot out there. You might let me know if you're going to be there next winter, because we have plans to come in October and remain till May. I want to go if possible to Sikkim in the spring and also to the far south in the winter. This is something that has been planned for four years, and as with all long term plans I shall only decide two weeks beforehand.

I spend the weeks in Oxford now, heavily disguised as a skiiing undergraduate, and, I confess, celebrating my thirtieth birthday with a skittish affair. Merton College, jasmine tea, shades of Max Beerbohm
²³⁵
, red lacquer, ecclesiastical drag, mystical excesses of the Early Church Fathers combined with the intellectual mentality of Ronald Firbank.
²³⁶
You get the picture?
Not serious
, very pretty.

I may go to Patmos in July and August, where I have undertaken to rent a house, providing a. I have finished my so-called research b. I have the funds. Do you know that island? The most beautiful in all the Aegean. Couldn't you come there?

Off to Ireland for a week or so then here.

Do write.

love B

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 8 June [1970]

 

 

Do you know the story of her retreat from Kabul? Refusal to cut her personal staff below 46. Insistence on removing her grand piano down the gorge in midwinter, and solemn devotion to her needlework throughout capture and possibe rape. L[oelia] wouldn't have to act.

Dog has torn up my last jersey, but it is all quiet without the parrot
²³⁹
for whose continued absence I pray. Love B

Chora | Patmos | Greece | [July 1970]

 

Monday

Dear E.,

Am very well installed after an uneventful journey with the Father
²⁴⁰
who sends you his love. We stayed two days in Athens with his friends, which was not entirely thrilling except for one hilarious interlude.
La Vache sacrée
of American anthropology, Margaret Mead
²⁴¹
no less, at luncheon in a restaurant with her students – or rather her menagerie, one of each ethnic type from Eskimo to Javanese, obviously all hating each other and her in particular. She, garrulous and white fleshed, held forth on a number of very audible topics. When I heard her say ‘Well, I think we've got a bunch of silly egalitarian ideas about the place,' I fixed her with my well known acid blue glare, and if it didn't shut her up entirely, at least it made her profoundly nervous.

Ginette Camu, Bill Bernhard and Thilo von Watzdorf's brother are here.
²⁴²
Otherwise the horde has not yet descended. The weather is perfect, and the
melteme
doesn't come for another fortnight. I am feeling human again. As one gets older, one realises that there are some places that suit one, and others that emphatically do not. One can only find out by experience. Paris and this place are two of them. I don't think we could afford to live in Paris, but I must say I wouldn't mind a try. Can you let me know how you get on with the unholy alliance of trustees? Please also can you contact David and Judy [Nash] at 42, Eaton Square, and retrieve from them the Inca as and when you take the feathers.
²⁴³
Please be doubly careful of the frame, and use blankets. Remember it is very heavy, heavier than you would think, and once the edges are bashed up it will be very difficult to repair.

When a book comes from Blackwells for me by Bruning, called
Biological Clocks,
²⁴⁴
will you let me know at once. Then I will have you send it to someone coming out here like Ron
²⁴⁵
. . . Clem and Jessie
²⁴⁶
were well in Paris, and were driving to Greece today. Poor Iain Watson
²⁴⁷
had bronchial pneumonia which loused up their plans for Istanbul.

Incidentally, that gramophone record we heard at Derek [Hill]'s was
Autour du Celebre canon de Pachelbel
. I just found the note of it today. Why do you not order a copy from Discurio in Shepherd's Market?

The post takes for ages – about one week from London, and so we will have to cable if anything becomes urgent. Work begins in earnest in two days time. Meanwhile I have swum several miles, and will swim several more.

B

P.S. Will you buy 2 small Winsor-Newton Watercolour brushes for me. I only have the smallest and 2 large.

P.S. Can you try and do something for me? It is rather complicated. Either at the Bodleian or the British Museum they have services for photocopying articles. I have decided that I must have that famous Lorenz article copied and then translated. The reference is . . . Konrad Lorenz,
Die Angeborengen Formen Moglisher Erfahrung in Zoologische Tierpsychologie
, V, 1943, pp. 235-409. (God help us for the number of pages) I shall need it directly I get back and will have to find someone to translate it. If the cost is desperate, obviously don't do it. The Bodleian card number is 20374 if they have any queries.

Chora | Patmos | Greece | 1 August 1970

 

Dear E.,

. . . You may complain of my lefty views, but God I'm right. We have the daughters of the upper classes here in force and I have been listening to a baklava of snobbery and prejudice for the past week. Maxime McKendry
²⁴⁸
and John are here, which is quite fun, but they are rather brittle too. Shilly shallying conversation and no desire to go to the beach. I go down and talk to Irina
²⁴⁹
occasionally in her little house. Otherwise nothing. I would sell the car if you want to. I really don't care for it as you know, though as I definitely do not want one myself I leave it entirely to you.