Under the Sun (26 page)

But I do badly want to see you – for lots of reasons. Apart from the obvious one, I want to ask your advice. I have in the rough a story, which doesn't really work as a novel because I have tried it. It is also a true story about someone I met by chance. I have a
goût de monstres
but this was the best ever and I ended up feeling the deepest compassion for him. He was a real estate agent in slum property in down-town Miami; each year he spent his entire income on coming to London as Cinderella from the Ball. His letters to me are great pieces of Americana; unfortunately they are in Glos. To my knowledge – and you will probably be able to correct me – nobody has ever dealt
compassionately
with the idea of going to Miami to die. Also
visually
Miami is surely the most extravagantly beautiful example of holiday camp horror in America. I called my story ‘Rotting Fruit '.
³³²
Do you think there might be something in it for you?

When you get this can you cable me at Oppedette
and
at Aubenas when you will be at a particular number in London and I will call you? But if I have to make an expedition of six kilometres to the phone box it isn't worth the bother and find you not there. You should also allow that you'll be at least one hour in the same place, because the lines have a tendency to whistle for half an hour.

Love, B

Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | Tuesday 15 July 1971

 

Dear E.,

So the cheque came OK thank God! I have endorsed it and it is for you to pay into your external account FOR ME, but you can use it if it gets you out of a fix. I would like you to have your bank send me £100 to a bank of their choice in Apt, Vaucluse,
by cable
and fairly quick. I have about £30 odd still left but don't want to get stuck at all, and to inform me at once WHAT BANK.

Now the house. A couple I met with Hiram Wintherbotham
³³³
are called the Rochés, father was a famous old art collector and author of
Jules et Jim.
Jean-Claude is the greatest expert in France certainly on birdsong and has a chateau rigged up as a recording studio.
³³⁴
He is renting me his mother's house two rooms all mod con when I want it till the 18th or so of August and even then it's not the end of the world because there is apparently bound to be something else.

I suggest you come around the 23rd or so with a car
plus
another typewriter as I suspect there will be typing to do, and the two large Oxford dictionaries and some money – enough money – mine if not yours and also the
New Yorker
article about Chomsky
³³⁵
which I left behind. It's not coming along too badly at all. At least I know how to do it.

. . . Jungle Jim Ivory wrote saying he wants to come to France and I've asked him here only if he brings a car. You can if you want buy a car with that money of mine, but I don't particularly want to own it. Did anything happen with my flute delivery from Parke-Bernet? If so please bring it with you, WELL WRAPPED. Also I suspect that Rogers and Co will have sent me a bill for the shipping of the Maori. Should be about £30. Please pay it.

Still quite beautiful up here. Never gets too hot. No mistral but a breeze. Apparently its freezing in winter but always bright.

love, B

P.S. Did you know, my dear, that Chatwin means ‘a spiralling ascent' in Old English?

Le Grand Banc | Oppedette | Basse Alpes | France | Tuesday [July 1971]

 

Dear E.,

Further to the phone call of today. I have a card from Charlotte today saying that the Max Ernst fetched £6500 which by my calculation should bring in about £150 or a bit less, and then there is Porter Chandler's Picasso which I don't know the price of. Plus the cheque from Cary [Welch] which if you haven't received it by now you should be calling the alarm, by cabling me at Aubenas or phoning there. Will you then please do the following for me – buy and bring with you if he's there the little Plains Indian female figurine from K J[ohn]H[ewett]. The price I believe he quoted at me was £220 or so. Don't pay more and if he asks you say he'd better speak to me about it.

I go with Hiram [Winterbotham] to Douglas Cooper's
³³⁶
for dinner on Thursday and hope on Friday morning that the money will have arrived at the Société Général in Apt, that is if your confounded bank don't muck the whole thing up as usual. Otherwise I want and need nothing but perhaps a few more clothes. Rather low on shirts. Plus the things mentioned in my last letter.

See you, love B

Very nice American couple here! Jane Kaplan or something like that. On permanent staff of
New Yorker
.

 

c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 2 August 1971

 

Dear Jim,

No alarm calls so we presume all is well. By the time this letter reaches London you will probably be in New York. I had a note from a friend asking me to meet him in Marseilles which arrived eight days after the sending, and two days after he'd gone. I look forward to your acerbic comments on the riff-raff life in Tangier. Did you meet someone called Yves Vidal, known commonly as Ma Vidal, who owns some castle that sounds tasteless and hideous and is or is not normally for sale at a million dollars. All
meubles en matÄ­ere plastique
.

We have had the Mistral for four solid days and I have had a solid stomach ache. The house has become like a gas oven. Really, he might have had more sense than to plonk it on a south facing hill with a nice stretch of gleaming gravel to reflect the heat into the house. I doubt that Mummy will leave her apartment in Neuilly often to fry in these rooms.

Despite the heat and stomach I have gone racing on with the book. Forty pages have been done since you left. I do hope it's not all nonsense. I have also finished Mr C
³³⁷
I must confess with rising exasperation over the chapters on the minorities. I am afraid that like so many intelligent people he has fallen victim to a complaint called Aryan Nonsense. The mysterious blond brutes have an uncanny way of unhinging people's common sense.

I will leave here on the 18th or so and then go for eight days to Porto Ercole to see some old friends,
³³⁸
then back to England with the manuscript I hope pretty well intact. Never never never will I write anything longer than a few pages. Never – at least for a very long time – will I try anything that demands RESEARCH. I think on that day we were all under a cloud. You were anxious. I was anxious and I hadn't thought what I was going to be. Quite an emotional crisis, but it passed. What's to be done? America not before the 15th Sept. but I have really no idea. All depends on Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Anyhow I miss you.
³³⁹

love, B

 

c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 12 August 1971

 

Dear J.

O my! that housemaster. As I have written to the
Times
in high dudgeon and irony – so high they won't publish it – no spectacle, not even the Angel Gabriel on a trip, was more bizarre than one puffy public school master followed by three of the most exquisitely dressed and pretty and flirtatious boys, one with boots and marginally more masculine than the other two with handbags, as they picked their way delicately from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of the Exterior to the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Culture and finally when the Afghan government had made it abundantly clear that they didn't want to be investigated, least of all by an ex-British army exmajor, the party dropped in on the PM to be shown the door, first of all quite politely and then really rather rudely. The major, believe it or not, is the self-appointed expert on the Old Man and the Mountain and the hashashins,
³⁴⁰
and his real motive in attempting to queue barge his way into the northern province of Badakhshan was to try and contact a group of Ismailis who live there. To do this he invented a great yarn to [the] head of the Anti-Slavery Society of London and presumably Ltd., because it must be a profit-making institution, about the slave markets of Afghanistan. As I first heard it, the original slaves to be investigated were Czech and Hungarian women, enslaved in Bulgaria, traded in Afghanistan with officers in the Chinese Army for Opium. As that tale wore rather thin and to justify Major Gordon
³⁴¹
the expenses, not only for the air tickets, but also for the button-microphones and miniature cameras, and tins of corned beef and the packet soups he had so generously provided (one couldn't expect boys that delicate and attractive to eat the native food), they found the slaves in the bazaars of Kabul, because Kabul was where the Afghans said the expedition must remain and remain it did.

My Dear, it was funny, very funny. And that really is worth a filum. Or maybe we might incorporate it. My mind has been on my book. O God that book, now lurching into the final chapter and letting off heavy ordnance at random, thereby probably murdering it myself. E and I are going to the observatory this afternoon so that I can get a little celestial guidance and this letter as you can see is being ripped off at an alarming rate.

She THE FINANCIAL MASTER-MIND whose mind works only in terms of the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh says you owe HER not me, the sum of 128 dollars – what a hideous expense that tiddly little car was, and then apparently the ticket came to more than we had imagined, because when we went to settle in Manosque the man said he was some short. Can you possibly send it to E direct at Holwell Farm?

The house at Aubenas is now filled at nights with little black flies that you can neither see nor hear.

Will be in touch as soon as ever I can.

xx B

c/o Jean-Claude Roché | Aubenas-les-Alpes | France | 23 August 1971

 

Have had 2 very entertaining days with the
Mayoress
if that's what she can be called – of
Marseilles
. Am going to Italy for 8 days then return. All but the last 10 pages are done. What a relief when it's over! Bruce

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 15 September 1971

 

Dear Jim,

Sorry for this hasty note. Elizabeth is flying to Boston and then to Upper New York State to face her sister's
³⁴²
wedding, and she will post it. I am two-thirds of the way through typing the book out, but the last chapter will require some energetic doctoring before I can bestow it on the unsuspecting publisher. When and as it is ready, I shall come, but not before I am released by him. Once in the US I don't particularly want to go back to the UK but still plan the South American trip, all being well.

She'll phone you in NY, because the poor thing is penniless, more penniless than I, which is a happy state of affairs but not likely to last. This means she will HOUND you for the dollars, so that she can go on little shopping expeditions to Abercrombie and Fitch.

Once I'm through I'll apply my febrile mind to the idea of the film about THINGS. Incidentally I have a splendidly macabre story about a compulsive collector of Cherry Blossom Boot Polish tins, set in North London between the wars, and ending with the most enigmatic death. See you I hope in about 6 WEEKS. Oh dear! What a long time!

Love

B

Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | [October 1971]

 

Dear Jim,

You're an angel to send the cheque. Lord knows why you should have had to pay for the bloody car anyway though we'd have been pretty stuck without it. Anyway it eases the financial situation here somewhat. I have hardly earned a penny for the past four years, though I manage to survive somehow – a mixture of meanness and cunning but nothing more. The bright star on the horizon financially is that I have a feather cape from Peru bought for 300 bucks in 1966 in NY. Yesterday the phone rang from a friend asking whether I would accept $22,000 for it. You bet I bloody well would.
³⁴³
The deal has yet to go through, but God . . . just one further proof of the lunacy of the times.