Nearby there's a Shakespeare Festival of all things, the oldest in North America founded in the early twenties. The town Ashland is full of banks and hamburger joints got up to look like Ann Hathaway's cottage. Teenage girls float around with syllabub trays and if you want to eat there's always an English tart. âIt's sort of like a pecan pie, but we call it English tart . . .' The performance was horrendous. The women were like the daughters of the American revolution at a bridge party and the men all came from Texas and gassed about on phoney hobby horses waving silk handkerchiefs at each other, shouting âHi . . . yeee . . .' I have refused an invitation to go to the
Taming of the Shrew
.
I don't know how long it will take. I am simply going to sit here and finish it. I refuse to be budged. My book, whatever anyone may say, is far the most important thing I've ever attempted. This place is quite conducive to work. So there we are.
Much love, XXX
Bruce
To Elizabeth Chatwin
P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 14 September 1972
Â
c/o Charles Van
Dear Hurrubureth,
Charles Van is the caretaker here and as all the post is directed through him it's best to put his name on letters because the main supplies of post have gone, the summer people having flown and I seem to be left entirely alone with the beavers.
So we went to San Francisco which is so unlike anything else in the US it doesn't really bear thinking about. It's utterly light-weight and sugary with no sense of purpose or depth. The people are overcome with an incurable frivolity whenever they set foot in it. This doesn't mean that one couldn't live here. In fact I think one could easily, preferably with something equally frivolous to do. I stayed with the Oppens
369
and they were lovely. They have no money. He is very Jewish of the muscular outdoors type and they sail all round Maine in an open 16ft dingy with a light plastic awning. Imagine. He considers every word meticulously and makes one feel slightly foolish. I think his poetry is some of the best in America. She is sort of homespun with one of those little girl-straight-from-the-ranch simplicity faces, even though she's nearing seventy. We went one night to the grand San Francisco poet Robert Duncan
370
who is famous with the young for his grandiloquent and skillful outbursts on the Vietnam war. I on the other hand thought him one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met, with a waxen witch-like face, hair tied in a pigtail and a pair of ludicrous white sideburns. He gassed on and on in a flat monotone and it was impossible to decide if the tone was hysterical or dead pan. The house was a creepy-crawly nightmare, and betrayed
la moralité des choses
, all
art nouveau
of the worst kind. Bloodless fingers fingering the objects as he spoke, and I suspect that if he weren't fingering
art nouveau
objects he could just as easily be pressing buttons or ordering napalm, so sinister and obsessed with the demonic alternative he was.
There's a beautiful little town on the north coast of S.F. called Mendocino with marvellous clapboard buildings and water towers and sculpture of the latter-day Greek revival and if it gets too cold here I might try and find a room down there on the coast for a week. So beautiful there with sheer cliffs going down to the sea and wind-blown pines and sea-lions on the rocks, and redwood in the mountains behind. The northern section of the road is utterly deserted, then one meets the real estate signs, then the developments in varying degrees of artyness, then the funeral parlours. The one thing I feel about S.F. is that it doesn't reek of death, whereas almost everywhere else does. I intend to stay here or nearby until October 5th or so and should have a great hunk of this done by then. I am writing fast, then hitching the things up for the finer points of style later. I had terrible trouble with my back at one stage. It hurt all down my right side, not the left as was usual. It was sitting down to type that did it, plus the most horrible bed that meant one was floating in an oily sea. Plus I imagine the
diet
. So I went to health shop in S.F. and spent 50 bucks on emetic food. Needless to say I ran into the dreaded Linda who was buying her molasses and brown rice at the same time. Grown enormously fat she had, and she was with the Sufis.
Yes I should like to go to Africa this winter and preferably to Dahomey, and would certainly be prepared to go THERE with the Kasmins. We could take a car perfectly easily from Cadiz or Barcelona or wherever to Abijan in Ivory Coast. It gets there in three days and there's no earthly problem and it means one doesn't have to have something that crosses the Sahara. But to be comfortable one must go in January at the very latest. Otherwise the heat and the rain start to set in. Preferably of course before. Like November. God knows how to finance. Means I must work like a black. The more I cogitate it the more I dread the
Sunday Times
business as being something I don't want to do. I have sent a host of letters from here about this and that, none of which gets a reply. I'm exasperated without having begun. One's independence is so fragile a thing and I hardly think the money matters. Frankly, I prefer to flog the flat or long-let it rather than have to work in London. I find it fine for three weeks, but thereafter, WHAT IS THERE TO DO? I hate the theatre and the weather kills me. I seriously contemplate a cabana near Hiram [Wintherbotham]. What do you think? Or the Pyrenees. What do you think of the Kasmins',
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a bit like Holwell for scenery?
Not one bit surprised by P[eter] Levi's expulsion from Greece
372
and frankly and being rather cruel I think he richly deserved it. Though naturally he wanted it to happen, being such a publicity seeker. He courted the police to make them think he was suspicious. I found it immensely irritating, though less so than the Afghan book
373
which drove me wild with rage and I think I'd better not read it or I shall become apopleptic. I hope HIS book won't mean
we
are expelled from Afghanistan. What he really seems to enjoy is implicating other people in his own mess. All that harum-scarum Scarlet Pimpernelery only implicates his other English friends like Paddy and Joan [Leigh Fermor] and he can waltz about calling them crypto-fascists when they disassociate themselves from him. That's about the level of his political carry-on. O what a subject for a novel. I really think I must write one. P.L. is really about on the level of Major Willey when it comes to that sort of thing. The thing that really infuriates me about the Afghan book is that all my remarks and observations are repeated verbatim as an integral part of his text. Much love B
Have found 18th Cent Hawaiian food bowl.
To James Ivory
P.O. Box 464 | Harriman Route | Klamath Falls | Oregon | 14 September 1972
Â
Forgotten what day of the week it is.
Dear Jim,
All well here. Fine but cold. This is the last letter. Hope it's not a declaration of total war from your sister. Cary [Welch] writes me that he hasn't yet gone to England and will do so before the end of the month and will then be in the flat. You'll have to arrange it between you who has it, and there's not room for two, UNLESS OF COURSE . . . But that is impossible.
Off to Ashland to shop.
love B
P.S. Elizabeth says it's YOUR BANK'S STUPID FAULT. There was No reason why that cheque wasn't payable in the US. They simply don't use their eyes. Anyhow the money's been cabled.
Â
When Chatwin left Oregon in late September he carried with him a manuscript that he believed to be virtually finished. In Los Angeles he called on the writer Christopher Isherwood and poured out to him its essence. On 28 September 1972 Isherwood wrote in his diary: âYesterday, we had a visit from Bruce Chatwin, a blond, blue-eyed but somehow not really attractive friend of Peter Schlesinger. He is an anthropologist â and has spent time with native groups of hunters in the lands south of the Sahara; Mali, Niger and Chad. He maintains that hunting-groups aren't religious; religion only begins when people settle down and have individual possessions. (I didn't want to get into semantics so didn't challenge this, because it was obvious that Chatwin attached a different meaning to the word “religion”.) But he was extremely interesting, describing how the boys between thirteen and sixteen wear a sort of drag and are regarded as girls. The whole huntinggroup is perfectly adjusted to its environment; even the young children know what stars are rising and setting and when the migrations of birds take place and what habits the various animals have. As Chatwin put it, they differ from us in that they never try to interfere with Nature in any way. They also think that our preoccupation with possessions is crazy; according to their way of thinking, you share everything you have, so they “steal” from tourists, only it isn't really stealing because they don't want to keep what they take.'
On 30 September, Isherwood wrote again: âI had some more talk with Chatwin yesterday morning on the phone â I think he has now left Los Angeles, on his way to see some of the pueblos of New Mexico. He repeated some of the things he told me when he came to the house â that he regards the hunting-groups as being fundamentally unaggressive; that “much of what passes for aggression is a response to confinement” and that where there is no confinement giving replaces aggression â when two groups are in the same territory they don't fight over it, they exchange gifts, one group leaving its gift at a certain place and the other accepting it only when the gift seems sufficient; if the gift is not accepted, the giver adds to it until the recipient thinks it adequate and takes it away, leaving another gift in its place. Chatwin is very scornful about Konrad Lorenz's
On Aggression
and says that his philosophy is derived from the same sources as that of the Nazis.'
On his return to England early in November, Chatwin delivered his manuscript to Deborah Rogers, who waded conscientiously through it:âI remember the heart sinking.' She found the writing leaden, the content plodding. Unable to see a way to salvage the book, she nevertheless sent it to Tom Maschler who read 50 or 60 pages and stopped. âThey were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write.' Maschler told Chatwin his verdict face to face, saying: âSomething's going wrong here and maybe you should not be doing this.' He says,âI remember Bruce saying as he left: “I'll think about it.” I hoped I'd put him off.'
To Derek Hill
L8 Sloane Avenue Mansions | London | 24 November 1972
Â
Why don't you move into the farm pro temp. The whole upstairs can be made into studio etc. We can go away more often and it'll all be lovely.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUNDAY TIMES: 1972-4
Chatwin began work at the
Sunday Times
on 1 November 1972. He found himself part of a tight-knit editorial team that considered no subject too ambitious or too trivial. âFor a time it was the best photo-journalism magazine in Europe. I remember angry Frenchmen demanding their money back from the kiosk outside the Café Flore. That was the Sunday when, for “economic reasons”, the magazine was not sent to France with the paper.'
Although hired as arts consultant, Chatwin was given leave by the senior editor Francis Wyndham to spread his wings. âAt our first meeting I made suggestions â and one was adopted. We chose a photographer.
â “Now,” I said, “we shall have to find a writer.”
â “Don't be silly,” said Francis. “You'll write it yourself.”
â “I can't,” I said. “I can't write.”
â “I've never heard such nonsense.”
âThe article was that on Madeleine Vionnet.
âThe rest followed.'
After three years of tussling with his nomad book, the magazine offered Chatwin a deadline and an audience.âWe soon forgot about the arts, and under Francis's guidance, I took on every kind of article.' As a journalist he would file from Paris (on the couturière Madeleine Vionnet, the artist Sonia Delaunay, the writer André Malraux); New York (on the Guggenheims); Moscow (on the collector George Costakis, the architect Konstantin Melnikov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip); Vienna (on the animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz, the âNazi-hunter' Simon Wiesenthal); Upper Swabia (on the aesthete Ernst Jünger); Marseilles and North Africa (on Algerian migrant workers); Peru (on Maria Reiche and the Nazca Lines); India (on Mrs Gandhi, Shamdev the Wolf Boy). âHe was better in short stretches,' says the historian Robin Lane Fox, who came to know him at this time. âHe was an unsurpassed feature writer. He had an ability to evoke a place and build supportable castles in the air which were actually well founded.'
Few letters from this period have come to light.
Almost the first subject Chatwin suggested for a profile was the 93-year-old Irish architect, and designer of the chrome chair, Eileen Gray, who had lived in Paris since before the First World War. One winter Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m. he called on Gray in her apartment at 21 Rue Bonaparte.
To Eileen Gray
L8 Sloane Avenue | London | 21 December 1972
Â
Dear Miss Gray
I cannot thank you enough for the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years.
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This morning too I have looked at your cahiers with Alan Irvine
375
and I am completely bowled over by them.
I do hope you'll come over for the exhibition. It is going to be most exciting; but if not could I please come again sometime to the Rue Bonaparte.
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