Under the Sun (35 page)

Re Spain: I don't think I can make Rio before say April 8-10. Don't want to stay more than a day or so and there are flights every day to Lisbon and Madrid. The best thing might be for you to ring Margaret Mee
⁴⁴²
again and say where you are.

All this depends on what happens here.

Lots of love

B

PS Please have my typewriter repaired xxx B

 

8 Gloucester Gate | London | 20 September 1977

 

Dear Charles,

Of course, the footnote about Robert Harding
⁴⁴³
can be cut out of the paperback.

I had attached a lot of importance to it at the time, but now see that it is rather superfluous. It's terribly difficult to get such things in perspective when you're close to them.

The trouble is that he, your grandfather, became one of my childhood obsessions, ever since I discovered that court suit (and dressed up in it), in the red spotted trunk at Brown's Green. I felt that his vertical rise and fall somehow offset Charley's horizontal wandering.

Anyway I
am
sorry.

as always,

B

 

After their times together in France and Oregon, Chatwin saw less of James Ivory. ‘I went down one time to Holwell Farm,' Ivory remembers. ‘Strolling about with him in a long upstairs hall with polished floorboards he privately told me that he had given up homosexuality – that he didn't have those feelings anymore.' Ho wever, at a wedding in Long Hanborough in June 1977 Chatwin met Donald Richards, a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker who had arrived with the artist Keith Milow. ‘I
introduced brown-eyed Donald to blue-eyed Bruce and their eyes met,' says Milow. ‘Something seemed to click which I was not prepared for.' Before, Chatwin had had passing affairs with men. ‘This was the first time he'd committed his life to a man,' said Teddy Millington-Drake. ‘Bruce was infatuated with him.' No correspondence survives of their relationship, which lasted five years, save for a postcard from Richards two months after their meeting: ‘I long to see you, so I can relax, and tell you
everything
. Rest assured I do look forward to
that
. Meanwhile take care, and keep writing, with my love XXXX
D.'

In October 1977 Chatwin drove with Elizabeth through Switzerland and Austria (‘bought the inevitable loden coats and had two thrilling days in the Ost-Ture romping round in the snow') to Siena, where he had rented from Millington-Drake the annexe at Poggio al Pozzo in order to begin writing
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
‘When he came to stay,' wrote Millington-Drake, ‘he settled in and made his nest in whatever part of the house he had been assigned; then when it suited him, he would move on to another nest in someone else's house. He expected to be fed: “What's for lunch?” he would cry as he breezed in at half-past twelve. Occasionally he would contribute a couple of bottles of champagne or, as a great treat, some wild rice. Then there was the telephone bill. He telephoned continually to his agent, his friends, to a young man he'd fallen in love with in Brazil. At the end of the visit he would offer 10,000 lire (about £4), saying he hadn't used the 'phone much. But his friends didn't mind because we were so fond of him, though he was selfish and self-centred like most artists are.'

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]

 

Dear King,

On leaving England we moved to Geneva and stayed with my friend George Ortiz. I played with his little girl Graziella aged 5 and now the only trace of her is a chloroform soaked rag left in a falsely registered car abandoned near the French border. The real nightmare of being rich is that even if you gave away every cent, no one would believe you and you'd then have
nothing
to protect yourself with. G[eorge] O[rtiz] is innocence at large and that this should happen to him monstrous.
⁴⁴⁵

Otherwise we didn't have too bad a time in Austria and I am quite well installed here. In Florence yesterday we met the Director of the Karlsruhe Museum who said that anti-Hitler jokes during the war were exceedingly funny. An example: Hitler, as everyone knew, would sometimes grovel on the floor in a rage and bite the carpet. The story: Hitler goes to a big store in Berlin and buys a new carpet with a very thick pile. The salesgirl says: Mein Fuhrer, will you take it away or eat it now?

Drop me a line to say how it goes with T[om]M[aschler]

as always, Bruce

 

In Patagonia
was published in England on 14 October 1977 with an initial print run of 4, 000 copies. Paul Theroux was one of the first enthusiastic reviewers, writing in
The Times
. ‘He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and strange and seldom visited like the Land where the Jumblies live.'

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | about the 20th Oct. [1977]

 

Dear Francis,

This is better than the Welsh mountains. Bare hills, bright light and most of the English gone back for the winter. I cycle to Siena for groceries and speak to shopkeepers in an incoherent mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin; they smile breezily and ask if I want peanuts.

[John] Stefanidis is here and says the doctors have taken Violet
⁴⁴⁶
off some drug and that she's much better – and going out to lunch! I am so glad. It would be wonderful if she could go on as she was.

The two of them have gone for lunch at Lord Lambton's
⁴⁴⁷
new papal villa, bristling with statues. I have stayed behind to write the bit about the Dahomean coup, have written four bad pages and will reduce them to a single line. So it goes. I am also holding the fort for the arrival of guests: Mme Lillaz and Mme Picasso,
⁴⁴⁸
no less.

So far I have seen the reviews in
The Times
and
Observer
. Not at all bad. Gratifying, in fact. Neither quite got the hang of it – or what the brontosaurus stands for. Who is Nicholas Wollaston?
⁴⁴⁹

I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you . . .

As always, Bruce

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 24 October 1977

 

Dear E.,

I appear to have lost two library books belonging to the Museum of Mankind. They are Money Kyrle
The Meaning of Sacrifice
(green) and Donald Pierson
Negroes in Brazil
(beige). God knows what happened. As I remember it, I went through them in the Library itself, found only a few things of interest, and left them, without however getting back my borrowing slip. Could you a. check at the farm? (I know they are not at Carney).
⁴⁵⁰
b. check to make sure I didn't return them to the London Library by mistake?

The whole of last summer is like a bad dream to me.
⁴⁵¹

love,

B

P.S. Can you ask Pat Trevor-Roper to send 3 Betnesol N eye drops. Winter's supply. B

 

 

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | [October 1977]

 

Many thanks for the enclosures. Tom Maschler sent others with the news that we have an enthusiastic American publisher and several offers for foreign translations. Eh! Hiu! Bruce

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 29 October 1977

 

Dear John,

Many thanks for your card.

The pianist! Ah! The pianist!

E. Hemingway, who knew a thing of two though it's fashionable to put him down, said if you take something OUT of a piece of writing it always shows. What I took OUT of that story was the head falling backwards at the end of the mazurka, automatically with no hint of it before, and lifting him off the piano stool into the bedroom.

But that is off the record and should be torn up.

Reviews rather good, the ones I've seen so far. All rather missing the point, but gratifying all the same. Nightmare interview with the
Guardian
. He had somewhere done his homework on my Sotheby period, which I was more than anxious to suppress. I suppose it can't be helped. But I will never give an interview again, nor will I interview anybody. (He says!).

Much love,

Bruce.

 

 

On 19 October Welch wrote praising
In Patagonia.
‘Perhaps I particularly like it because it has the qualities I find in Mughal pictures: extraordinary portraiture, very deep and psychological, superb technically, with all sorts of enrichments.'

Poggio al Pozzo | Siena | Italy | 5 November 1977

 

Dear C.,

What a welcome letter! I hadn't thought of
In Patagonia
in terms of Mughal Art but the connection exists.
The Babur-Nama
⁴⁵²
has influenced me greatly in what I write. With the possible exception of Isaac Babel,
⁴⁵³
I know of no writer capable of such economic portraits of people. What I love is the clear, staccato line with a fantastical flourish at the end.

I must fish out my first piece of ‘writing'. It was on the masterfully described descent of Omar Sheikh Mirza (is that what Babur's father was called?) from his pigeon loft.
⁴⁵⁴

Such directness in Babur, Such awesome GAPS. I haven't got my Miss Beveridge here, otherwise there would be quotations. So there you are!

Is there anything else in Indian literature as good? I once bought Abu'l Faz'l
⁴⁵⁵
but sold it; it didn't have the same effect. Perhaps it's to do with their having being in Turki. I have often suspected the Turkish languages of having wonderful reserves of expression. It comes out in a lot of Russian literature.

So far the critics have been very complimentary, but the FORM of the book seems to have puzzled them (as I suspect it did the publisher). There's a lot of talk of ‘unclassifiable prose', ‘a mosaic', ‘a tapestry', a ‘jigsaw', a ‘collage' etc. but no one has seen that it is a modern WONDER VOYAGE: the Piece of Brontosaurus is the essential ingredient of the quest. Patagonia, as the farthest place to which Man walked from his origins on foot, is a symbol as well as a country. I think the photographs were a mistake. If it gets reprinted I'm going to have them out.
⁴⁵⁶

Tom Maschler writes today that we have at last found a ‘really enthusiastic American publisher'
⁴⁵⁷
but doesn't say who. I suppose it's the agent's business to tell me.

The days pass with the landscape of Southern Tuscany spread out before me. In human terms it's all rather dreary. I don't speak Italian: for every one word I master in Italian, I feel I'm massacring twenty in Spanish.

Unfortunately the book I'm writing has to be a novel: the story is wonderful, but the facts are too few and contradictory to permit any other form. I had thought of giving it up when I was kicked out of Benin last winter. Then thought that was weak-kneed and so I go on. I am in no position to judge how it will turn out.

I haven't rung up the Tiz [George Ortiz] yet. When I did so there was a recorded announcement; so I imagined they didn't want callers. We were in the house a week before, and presumably being watched. It does seem uncanny that I said there were no kidnappings in Switzerland yet, and she gave me a look of despair and said YET.
⁴⁵⁸

I can't think the H[oward]H[odgkin]
⁴⁵⁹
situation is all that painful. The trouble is that it got out of hand. In the English ‘art world' his became the most publicised private life of the century, and he didn't know how to handle it. When everyone else overdramatises your life, it inevitably becomes more dramatic.