Under the Sun (49 page)

The only way to inhabit a cave, which is also inhabited by predators, is to deter them with fire. And though archaeologists have been hunting for fire in Prehistoric Africa for thirty years now, the earliest hearth they could find was only 70,000 years old. On the one day I visited Brain's cave, at Swartkrans, I remembered how nice it would be to discover the human use of fire in the cave. Half an hour later, we excavated a bit of blackened bone. Brain, who is a most undemonstrative man, said: ‘That bone is remarkably suggestive!' – which indeed it was. It turns out I was present at the uncovering of a human hearth, probably dated around 1,200,000 years old. The earliest by 700,000 years.

I'm off to Australia in the morning, where I have to give a talk at the Adelaide Festival next week (on what Lord knows!) and then I'm off into the Outback again for four weeks or so. My new book is a very slow operation, but if it comes off I think it could be very unusual.

I gather from Lib that we're coming over in the summer, and look forward immensely: but I certainly didn't want to wait to thank you for those two magnificent French goblets, in which we drank your health!

I hope to have something substantial to show to my publishers by then. There have been fearful upheavals at Viking Press, though I hope they all simmer down.

All my love to you, Bruce

 

Also at the Adelaide Festival, Chatwin met Anne-Marie Mykyta, whose 16-year old daughter Juliet was one of eight women murdered by two serial killers, James Miller and Christopher Worrell in what became known as the Truro murders. On 21 January 1977 Juliet was waiting at a bus stop when Worrell offered her a lift home. Instead, he drove her to Port Wakefield where he tied her up and strangled her. Mykyta had told the story in
It's a Long Way to Truro
(1981). Chatwin was introduced to her because he wanted to speak to Ukrainians in Australia. ‘My husband's family is Ukrainian so I invited Bruce to our house to meet my husband and his brother and his wife. The evening turned out very differently.' A television programme,
60 Minutes,
had recently interviewed Miller and Mykyta concerning a book that Miller had written while in prison. ‘During the evening a number of people rang begging/ ordering me to stop Miller's book from being published. I had already taken legal advice and knew there was nothing I could
do,
but in the end when Betty Ann Kelvin (whose son was murdered) started screaming at me, I started screaming back. My husband took the phone from me, I walked out of the room and Bruce followed me.

‘I signed a copy of
It's a Long Way to Truro
(which is about the impact on us of Juliet's death) and he signed a copy of
On the Black Hill.

Alice Springs | Australia | 14 March 1984

 

My dear Anne-Marie,

A quick note from the middle of nowhere to thank you for your beautifully conceived and, in the end, heartening book. Your courage is unsurpassed. Salman and I are having an enjoyable time in the Centre, but, needless to say, wherever I go in the desert, I always nearly get washed away. Love Bruce

 

After the Adelaide Festival Chatwin and Rushdie flew to Alice Springs where Chatwin introduced Rushdie to the characters who would reappear, without much disguise, in
The Songlines
; he also introduced Rushdie (by telephone) to Robyn Davidson, author of
Tracks
,an introduction that was to have far-reaching consequences. They hired a four-wheel-drive Toyota and drove to Ayer's Rock. Rushdie went on to Sydney to meet Davidson; Chatwin to the Aboriginal settlement at Kintore. At the end of March, he joined Ninette Dutton for a five-day drive from Adelaide to Boona where they stayed with the poet Pam Bell, who became yet one more in the line of Australian women who admired Chatwin as much as he them. Bell listened to Chatwin talk about his experience with the Aborigines.‘He was desperately trying to go to the centre. It was the most important thing for him and he realised half way through he wasn't going to be able to do it, he was excluded. You have to
earn
mystery. It's only lovers who get there.'

Postcard, The New Moree Hotel | Newell Highway | Moree | Australia | 5 April 1984

 

I hope your aesthetic sensibilities will be OUTRAGED by this card – but this is, after all, the
heart
of New South Wales . . . [Ninette Dutton's handwriting] We are thinking and talking of you very much as we career across vast areas of this country while I search for the smallest of wild flowers. We hope to reach Cape York and see some Aboriginal painting. Much love, Nin, Bruce

Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | [May 1984]

 

My dear Shirley,

Just back from Sydney to find your wonderful letter of January. I discovered the use of sleeping pills for a long distance flight, and considering the fact that I failed to notice Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or Abu Dhabi, they must have worked. I am only feeling
slightly
hazy the day after. I enjoyed Oz far more this time than the last. The Adelaide Festival was a little like going to a clinic for a week, in that there were always young, encouraging, nurse-like figures at one's elbow, with gentle words to say it was time to do this or that. I had never been to such an occasion; hope never to go again; but found that to have done it once was all right. I still maintain what I thought last year: that it is the interior of Australia which determines what goes on around the periphery. At a dinner in Sydney, a very intelligent man picked a quarrel with me; said he never met Aborigines; implied that Aborigines were irrelevant to the Australian situation. I then found voice and said that the Aborigines, or their destruction, were as important as the Penal Colony in the Australian consciousness. The enormous riches of Australia are generated by the heartland; and by the same token that your Sydney intellectual has never met an Aborigine, he has never seen the iron-ore trains approaching Port Headland – without which, of course, the cities of the fringe would not, in their prosperity, exist. But as a place, it is immensely intractable to the pen. How few writers really get the texture of, say, a small town in the Outback! Randolph Stow,
⁶⁴²
for Western Australia, is the exception. Why also am I moved, almost to tears, by the women, and indifferent to the men? Except, I may add, by the drunk truckie at a pub famous for its red-neck attitudes, who, when taunted for having abused his Aboriginal wife, tried to explain to his tormentors the immense elaboration of Aboriginal society and when completely lost for words, shouted, ‘I tell you, it's so com . . . fuckin' . . . plex!'

There is one astonishing film on the Bakhtiari nomads called
Grass
, made by Americans in the Thirties. I'm not sure it's the one your friends saw. I suspect not. The word ‘rhythm' is the key to all: one has to remember that the cantillation of rabbis; the to-ing and fro-ing of the Passover and, for that matter, all the prostrations of the Islamic Hadj – are the ritualised versions of an original nomadic journey.
⁶⁴³

I found South Africa of enormous interest. What on earth is to be made of a country in which one can be jailed for marrying a Vietnamese wife, yet be an honoured member of Afrikanderdom if married to a Japanese? The amazing aspect of S.A. is that Apartheid can no longer be seen as anything but a joke, a sick, black joke. Often, in Australia, one heard of South Africans who could no longer support the brutality etc, and had come to a better place. Yet my friends, mostly Jews, I might say, who have to put up with the indignities and yet fight inch by inch to make the system yield, were contemptuous of the runaways. There's nothing bland about South Africa: and if, by some miracle, the country is saved from the bloodbath so many people have predicted, then its salvation will have been hammered out all the way. The scientists I talked to in Pretoria, for example, seemed to be some of the sanest, most creative people I've ever met: there is, one felt, a certain advantage in being so isolated, for then one can take it for granted. ‘Bob' Brain, the man I went to see, is I feel sure a genius fit to rank with the giants of the 19th century. He and his assistant have been completely rethinking the theory of evolution, in particular the mysterious transition from ape to man. I'm a bit too gaga to explain this all in a letter: it'll have to wait till I see you.

Murray B[ail] took me out to see Maisie Drysdale
⁶⁴⁴
on Tuesday and we had a marathon discussion in the car. I relish his company. I've no idea what I'll be doing, but I have to go away and write all summer. I intend to start on the 1st of May in a friend's house in France, and just go on and on . . .

If, ever, I manage to get the work in hand done, I intend to go and learn Russian in Paris with Les Pères Jésuites de Maudon. Russia exerts for me the most enormous fascination; and if one doesn't get to grips with it now, one never will.

I
am
sorry for this incoherent note and send you and Francis all my love,

Bruce

Nin Dutton and I sent you a post card from a small town in NSW. She is recovering from the dreadful shock of Geoff's disappearance,
⁶⁴⁵
and is putting the pieces together in an incredibly courageous way.

as from Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 1 May 1984

 

My dear Anne-Marie,

I
am
so sorry we never made it on my return to Adelaide. Things were a really terrible and hectic rush. I literally spent hours, rather than days, in the city. And now I'm infinitely far away in a more or less empty French farmhouse, trying to summon up my Australian experience and put it onto paper in some manageable form. We'll meet again before long, of that I'm sure. Do let me know if you're heading this way. Much love, Bruce

as from: Flat 7 | 77 Eaton Place | London | 4 May 1984

 

My dear Kath,

On getting back I found in my post the magnificent golden scroll. I hope you didn't think I'd omitted to thank you: it simply hadn't come before I left England. I adored seeing you AS USUAL; and you must promise me to signal PROPERLY THIS TIME when you're next heading this way. The chances I have to tell you of getting me at the above number are remote. I can't do a thing of work in London (Depressing place!) and at the moment I'm holed up in a farmhouse in France trying to summon up Australia. The best contact is my agent in London: Deborah Rogers
,
who usually knows where I am, roughly!

In the hectic rush of leaving Australia, I didn't get the chance to go to Canberra and talk to Mollison,
⁶⁴⁶
which would be the best way of sussing out the ground. I certainly will write to [him] if you like: but I'd need to know
what
to write. He is a rather mercurial, but likeable character, and from what I gather he's been under fire lately. He staked a huge part of his reputation and the gallery's money on modern American painting; and it turns out the Australian public couldn't care less about American painting, even though Americans come on special pilgrimages to see the Canberra collection. As Geoff Bagshaw
⁶⁴⁷
rightly said: the place for the Strehlow Collection IS the National Gallery; but as I don't have to tell you, there are complications!

Look after yourself; and there is, as a postscript, one thing I beg of you (though it's absolutely none of my business!). Technicolour film has a tendency to fade unless stored in the right temperature. I do think you should consult an expert on the matter. I took some footage in the Sahara – beautiful footage – and the whole thing is now a shadow of its former self, because I was unaware of this fact.

Much love,

Bruce

France | 25 May 1984

 

Not doing so badly in complete seclusion: Paris – a nightmare. Have put off Spain till after the summer if at all. Should – or rather will be – back 3/4 weeks for further research etc. XXX B

Apartado 73 | Ronda | Spain | 2 July 1984

 

Something always prevents me from having MY way and settling on a Greek island. For silly reasons am here in Spain. So you got the Renata A.
⁶⁴⁸
You wanted it, and got it. I couldn't read it, I have to say and frankly I'm glad you couldn't. I too adore her – what little I've seen of ‘her': but it does make me realise that NY is a very small pond. A disaster with the Australian book – in that another, by accident, had cannibalised it – temporarily. Think of you always XXX Bruce