Under the Sun (77 page)

‘Rotting Fruit' exists in rough draft, but not the letters. Edward Lucie-Smith heard it several times over ‘and laughed till I was nearly sick each time I heard it . . . There was going to be a mausoleum in which this rich American was going to be buried with his Mom, with a “bronze dog” reposing at their feet.'

Hiram Winterbotham (1908-90), Glos textile manufacturer, who changed his name to inherit the business of Hunt & Winterbotham in Old Bond Street; had moved to France, near Apt, with his ex-guardsman servant.

Roché recorded birdsong that he sold commercially on cassettes. Requiring someone to say the names in English, he asked Chatwin – whose voice enunciates the names of 406 separate species.

Noam Chomsky (
b
.1928), American linguist and political activist.

Douglas Cooper (1911 – 84), heir to Australian sheep-dip fortune and Cubist art collector who lived at Château de Castille.

Chatwin is probably referring here to Lorenz, not Chomsky. His long 1971 article ‘Excavating Lorenz' was never published; although he reworked many of its ideas into his 1979 review of Lorenz's
The Year of the Greylag Goose
for the
New York Review of Books.

Thilo von Watzdorf, whose mother owned L'Annunziata in Porto Ercole.

Ivory wrote to Chatwin on 6 September 1971: ‘A young man asked me more or less out of the blue what place I would choose to live in for a year (you couldn't leave) and comprising an acre. I said in the south of France, thinking of Aubenas and its environs . . . you can see from this reply how fondly I recall my week with you in that perfect countryside.'

Peter Willey,
Castles of the Assassins
(1962).

Actually, Colonel Patrick Montgomery. The Anti-Slavery Society published Willey's report
Drugs and Slavery
in July 1971.

Felicity Chanler was marrying Steve Young.

Chatwin never sold the cape.

From the Miami collector (see p. 193).

E.C.: ‘He was a wonderful guest, but a terrible host. He forgot to pass the bread around, he got the people he wanted to sit next to him and never bothered with anyone else, he never helped – and then he'd disappear and someone would say “Where's Bruce?” and he'd gone to write.'

J.I.: ‘Perhaps I was too stupid to understand that Bruce was
serious
about his film ideas, while seeming to play them down or making a joke of them. It never occurred to me that he wasn't just being entertaining in his letters, in the same way that Cary [Welch] always was, with preposterous plots and characters. When I read all his letters together, I see – too late – that Bruce might have been in earnest. I must have seemed like a poor friend, letting him down all the time.'

St James's Club, 106 Piccadilly, also home of Dilettanti Society, with separate room devoted solely to backgammon. Chatwin never did join the Traveller's Club.

M.R.: ‘Suddenly l get a letter from Bruce – blue paper, blue ink, Mont Blanc pen, very permeable:
My dear M, I want to see you more than anything else in the world. I want you to forgive me more than anything else in the world. Yours B.'
Blaming himself for bringing Akbar into her life – resulting in Miranda and Iain Watson divorcing, with Akbar's letters being read out in court – Chatwin went to see her in Paris. ‘He gives me a Mesopotamian duck-weight made of haematite. He'd affected my life to a tremendous extent. He owed me one.'

Brion Gysin (1916-86), English painter, poet, and inventor of cut-up technique used by William Burroughs (1914-97), American novelist and prominent member of the Beat Generation.

Chatwin had found a flat off the King's Road, 8 Sloane Avenue Mansions.

Nigel Greenwood (1941-2004), dealer.

Character in 1924 novel by P. C. Wren who leaves Britain to join the French Foreign Legion.

‘The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions,'
History Today
, 22 May 1972.

‘Milk' was published in the
London Magazine
, August 1977.

Notebooks: ‘Barmou, Niger. A Hausa boy, after listing the attractions of his village

This person turns out to be a tough, moustachioed Frenchman from Lyon, ex-Foreign Legion, a borer of artesian wells, builder of police-posts and village schools, who travels around in a Land Rover with eight spindly black boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty.

These all take turns to sleep with him.

E.C.: ‘I thought his moustache was fine, but everyone hated it.'

Ronald Colman (1891-1958) actor, known as ‘the English Valentino'.

E.C.: ‘I was telephoned by customs. “What do you think is in here? It says CLOTHES.” I said my husband had left here in winter clothes and obviously didn't need them. They never opened it. They'd have had a fit if they'd seen the lion's eardrum.'

Chatwin was Ivory's guest in Cannes on 8 May 1972 for the opening of
Savages
.

J.I. to B.C. 12 January 1972: ‘I told a friend of mine . . . that story of your friend Andrew Batey, as best I could recall it, and he was fascinated and also thought it was potentially wonderful material for a film.'

Ultra Violet (
b
.1935), convent-educated French actress, notorious for wearing torn vintage mauve dresses and colouring her hair with cranberry juice.

Ivory's 54-minute documentary, broadcast on the BBC on 1 April 1972, about Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) who four years after independence dedicated his first book to the British. J.I. to B.C., 12 January 1972: ‘He's quite incomprehensible, but that, I firmly believe, is half the film's charm.'

A.B.: ‘I just imagine a Merchant-Ivory re-make of
Death in Venice
– my Tadzio (they found the real one – he died in Warsaw in 1986) to Bruce's Aschenbach – in German with English Subtitles.'

E.C.: ‘A lovely idea, but a complete fantasy.'

The glass-fronted God Box was the only one of the three that he kept. E.C.:'He never talked about it, never explained. It was completely personal. I honestly don't know what it meant. Magic, I suppose.'

The 25-minute documentary for Vaughan Films, with Erskine's voiceover, was lost while being hawked around European film companies.

Chatwin did once come across the caretaker at Lake of the Woods, Charlie Van, who reported back to Ivory: ‘I saw this guy back in the woods a ways, hiking. And this son-of-a-bitch was stark naked, except for his big hiking boots, going along like he was in a nudist colony and owned the place. I shouted Hey you! and he turned around . . . And you won't believe this, but he'd tied some flowers round his pecker.'

In 1943, Lieutenant-Commander Charles Chatwin RNVR had crossed North America by Canadian Pacific Railway to pick up a large new mine-sweeper at the naval base, under Britain's ‘Lend-Lease' arrangement with the USA.

George Oppen (1908-84), American Objectivist poet, married to Mary Colby.

Robert Duncan (1919-88), American San Francisco Renaissance poet.

Kasmin had a house in the Dordogne.

P.L.: ‘My name was on a list. I was at the British School of Archaeology in Athens and had been helping to get Greek citizens out who wanted to escape. I was arrested in Corfu and sent out.'

The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan
(1972).

Chatwin never wrote the profile, but something else came of his interview. In Gray's salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache. ‘“I've always wanted to go there,” I said. “So have I,” she added. “Go there for me.”' From ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia – The Making of a Writer,'
New York Times Book Review
, 2 August 1983.

Alan Irvine, curator of an exhibition of Gray's work,
Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design
, staged at the Heinz Gallery of the RIBA, 8 January-23 March 1973.

When Gray died, Chatwin tried and failed to persuade the Victoria & Albert to buy her room intact. In March 2009 a 24-inch tall wooden and leather chair that she designed was sold at auction for £22 million.

David Rogers. Paul Getty and Ralph Dutton were Valerian's other godparents.

Stella Astor (
b
.1949) m. 1974 Martin Wilkinson. They lived at The Cwm in Shropshire.

Janetta Woolley (
b
.1922) m. to Dr Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit; Robert Kee 1948-50; Derek Jackson 1951-6; 1971 to Jaime Parladé, Marques de Apesteguia, Spanish architect; lived at Tramores on the lower slopes of the Ronda mountains. She had worked for
Horizon
.

The banner carried in battle by Muhammad Ahmad (1844-85), Sudanese leader who in 1881 proclaimed himself the Mahdi, leading an uprising that culminated with the fall of Khartoum. Gloria Taylor had married his grandson, Tahir.

Cyril Connolly (1903-74), English critic. Almost his last piece for the
Sunday Times
magazine was
Cooking for Love
on the Andalusian cookery of Janetta Parladé, ‘a phenomenon of our time it would take too long to describe . . . the pleasantest and most stimulating companion that an artist could hope for, one who would drive you to Ankor at the drop of a map'.

Richard Timewell, head of Furniture at Sotheby's, had a house in Tangier.

Alasdair Boyd (
b
.1927) 7th Baron Kilmarnock, married to Hilary (‘Hilly') Bardwell. Her first husband, the novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-95), came to live with them at the end of his life.

Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport (1903-89), Conservative MP, and his American wife Lenette.

The salmon was transported back to Fiva strapped to an oar.

Princess Marie-Gabrielle (‘Mariga') von Urach (1932-89) m. 1954-83 to Desmond Guinness. E.C.: ‘She'd inherited from her suffragette aunt these log cabins in the woods north of Oslo. We were there several days. We had to pay to go up in a helicopter onto the glacier – and there she was, walking around in a parasol and long dress.'

William Whitelaw (1918-99) Conservative Secretary of State for Employment who confronted the National Union of Mineworkers over pay demands.

E.C.: ‘The expense was staggering. I even had milk out of a cow and had to pay for it.'

‘The Guggenheim Saga,'
Sunday Times
magazine, 23 November 1975.

Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006), New-York based Turkish founder of Atlantic Records.

At 9.40pm on 15 February 1898 the US battleship
Maine
blew up in Havana harbour with the loss of 2 officers and 258 men. Hugh Thomas writes in
Cuba
(1971): ‘One story suggests that she was blown up by a mine planted by a US millionaire and eccentric, William Astor Chanler . . . already engaged in gun-running to Cuba.' Thomas blames the explosion on new gunpowder needed for heavier guns.

Washington home of Elizabeth's diplomat grandfather Irwin Laughlin.

Argentine short-story writer and essayist.

EC: ‘Jorge came on a freighter to New York with three friends, sons of
estancieros
, one of whom owned the site of the W. H. Hudson story
El Ombu
. He spent the entire day looking all over New York for
dulce de leche
for me.'

On Saturday 14 December 1974 the IRA threw a bomb through the window of the King's Arms.

Thomas Bridges's great-grandson, Tommy Goodall (
b
.1933), continues to manage Estancia Harberton with his wife, American biologist Rae Natalie Prosser.

Roberts ran the museum in Gaiman in Welsh Patagonia.

A friend of Sally Westminster.

Chatwin was staying with Diana Porras when some men appeared on the skyline above and looked down, arms folded, motionless. ‘Who are they?' Mrs Porras: ‘Our future murderers.'

E.C.: ‘I brought all this stuff and never used it because the camper was equipped.'

Maria Reiche (1903-98), German-born archaeologist. ‘The Riddle of the Pampa',
Sunday Times
magazine, 26 October 1975.