Under the Sun (80 page)

Akbar (‘Dumpy') Ahmed, politician and school friend of Indira Gandhi's younger son Sanjay.

Catholic and reclusive short story writer (1925-64) from the American South who died of lupus.

I.F.: ‘We gave a huge dinner party for 110 people. Bruce and Diana Cooper were photographed together in
Vogue
.'

It has not been possible to trace the identity of this photographer or his photograph. E.C.: ‘The only photographs I know that Bruce bought were a little sepia print of wheat and a print by Edward Sheriff Curtis [1868-1952] of Kwakiutle dancers in Alaska.'

Edward Steichen (1879-1973), American photographer.

Homer End, Ipsden. Built as a school in the 1930s by the artist Eric Kennington, who had illustrated
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
for T. E. Lawrence. In the autumn of 1974 the author and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer (
b
.1940) wrote his first book there,
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
, also published by Tom Maschler. E.C.: ‘Bruce did like the house when he saw it. It was light and not very big.'

Stella's mother, Ana Inez Carcano, m. 1944-72 Hon. John Jacob Astor.

He never travelled to either place.

E.C. had sold Holwell Farm for £170,000 and bought Homer End for £150,000. ‘I gave Bruce $50,000 from the sale to buy the flat in Eaton Place. He thought that that should be his share.'

American novelist and short-story writer (1909-2001).

The ruins of a Cistercian monastery in North Wales founded in 1164.

French novelist (
b
.1924) who retold the Robinson Crusoe story in his first book
Friday and Robinson
(1967).
Les Météores
(
Gemini)
was published in 1975.

Rene Zazzo,
Les Jumeaux, le Couple et la Personne
(1960).

Ten cannabis plants, nearly six feet high, were eventually discovered by the Welsh police. Chatwin smoked pot on occasion, if someone else produced it. From his shortlived diary, 12 December 1969: ‘Hashish before going to bed. Light-headed.' In
Take a Girl Like Me
Diana Melly writes: ‘Bruce stayed with me on and off for five years and never even made a cup of tea, although he did occasionally boil up some rather disgusting-smelling Mexican leaves [actually, Argentine
maté
] into a brew which he said gave him energy – not something I thought he lacked, rather he fizzed with it.' E.C.: ‘He'd suddenly come down from the top floor and say, “Where's the coffee?” or “What's for lunch?” He wanted to be waited on all the time.'

A lamp designed by King, six feet high, one foot square, with a 25 watt lightbulb sunk into the top shedding a faint glow. Chatwin wanted to paint it dull grey; King refused.

E.C.: ‘He spent two days. We moved in, slept on the floor and mattresses with the movers from Holwell Farm. Bruce tore the dark brown ribbed
moiré
wallpaper off the little sitting room to make one room habitable. He relined and painted it pale buttercup. Next day, he pulled off the black and white paisley wallpaper and sea-grass in the big room. Then he went away. He didn't carry any objects in, not a thing.'

Chatwin had lunch with Sifton in London on 20 October and agreed to leave Jim Silberman and go with her to Viking in America. On 26 October she offered an advance of $50,000 for
On the Black Hill
. In the UK, Cape paid an advance of £7,500.

Gerald Hingley of Wragge's, Chatwin's lawyer in Birmingham.

Kenyan paleoanthropologist (
b
.1944).

Danish author, also known as Isak Dinesen (1885-1962); her books include
Out of Africa
.

Joan Saunders of Writers' and Speakers' Research, a literary researcher whom he shared with Patrick Leigh Fermor. In January 1981 she had sent Chatwin a list of Air Crashes and Women Fliers.

American author and political activist (1933-2004).

In Chinatown. S.S.: ‘Bruce was the only person I knew whom I could invite to a hakka – fried intestines and toe-nails.'

Robert Calasso (
b
.1941), Italian author and Chatwin's publisher at Adelphi.

The Day of Judgement
, posthumous novel by Salvatore Satta (1902-75) set in nineteenth-century Sardinia; it was published in English in 1987.

Cambridge-based critic and philosopher (
b
.1929).

In a speech at the New York Town Hall on 6 February 1982 to protest against the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, Sontag had said ‘Communism is . . . Fascism with a human face' – drawing boos and shouts from the audience, and accusations that she had betrayed her radical ideas.

Chairman of Jonathan Cape.

‘The young men', Betjeman called them.

Bickerton was the eldest son of the disgraced solicitor, Robert Harding Milward; he was in the Broken Hill gold rush, badly gassed in the First World War and ended his days living ‘rather rakishly' in Broadway.

ABC radio producer from Sydney; she had visited Chatwin in Albany in January 1980.

Sontag replied on 11 July 1982: ‘I loved the stamp on your last letter [commemorating Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, and his 1906 creation HMS
Dreadnought
]. The vivid, curiously Negroid head of Lord Fishersomething (part of the name inked out by the postmark); his pale Dreadnought riding in the background; and a miniature grey silhouette of the Queen as Girl, hanging in the upper left. Worthy of Donald Evans, which shows once again that you know . . . I'm off for ten days – all quite unexpected – to Kiev. My only justification is that I've never been to the Soviet Onion and I want to smell it, and it's
only
ten days. I look forward to your visit toward the end of August with impatience.'

George Weidenfeld, British publisher (
b
.1919).

Mimar Sinan(1489-1588), Ottoman architect of Suleiman Mosque in Istanbul.

The first mention of a novel which Chatwin did not begin until 1988, of which but a fragment exists.

For the
Observer
magazine, ‘Great Rivers of the World: The Volga', June 1984.

V.S. Pritchett reviewed
On the Black Hill
in the
New York Review of Books
, 20 January 1983.

Penelope Tree (
b
.1950), Anglo-American model photographed by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton and David Bailey. She had lived in Sydney since 1974 m. to Ricky Fataar, South African musician who briefly played for the Beach Boys.

Childhood friends who had emigrated to Australia.

Bailey in the London
Evening Standard
had called
On the Black Hill
‘a curiously coarse-grained book . . . The writing is rife with cliché . . . At its worst it suggests Mary Webb on a very off day.'

Australian television producer with whom Chatwin stayed on Bondi Beach.

Altie Karper, Sifton's assistant at Viking.

Theodor George Henry (‘Ted') Strehlow (1908-78), anthropologist who grew up speaking Aranda on the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg, where his father was pastor, and made it his life's work to record ‘in notebooks, on tape and on film the songs and ceremonies of the passing order'. The Aboriginals considered Strehlow to be a member of their people and, controversially, entrusted him with the responsibility of safeguarding their sacred objects and ceremonies. In May 1978 he caused outrage when he sold photographs of secret ceremonies to
Stern
magazine which were syndicated to the Australian weekly
People
. He suffered a cardiac arrest four months later. Chatwin wrote in
The Songlines
: ‘Strehlow died at his desk in 1978, a broken man.'

Thomas had researched ITV's
The South Bank Show
on Chatwin, aired on 7 November 1982.

George Melly was appearing at the Perth Jazz Festival with John Chilton's Feet-warmers.

Father Dan O'Donovan. ‘Yes, I remember well the day Bruce turned up at my paperbark humpie, just south of Cape Leveque lighthouse . . . Regarding the pages which pertain to me [in
The Songlines
], apart from a couple of details accurately conveyed, the whole statement is purest fantasy.'

Richards ended up working at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Diana's daughter. Her Italian boyfriend, Marco Bellucci, a friend of Teddy Millington-Drake, had died in a car accident in Radda in Chianti. Chatwin wrote to her, the only person to do so. ‘My dear Candy, A short and terribly inadequate note to say I am thinking of you in your sorrow. With all my love, Bruce.'

Lady Sophia Vane Tempest Stewart (
b
.1959), Marco's previous girlfriend.

Hon. Jasper Guinness (
b
.1954) lived near Siena.

1923 novel by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) about his short residence in Western Australia and New South Wales, and reflecting his sense of persecution at the hand of the English.

Sydney film producer; Chatwin was so taken with her name that he planned to call his projected ‘Russian novel'
Lydia Livingstone
.

Werner Herzog (
b
.1942), German film director, was filming
Where the Green Ants Dream
in Coober Pedy, based on the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement and their lawsuit against a mining company. Chatwin had met Herzog in Melbourne on 8 March 1983, and talked for 48 hours non-stop, it seemed to Herzog. W.H.: ‘It was a delirium, a torrent of storytelling. It went on and on, interrupted by only a few hours of sleep.'

M.B. to B.C. 26 June 1983: ‘I mentioned to S. Hazzard and Steegmuller we'd penetrated the Blue Mountains, but that our view of “Govett's Leap” was spoiled by a girl squeezing the pimples on the back of her fiancé's neck nearby, perhaps you noticed?'

E.C.: ‘He didn't go back then. Werner offered him a bit part, but he decided that he didn't want to be in the film.'

Margaret Wordsworth (
b
.1944); m. 1965-91 Murray Bail.

Lisa van Gruisen (
b
.1951), m. 1986 Tenzin Cheogyal; marketing director Tiger Mountain Group Nepal 1974 – 97. She had organised the Chatwins' trek.

On 9 June 1983 the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher won the most decisive election victory since that of Labour in 1945. Chatwin had been equally appalled when Harold Wilson's Labour Party hung on to power in October 1974. He had watched the result on Robin Lane Fox's television in London. R.L.F: ‘I said, “This is so awful, I might emigrate.” Chatwin said: “I can't think why anyone would want to live here in the first place.”'

E.C.: ‘We were near Gokyo-Ri, at 13,000 feet. We'd been in our tent and Bruce said, “Come over here. Look, what do you think of this?” There were tracks. I said, “Nah, can't be.” I was hugely sceptical. Immediately, I thought: Someone with a broomstick and shoe can make those. But they weren't bootprints and they ended where the snow had melted off the bare rocks. There was no explanation.'

Independent bookshop set up by John Sandoe in Chelsea in 1957.

Mario Vargas Llosa (
b
.1936), Peruvian novelist.

Frank Delaney
, BBC2, broadcast on 24 October 1983.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine short-story writer and essayist. ‘What is wonderful about his writing is the compression of his thought,' Chatwin said on the programme. ‘They say Borges lives in a world of imagination and dreams, but he's central to life.' His influence is evident in Chatwin's 1979 story ‘The Estate of Maximilian Tod'.

The
General Belgrano
was an Argentine Navy cruiser sunk by HMS
Conqueror
on 2 May during the Falklands War with the loss of 323 lives. In notes for an unpublished essay on this episode, Chatwin wrote: ‘I cling to the archaic idea that unjustifiable killing in peace or war eventually rebounds on the killer. The dead do haunt the living. There is such a thing as blood guilt.'

Margaret Thatcher (
b
.1925), British Prime Minister 1979-90.

General Leopoldo Galtieri (1926-2003), President of Argentina 1981-2.

Nicholas Shakespeare (
b
.1957), author and broadcaster, had invited Chatwin to appear on BBC2's
Frank Delaney
with Borges and Vargas Llosa.