Under the Sun (83 page)

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) French filmmaker and writer, associated with the Nouveau Roman.

Fred Smetacek and his son Peter. E.C.: ‘Smetacek was a Czech national who had lobbed a knife at Hitler and escaped, went to India, which he liked, and was interned by the British for the duration of the war. He met a moghul princess through an ad in the marriage columns and they married. They swapped nationalities so he could buy the resort.'

Robert Ducas, Bartlett's New York-based agent, had submitted ‘The Chinese Geomancer' – which Chatwin had written for Bartlett – to the
Connoisseur
magazine in London.

Paddy Booz, son of Elizabeth Booz; Johnson Chang, Chatwin's translator in Yunnan; Professor Tea, the title bestowed on Michael Ng of Wing Kee Tea Merchants, a real connoisseur of Chinese tea whom Chatwin had met in Hong Kong, ‘who
only
specialises in the finest possible Oolong special leaf', as he wrote to Derek Hill, enclosing a gift of a tiny amount of high altitude white tea.

Bartlett had discussed with Elizabeth the possibility of her doing a guide to Gujarat.

In another version, Fred Smetacek was involved in a plot, discovered by the Gestapo, to dynamite a railway tunnel in the Sudetenland.

Jim Corbett (1875-1955), Indian-born British hunter and author of
The Man Eaters of Kumaon
(1944).

E.C.: ‘A leopard's favourite thing is dog. People lost their pets very, very quickly.'

Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), prolific English author of 723 romances; her brother, the Conservative MP Ronald Cartland, had briefly employed Chatwin's mother.

On the night of 21 March a joint on a temporary water main at the Victoria and Albert Museum failed, causing serious flooding of the basement area.

Local independent airline.

Author (
b
.1942) and daughter of Penelope and John Betjeman.

‘O the flower of the lotus,' Buddhist mantra.

Worship.

E.C.: ‘She was going to get a Swedish ready-made house on a plot next to the Catholic Church so that she could pop in any time.'

Greek soldiers.

A great mead hall described in the Anglo-Saxon epic
Beowulf
as ‘the foremost of halls under heaven'.

John Prizeman (1930-92), English architect.

Pawson's new baby son. Elizabeth and Bruce were joint godparents.

S.S.: ‘The story was about an original house designed by Le Corbusier for Mani Sarabhai, a young widow with two sons. She belonged to a famous family of textile magnates in Ahmedabad, known for their patronage of the arts. She asked the boys what features they would like in the house; one wanted a slide and the other a swimming pool. So the architect designed a house incorporating a slide that dips from an upper storey into the swimming pool in the garden below.' The house featured in Sethi's book
Indian Interiors
(1990).

Bond Street stationers. S.S.: ‘We chose the leather-bound address book, and still have it.'

On 15 April 1986 the United States had bombed Libya in operation ‘El Dorado Canyon'.

Beatrice von Rezzori. ‘A Tower in Tuscany,'
House & Garden
, January 1987.

Robert Hughes (
b
.1938), Australian-born art critic and friend of Ninette Dutton; m. 2nd 1981-96 Victoria Whistler.

Chatwin's editor at Grasset
.

For a cataract.

The BBC radio play of
On the Black Hill
, directed by Adrian Mourby, went out on Radio 4, 2 March 1987.

Bruce would see the play the following year, in Brentford.

Dr Robert Keller at Allgemeine Medizin, 17 Muhlebachstrasse.

Venetian painter (1528-88) celebrated for large works like
The Feast at the House of Levi.
In
Looking Back
, Somerset Maugham describes sitting down to view this painting on one of his last visits to Venice; and how, as he gazed at it, he suddenly saw Jesus turn and look him full in the face.

British theatre and opera director, author, physician (
b
.1934).

E.C.: ‘Bruce was crazy about this play, its claustrophobia and “prison atmosphere”; he and Jonathan Miller used to have long conversations. Bruce longed for someone to do it and then after he died Peter Eyre directed it at the Almeida Theatre.' Notebooks: ‘Racine: note the astonishing swift reversals of fortune. The outcome of Andromache is fated from the start . . . There is no way out for the players. Yet in act II scene iii Orestes is buoyant with hope for the future: only to be dashed 2 stepped stanzas in the next scene.'

Dutton had sent some leatherwood honey from Tasmania.

E.C.: ‘We went to see Land's End and the wind nearly tore the door off the car. We stayed in The Abbey Hotel, Penzance, owned by Jean Shrimpton, “the Shrimp”. When we lived in Mount Street, she was having an affair with Terence Stamp who lived on the same landing, and we used to see her running up and down.'

In August 1985 the singer David Bowie had also offered for the film rights.

John J. Klejman owned a gallery on Madison Avenue devoted to antiquities, or what Welch called ‘tickwiddies'; upon his death, his gallery was rumoured to have been discovered empty.

Rudolph Just (1895-1972), Prague lawyer, cavalry officer and manager of the Bata shoe company, which financed his travels and art-collecting. Chatwin had met him for four hours in 1967. The maid was peeling potatoes on a plate made for Frederick the Great and after a walk through the town Just said to Chatwin: ‘I'm going to a brothel.' On 11 December 2003, Sotheby's auctioned the remains of Just's collection for more than £1 million.

E.C.: ‘Dr Keller tested him positive for HIV. That's when I rang our surgery in Nettlebed and they said “Where do you want to go?” and I said “Oxford.”'

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet, discovered Rock's
The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China
(1948) when he was locked up as a lunatic in St Elizabeth's hospital, in Washington, in 1956.

E.C.: ‘We didn't sleep in peasant houses – we were in a hotel in Lijiang. You weren't allowed to stay anywhere else. It was still very strict.'

E.C.: ‘A miniature of someone skeletal in bed, dead white and dying.'

Son of Jessie Wood.

Teddy Millington-Drake, Gregor and Beatrice Von Rezzori, Matthew and Maro Spender, Roberto Calasso.

Unfinished Cistercian monastery near Draguignan. He urged Murray Bail to visit. For Bail, the austerity and elegance summed up Chatwin's aesthetic: ‘Everything has been removed. It was plain, immaterial and resonant because of the emptiness.'

The registrar at the John Warin ward at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford.

E.C.: ‘We picked a doctor with an Alsatian name out of the yellow pages.'

Restaurant la Chicane, near Lyons.

Chatwin had recently bought a first edition of
Madame Bovary
. Monsieur Homais, the apothecary in Flaubert's novel, is the embodiment of a pompous bourgeois.

American artist (
b
.1930) in whose house in the Caribbean Chatwin had stayed with Katz.

Russian poet (1940-96) and 1987 Nobel Laureate.

American mythologist (1904-87).

American satirical novelist (
b
.1934).

New York sculptor – ‘he had once been a surfer and was a student of Zen' – off whom Chatwin had bought ‘a fibreglass wallpiece the colour of watermelon'.

Among the Thugs
(1990) documented football hooliganism in Britain. Bill Buford (
b
.1954) edited the then Cambridge-based magazine
Granta
, for which Chatwin had written.

Kranti Singh later died of kidney failure.

On 7 April 1987 Peter Taylor was awarded the $50,000 prize for his novel
A Summons to Memphis
, set in Tennessee. E.C.: ‘The next year Bruce ganged up with the other judges and said none of the books were worth anything, and they agreed.'

Author, former editor of the Melbourne
Age
and journalist (1924-2005). His interview with Chatwin had appeared in the
Observer
on 21 June; he lived four miles from Homer End.

English travel writer and novelist (
b
.1939); Thubron's interview with Chatwin had appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
, 27 June 1987.

Chatwin later telephoned Thubron: ‘If the condition of man is to be walking through a howling wilderness . . . if, for example, the sources of aggression are directed against not other human beings but against the wild beast etc, then our condition is OK. This is the moment to talk. If hostility is against forces which are outside our control . . . if language is the medium of diplomacy (of uniting v. the beast etc) then we can see how it came into being. It was thus through language that the earliest hominids saved themselves. If man's underlying core of instinct is like theirs, then he's moral . . .'

Brain's article was the cover story of
Nature
magazine, December 1988.

On 20 July
The Songlines
reached Number 1 on the
Sunday Times
bestseller list. In October Tom Maschler wrote to Chatwin's new agent Gillon Aitken: ‘You will not be surprised to hear that SL is, for me, one of the most wonderful books I have ever published and for it to have been at number one (ahead of the newly published Douglas Adams) is a high point in my publishing career.'

E.C.: ‘No, a guide to Gujarat. I never did it because I didn't know how to work a computer.'

Short stories by Ninette Dutton (1987).

Jiří Mucha, son of the artist Alfonse Mucha, was married to a Scot. His mistress lived in a house opposite.

Georges and Anne Borchardt, co-founders of the New York-based literary agency which had looked after Chatwin's American rights.

On 15 September, at the invitation of the organiser Greg Gatenby, Chatwin had appeared in Toronto at the Harbou.rfront Festival. Just before going on stage, he vomited in the dressing room and asked to be rushed back to his hotel. E.C.: ‘He was suddenly awfully tired; I stamped my foot and said: “He's too tired. If you want to see him, come to the hotel.”'

Gatenby had discussed with Chatwin the possibility of him starting a Writer in Residence Programme on Baffin Island.

Gillon Aitken (
b
.1938) had met Chatwin in New York in 1974 when setting up a literary agency with Anthony Sheil and Lois Wallace. In a draft introduction for
What Am I Doing Here
, Chatwin wrote: ‘Two days before I flew to Buenos Aires I met Gillon Aitken at a party. He asked me what I did. I said I was a journalist. He said he was a literary agent. I asked him whether, when I came back, he could place an article with an American magazine. The title would be “Letter from the End of the World.”

‘He invited me to his office. I told him what I knew of Patagonia – and what I hoped to find. He took notes and said:

‘“This is a book and you must write it.”' G.A.: ‘He regarded his connection to Deborah as evanescent and appointed me his agent in New York. He kept talking about Patagonia and he talked so much about it I said: “You must stop talking about it, you must go. Go, go, go.” I got him to do an outline and on the basis of his letter sold the book to Harper and Row for $12,500. I rang Bruce to tell him and he'd gone. Two years later I was again in New York and looked across the room and there he was and he with his hands covered his face as a gesture of apology. I went up and said: “What happened?” He'd gone back to Deborah – or never left her.'

Probably Paul Theroux.

Editor at Random House.

Sonny Mehta had published Chatwin in paperback at Picador in London, before moving to New York as Editor-in-chief at Knopf.

CEO of Viking Penguin.

Chatwin's new agent in New York; Wylie (
b
.1948), known as ‘the Jackal' ever since this episode, was in negotiation with Georges Borchardt, Chatwin's previous American agent, in regard to his release from Summit Books and transfer to Penguin.