Under the Sun (9 page)

Read Under the Sun Online

Authors: Bruce Chatwin

The bazaar is quite incredible. All women are in yashmaks. The men storm about with artificial ferocity, flashing dark and disdainful glances. In fact their eyes are made up, but then the outward appearance is all important. Turbans are often yards of ice-pink silk and reach gigantic proportions. Behind a street of little booths we found a vast caravanserai, an enclosure with two layers of arches, built at the time when Herat was one of the greatest trading posts in Asia. Camel trains are still to be seen all over Afghanistan but they have deserted this one. It has become a cloth market; from every arch row upon row of colourful clothes are suspended and are blown about in the breeze. What is extraordinary in this last outpost of untrammelled orient is that all are Western. A genius has bought up a gigantic horde of American ladies dresses and has sold them here. A student of modern fashion could find no better museum of modern dress. From Maine to Texas, from Chicago to Hollywood the wardrobes of thousands of American ladies over forty years are hanging into the breeze. Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo pink crepe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the War in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams all to be closely concealed under her yashmak.
I am sure she will get far more pleasure from it than its original owner.
Tomorrow we will ride out to Gazar Gah, the 14th century tomb of a saint called Ansari; he was a prodigious old bore who had visions while sucking his mother's milk and who went through life moralising until he was over 90.
We will start for Kabul on Thursday.
XXX Bruce
PS I forgot to tell you that the total cooking arrangements for a first-class hotel with 20 bedrooms consist of one noxious primus!
To Margharita Chatwin
Postcard, ancient mountain fortress near Bamyan | Afghanistan | [September 1963]
 
Off to Peshawar in the Embassy truck tomorrow, so that we can eat curry to burn out Robert's cold and see Taxila, a Buddhist site on the Indus. X B
 
Chatwin's lease on Grosvenor Crescent Mews was due to run out in September. While away in Afghanistan he had sub-let the flat to a Frenchman called Pascal on the understanding that he would collect his belongings upon his return. However, when Chatwin got back he found that Pascal had changed the locks; further, Pascal claimed the flat's contents as his. Someone suggested that for £20 Chatwin could hire ‘two goons' to knock down the door, but his father's name was on the lease and he did not have the stomach for this. It would involve more than a year of legal action to retrieve his belongings, Pascal settling out of court on the eve of the trial. Even so, Chatwin lost several favourite possessions, including his christening mug and a watercolour of a Roman mosaic pavement in Gloucester that he had wanted to donate to the British Museum. Increasingly, from this time on, he supplemented his meagre income from Sotheby's through private deals and running errands. He later wrote: ‘It was still possible in the early 60s to buy Greek antiquities without causing legal harm.'
To Edward Peregrine
New address: 119a Mount Street | London | 27 December 1963
 
Dear E.F.P.,
I was just about to write to you. I had news from America just the other day to say that the picture safely arrived there. The cleaning took ages, and I saw it before it was sent over. The man did a most wonderful job and there is no cause for worry about it at all. Eugene Thaw
45
asked me to tell you that he wants just a little more time as nobody does anything around Christmas in America and it naturally slowed things up, the death of Kennedy. He will certainly be getting in touch with you direct in the middle of January. He is a charming person and I have 100% faith in him and his judgment.
Merry Christmas (belated) to you, Molly and the family.
Bruce
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Postcard, ivory ointment box in Brooklyn Museum | New York | May 22 [1964]
 
Total chaos here as usual and horrible humidity. Hope to be back Tuesday after reopening of Museum of Modern Art here, love B
 
In 1964 Sotheby's purchase of the New York auction house of Parke Bernet required Chatwin to make frequent trips to America. But after six years, a loathing had started to set in. He confided his frustrations to Cary Welch, an American curator and collector of Indian miniatures and nomadic art. Described by Chatwin as a ‘hypnotic character',Welch (1928 – 2008) was married to Elizabeth's cousin Edith; he had been introduced to Chatwin in Paris by Welch's old Harvard room-mate, the collector George Ortiz Patino. ‘We became instant friends,' said Welch.‘In life, one does run into
people who are the perfect ping-pong opponent. In some ways I became the mentor/father figure.'
To Cary Welch
119a Mount Street | London | 27 July 1964
 
Dear Cary,
We are now the proud possessors of Parke-Bernet which I personally think is a highly dubious venture but do on no account want to be quoted as such. Am given over to much private melancholy on the subject as well as to my own future. The great golden handshake seems to have turned out to be of baser metal.
46
It's like a game of snakes and ladders and as far as Sotheby's are concerned I have slid down the snake to square one. This means that to go up the ladders again it will be a question of threats, imbecilic charm, insinuous manoeuvring and a better spy-ring. One day I shall kick the whole thing in the pants and retire to Crete. Sorry to be so devious – the details I'll fill in when I see you.
I have bought nothing and am not interested in doing so.
I am going again to Afghanistan with a friend.
47
We are going to walk this time in the Eastern part of Kafiristan. I am saying hell to works of art and have been given equipment and supplies from Kew on condition that I collect plants for them.
48
The area has never been botanised before at all. It is one of the last botanical unknowns in the world. This is my ambition – BOTANIST written in my passport. The sale of works of art is the most unloveable profession in the world.
Am just a touch cross over the painting by Daulat,
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but don't let on to Howard.
50
I think it is a very good thing and that you should have it. Please bear in mind that whatever I may say about not wanting works of art I do want to buy sometime soon a really good Mughal painting. Perhaps we could go into a huddle and find something in the Spencer-Churchill sale. This last has really thrown Mr T.
51
He even flew back from Greece to see the poor old thing almost breathing his last, and is now astonished to find that the lot are going to be sold. I do envy you your boat and wish I were on it.
All the best to the Knellingtons
52
and their mother,
Bruce
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Postcard, Zamzama or Kim's Gun, Lahore | Pakistan | [August 1964]
 
This is the gun that Kim used to sit under. We are doing a tour of N Pakistan because my arm went septic (as usual)
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and we had to return after having got a third of the way. We are spending a week in Chitral then return via Beirut.
XX Bruce
To Stephen Tennant
119a Mount Street | London | 20 October [1964]
 
Dear Stephen Tennant,
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I do so much look forward to the 2nd of November. We did decide to come by car after all as the drive is so pleasant in the autumn.
I'm longing to see the cottage
55
and do fervently hope that no one else takes it in the meantime. I'm sure from what you say that it's absolutely charming.
Delighted that you enjoyed the Gauguin
56
. The two figures have an immutability and ineloquence that recalls Piero.
Till the 2nd,
As ever,
Bruce Chatwin
 
Aside from his arm, Chatwin was having trouble with his eyes. Sotheby's acquisition of Parke-Bernet had demanded a succession of transatlantic flights which exhausted him. Plus he was responsible for two important sales. On 16 and 17 November 1964 Sotheby's auctioned the Ernest Brummer collection of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities, which Chatwin had catalogued with Elizabeth Chanler, Peter Wilson's American assistant. He had also helped catalogue 540 works for the Impressionist sale four days later, including Cézanne's
Grandes Baigneuses
, acquired by the National Gallery for a record sum of £500, 000. By his own account,
he went blind after these sales. On 31 December 1964 he visited the eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper and told him:‘When I look upward I feel brown clouds.' The symptoms seem to have been a flare-up of his 1955 complaint. Trevor-Roper advised him to give up concentrated work and get away from the office for a few months.
‘“You've been looking too closely at works of art. I suggest long horizons. Where do you want to go?”
‘“Africa,” I said.'
To Stephen Tennant
119a Mount Street | London | Sun [January 1965]
 
Dear Stephen,
New York turned me inside out and has left me in a highly nervous state also without the power to focus my right eye. Exciting yes but it would kill me to live there.
Have you been getting
Art News
? I have sent you 1 year's subscription as a Christmas present so if you didn't get it I shall raise a storm.
I saw none of my friends in New York, but spent many tedious evenings with the so-called ‘Great Collectors'; they reduce one to a state of physical and visual indigestion.
May I come again at the end of Jan? I have to go to hospital for my eye soon, but after then.
As ever Bruce
To Cary Welch
119a Mount Street | London | [January 1965]
 
Dear Cary,
A quick note. Am rather depressed because the focussing in my right eye has packed-up. Apparently the result of over-doing it in America.
You don't have any worries about the tax people looking into the accounts of Parke-Bernet unless you have a Federal Tax investigation against you in which case P-B are obliged to open their books to them. Many thanks for everything.
Am not intending to return until I can SEE.
British Paintings Dept suggest reserves
Sutherland
57
– £125
Palmers – £150 each
Please let me know.
If you think too little, I think I can sell the geometric Palmer for that at least to Derek Hill
58
who wants it but is neurotic about bidding in sales.
Say boo to the Knellingtons,
as ever, B
 
On 5 February 1965 Chatwin set off for the Sudan where he was the guest of a former girlfriend; Gloria Taylor had married Tahir El-Fadil el Mahdi, the Cambridge-educated grandson of Siddig el Mahdi, who had won Sudan's independence from Britain. After a week in Khartoum, Chatwin met Abdul Mohnim, a geologist who was leaving on an expedition to the Red Sea Hills to look for kaolin deposits.‘I asked if I could come along and he said I could.' Here, on a short camel trek in the Eastern Sudan, Chatwin experienced his first taste of nomadic life.
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Postcard, camel riders at El Obeid | Sudan | 13 March 1965
 
Many thanks for your cable. That makes life a lot easier. 3 more books I've remembered. Palmer's
Myceneans and Minoans
. Weigall's
Travels in The Upper Egyptian Desert, The Red Sea Hills of Egypt
. Do you have the christening mug? If not the swine [Pascal] has that too. Have got a cold – now better.
Bruce
 
After six weeks recuperating in the Sudan, Chatwin returned to London by way of Greece.
To Charles and Margharita Chatwin
Postcard, fish plate in Museum of Corinth | Athens | Greece| [27 March 1965]
 
Arrived here . . . 3 days ago because it was hotting up too much. I must say I had a marvellous time there. Will be in Crete as from tomorrow. It's bitterly cold in Athens but the sun shines and the flowers are out. The eyes vary from day to day, and are obviously still far from right, although they got much better at one stage. Let me know how things are. XXX Bruce

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