Bruce Chatwin (26 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Like Bruce, Elizabeth knew what it was to be the eldest child of a father at sea. Until she was seven, she thought of him as a photograph. “Where’s Bobby?” Gertrude once asked. Elizabeth replied: “He’s on the bureau.” In Hawaii, scene of her earliest memories, her father became known, because of the blackout, as “The Man Who Comes and Goes in the Dark”.
In 1941, Bobby was posted to Hawaii on the heavy cruiser
Minneapolis
. On 4 December, Gertrude arrived on the island with Elizabeth and her new-born brother, John. Three days later Elizabeth was playing on the beach when the boy from next door said: “They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor.” Elizabeth ran to tell Gertrude. Then aeroplanes roared overhead. She looked up and saw red circles under the wings. Taking both children, Gertrude left Hawaii and went to stay with her parents in Washington. Bruce would later cite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “to illustrate our murderous propensity”.
Minneapolis
. On 4 December, Gertrude arrived on the island with Elizabeth and her new-born brother, John. Three days later Elizabeth was playing on the beach when the boy from next door said: “They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor.” Elizabeth ran to tell Gertrude. Then aeroplanes roared overhead. She looked up and saw red circles under the wings. Taking both children, Gertrude left Hawaii and went to stay with her parents in Washington. Bruce would later cite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “to illustrate our murderous propensity”.
Gertrude’s father, Irwin Laughlin, was a compulsive collector who had retired from the diplomatic service to Meridian House, an airy French-style home which he built and decorated with drawings by Boucher and Fragonard, eighteenth-century French furniture, and Oriental screens from his bachelor years in Japan – where, unbeknown to his family, he had left behind an illegitimate daughter. It was the lure of Irwin Laughlin’s collection for Peter Wilson which led Elizabeth, eventually, to a job at Sotheby’s.
Laughlin was important in Elizabeth’s early life. From her grandfather she gained an attachment to antique mirrors, chandeliers and embroidery. Meridian House, with its large staff and walls painted to resemble grey silk, was one of several substantial homes in which she grew up.
Bobby remained at sea. The
Minneapolis
had been absent from Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack. But a year later, news reached Washington that she had been engaged in action in the Solomon Islands. On i December 1942, a torpedo sliced off her bow and the cruiser, 15 feet down in water, was engulfed in flaming gasoline. Bobby, as Damage Control Officer, was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his part in directing the repairs.
Minneapolis
had been absent from Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack. But a year later, news reached Washington that she had been engaged in action in the Solomon Islands. On i December 1942, a torpedo sliced off her bow and the cruiser, 15 feet down in water, was engulfed in flaming gasoline. Bobby, as Damage Control Officer, was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his part in directing the repairs.
Elizabeth’s childhood was more peripatetic than Bruce’s. She had crossed the Pacific twice by the age of three. After the war she came to live in a palace in Rome where, in 1946, Bobby had been appointed Naval Attaché. At the Assumption convent school, Elizabeth learned Italian and calligraphy. She had terrible handwriting. Bobby, replying to a letter, wanted to know: “Why didn’t you write it a little more carefully . . . I have very little time to spend on trying to decipher bad handwriting. Your Bobby.”
He had more time than he cared to admit. His naval career did not end splendidly. After three years in Rome, he requested sea duty and was turned down. There were too many captains and technology had changed. Bobby’s last command was the repair ship
Hector
on the American west coast, anchored within the breakwater. From
Hector
he transferred to working two days a week on the veterans’ disability board. In April 1952, he was given the rank of rear admiral on retirement and he clung to it tenaciously.
Hector
on the American west coast, anchored within the breakwater. From
Hector
he transferred to working two days a week on the veterans’ disability board. In April 1952, he was given the rank of rear admiral on retirement and he clung to it tenaciously.
Bobby retired to Sweet Briar. The farm had been left him by his mother. Daisy walked out of the house with what she was wearing, leaving everything behind, including the painting which she had at different times promised to each member of the family.
He came home intending to set the world on fire as a farmer and horsebreeder. But shortly after taking up residence, his horse “Mainstay” stepped in a woodchuck hole and Bobby broke his collarbone. A year later he still came down to dinner with a wide elastic bandage wrapped under his dress shirt.
In retirement, he became an irascible disciplinarian. His eldest son, John, says, “He had preconceived notions, some of which were based on his naval training, on how children should be brought up.”
He raised them as Catholics. Every week in summer a priest visited the private chapel to say mass and afterwards came to breakfast. When a new priest addressed Bobby as “Mr Chanler”, he said gruffly: “I’d really rather be called Admiral.” His main source of information was the
Tablet
which he read cover to cover.
Tablet
which he read cover to cover.
He was constantly laying down laws. There was a correct procedure for cutting cheese. No parking on the lawn. No trousers for women. At home, the eight children changed for lunch and supper.
After dinner, for which he wore a maroon smoking jacket, he staggered into the library and closed the door. He forbade books to leave the house. If there was a gap in his shelves it enraged him. “Did you take a book out of Bobby’s room,” wrote an anguished Gertrude to Elizabeth, “
La Princess des Ursins
?” He had read the complete works of Henry James twice and
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
three times, once aloud to his mother. But apart from the
Tablet
he was not a serious reader. One of the few contemporary books on his shelves was
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
. Suspicious of most writers, he blamed Scott Fitzgerald for his Uncle Teddy’s drinking problems.
La Princess des Ursins
?” He had read the complete works of Henry James twice and
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
three times, once aloud to his mother. But apart from the
Tablet
he was not a serious reader. One of the few contemporary books on his shelves was
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
. Suspicious of most writers, he blamed Scott Fitzgerald for his Uncle Teddy’s drinking problems.
Elizabeth was not allowed out with young men before her eighteenth birthday. Until then, an II p.m. curfew was enforced. Bobby did not like her watching television and only grudgingly permitted visits to the Riviera cinema in Geneseo.
Drink increased his rigidity. He was not supposed to drink because he had pancreatitis. But he laced his consommé with sherry and drank two and a half bottles of smoky red wine a night. And before going to bed, he took a bottle upstairs on a silver tray.
With Gertrude he enjoyed a powerful attraction, but she had a difficult time of it. He conducted their serious arguments in French, which he spoke fluently, shifting to Italian once his children learned French. A lot of their arguments had to do with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth grew up the most independent of eight children. She learned to cope with the heckling of a large family. Bobby doted on her, but she bore the brunt of his discipline. “She was difficult, precocious, with a good mind,” says Gertrude. “And very determined if she wanted something.”
As a baby she screamed incessantly. “I hate being told what to do. I remember going on a steam train and when we got into the compartment I was furious. I wanted to get into the engine with all the excitement and noise.”
Only one person could control her, Fuddy, the children’s governess. Miss Kathleen Fogarty was an emaciated, common-sensical Irish Catholic from New Brunswick. Over her white uniform she wore a full-length raccoon coat so that, from the rear, herding everyone down the aisle in church, she looked like a raccoon. Elizabeth may have been the first granddaughter of millionaire grandparents, but Fuddy made her finish everything on her plate. “Anybody caught looking at themselves in the nude, she’d go after them. ‘Never look at yourself in the mirror!’ she’d say. So I hardly ever do.”
Elizabeth, like Bruce, was a sickly child. She suffered from asthma. If she ate raw wheat during harvesting, half an hour later she would not be able to breathe. She also had a condition that came to be known as “Lib’s Tongue”, aubergines, tomatoes and walnuts in particular making her blow up. Most debilitating, she had rickets, probably from Vitamin D deficiency. She grew up with the stoicism of a child who has a physical handicap. “Lib is someone who lives in the present very much,” said her best friend Gillian Walker. “‘That’s who I am and I’m going to make the best of it.’ There is no self-pity.”
Her condition did not prevent her from riding. Her grandfather had been Master of the Genesee Hunt, in the saddle at the time of his stroke. From the age of twelve Elizabeth was riding three times a week to hounds.
Animals were her passion. At Fox Hollow School in Massachusetts she decided she wanted to be a vet. “I was always rescuing game-cocks and chickens and when we did biology I liked to cut up animals. We started out with earthworms and progressed to pregnant cats.”
At 17, she applied to Scripps College in California to study biology and was accepted. Months afterwards she received a letter at school. Rear-Admiral Chanler had withdrawn the application. He regarded vets as second-class doctors. And he did not want her in California for the same reason Charles Chatwin had not wanted Bruce to be in London. Bobby thought California was “a bad place”.
She was 17 when she reached breaking point with Bobby. It was a small incident, one that occurs in households everywhere. She had invited a friend to stay, Didi Drysdale, who persuaded her to put on lipstick. “I forgot I even had the lipstick on.” Elizabeth came downstairs to where the family was sitting. “She looked so pretty and alive,” remembered her brother Ollie. Then Bobby saw her face and screamed: “GO UPSTAIRS AND WASH THAT OFF IMMEDIATELY.”
“That did it,” says Elizabeth. “For years and years and years I didn’t carry on a conversation with him. He never apologised. I don’t think he knew what he’d done. Once I went to Radcliffe, I was gone.”
Bruce wrote the incident into his second novel
On the Black Hill
: “She would steal off to Rhulen and come back with cigarette smoke on her breath and rouge rubbed off around her lips . . . He called her a ‘harlot’.”
On the Black Hill
: “She would steal off to Rhulen and come back with cigarette smoke on her breath and rouge rubbed off around her lips . . . He called her a ‘harlot’.”
Elizabeth majored in history at Radcliffe, but after her tutor absconded she studied what she wanted: Russian and Byzantine history, Indian art, and a course in Dante from an Italian who hated correcting papers. Thwarted from her true vocation – to study biology in California – she did not work hard.
Radcliffe was the female branch of Harvard, but segregated for sleeping purposes. Her floor mates were Pattie Sullivan and Gillian Walker, whose father was the Director of the National Gallery in Washington. When Elizabeth came to live in London, Pattie and Gillian joined her as lodgers.
Gillian says, “She was interested in odd things, not in what others thought. She wasn’t solitary, but she made up her own world.”
Bobby found it difficult to relinquish her. He forbade her to work as a waitress in the summer and she was not to go away for the weekend, unless with a family relation. He wrote often with news of the farm, the horses. “You might drop us a line . . . In the absence of official information to the contrary, we believe you are still alive, but we have nothing else to go by – so sit down and tell us what you have been doing and what you would like to do about all those invitations we have been forwarding, which Mummy says are for the ‘short season’ in Washington in June.”.
On 24 November 1956, the month of her eighteenth birthday, Bobby introduced Elizabeth to society at a ball in Meridian House. Dressed in the same whites he would wear at Bruce and Elizabeth’s wedding, he led her in a dance before the orchestra that had played at his own wedding. From this night on, she was permitted to meet young men.
Her first boyfriend at Radcliffe was Upton Brady, one of a sunny-faced group of American-Irish brothers whose father was a teacher at Portsmouth Priory. Then, when she moved to New York, she fell in love with Upton’s elder brother Buff, a gentle, poetic soul who worked as a flight controller. She says, “He was much less complicated than Upton: athletic and very good-looking, with Irish blue eyes put in by smutty fingers.” Soon Buff wanted to marry her.
Elizabeth prevaricated. She worked for a private charity in the Bronx and laid out pages for scientific magazines. By now she knew her vocation: if not a vet, she would work for Sotheby’s. In 1958 she had spent all summer as a volunteer at the Freer Gallery in Washington. In the following summer she visited London and found it, as she wrote to Gertrude, “really neat”. Her visit coincided with the sale at Sotheby’s of half the collection at Meridian House, including 141 black chalk drawings by Fragonard from his first Italian journey and Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune’s
N’ayez pas peur, ma bonne amie.
Her grandfather’s collection was sold so cheaply that Elizabeth, when she understood more, believed a ring had been involved.
N’ayez pas peur, ma bonne amie.
Her grandfather’s collection was sold so cheaply that Elizabeth, when she understood more, believed a ring had been involved.
On 16 June 1959, she turned up at Sotheby’s “having found that I could just walk in”. Quite by chance, some of her grandfather’s lesser objects were being auctioned that day in a sale of Antiquities. She wrote to Gertrude: “I got there early, fortunately, as it was a tiny room and there was a big rush after a while. Fascinating sorts of people.”
The chances are, Bruce was in that room. It may even have been the first sale he catalogued.
It was no secret that Wilson hired Elizabeth to get at the rest of the Laughlin collection. She says, “I got in because I had collecting in my background. That was the carrot. I used it like anything.” At the New York office in the Corning Building, Peregrine Pollen employed Elizabeth as a secretary. But her ambition was to spend a year in Sotheby’s in Bond Street. As a child she had read
An English Year
, by Nan Fairbrother, which might have described the life led by Margharita and Bruce in his childhood. “It’s the book of my life. Her husband’s at war. She’s living in the country. It made me want to live in England.”
An English Year
, by Nan Fairbrother, which might have described the life led by Margharita and Bruce in his childhood. “It’s the book of my life. Her husband’s at war. She’s living in the country. It made me want to live in England.”
In September 1961, Sotheby’s offered her a secretarial position in London and arranged a visa. Was two years all right?
She left New York on the
Queen Elizabeth.
Her mother saw her off with an enormous trunk that would double, once she got to London, as a dinner table. Gertrude had always been slightly psychic. “I remember thinking: ‘Well, she’s gone. She will stay in Europe’.” On the quayside, she burst into tears.
Queen Elizabeth.
Her mother saw her off with an enormous trunk that would double, once she got to London, as a dinner table. Gertrude had always been slightly psychic. “I remember thinking: ‘Well, she’s gone. She will stay in Europe’.” On the quayside, she burst into tears.
“She was crying and I didn’t know why she was crying,” says Elizabeth. “I thought, ‘Honestly, it’s too silly, too dramatic, why shouldn’t I go?’ It never occurred to me I wasn’t coming back.”
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