Bruce Chatwin (30 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
At work, Wilson’s acquisition of Parke-Bernet demanded of Bruce a succession of transatlantic flights that exhausted him. “I felt sort of trapped by New York and having to turn up at 3 a.m. to get my post done.” He wrote: “However enthusiastic my response might be to works of art, however strong my desire to possess them, and however beguiling the atmosphere of the world’s largest auction house, I became convinced it [Sotheby’s] would drive me insane.”
Two important sales consumed his energies that autumn. On 16 and 17 November 1964, Sotheby’s held the sale of the Ernest Brummer collection of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities. Bruce had catalogued this collection with Elizabeth. An Impressionist sale, four days later, included Cézanne’s
Les Grandes Baigneuses.
Interviewed by the
New York Times,
Bruce promoted himself above Michel Strauss. “Bruce Chatwin, head of the Impressionist and Modern Painting Department of Sotheby’s, said Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ had a ‘profound’ influence on Picasso and Braque. He says the last comparable work to come on the market was ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’ in 1958 which sold for £222,000.”
Les Grandes Baigneuses.
Interviewed by the
New York Times,
Bruce promoted himself above Michel Strauss. “Bruce Chatwin, head of the Impressionist and Modern Painting Department of Sotheby’s, said Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ had a ‘profound’ influence on Picasso and Braque. He says the last comparable work to come on the market was ‘Boy in a Red Waistcoat’ in 1958 which sold for £222,000.”
The National Gallery in London acquired the painting for £500,000, once more a record. In a letter to Murray Bail, Bruce explained that the painting was then owned by Madame de Chaisemartin, “a deafening barrister, who specialised in the cases of poor Algerian immigrants on murder charges. I thought she was terrific. It was I . . .
Je garde mes souvenirs
. . . who set in motion the deal whereby the
Grands Baigneuses,
then hanging in the maids’ corridor, was bought by the National Gallery.” How he managed this is unclear.
Je garde mes souvenirs
. . . who set in motion the deal whereby the
Grands Baigneuses,
then hanging in the maids’ corridor, was bought by the National Gallery.” How he managed this is unclear.
By his own account, Bruce went blind after these sales. “I manufactured a nervous eye complaint, which I came to believe in and then suffered from. This was interpreted in many ways.” Integral to his myth, his blindness was said to precipitate his need to view “distant horizons”.
The initial symptoms were real enough, a flare-up of his 1955 complaint from the rugby pitch. He described the problem to Welch: “Am rather depressed because the focussing in my right eye has packed up. Apparently the result of over-doing it in America . . . Am not intending to return until I can
SEE
.” He had flown back from New York to Dublin, hired a car, driven to Donegal, and while sleeping in a four-poster bed, had put on the light and seen nothing – just a weak glow from the lamp. In the morning, one eye had recovered while the other remained foggy.
SEE
.” He had flown back from New York to Dublin, hired a car, driven to Donegal, and while sleeping in a four-poster bed, had put on the light and seen nothing – just a weak glow from the lamp. In the morning, one eye had recovered while the other remained foggy.
On 31 December 1964, Bruce visited the eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper. By now, the problem was not confined to his eyesight. “He described a multiplicity of symptoms,” says Trevor-Roper. “He had feelings of fatigue, discomfort and vague subjective unease. He not quite hallucinated: he fantasised. ‘When I look upward I feel brown clouds’.”
Trevor-Roper discovered a latent squint. The effort of trying to pull it straight had caused the stress. He ascribed Bruce’s condition to pressure from Wilson and the result of “a bright, sensitive rather neurotic young man trying to cut a dash”. He recommended Bruce give up concentrated work and get away from the office. Bruce told him, “I’d like to go away and write” – the first time he had vouchsafed such an ambition.
Trevor-Roper said, “If you can afford to take six months off, that’s what you must do. Go away and write.” He had designed an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, “staffed by hopeless Bulgarians”, and travelled every year to anglophone Africa, so perhaps the desert had emerged in their conversation as a choice of location.
In February 1965, Bruce set off for a long spell of recuperation in the Sudan.
Bruce made much of the damage to his sight, blaming it on the awfulness of Sotheby’s. After he left, he expressed a disgust for collectors whose only passion was to possess, for the dull weekends he had had to spend in their Long Island houses. “It was all to do with
having
and
holding
and
hoarding
and I became less and less impressed.” If they already owned a couple of Matisses, they were
de facto
interesting in the Wilson scheme. “In fact, they’re not that interesting at all.” Welch wrote to agree: “Collectors, after all, are the world’s least mature and yet hardest-driving types. They are also in 99 per cent of the cases horrible, corrupt human beings – wildly egotistical, selfish as all hell, ruthless, scheming, dishonest, and utterly miserable. Ugh. What hellish trash (except for the ones we know and like).”
having
and
holding
and
hoarding
and I became less and less impressed.” If they already owned a couple of Matisses, they were
de facto
interesting in the Wilson scheme. “In fact, they’re not that interesting at all.” Welch wrote to agree: “Collectors, after all, are the world’s least mature and yet hardest-driving types. They are also in 99 per cent of the cases horrible, corrupt human beings – wildly egotistical, selfish as all hell, ruthless, scheming, dishonest, and utterly miserable. Ugh. What hellish trash (except for the ones we know and like).”
“Things”, reflects the narrator in
Utz
, “are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.” The atmosphere of the art world conjured up for Bruce the image of the morgue. “In the end you felt you were working for a rather superior kind of funeral parlour,” he told Thubron. “To give you an idea as to how it was, each morning there came round the
Times
obituary column and it had to be ticked off by any of the partners to see who had died . . .” People would say: “‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,’ – and I’d look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth.” Then, as he told Thubron, warming to his theme, he developed sores, rather like stigmata, on his palms. “These works of art, however wonderful they may have been, were literally going to kill me. There and then.”
Utz
, “are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.” The atmosphere of the art world conjured up for Bruce the image of the morgue. “In the end you felt you were working for a rather superior kind of funeral parlour,” he told Thubron. “To give you an idea as to how it was, each morning there came round the
Times
obituary column and it had to be ticked off by any of the partners to see who had died . . .” People would say: “‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,’ – and I’d look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth.” Then, as he told Thubron, warming to his theme, he developed sores, rather like stigmata, on his palms. “These works of art, however wonderful they may have been, were literally going to kill me. There and then.”
Bruce’s breakdown, which he laid at Sotheby’s door, was as much personal as professional and it involved more than one layer of distress. He conveyed something of this to Wilson’s assistant Kenelm Digby-Jones after collapsing on his way to Dorset during the same autumn.
Digby-Jones was taking Bruce “to do a job” at a private museum in Farnham, owned by George Pitt-Rivers, which housed the best collection of Benin bronzes in the country. The Pitt-Rivers “job” had already become a symbol of everything Bruce disliked about Peter Wilson’s Sotheby’s. On this day, however, Digby-Jones had no doubt as to what lay behind Bruce’s collapse and it had nothing to do with Benin bronzes.
On the way to the museum, Digby-Jones stopped at Heathrow to drop off his wife, who was flying to Paris. “I went to have a pee, came back – and there was Bruce buried in Ursula’s bosom, in floods of tears and shaking like a leaf.” Digby-Jones at once drove Bruce back to London to see a doctor. “He was in a bad way. It was genuine, no messing. He kept saying: ‘I’m in such a muddle, I don’t know what to do.’ He thought he was going blind. He said it was because he hated Sotheby’s. I knew it was a bit of that, but really it was a struggle with himself and the stress of his sexuality.”
Bruce’s relationship with Elizabeth, which had begun surreptitiously more than a year before, had reached a watershed. When he came back from Afghanistan, Bruce discovered that Elizabeth was making moves to leave Sotheby’s.
Elizabeth had never in this time considered herself faithfully attached to Bruce. “I went on seeing other people, although if that had got back to Bruce he would have been put off.” Nevertheless, her reluctance to leave him can be traced in the variety of jobs she considered and rejected from 1963 onwards. In September 1963, she was to take up a position at the Freer Gallery in Washington where she had worked as a volunteer. At the last minute she baulked at the prospect of having only two weeks’ holiday. Throughout 1964, her letters to Gertrude describe flirtations with the Freer, the Frick, a teaching project in south India. “What I really want to do is bum around with no time limit and no fixed address.” This attitude exasperated her punctilious father. “You only seem to make plans of the most fluid kind and can change them more or less on the spur of the moment.” On 29 December 1964, two days before Bruce went to see Trevor-Roper for the first time, Elizabeth wrote to her mother with news of her latest project: to spend six months in Spain, filming black-winged kites.
Not holding out hopes for marriage – “You couldn’t bank on Bruce” – Elizabeth packed her trunk and gave away “Birdbrain”, who flew out of a window in Norfolk and froze to death. Clearly, unless Bruce acted he would lose her.
Like his Swedish friend, Percivald Bratt, in a time of personal crisis Bruce sought his solution in the desert. Wilson raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there’s something wrong with Bruce’s eyes, but I don’t know why he has to go to the Sudan.”
One answer lay with Gloria Taylor, Bruce’s old girlfriend, on whom Khartoum had exercised a cathartic spell. A three-week holiday in Africa had changed her life.
In October 1963, “Glor” had been with Robert Erskine to Egypt and the Sudan. One night they sat in the Muglani gardens where the Blue and White Niles met. There they awaited the arrival of a contact: Tahir, a diffident member of the Mahdi clan whose grandfather Siddig El Mahdi had won the Sudan’s independence from Britain. “Tahir arrived at midnight,” says Gloria, “an amazing vision wearing a white jellaba and shoes of white camel leather. He was 35, slim, blue-black, and he spoke the most beautiful English.” By the third day they were inseparable. Erskine came home on his own.
“I wondered why there was no resistance,” says Gloria. “Everyone just said, ‘Oh hello’, when they saw me. On his deathbed, the Imam had predicted: ‘Tahir will marry a foreigner and you’re all to accept her.’ When we went to meet his mother, she treated me like a long-lost friend.”
Gloria and Tahir married in December after a visit to England. In Kent they stayed with John Hewett. Gloria’s anxious father sent her brother, the actor Malcolm MacDowell, to check. “Malcolm rings him: ‘Are you sitting down, Dad? You know that phone you’re holding? Well, that’s the colour. As black as your phone’.”
Bruce arrived in Khartoum on 5 February 1965. He had written to Gloria to say he needed bright, glaring light. He had brought Tahir a purple shirt recommended by David Niven after striking up a conversation with the actor in a shirt-maker’s in Jermyn Street. Bruce found Gloria heavily pregnant in a tiny flat with a huge, balustraded terrace beside the Mahdi palace. He stayed with them a week, sleeping on the terrace.
Bruce longed, as Gloria had done, to hatch into something else. “We’d have long conversations about where he was going with his life,” she says. “He was trashing everything. ‘It’s burning me up. I can’t stand this much longer. I have to get an education’.” Tahir, who had studied at Cambridge, urged Bruce to go to university: it would discipline his thoughts.
Bruce was restless after a week in Khartoum. “Couldn’t sit still for five minutes, our Bruce. Unless he was on a quest,” says Gloria. Then, at a wedding party, he met Abdul Monhim, a geologist who was leaving on an expedition to the Red Sea Hills to look for kaolin deposits the very next day. “I asked if I could go along and he said I could.”
The journey was a “great turning point”. He had arrived in Khartoum glutted on the art world, on “women who sent their Renoirs to be relined as often as their faces”. Now he found himself in close quarters with someone who took pride in getting rid of everything he owned. The less Abdul Monhim had, the richer he became. “He was the utter swing of the pendulum, but I found him the most fascinating person that I’d ever met.”
They headed on camels towards the Rift Valley, riding at a gallop through flat-topped acacia. Bruce discovered “the joy of going on and on”. The country was harsh, glinting rocks and shining gorges with white thorns. The biblical landscape recalled the engravings of his favourite Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers. When he found the rock that resembled the Eagle Stone in Derbyshire, he experienced a homecoming. “The word ‘homecoming’ in that sense is the idea of returning to some kind of original landscape.” Close to Ethiopia, he was riding through the Valley of Shadows. “It was, like so many things in life, completely accidental that we should have ended up there.”
Here, in the Eastern Sudan, Bruce experienced his first taste of nomadic life. The tribe was the Beja, “the Fuzzy-Wuzzies of Kipling” – people who had been mentioned in the Egyptian annals 3,000 years ago. “They are sensationally idle, and truculent as well. Most of the morning for men is taken up by a fantastic mutual coiffure session.” The Beja had long curly hair that they anointed with goat’s grease. “The hair would contract at three in the afternoon and pour down their shoulders and by evening was a round fuzzy ball in which they could sleep.” They carried buff hides and wandered around without tents. “I was overwhelmed by the simplicity of the lives of those people and struck by the idea that you were much happier if you carried nothing with you.” Bruce told Michael Ignatieff: “They started my quest to know the secret of their irreverent and timeless vitality: why was it that nomad peoples have this amazing capacity to continue under the most adverse circumstances, while the empires come crashing down.”
Bruce afterwards sought parallels for his desert epiphany in the example of two previous travellers to the Sudan. In 1930, Wilfred Thesiger had crossed the country of the Danakils. “The Danakil journey”, Bruce wrote in a review of
Desert, Marsh and Mountain
, “set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness.” On that dangerous journey, Thesiger had crossed the tracks of the other and earlier traveller: Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce came to identify with the French poet. In his mind their situations were similar. “As Rimbaud was passing through his ‘
saison en enfer
’, he realised that the Beast was winning. He made a last-ditch stand to avoid suicide or mental collapse, and took to the perpetual pilgrimage of the road.” In Bruce’s opinion, Rimbaud’s abrupt departure was not a failure: it was a cure. “Among the testicle-hunting Danakil in the leopard-coloured lands of Ethiopia, tracking his way
‘par des routes horribles rappelant l’horreur présumé des pays lunaires
,’ a country of tearing thorns, black acacia trees, glinting schists, and shimmering white salt pans, he found himself again. He reaffirmed his identity, just as Proust found his in re-walking the ‘ways’ of childhood . . . In his search for mental calm, Rimbaud found that he was a small-time honest provincial bourgeois from Charleville. This is what he was. This he could not change.”
Desert, Marsh and Mountain
, “set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness.” On that dangerous journey, Thesiger had crossed the tracks of the other and earlier traveller: Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce came to identify with the French poet. In his mind their situations were similar. “As Rimbaud was passing through his ‘
saison en enfer
’, he realised that the Beast was winning. He made a last-ditch stand to avoid suicide or mental collapse, and took to the perpetual pilgrimage of the road.” In Bruce’s opinion, Rimbaud’s abrupt departure was not a failure: it was a cure. “Among the testicle-hunting Danakil in the leopard-coloured lands of Ethiopia, tracking his way
‘par des routes horribles rappelant l’horreur présumé des pays lunaires
,’ a country of tearing thorns, black acacia trees, glinting schists, and shimmering white salt pans, he found himself again. He reaffirmed his identity, just as Proust found his in re-walking the ‘ways’ of childhood . . . In his search for mental calm, Rimbaud found that he was a small-time honest provincial bourgeois from Charleville. This is what he was. This he could not change.”
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