Bruce Chatwin (33 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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“Really?” said Bruce. “That sounds
very
expensive.”
“Think of the colour of skin against this yellow,” said Hodgkin.
It cost £125 to cover all four walls. Bruce explained to a visitor: “I’ve always wanted to live inside an egg.” To Lucie-Smith, the Mount Street flat – which had no view – was more “like a very posh crackle-glazed prison cell”.
Into this confined space Bruce and Elizabeth arrived from America with 15 pieces of luggage. When Elizabeth on the spur of the moment accepted the gift of a female ginger kitten havoc ensued. The cat immediately fouled Bruce’s perfect yellow bathroom, initiating a lifelong exasperation with her pets. “I didn’t know Bruce hated cats,” says Elizabeth. “It drove him up the wall. At least it wasn’t a dog.”
Elizabeth had accepted the cat in anticipation of a country house overrun with mice. The finding of this house was now a matter of urgency. As Margharita confided to Gertrude, it was even more important for Elizabeth than for Bruce “as she will be much more tied as soon as she has family responsibilities.”
Bruce had hoped to keep two establishments: the London flat and a country house in North Oxfordshire, where they had seen an eighteenth-century vicarage. But during October he became aware for the first time just how limited his wife’s finances were. If they pooled their incomes, they could just afford one home.
Elizabeth’s share of the Astor estate was “31 cents annually”, while her mother’s fortune was strictly entailed. In 1958, Gertrude had endowed each of her children a capital sum of $250,000, kept in trust at the Mellon bank in Pittsburgh. The capital provided $8,000 dollars in a good year and could not be touched.
“Our situation is not at all good,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “Bruce is now getting £3,000 a year & I get about £1,600. The total of £4,500 will after US & English taxes be reduced to something like £3,500 or less . . . And as Bruce earns more, the tax on
my
income goes up so that it pays him to work less, if you see what I mean.”
Sympathetic, Gertrude wrote on 18 October with welcome news. “I have arranged that there will be plenty of money available for the house when you find one.” While Bruce worked, Elizabeth house-hunted: one week in London, one week in the country. By November the hunt had widened to Dorset with Hugh and Charles joining in. A promising old priory came to nothing when Hugh – who had completed his training as a surveyor – prodded the plaster and found dry rot. Bruce kept Gertrude up to date. “No luck with houses so far. The market is apparently depressed at the moment and we may have to wait till spring because that’s the time people put them on the market.”
* * *
 
It should have been a glorious homecoming: the young and talented honeymooner returning to assume his new directorship.
He had been appointed a director in the summer and at the age of 25 his name was now on the masthead. The directorship was the fulfilment of a promise by Wilson. “Wilson told him that if he stayed, he would be one of a small group of new directors – about three – who would eventually control the whole firm,” wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary, after a conversation with Bruce in 1968. But the Beast groomed many of his favourites for positions they would never fill. The promotion was not the advancement it appeared to be. Bruce kept from Elizabeth the extent of his disappointment until after their wedding.
In March 1965, the board of Sotheby’s comprised nine directors. Bruce imagined he would be the tenth, with a vote and a share. He was not alone in his expectations. When the announcement was made, soon after Elizabeth flew to America to prepare for their marriage, Bruce discovered that eight others had been given identical encouragement, two of them – Marcus Linell and Howard Ricketts – younger than himself.
Among the new appointments was Richard Day, in charge of prints and drawings. Summoned to the office of the financial director, Day found Bruce already sitting down. “Bruce was the first in, the catalyst for all of us. I was the second. He was amazed to see me. He realised if I was a director, there would be others. Slowly, the others turned up. Howard, Marcus, Michel . . . He wasn’t best pleased.”
Those who filed into the room were not invited to join the ruling élite. They were to be subsidiary directors without voting rights. “They were called directors,” says Pollen, “but they weren’t the executive committee.”
Because of a new tax law, there was a waiting period of several months before the partnership came into effect. Meanwhile, Bruce was expected to attend board meetings. On 23 October, he wrote to his mother-in-law, who had agreed to loan him the £6,500 he needed to buy his shares: “I’ve been going to board meetings for the first time and more often than not they’re long and tedious, but sometimes they are very funny especially when all my own contemporaries stand on their dignity and get pompous and silly.”
Bruce felt able to contribute litde. Too many directors crowded the boardroom and there was a joke: “standing room only”. Also, the feeling that a meeting had already taken place. “He felt utterly betrayed,” says Elizabeth. “I remember a lot of rage.” The powerlessness of Bruce’s new position was driven home when one of the elite, Graham Llewellyn, queried Bruce’s expenses.
Had Bruce been appointed a full director, Elizabeth believed he might have remained at Sotheby’s. “It was typical of PCW. He thought he was going to get away with it. But he had come up against someone as strong-willed as he.”
Elizabeth’s observation to her mother after two months described the tempo that prevailed all her married life. “I’ve discovered there’s no point in planning on anything as Bruce’s schedule is always changing. You have to leave everything open always.” In November, they stayed in Birr Castle with Elizabeth’s friends Brendan and Alison Oxmantown. The United Nations had posted Brendan to West Africa and his mother was throwing a farewell party. “Lady Rosse is amazing and calls everything dear, darling beloved, including butlers and the Queen . . . The Press rang up one night while we were there and she did a marvellous imitation of an old Irishwoman till they hung up.” Conversation that weekend concentrated on the Oxmantowns’ destination, Dahomey. Once the capital of the slave trade, the country would be the setting for Bruce’s novel
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
A plan to spend Christmas in the Sudan was cancelled, but in early December the Chatwins travelled with Hewett and Felicity Nicholson to Leningrad. Bruce explained to Gertrude: “John Hewett and I have always wanted to see the archaeological stuff in the Hermitage and so we’ve cooked up an expedition.”
Immediately after Christmas, Gertrude received another letter from Bruce, this time from Paris. “We are sitting in an Italian restaurant and the woman next to me is a blonde with a
khaki
face. E. and I are speculating how it got that way because she is not a negress. E. has eaten an enormous pizza, half a chicken, and is now proposing to embark on an elaborate sweet. Nobody would say she doesn’t eat! But what really irks me is that she doesn’t appear to get any fatter while I blow out like a balloon.”
Bruce had definite ideas about how his wife should dress. From Sotheby’s he had bought her a big-sleeved Victorian dress in brown and grey taffeta. He also insisted that she wear a pair of real tortoise-shell glasses.
He was in Paris with Elizabeth to catalogue Helena Rubinstein’s collection of African and Oceanic sculptures. “Helena Rubinstein wore a lot of people out during her long life, and she retains that capacity in the grave. We work from 9 till 8 in the evening and we still get nowhere . . . I’m going to insist that E. gets paid a fortune.”
The Rubinstein sale took place on 21 April 1966, fetching £516,320. Bruce at the gavel maintained an open phone link with New York. More than 40 dealers squeezed into the boardroom and a Brancusi bronze called
Bird in Space
sold for £50,000 in 75 seconds. It was Bruce’s last major sale.
After several false starts the Chatwins found a house.
Bruce had been advised by Hewett, who lived in Kent “practically underneath a mound”, that you never wanted a home with a view. “He was so much in thrall to Hewett, that this is what we were after,” says Elizabeth, who would have preferred the open spaces of Wiltshire. One day she drove down the Ozleworth valley, in Gloucestershire. “I thought: this is
great,
it doesn’t have a view.”
Holwell Farm was a pink, seventeenth-century house set in 47 acres near the town of Wotton-under-Edge. It was perched on a steep slope and almost derelict. There was no central heating, limited electricity, and the kitchen was permeated with the stink of untrained tomcats. It required a new roof, new beams, complete redecoration.
The house was beautiful. “All the bluebells and primroses and cowslips are out so it is very pretty, rain or not,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “We like it better every time we see it.” She was able to foresee a country house in the image of her favourite book.
In April, Gertrude advanced £17,000 to buy Holwell Farm. They planned to move in on 9 May. The builders would have finished their work by the autumn. “The main thing is for you to own the house and not the house own you,” warned Elizabeth’s cousin, O’Donnell Iselin. They little suspected that the house was like a Hobbit hole, sunless for three months of the year.
In April 1966, after a protracted and complex procedure, Bruce officially became one of eight second-tier partners. He may have felt insulted about his directorship a year before, but at the time he had not judged it an issue on which to leave. He was viewed as Wilson’s heir. “None of us had any doubt but that he would be at the head of Sotheby’s in due course,” says Brian Sewell. Then, in the early summer of 1966, he resigned.
The fuse had been lit in the Sudan. Bruce, walking down Bond Street with Wilson, had surprised his chairman by spitting onto the pavement like a Bedouin. “He realised then that I’d changed.” The desert had restored his eyesight. “I was never at all able to focus on Sotheby’s again.”
He maintained that the decision to resign came to him after a revelatory “flash” in the boardroom. “I decided I didn’t want to spend not only the rest of my life with these people, but another week and I resigned . . . Just like that.”
He presented several reasons. He was piqued at his status; he was bored by his work in the Impressionist department, where there was no longer much movement of first-rate paintings to explore or exploit; he had grown sick of the auctioneering process. “Two days in the auction room brought back a flood of gruesome memories,” he wrote to James Ivory in 1972. “The nervous anxiety of the bidder’s face as he or she waits to see if she can afford to take some desirable thing home to play with. Like old men in nightclubs deciding whether they can really afford to pay that much for a whore. But things are so much better. You can sell them, touch ’em up at any time of the day, and they don’t answer back.”
But there may be an additional explanation for his resignation. Near the end of his life Bruce became fixated on one particular drama, little known at the time, which was being played out in the back-room between his two mentors, Wilson and Hewett.
Bruce always told friends he could have written a devastating biography of Wilson. “If he had lived into his eighties, he might have turned the saga of PCW into a
Viceroy of Ouidah,
” says the Islamic art dealer David Sulzberger, in whose London and Paris homes he would write that book. “He said he had the goods on PCW. He didn’t say it threateningly, but the goods existed and he had the low-down and thereby lay a tale.” Sewell suspected that Wilson was directly behind Bruce’s decision to leave. “I believe that relationship came to an end over a piece of outright dishonesty by Wilson in which the collaboration of Bruce was necessary.”
In the late 1970s, Bruce went for a walk with James Fox to Downton Castle in Shropshire and revealed how he had more or less hijacked its contents for Sotheby’s. “I was a very fierce salesman in those days.” To Jane Abdy, he boasted how he once saw a François II cabinet coming up for sale. “Bruce removed the pillars, bought it at the sale, and put the pillars back on afterwards.” His capacity for subterfuge is hinted at in a letter written in 1960 to his former master at Old Hall, Edward Peregrine. The subject was a Fra Angelico panel, one of two owned by Peregrine. Bruce had sold the first successfully through Sotheby’s, but he conducted the sale of the second panel privately, finding the dealer and charging commission. He wrote, “Sotheby’s name must on no account be used in connection with St Anthony Abbot and it must appear that the decision to sell only one stems entirely from you.” He made a further request. “Please would you not do anything without my being in the picture as it would not make things easy for me here. Enclosed is a photograph for you to have, but it is essential not to show it to
anyone
yet.”
The letter is rare because, amazingly, no archives for Sotheby’s exist prior to 1972. This is surprising in an institution whose activities play so central a role in late twentieth-century cultural history. It makes the task of establishing what went on difficult. A number of people have tried, among them Frank Herrmann in the official history of the firm. Four other attempts to write the story of Sotheby’s were abandoned, one, by a friend of Wilson, the American art journalist Leo Lerman, in unsatisfactory circumstances. In 1964, Lerman arrived in London at Wilson’s request and had use of a temporary office. “Once he began to stir the surface,” says his partner, Grey Foy, “there were so many dicey aspects. He didn’t want to know where the horse was buried. He withdrew.” Lerman told Elizabeth that what he had learned was too litigious. “He could not write the true story because Wilson would not accept it.” That may be why, when Lerman heard of Bruce’s resignation, he wrote a letter of congratulation. “You must tell Bruce that I admire him enormously – his brave departure from the firm & his marvellous determination. Do, please, tell me in minute detail all about Bruce’s departure, the Beast’s reaction – everything . . . Tell me, tell me.”

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