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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

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

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BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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“It was all private deals,” says Elizabeth. “And it went on for years.”
For as long as Bruce supposed the Pitt-Rivers collection was promised to Sotheby’s, he might have found a means to square his conscience. “Bruce wasn’t particularly devious himself about commercial activity,” says David Nash, “but he did admire it in other people. He probably felt this was some cunning ruse.”
Or if only minor pieces were being sold privately. But this was not the case. The best pieces were leaving the country, going to people he knew anyway. “Bruce was very angry at John Hewett because he had the plums,” says Martin.
George Ortiz, who bought two Benin bronzes from the collection, was aware of Bruce’s distress. “He did talk to me. He thought they’d misbehaved horribly.” Bruce’s anger struck Ortiz as an emotional thing, as if he was implicated but not getting anything out of it himself. Ortiz, after considering the evidence, gives this explanation: “Either Bruce
was
involved and didn’t feel he had got a fair share; or he felt he shouldn’t have been involved and regretted it – ‘I will leap out of the picture.’ Or he felt he had been abused.”
The first possibility was discounted by Hewett himself. If Bruce could have profited from the Pitt-Rivers museum, said Hewett, he would have done so. But he did not. The one item Stella gave Bruce, a Roman bronze doorknocker, turned out to be a fake.
Lucie-Smith opts for the second explanation. Flanked by Wilson, Hewett and the Hunts, Bruce cut the figure of a child trailing after adults. “Bruce fantasised about being a dealer, but he was out of his depth and increasingly panicky. It probably dawned on him very gradually what was happening, and it probably disillusioned him more to find Hewett up to his neck than to discover the same thing about Wilson. Moral revulsion might have played a part, but he also suspected that he might finish up as the fall guy. And, of course, he was riveted by the whole thing as ‘story’: the errant Stella and her conman; the notion of being on the inside; knowing what other people didn’t; hinting and not telling.”
A creeping self-disgust is also likely. The Pitt-Rivers collection was, in its way, a larger version of his grandmother’s cabinet. Had Bruce, because of his “eye”, been brought in sneakily to disperse what he responded to most?
This might explain why, in one of the last fragments he wrote, Bruce launched into Wilson. In 1988, while assembling stories and pieces of journalism for
What Am I Doing Here
, he composed “The Duke of M” knowing that his death was imminent. The portrait is a rare sample of Bruce being ungenerous in print and it reads as if all his sorrows could be laid at Wilson’s door. In the piece, the chairman of Sotheby’s is asked by a disgusted Spanish grandee to leave the house in the middle of lunch after Wilson starts to tell his host how much his Guardis would fetch at auction. “A most disagreeable experience,” the grandee tells Bruce – “after
our
agreeable experience.”
George Pitt-Rivers died on 16 June 1966. In the same month, a dinner was held in Paddington. It was a beautiful, warm evening. Ward Landrigan, head of jewellery at Parke-Bernet, had found a place to sit in the garden when Wilson joined him. All of a sudden Bruce hove into view. His face was flushed. He looked upset. Bruce accosted Wilson and angry words were exchanged. “I don’t want to be part of this,” Bruce said. “I don’t care about
it
or
you
.” It wasn’t just a business discussion, says Landrigan, who listened appalled. Wilson, spluttering and embarrassed, backed off. Bruce left the party.
This was the backdrop against which Bruce resigned. But by then the die was already cast. To the surprise, even irritation, of the Sotheby’s board, he announced his intention, at the age of 26, to study archaeology at Edinburgh.
XVI
 
The Archaeologist
I met him in a television studio in England. We looked at the chitchatting intellectuals around us and he whispered in my ear: “Did you ever get a degree at university? No? Thank God, neither did I.”
—Breyten Breytenbach
“
PLEASE DON’T HAVE A FIT,
”
BRUCE WROTE TO GERTRUDE ON
24 June 1966, informing her of his departure from the firm. “We’ll survive, and before you know it Lib will be turned into a SCHOLAR! I’ll write soon: I’m sorry it’s all so precipitate, but it’s no use chewing it over and over once one’s decided to take the plunge.”
His mother-in-law needed delicate handling. She had bought their house in Gloucestershire. Furthermore, she had lent Bruce the money to buy his director’s share. “I am afraid that the art world, at least the world of art dealing, is coming to a grinding halt,” he wrote a fortnight later. “It is no longer the reasonably civilised occupation it was five years ago.”
Bruce had been contemplating the idea of university for at least four years. Like many autodidacts he did not think he knew enough: “the worst of all tragedies is the plight of the semi-educated,” is a phrase which recurs in his notebooks. He regretted not having taken up his place at Oxford and envied the academic foundations to the careers of Cary Welch and Robert Erskine. The idea had presented itself again during his visit to Leningrad in December 1965.
At the Hermitage, Bruce stood fascinated before the embalmed body of a Pazyryk chief buried in a soaring headdress. His skin was covered in ancestral tattoos of “fantastic beasts”. There were horned and winged monsters and on his right shin a creature like a catfish. The finest tattoos had patterned his chest, the curator told Bruce, but his stomach had decomposed not long after the archaeologist Rudenko brought back the body to Leningrad in 1933: the state morgue had refused to store the body without a birth certificate.
He was a nomad recovered from a tomb of ice on the Mongolian border. “He was deep-frozen in perfect condition in that first winter more than 2,000 years ago. His body lay in a carved coffin, stuffed with hemp . . . his concubine was laid beside him.”
The image of this Altai herdsman, his protective tattoos and his tent of thick white felt “with springy cut-out appliqués like a Matisse collage” branded itself on Bruce’s imagination. On his return to London, he borrowed Rudenko’s report from Robert Erskine, once an archaeologist at Cambridge. Without telling Erskine, he began to look into archaeology degrees. He let Cary Welch in on his plan, who was discouraging. “I know, from experience, that you are too alive for the academic world. People like us in fact make the best scholars because we have ideas and earthiness. But the universities are dominated entirely by the cerebral types . . . In short, DON’T sign yourself up for dreary years of academia. Leave that stuff to the eunuchs.” But he did agree to write on Bruce’s behalf to Stuart Piggott, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh. Bruce’s meeting with Piggott at the end of May decided him, as he wrote to Gertrude. “He has hardly any students to start with and will be able to take the whole thing tutorially, and he is also one of the finest archaeologists in the world.” Since the subject was so vast and complex there was no time to be lost. “I took a very rapid decision, and it is arranged that I start in October.”
On 14 July, Welch wrote in a different vein to Bruce: “Edith promises to send a loverly letter to her cousin Gertrude all about how sound archaeology is, what a fine man St P is, what a grand party Preuss is, and zo on.”
Bruce needed gurus. Piggott, one of the world’s experts in neolithic and Bronze Age studies, would now replace Wilson as his mentor.
Bruce had known of Piggott already at Marlborough, of course, when he excavated West Kennet Long Barrow. His idiosyncratic career appealed to Bruce, who had not impressed anyone the last time he had written an essay. A published poet, the 56-year-old Piggott described his academic background as “very unedifying”, twice having failed his school certificate in mathematics. He went up to Oxford when he was 36 and became a professor without ever having taken a degree. In 1946, his breakfast was interrupted by a telegram from his wife: “You have been offered the Abercromby Chair in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, God help us.”
Piggott’s mind was open and enquiring. He was as interested in the history of ideas as in British neolithic pottery. He wrote his thesis on the seventeenth-century antiquary William Stukeley and was as happy in Bronze Age Wessex, or among the Scythians, as in the pre-history of India, where he had spent three wartime years in aerial intelligence. His excavation reports were clean and precise. He refused to reduce archaeology to graphs. The job of the archaeologist was to tell a story. “What we like to call our thinking may be as much conditioned by the fears and prejudices of the early mammoth-hunters as by the speculative thought of the Greeks.” Eventually, he would tire of archaeology, because it could not follow his flights of fancy. At the time of his meeting with Bruce, he had just published
Ancient Europe
(which included an illustration of his friend Cary Welch’s Siberian plaque), a survey of the archaeological evidence “from the beginnings of agriculture to classical Antiquity”.
Blue-eyed, with a long nose and slightly overweight, Piggott was popular with his students. But he was a difficult person to know and his humour concealed a depressive nature. This melancholy streak, exacerbated by arthritis, came out in his poetry and, most graphically, in a photograph of himself lying at the bottom of a prehistoric burial site he had excavated, curled up in imitation of a dead body and clutching a gin bottle.
He contributed a column to the
Scotsman
under the byline “Gastronome” and treated visitors to his top-floor flat in the New Town to the same dishes as he served his readers. (A Piggott staple was Kaspin, consisting of jelly consommé, curried mayonnaise and Danish lumpfish.) His friends included Penelope Betjeman, John Piper and Agatha Christie whom he described as “great fun and very shy”. The same might have been said of Piggott. His wife Peggy had left him during the 1950s, ending up with T. E. Lawrence’s brother. Something lay unresolved from their marriage. Emotionally restrained, he was flirtatious with ideas and relished strong intellectual relationships.
On 15 July, he met Bruce for lunch at 46 King Street. Piggott recorded the meal in his diary:
“œufs mollets en gelée,
cold salmon trout with mayonnaise, tomato and cucumber salad, strawberries
arrosées
in brandy & with cream; cheese; bottle of chilled Sancerre. Bruce C. very good value and should be a pleasure to teach.”
“Sotheby’s is having fits, of course,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. She had left Wilson’s employ soon after her engagement was announced, but Bruce’s parting was not so amicable. Lerman was eager for details. “Is it verity that Richard Came called your Bruce a
cad?”
Bruce had also received from Graham Llewellyn a patronising letter insisting Sotheby’s keep his pension. “With each day that passes, the fatter their arses,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth.
Wilson kept Bruce to the bitter end, not releasing him until 5 p.m. on the day before Edinburgh required him to register. He had to take the sleeper to Edinburgh. He travelled in high spirits to the land of his Bruce ancestors. Soon after his arrival, he sent a postcard to his Marlborough study-companion, Michael Cannon: “Change is the only thing worth living for. Never sit your life out at a desk. Ulcers and heart condition follow.”
Bruce had an Indiana Jones notion of archaeology. “I saw myself as an archaeological explorer.” He was fired by the examples of André Malraux; of Alexandre Dumas, whom Garibaldi had appointed director of excavations; of Prosper Mérimée who had worked as an enthusiastic Inspector of Monuments. But his attention wandered when confronted by the detailed work. “Bruce had no patience at all, he wanted to find everything immediately,” says Erskine, who had studied under Piggott. “He went into archaeology thinking he’d be the next Howard Carter, walking into a room of Egyptian antiquities – and not spending his time with his bottom in the air, in the mud, groping around some sodden Mesolithic site. When he had to face academic discipline and piles of old pots, which actually tell you about a culture, he found it incredibly boring.” Bruce once told Erskine: “I’ve always been interested in the marvellous.”
Bruce usually sat in the front row of the lecture room at 19 George Square. The notes from his first week hint that all is not well. Megalithic burial sites in the vicinity of Edinburgh, he finds “
Totally bewildering!
Piles of stones everywhere.” He recorded the lecturer’s definition of archaeology: a series of methods to gather information about the past which depended on the analysis of results obtained by those methods. And next to it, underlining the word three times, Bruce wrote:
“Terrifying.”
Sitting behind him would be 40 undergraduates, seven or eight years younger. Rosanna Ross came directly from a convent school in Edinburgh. “We were sitting in our anoraks and there was this beautiful man in the front row who turned round and amiably scrutinised us.” Rosanna had never travelled further than Dorset: Bruce had twice been to Afghanistan. He had worked or moved in circles his fellow students could not fathom. He dressed in bright red corduroys and delivered his essays typewritten.
There was a feeling among the students that Bruce was engaged in exclusive activity with the professor and this provoked jealousy. He was very much the apple of Piggott’s eye. Some of the students assumed he was a faculty member because he came in through the door reserved for lecturers.
BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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