Bruce Chatwin (49 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
The telephone call had nothing to do with his writing, rather with his photographs of Mauritanian roofs, doors and robes which Bruce had shown Sylvester. “Would I, he asked, like a small job as an adviser on the arts?”
Bruce met Wyndham to explore ideas with the magazine’s new editor, Magnus Linklater. The 30-year-old Linklater thought Bruce’s Mauritanian pictures “arty-farty”.
Linklater had been appointed editor weeks before with a brief to curb the excesses of the colour supplement and to bring it within the orbit of the main paper. Under instructions from the editor, Harry Evans, “to go in and sort that lot out”, he was alarmed to discover £70,000 of commissioned pieces and an art department running the roost. “The epitome of that was an eclipse of the moon which could only be photographed from a certain peak in Kenya. The photographer returned with an image completely black except for a sliver in the top right hand corner. David King ran it for two pages. The ad manager came up and said: ‘I could have sold those pages for £5,000 and you ran two blank pages.’ I suddenly thought: ‘What the hell is this all about?”’
Linklater was wary, but he listened to Bruce whose journalism amounted to two articles for
Vogue,
another in the pipeline for
History Today
and a film on a market in Niger not yet transmitted. “Bruce talked brilliantly,” says Wyndham, “but not journalistically and not like someone being interviewed for a job.” He had no shortage of ideas: Madame Vionnet, the inventor of the bias cut; Eileen Gray, the designer of the chromium chair; Theodor Strehlow, an Australian anthropologist who had grown up with the Aborigines; a Greek who had amassed a priceless collection of Leftist art in Russia. “I rather feebly said, ‘OK’,” says Linklater. He hired him on a retainer of £2,000 a year.
Vogue,
another in the pipeline for
History Today
and a film on a market in Niger not yet transmitted. “Bruce talked brilliantly,” says Wyndham, “but not journalistically and not like someone being interviewed for a job.” He had no shortage of ideas: Madame Vionnet, the inventor of the bias cut; Eileen Gray, the designer of the chromium chair; Theodor Strehlow, an Australian anthropologist who had grown up with the Aborigines; a Greek who had amassed a priceless collection of Leftist art in Russia. “I rather feebly said, ‘OK’,” says Linklater. He hired him on a retainer of £2,000 a year.
Whatever Bruce’s qualms as he entered the hessian and black leather vestibule in Gray’s Inn Road and rose to the fourth floor, they soon vanished. Days later Elizabeth was writing to Gertrude: “The
Sunday Times
things look as though they’re going to be just for him.”
Sunday Times
things look as though they’re going to be just for him.”
Bruce’s three years on the paper were the final stage of his apprenticeship as a writer. Sotheby’s had introduced him to a network of contacts and taught him to see and to remember. Edinburgh had provided a measure of academic base. After three years of tussling with his nomad book, the magazine gave him a deadline and an audience. “Journalism does help you a lot in the opening stages, as long as you set your own journalist standards and don’t kow-tow to the fashion of editors,” Bruce said. “Examine the great journalists of the past, like Stephen Crane. If you’re thinking about a wide readership you have to have clarity at all costs. It’s a very, very good training.”
Bruce joined the magazine when it was still at its height. Dubbed “Thomson’s Folly” on its launch, the colour supplement had become, in the words of Philip Norman, “Fleet Street’s most profitable as well as its most fashionable publication”, with a readership of one and a half million. For a while there was nothing like it.
Fiercely independent from the main paper, the small editorial team considered no subject too ambitious or too trivial. They did what they wanted and held themselves accountable to no one. “What I liked about journalism is that you studied for an exam you never took,” says Roger Law, who worked in the art department. “We were quite cliquey and utterly irresponsible.” Norman, a young reporter, recalled that anything was allowed, except the word “shit” and pubic hair in photographs. “The feeling as one sat in that fourth floor office,” wrote Norman, “was of appraising and evaluating all Mankind.” In his 1995 novel,
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
, Norman parodies a typical edition. The cover features a flat-chested model with legs like “articulated pipe-cleaners”, while inside pictures of starving famine victims mix with advertisements for double cream interspersed by long articles printed in “lovely chaste type” in book-length paragraphs: “Anthony Burgess on Mickey Mouse . . . V. S. Naipaul on the hard-up princes of Rajasthan . . . Cartier-Bresson in Bali . . .” There are theme issues on such topics as “What did Christ really look like?” or “the Steins” (based on a theory held by David Sylvester that every important person in civilisation has or had a name ending in Stein). In Norman’s novel, the magazine’s editor describes the Stein idea as “us at our adventurous eclectic best”. He sums up the magazine’s philosophy: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to absolute bloody excess.”
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
, Norman parodies a typical edition. The cover features a flat-chested model with legs like “articulated pipe-cleaners”, while inside pictures of starving famine victims mix with advertisements for double cream interspersed by long articles printed in “lovely chaste type” in book-length paragraphs: “Anthony Burgess on Mickey Mouse . . . V. S. Naipaul on the hard-up princes of Rajasthan . . . Cartier-Bresson in Bali . . .” There are theme issues on such topics as “What did Christ really look like?” or “the Steins” (based on a theory held by David Sylvester that every important person in civilisation has or had a name ending in Stein). In Norman’s novel, the magazine’s editor describes the Stein idea as “us at our adventurous eclectic best”. He sums up the magazine’s philosophy: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to absolute bloody excess.”
The magazine was best regarded for its photojournalism. Bruce was much impressed by a profile of General Giap, photographed by Don McCullin and written by James Fox. He took the author to lunch and swore him to secrecy: “I don’t want anyone to know this. The reason I went into journalism is that I wanted to compete with you.”
Fox and McCullin comprised one of half a dozen photographer-writer teams who globe-trotted for weeks at a time. Fox once spent three months in Zaire at the
Sunday Times’
expense. Instead of returning at the appointed date, he sent word that he wanted to go to the Ituri forests, there spending six more weeks.
Sunday Times’
expense. Instead of returning at the appointed date, he sent word that he wanted to go to the Ituri forests, there spending six more weeks.
Bruce had sympathy for this attitude. One of his first suggestions was a round-the-world trip. In the next three years he would file from Paris, New York, Moscow, Marseille, Algeria, Peru.
There was a saying at the
Sunday Times
: “Whoever runs the flat-plan runs the magazine.” Wyndham’s imprimatur was important, but so was the approbation of Michael Rand, the silent art director, who together with King and his assistant Roger Law laid out the pages. This trio were a law unto themselves and naturally suspicious of writers. “It was like belonging to a Masonic lodge,” says King, at the time a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Law remembers the moment when Bruce won over all three. “I was introduced to what looked like an upper class toff with strange blue eyes. He had this travel essay by Mandelstam,
Journey to Armenia,
and he read it aloud to the art department. That was it: we were in love with Bruce. I ended up reading poems by Mandelstam.”
Sunday Times
: “Whoever runs the flat-plan runs the magazine.” Wyndham’s imprimatur was important, but so was the approbation of Michael Rand, the silent art director, who together with King and his assistant Roger Law laid out the pages. This trio were a law unto themselves and naturally suspicious of writers. “It was like belonging to a Masonic lodge,” says King, at the time a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Law remembers the moment when Bruce won over all three. “I was introduced to what looked like an upper class toff with strange blue eyes. He had this travel essay by Mandelstam,
Journey to Armenia,
and he read it aloud to the art department. That was it: we were in love with Bruce. I ended up reading poems by Mandelstam.”
Bruce’s Russian taste coincided with David King’s, the arts editor. King was a talented designer and collector of Russian photomontage posters “which pack onto a sheet of paper all the enthusiasm of the Red Revolution”. Trained by the Central-European George Lois, King designed covers that combined a Russian constructivism with American nous: a tiny button mushroom to illustrate the post-war era, with the headline, “Every day from now on is a kind of bonus.”
King had an eye to crop a photograph so as to transform it. “The reason we all stuck to David,” says Law, “is because he’d take your picture, crop it and it would look good on the page. Bruce was interested in the visual side more than other writers. They hit it off like a house on fire.”
King was responsible for laying out Bruce’s posthumous book of photographs in 1993. “Bruce was one of the most visually aware people I’ve met. With a professional photographer, you decide what you want to photograph and normally you shoot around it, using 100-odd photographs of one image. Bruce never did that: he shot one picture, then another. You never got a sequence, or a choice.” Bruce’s images, shot with a Leica, a separate light-meter and only one lens, were, to King, “unbearably inquisitive” of their subject. “He loved wood and corrugated tin – art without artists. And he wasn’t afraid to shoot pictures in the sun.”
When he arrived in November, Bruce did not expect to have to write anything. He envisaged a sedentary job in the mould of Sylvester, his magisterial predecessor, who advised on whether, say, the new Alma Tadema exhibition was worth covering. In this role, his first responsibility was to organise “One Million Years of Art”, a six-part pictorial series encompassing nothing less than the history of art and the latest of several projects which its creators self-mockingly code-named “the wankers”. Conceived in the bath by the magazine’s former editor, Godfrey Smith, the debut “wanker” – “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century” – had attracted 60,000 new readers. Pressure was put on Linklater to suggest like-minded schemes for boosting circulation.
Bruce’s project, hurriedly assembled in the spring of 1973, was inspired by the 1937 book of a little-known Ohio professor and discovered by Michael Rand on his shelves at home:
An Illustrated Handbook of Art History
by Frank J. Roos Junior. Rand floated the idea of expanding this into a visual dictionary. Linklater agreed. “I desperately needed another promotable series. I envisaged a prosaic guide, leading the readers through artistic masterpieces from the Renaissance onwards.” This is not what he got.
An Illustrated Handbook of Art History
by Frank J. Roos Junior. Rand floated the idea of expanding this into a visual dictionary. Linklater agreed. “I desperately needed another promotable series. I envisaged a prosaic guide, leading the readers through artistic masterpieces from the Renaissance onwards.” This is not what he got.
Linklater was on holiday when Bruce buckled down in Holwell to compile the illustrations. He asked Lucie-Smith to assist him. “I was there to provide the bread and butter, and to remind him he had to have Giotto,” says Lucie-Smith. In the event, Bruce seized the project as an opportunity to make a manifesto. “One Million Years of Art” was a display case for his own taste, uniting the collector of curiosities, the Sotheby’s expert, the journalist.
The series ran for six weeks during the summer of 1973. It opened with a photograph of stone implements used by African nomads and incorporated many favourite Chatwin objects. Dotted among the “thousand examples of man’s art from primitive times to the 1970s” were stamp-sized photographs of a felt appliqué saddle-bag from the Altai, a Seghers landscape and a photograph, taken by Bruce, of an Afghan lorry. “Bruce injected his own distinction into the choice, heavily influenced by Ludwig Goldscheider’s
Art without Epoch
,” says Lucie-Smith. “The Afghan lorry is pure Goldscheider.” This lorry, carrying the Japanese contraceptives, was one of four images Bruce supplied to challenge our idea of what constituted art. (“We have frequently by-passed the obvious masterpieces in favour of curiosities – and even the obviously bad,” he warned readers.) Relying on provocative juxtapositions, he managed to squeeze into the series his own photographs of a tray laden with fish, and of a Mauritanian door (later the hardback cover for
What Am I Doing Here
). At Holwell, the gardener was surprised to recognise Exhibit 417: the Peruvian papagayo feathers. Bruce elucidated for
Sunday Times
readers how ancient Peruvians had discovered long before Rothko that “blocks of pure colour floating one above the other produced a mood of anxious calm”.
Art without Epoch
,” says Lucie-Smith. “The Afghan lorry is pure Goldscheider.” This lorry, carrying the Japanese contraceptives, was one of four images Bruce supplied to challenge our idea of what constituted art. (“We have frequently by-passed the obvious masterpieces in favour of curiosities – and even the obviously bad,” he warned readers.) Relying on provocative juxtapositions, he managed to squeeze into the series his own photographs of a tray laden with fish, and of a Mauritanian door (later the hardback cover for
What Am I Doing Here
). At Holwell, the gardener was surprised to recognise Exhibit 417: the Peruvian papagayo feathers. Bruce elucidated for
Sunday Times
readers how ancient Peruvians had discovered long before Rothko that “blocks of pure colour floating one above the other produced a mood of anxious calm”.
On 26 August, he explained in a short post-script the philosophy behind his selection: “Our aim has been to break down the compartments of period and place into which art history is too often divided and if this series has encouraged even a few people to widen their visual horizons then it will have achieved its aims.”
Linklater, hugely embarrassed, fielded the wrath of the marketing department. “It was completely
not
what I had in mind. A million years! I just wanted it from 1342. It was a typical example of the hijacking of the magazine by the nexus. It did not put on a single extra copy.”
not
what I had in mind. A million years! I just wanted it from 1342. It was a typical example of the hijacking of the magazine by the nexus. It did not put on a single extra copy.”
The Chatwin series confirmed Harry Evans’s judgement that the magazine was self-indulgent, mired in triviality, out of touch. “They’ve lost all regard for what the ordinary reader wants,” rants the editor in
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.
The editor was a Northerner, like Evans, who thought Alma Tadema was a woman and Leni Riefenstahl a man (“like Lenny Bruce”) and whose ideal series was a look at the seeding of readers’ window-boxes. Linklater had placed himself in a dangerous position. By promoting a series like “One Million Years of Art”, he was not carrying out his editor’s express wishes.
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.
The editor was a Northerner, like Evans, who thought Alma Tadema was a woman and Leni Riefenstahl a man (“like Lenny Bruce”) and whose ideal series was a look at the seeding of readers’ window-boxes. Linklater had placed himself in a dangerous position. By promoting a series like “One Million Years of Art”, he was not carrying out his editor’s express wishes.
Bruce was ideal for the role of arts consultant, but thanks to Wyndham this was not the role he fulfilled. With Wyndham’s encouragement, he went to Paris to investigate a pair of
grandes dames
, relics of the 1920s fashion world. Madeleine Vionnet had freed women, including Bruce’s Aunts Jane and Gracey, from the tyranny of the corset (
“le corset, c’est une chose orthopédique
”). She had designed her dresses to be worn as “a second, more seductive skin”. Bruce met Vionnet – “96-years-old but alert and mischievous” – in her salon in the Place Antoine-Arnauld, unchanged since she decorated it in 1929. He responded to the aluminium grilles and mirror glass. “The interior is as clean-cut and unsentimental as Mme Vionnet herself . . . Like a Vionnet dress, this is spareness achieved expensively.”
grandes dames
, relics of the 1920s fashion world. Madeleine Vionnet had freed women, including Bruce’s Aunts Jane and Gracey, from the tyranny of the corset (
“le corset, c’est une chose orthopédique
”). She had designed her dresses to be worn as “a second, more seductive skin”. Bruce met Vionnet – “96-years-old but alert and mischievous” – in her salon in the Place Antoine-Arnauld, unchanged since she decorated it in 1929. He responded to the aluminium grilles and mirror glass. “The interior is as clean-cut and unsentimental as Mme Vionnet herself . . . Like a Vionnet dress, this is spareness achieved expensively.”
Sonia Delaunay came to Paris from Russia in 1905 and lived “in a bedroom which is something between a room in an expensive clinic and a monk’s cell”. Accepted as a leading abstract painter before the Great War, she was preferred by Bruce for her clothes and literary acquaintances. She had designed patchwork dresses with bright geometric shapes to be worn in Bugattis and was a friend of the globe-trotting poet Blaise Cendrars. “The greatest poet of our age,” she flatly told Bruce, who quoted Cendrars for his epigraph in
In Patagonia
.
In Patagonia
.
Bruce enthused to Wyndham about these two elderly pioneers on his return to Gray’s Inn Road. “There was never any mention that I was going to have to write anything. I said, ‘Now we must find a writer,’ and he looked at me and said: ‘But you’re writing this’.” Bruce’s eyes lit up, says Wyndham. “He wasn’t confident – he didn’t see himself as a journalist. But he reacted with great excitement.”
* * *
Bruce was fortunate to have Wyndham and not someone younger and competitive as his immediate boss. Wyndham had first heard of Bruce as the boy with the golden eye from Sotheby’s. Millington-Drake, referring to him as “Chatwina”, had warned Wyndham how “some people think he’s too big for his boots”. Christopher Gibbs made him appear even less enticing. When Bruce looked at a painting, said Gibbs, it was quite different from the way anyone else looked at a painting. “I said: ‘What happens when Bruce looks at a painting?’ Gibbs said, ‘It sort of falls off the wall.’ If anything I
didn’t
want to meet him.”
didn’t
want to meet him.”
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