Bruce Chatwin (50 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce’s life had followed a cycle in which he set out in one direction after another to discover his talent, only to go to pieces. Under Wyndham’s guidance, he found his
métier.
“Words – I didn’t feel about them till the
Sunday Times
,” he told Colin Thubron. “I think it was something bashed out of me in my education.” Wyndham became the most enduring of Bruce’s mentors. On 20 October 1977, almost five years after joining the magazine, Bruce wrote to him from Italy: “I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you.”
métier.
“Words – I didn’t feel about them till the
Sunday Times
,” he told Colin Thubron. “I think it was something bashed out of me in my education.” Wyndham became the most enduring of Bruce’s mentors. On 20 October 1977, almost five years after joining the magazine, Bruce wrote to him from Italy: “I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you.”
In
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,
Wyndham is caricatured as the brilliant journalist Evelyn Strachey: “a man of about 40 with a large balding head and the close-set eyes and drooping mouth of some inbred minor prince . . . He wore unfashionable charcoal trousers, pulled high around his bulky waist, and a white, short-sleeved shirt of some archaic porous Aertex-like material. His right hand was turned palm downwards, holding a lit cigarette. His left rested on his hip.” Strachey on form was “the best there is”.
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,
Wyndham is caricatured as the brilliant journalist Evelyn Strachey: “a man of about 40 with a large balding head and the close-set eyes and drooping mouth of some inbred minor prince . . . He wore unfashionable charcoal trousers, pulled high around his bulky waist, and a white, short-sleeved shirt of some archaic porous Aertex-like material. His right hand was turned palm downwards, holding a lit cigarette. His left rested on his hip.” Strachey on form was “the best there is”.
In his profiles of the singer P. J. Proby or of the broadcaster and presenter of
This is Your Life
, Eamon Andrews, Wyndham elevated trivia to high art. The effect of his deadpan prose was lethal. Lax about his own writing talent, he was not lazy at editing. He liked to match serious writers with apparently frivolous subjects and to cause tension by playing disparate pieces one against another – Don McCullin’s war photographs, for example, with Bruce’s article on Paris couture. Trained on
Queen
magazine, he sought in every edition “a good mix”. This, the antithesis of a theme issue like “One Million Years of Art”, ideally consisted of “something serious, something shocking, something hysterically funny, something beautiful”. Bruce’s books are extensions of this formula, juxtaposing
Insight
-style investigation with profiles, art, fashion – all written under the influence of what Norman describes as Wyndham’s “barbed observation and limpidly cool technique”.
This is Your Life
, Eamon Andrews, Wyndham elevated trivia to high art. The effect of his deadpan prose was lethal. Lax about his own writing talent, he was not lazy at editing. He liked to match serious writers with apparently frivolous subjects and to cause tension by playing disparate pieces one against another – Don McCullin’s war photographs, for example, with Bruce’s article on Paris couture. Trained on
Queen
magazine, he sought in every edition “a good mix”. This, the antithesis of a theme issue like “One Million Years of Art”, ideally consisted of “something serious, something shocking, something hysterically funny, something beautiful”. Bruce’s books are extensions of this formula, juxtaposing
Insight
-style investigation with profiles, art, fashion – all written under the influence of what Norman describes as Wyndham’s “barbed observation and limpidly cool technique”.
* * *
On 14 November, a fortnight after Bruce started work, Elizabeth reported to her mother: “He seems quite happy at the moment, but one never knows how long that will last.” He had spent the previous three years engaged with abstract theories. It unblocked him to step on a plane to Paris with a photographer and then to spend only two hours with someone during which time everything took on significance. Required to deliver 2,000 words by a fixed date, he told Simon Sainsbury: “It suddenly gave me the discipline.” Since 1969, he had been locked in to what he thought writing should be, engaging himself with the origins of mankind. The exercise of profiling two elderly French ladies he found comparatively easy. “It was no more difficult than writing papers in Edinburgh,” says Elizabeth. Oliver Hoare, complimenting him on one of his articles, was impressed at the modesty of his reaction. “His basic attitude was: if he could do it, anyone could.” He told Hoare: “It’s simple to write. You just get down to it.”
Wyndham pronounced Bruce’s pieces on Vionnet and Delaunay exemplary. “If I did advise, it was
against
a certain preciousness and
for
crispness. Also, it’s so important to get
how
the person speaks, rather than what he says, the way they talk.” But Bruce required the minimum of editing. “It happens to so many people. They misunderstand their own talent: they slave away at something that is a mistake and suddenly they find through chance that they
have
a talent and it really is easy. That’s why his pieces were so fresh. They were very accomplished, didn’t need changing and they weren’t imitative of other journalists. I didn’t ever have to teach him how to write. What I felt I did do, which was not difficult, was to encourage him.”
against
a certain preciousness and
for
crispness. Also, it’s so important to get
how
the person speaks, rather than what he says, the way they talk.” But Bruce required the minimum of editing. “It happens to so many people. They misunderstand their own talent: they slave away at something that is a mistake and suddenly they find through chance that they
have
a talent and it really is easy. That’s why his pieces were so fresh. They were very accomplished, didn’t need changing and they weren’t imitative of other journalists. I didn’t ever have to teach him how to write. What I felt I did do, which was not difficult, was to encourage him.”
Given the green light to suggest stories, Bruce did not stop. “Little did he know what we were used to,” says Wyndham. “No one had an idea. He came in and had
rows
of ideas.” Rarely was he more ebullient than when coming back to tell Wyndham about a story he had researched. “I thought he was marvellous, a great big treat.”
rows
of ideas.” Rarely was he more ebullient than when coming back to tell Wyndham about a story he had researched. “I thought he was marvellous, a great big treat.”
The fashion editor Meriel McCooey shared an office with Wyndham. Bruce would walk straight across to Wyndham’s desk emitting high-pitched shrieks. “It was always an entrance. You could have put a proscenium arch in front of him.” He dressed in a blue shirt to match his eyes, dark navy blue jackets and a Little Lord Fauntleroy coat. “He had a thing about little boy clothes.” But when he laughed out of control, she wondered, sometimes, if there was not a touch of insanity. “At times he looked like the cover of
Mad
.”
Mad
.”
The photographer Eve Arnold accompanied Bruce on two assignments. “There are people who are camera-loved and people whom the camera couldn’t care about. He was one of the camera-loved. He was always on and he loved the attention. If you took the features apart, there was not one great feature: he was too boyish-looking for real elegance or style. His attraction lay in the mobility of his face, the absolute rubber quality as it moved back and forth.”
Roger Law left the magazine to create the puppets for the satirical television series
Spitting Image.
This is how he would have satirised Bruce in the autumn of 1972: “You’d have starey blue eyes and floppy fair hair and the manic animation of a storyteller and it would fit into the category of our ‘Talk Bollocks’ slot – like Jonathan Miller as a cabbie breaking off to lecture you on The State of Man. It was a very intense, frenetic performance. You had to keep out of spittle’s way. You never retaliated because you knew how vulnerable he was. When he wanted to tell you about Butch Cassidy and what you really wanted was a beer and it’s nine degrees below and you’re on the corner of a Manhattan street, you still listened. He always came up with something – an image, a story, which you wouldn’t forget for a while. Making images that stop people so they remember is what we’re all about.”
Spitting Image.
This is how he would have satirised Bruce in the autumn of 1972: “You’d have starey blue eyes and floppy fair hair and the manic animation of a storyteller and it would fit into the category of our ‘Talk Bollocks’ slot – like Jonathan Miller as a cabbie breaking off to lecture you on The State of Man. It was a very intense, frenetic performance. You had to keep out of spittle’s way. You never retaliated because you knew how vulnerable he was. When he wanted to tell you about Butch Cassidy and what you really wanted was a beer and it’s nine degrees below and you’re on the corner of a Manhattan street, you still listened. He always came up with something – an image, a story, which you wouldn’t forget for a while. Making images that stop people so they remember is what we’re all about.”
After his initial guardedness, Linklater warmed to Bruce. “Editors have few pleasures. One of them is hearing the stories journalists bring back. Viscerally, Bruce was a real journalist. He didn’t play fast and loose with the facts and he had an instinct for what made a story: something that no one has written about which is new and intriguing but not completely out of touch. All Bruce’s stories had a recognition factor: Butch Cassidy, The Wolf Boy, like Mowgli; the Woman in the Desert, in the line of Thor Heyerdahl. But you got the impression that what mattered to him, more than writing itself, was sitting down and telling you about the story he was doing or about to do or had done. The bushfire of his imagination leapt over unproductive ground and inconvenient bits of territory to the next bit. That was the reason he was such good company – he was so stimulated by his own stories.”
As highly as Linklater rated Bruce the feature – writer, he never altogether relaxed in his company. “There was a slight one-upmanship in the way he talked, a sort of snobbery in the names he dropped. You always felt with Bruce he’d produce things which revealed he had a greater depth of awareness than you in the things you knew about.”
Bruce became one of the magazine’s star reporters. “We soon forgot about the arts and under Francis’s guidance I took on every kind of article.” He wrote a dozen features over the next three years and in his last months gathered together most of these, with some tampering, in
What Am I Doing Here.
With two exceptions, they were articles he suggested himself – discussed and commissioned at lunches with Wyndham and the art department in the Progessive Working Men’s Club, a café in Farringdon Road.
What Am I Doing Here.
With two exceptions, they were articles he suggested himself – discussed and commissioned at lunches with Wyndham and the art department in the Progessive Working Men’s Club, a café in Farringdon Road.
Bruce mostly pitched ideas to take him abroad. “The
Sunday Times
still hasn’t decided whether his round-the-world scheme is too expensive or not,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude at the end of December 1972. But in January he was sent to Russia.
Sunday Times
still hasn’t decided whether his round-the-world scheme is too expensive or not,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude at the end of December 1972. But in January he was sent to Russia.
David King’s preoccupation with Soviet political art resulted in Bruce flying to Moscow to meet a collector of banned Leftist art who worked as a minor functionary at the Canadian Embassy. Bruce’s Sotheby’s friend Tilo von Watzdorf, who had spent a week in Russia seeking Constractivist works to auction, was responsible for the idea. Watzdorf had met the 61-year-old George Costakis, known as “the mad Greek who buys hideous pictures”. For 26 years Costakis had stubbornly tracked down abstract canvases by artists like Tatlin and Malevich, officially ignored since 1932. Watzdorf described the extraordinary collection to his friend – “who went off like a shot”.
Bruce was attracted to characters like Costakis, who reflected facets of himself and to whom, through his contacts, he had access. Nor were they necessarily talented, eccentric or famous. One of his best articles was motivated by sympathy for a young outsider who had suffered a nervous breakdown. In August 1973, Bruce read of an immigrant Algerian, a 36-year-old sewage worker called Salah Bougrine who had without warning gone berserk in Marseille and fatally stabbed a bus-driver. With Don McCullin, Bruce travelled to France to understand the pressures that had driven Bougrine to leave behind wife and family and, finally, go mad. He visited a squalid
bidonville
and crossed into Algeria to meet Bougrine’s father, a shepherd in a yellow headcloth on a chalk-white hillside. Bruce’s sympathy for Bougrine, the demented exile, and his undisguised contempt for the fleshy-nosed protagonists of French racism received a warm welcome from Algeria’s ambassador in London. “I was deeply moved by the compassion and great understanding with which you have written on this subject,” wrote Lakhdar Brahimi, after the article was published in January 1974. Inviting him to dinner, he told Bruce how much his conclusions had dismayed the French Embassy. “I fear I intended that,” Bruce wrote in his notebook. “But then I did come back from Marseille angry.”
bidonville
and crossed into Algeria to meet Bougrine’s father, a shepherd in a yellow headcloth on a chalk-white hillside. Bruce’s sympathy for Bougrine, the demented exile, and his undisguised contempt for the fleshy-nosed protagonists of French racism received a warm welcome from Algeria’s ambassador in London. “I was deeply moved by the compassion and great understanding with which you have written on this subject,” wrote Lakhdar Brahimi, after the article was published in January 1974. Inviting him to dinner, he told Bruce how much his conclusions had dismayed the French Embassy. “I fear I intended that,” Bruce wrote in his notebook. “But then I did come back from Marseille angry.”
Each time he came back with a story, Wyndham “encouraged, criticised, edited”. One cannot underestimate his influence. With Levi, Bruce had discussed Russian and English poets. With Wyndham, he discussed fiction. “I had assumed Bruce to be as knowledgeable about writing as he was about art. He wasn’t. One of the things that excited me about our friendship was that he hadn’t read any of the classics, or very little. So it was exciting when he did suddenly read
Madame Bovary
or Hemingway’s short stories, which seemed to him as revolutionary as when they came out in the 1920s.”
Madame Bovary
or Hemingway’s short stories, which seemed to him as revolutionary as when they came out in the 1920s.”
In Our Time
struck Bruce as a total innovation of form. Typically, he compared Hemingway’s prose to the visual arts. He told David Plante, to whom he gave a first edition, that this was the moment literature became Cubist. “I’m always seeing things in terms of images,” he said. “I could never, for example, do an interior monologue.” He was impressed by how Hemingway was able to evoke the emotion without providing the emotion, how he created a tension in his prose and dialogue that drove the reader to the next sentence. “Gertrude Stein says to Hemingway about some early things he has written: ‘Ernest, comments are not literature.’ Bruce understood that,” says Plante. “He described.” Bruce told Jean-François Fogel: “Hemingway’s interesting even when he’s bad.”
struck Bruce as a total innovation of form. Typically, he compared Hemingway’s prose to the visual arts. He told David Plante, to whom he gave a first edition, that this was the moment literature became Cubist. “I’m always seeing things in terms of images,” he said. “I could never, for example, do an interior monologue.” He was impressed by how Hemingway was able to evoke the emotion without providing the emotion, how he created a tension in his prose and dialogue that drove the reader to the next sentence. “Gertrude Stein says to Hemingway about some early things he has written: ‘Ernest, comments are not literature.’ Bruce understood that,” says Plante. “He described.” Bruce told Jean-François Fogel: “Hemingway’s interesting even when he’s bad.”
Bruce raised Flaubert and Hemingway to the shelf that housed Mandelstam and Robert Byron. He studied them with microscopic attention. As slavishly as he had imitated
The Road to Oxiana,
he pared his prose in conscious imitation. “No whiches, thats and whos,” he put in his notebook while reading
The Sun Also Rises.
The Road to Oxiana,
he pared his prose in conscious imitation. “No whiches, thats and whos,” he put in his notebook while reading
The Sun Also Rises.
At this time he also discovered Ernst Jünger’s
On the Marble Cliffs.
In June 1974, the magazine published Bruce’s interview with the German aesthete, soldier and botanist who had recorded in his extensive diaries the Nazi occupation of Paris. Jünger, a member of the German High Command, noted with the dispassion of a trained beetle-collector how looting soldiers destroyed musical instruments yet spared mirrors, and how in a Wagner concert the trombones suddenly fell silent because the starving musicians had no breath left.
On the Marble Cliffs.
In June 1974, the magazine published Bruce’s interview with the German aesthete, soldier and botanist who had recorded in his extensive diaries the Nazi occupation of Paris. Jünger, a member of the German High Command, noted with the dispassion of a trained beetle-collector how looting soldiers destroyed musical instruments yet spared mirrors, and how in a Wagner concert the trombones suddenly fell silent because the starving musicians had no breath left.
Bruce at this time had “an unlimited and obsessional regard” for Jünger’s work, says the critic John Russell. “More than once when we met he went back and back to
On the Marble Cliffs.
I put this down to his interest in extreme cruelty and the ways in which it could be inflicted.”
On the Marble Cliffs.
I put this down to his interest in extreme cruelty and the ways in which it could be inflicted.”
Bruce continued to be fascinated by Jünger to the end of his life. Wanting to write another essay on him, he squeezed his German publisher for fresh information. “In those days I was a kind of Jünger expert,” says Michael Krüger. “The mystery about him has never been solved, even now. Here was a man in the middle of occupied Paris with bombers flying overhead and he’s standing on the roof with champagne in his hand making little remarks. Bruce was deeply affected and involved by this coolness: how, in the middle of the biggest possible chaos, is it possible not to move, not to run away, not to accept all kinds of moral commitment? He would ring me up. ‘Did you see Jünger? What is he doing? Was he a Nazi?’ Always the question of immorality came up. Is it important for our notion of a writer if he has a moral life or not? Does the experience of immorality bring you to a deeper understanding of mankind? It was the same for Montherlant, the same for Lorenz – he was deeply interested. You came to the conclusion there must be something doubtful about Bruce’s own life which produced this interest.”
Collaborators exerted a powerful attraction for Bruce, who respected no political agenda and whose Jacobite ancestors, the Arbuthnots, had ended up as German mercenaries. “The rumours were true,” the narrator writes in
Utz.
“He had collaborated. He had given information . . . to protect, even to hide, a number of his Jewish friends.” Bruce admired the Italian writer Malaparte, author of
Kaput
, who, before he turned, had worked for Mussolini; also, the circle of French writers hovering around Jünger: Montherlant, Drieu la Rochelle, Paul Morand. “He was interested in borders, where things were always changing, not one thing nor another,” says Elizabeth. One journalistic project he discussed with Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a walk around Berlin.
Utz.
“He had collaborated. He had given information . . . to protect, even to hide, a number of his Jewish friends.” Bruce admired the Italian writer Malaparte, author of
Kaput
, who, before he turned, had worked for Mussolini; also, the circle of French writers hovering around Jünger: Montherlant, Drieu la Rochelle, Paul Morand. “He was interested in borders, where things were always changing, not one thing nor another,” says Elizabeth. One journalistic project he discussed with Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a walk around Berlin.
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