Bruce Chatwin (56 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
The magazine never published the Butch Cassidy article. On 27 October, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude that “all Bruce’s editors are being removed”. On the 24th, Linklater returned from lunch to discover a notice on the board: he had been replaced by Hunter Davies. At Linklater’s hastily assembled leaving party that night, Meriel McCooey yelled at a whitefaced Harry Evans: “
You
! I mean
you
! William fucking Randolph Hearst! Do you know what you’ve
done
?” In a subdued voice, Michael Rand spoke for many, including for the absent Bruce, when he turned to the art assistant Roger Law and said: “The party’s over, boys.”
You
! I mean
you
! William fucking Randolph Hearst! Do you know what you’ve
done
?” In a subdued voice, Michael Rand spoke for many, including for the absent Bruce, when he turned to the art assistant Roger Law and said: “The party’s over, boys.”
The sensibilities of the new editor were confirmed after Davies visited Linklater at his Islington home. That Sunday’s edition of the magazine had carried photographs by Leni Riefenstahl of a Sudanese tribe. “I’m sure you’ll want to change the magazine,” said Linklater, “but I hope you won’t abandon the tradition of marvellous photographs.” According to Linklater, Davies replied: “Quite frankly, Magnus, most people who picked up the magazine on Sunday would have said to themselves: ‘Bloody hell, not another load of black tits’.”
Bruce had come back on the
Queen Elizabeth II
in mid-September. He was “not quite sure of his own position,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude, “but won’t be able to work under the new regime, so it has all come to an end . . . It’s too bad really, but it’s been a nice few years for him & as usual he had most things his own way.”
Queen Elizabeth II
in mid-September. He was “not quite sure of his own position,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude, “but won’t be able to work under the new regime, so it has all come to an end . . . It’s too bad really, but it’s been a nice few years for him & as usual he had most things his own way.”
His position very soon clarified itself. One of Davies’s first acts was to stop Bruce’s retainer. “Looking at the stuff he’d done, I really thought it was purple prose, self-indulgent, poncy stuff which personally I didn’t like. I wrote him a letter. ‘Very sorry, your contract’s not renewed’.”
It did not matter. Bruce incorporated the Butch Cassidy material into his first draft. In November, he rented a cottage in Bonnieux in the Luberon to complete it.
“The fatal thing is to ever to tell anyone about what you’re really writing till it’s done because a) you don’t do it and b) you get people vaguely worked up about it and they try to tell you what to do.” Bruce had spent several years unable to make his thesis into a publishable book. He did not want, as he told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni, another “rotten experience”. This time he kept silent until he was finished. Friends, agent, publisher understood him to be still embroiled with nomads. He stayed in France all winter, all spring, writing and rewriting and reshaping until it was finished.
Robert Byron presented
The Road to Oxiana
as a diary, encouraging readers to think that it had been dashed off on the hoof. In fact, it took three years to write. Likewise, Bruce gave the illusion he had gone to Patagonia for four months and then produced a book. But he took with him a body of knowledge he had cultivated for years.
The Road to Oxiana
as a diary, encouraging readers to think that it had been dashed off on the hoof. In fact, it took three years to write. Likewise, Bruce gave the illusion he had gone to Patagonia for four months and then produced a book. But he took with him a body of knowledge he had cultivated for years.
Although
In Patagonia
was an overnight success, it had been an arduous apprenticeship. His confidence was fragile. He once told Elizabeth: “I wish I could write really well.” When she assured him, “You’re really good,” he said: “No, I’m not really good.” But once he started writing he wanted to be in the front rank. “He knew he wasn’t top notch and it bothered him,” says Elizabeth. Peter Adam, who would lend him books from his library, says, “You would not catch him talking about Tolkien or Iris Murdoch. He went always up the ladder and somehow that’s how he wanted to be seen: Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Thomas Mann.” His Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso, says: “He had a huge ambition. But not more than any other writer.” He reminded Calasso of Italo Calvino: unless you try to do something apparently impossible, you cannot be a first-rank writer.
In Patagonia
was an overnight success, it had been an arduous apprenticeship. His confidence was fragile. He once told Elizabeth: “I wish I could write really well.” When she assured him, “You’re really good,” he said: “No, I’m not really good.” But once he started writing he wanted to be in the front rank. “He knew he wasn’t top notch and it bothered him,” says Elizabeth. Peter Adam, who would lend him books from his library, says, “You would not catch him talking about Tolkien or Iris Murdoch. He went always up the ladder and somehow that’s how he wanted to be seen: Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Thomas Mann.” His Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso, says: “He had a huge ambition. But not more than any other writer.” He reminded Calasso of Italo Calvino: unless you try to do something apparently impossible, you cannot be a first-rank writer.
Bruce had a knack for simile because he had seen and remembered so many things, but this was the only part of writing that came easily: he willed himself to be a writer. He perfected his style by dint of sheer concentration and focus, typing out his drafts again and again, and reading them aloud to be sure they were lucid. His friend Christopher Gibbs likened the relentless winnowing and culling to his previous life as a collector. “Like old lacquer applied and rubbed away, applied and rubbed away a hundred times more, that texture, so admired in the Orient in former times, is found again in Chatwin’s prose.”
He was a highly visual writer. “Writing is the painting of the voice,” he wrote in his notebook. “The more it resembles it, the better it is.” He sought in his prose the abstraction he admired in Sung dynasty painters, of flattened forms suspended in space with no suggestion of depth. Writing of Mu Chu’ih, he singled out “his splashed ink technique, the quick dots and dashes, the incisive stabs of the brush, the swirls he used to achieve running water or ruffled feathers, the long patient stroke with which he brought a branch quiveringly alive.” He observed this empty, jettisoned effect in certain Cistercian monasteries or in Cézanne’s last work, in which, he wrote, “the essence of Mont Saint-Victoire is captured in a few strokes of watercolour. What is not appreciated is that this empty space is not empty but full; and to realise this ‘fullness’ requires the most single-minded discipline. Either the work must be perfect or it is nothing.”
It is hard, reading him, to escape another link: between the elegantly starved-down style he aimed for and the asceticism of the Moorish nomad who “whittles his possessions down to a minimum”. The dominant colour of the nomad is blue, he wrote; their dominant art-form patch-work. “A much darned and patched piece of blue cloth is often far more expensive to buy than a new piece, because patchwork carries the imprint of human associations.” The desert nomads wove together their fragments to create the modern effect of Bruce’s Peruvian feathers. “They build their shacks, palisades, doorways and furniture with anything that comes to mind – scrap metal, abandoned cars, packing cases, sacking, old advertisement hoardings – the components foraged at random but fitted together with an unerring eye that still exemplifies the desert sensibility. The result is curiously like a Schwitters collage or a Russian Constructivist ‘assemblage’.”
Bruce’s prose has this fragmented quality. “He didn’t have the intellectual organisation to write a conventional book,” says Lucie-Smith. “With the exceptions of
On the Black Hill
and
Utz
, everything consists of fragments, all shattered and brought back together.” Gregor von Rezzori was aware of the labour involved: “One of his obvious virtues was discipline. Which was also the cause of his well-concealed exhaustion.”
On the Black Hill
and
Utz
, everything consists of fragments, all shattered and brought back together.” Gregor von Rezzori was aware of the labour involved: “One of his obvious virtues was discipline. Which was also the cause of his well-concealed exhaustion.”
In the first days of August 1976, Bruce arrived at Deborah Rogers’s office with a 350-page typescript. It was no longer titled
A Piece of Brontosaurus
but
At the end: a journey to Patagonia
. Five years had passed since he had delivered
The Nomadic Alternative
. “With that book, you felt he had been crushed by the weight,” says Rogers. “When Bruce came in with his new manuscript there was this buoyancy. ‘I don’t know what you’ll make of it,’ he said.”
A Piece of Brontosaurus
but
At the end: a journey to Patagonia
. Five years had passed since he had delivered
The Nomadic Alternative
. “With that book, you felt he had been crushed by the weight,” says Rogers. “When Bruce came in with his new manuscript there was this buoyancy. ‘I don’t know what you’ll make of it,’ he said.”
On 6 August, Rogers sent the typescript on to Tom Maschler. “As one might expect, the book is extraordinary, and like nothing else – a law unto itself. But I think it is also quite wonderful, though does need some work.”
Bruce had told Maschler nothing. “It arrives. I have no inkling that this is anything other than the nomad book. And then I read this thing.” Maschler describes the experience as “one of the ten most exciting events” in his publishing career: “to read this book which I have commissioned, which bears no relation to what I had commissioned”. He judged the manuscript needed “very little editing – it was magnificent and almost ready to publish”. But he believed improvements could be made and passed it to one of the Cape editors, Susannah Clapp. In her report five days later, Clapp shared Maschler’s enthusiasm, adding a caveat. “This
is
very extraordinary – and a possible problem.” While struck by “the very high quality of the writing” Clapp did not feel always impelled through the 350 pages. It seemed a series of exquisite cameos without a central drive. “If I weren’t so impressed by the matching of informativeness with intelligent description, I would say a sad no. As it is, I don’t feel able to dismiss it – particularly since this may mean saying goodbye to someone who may well have other good books to come. But I don’t think it’s on as it stands.”
is
very extraordinary – and a possible problem.” While struck by “the very high quality of the writing” Clapp did not feel always impelled through the 350 pages. It seemed a series of exquisite cameos without a central drive. “If I weren’t so impressed by the matching of informativeness with intelligent description, I would say a sad no. As it is, I don’t feel able to dismiss it – particularly since this may mean saying goodbye to someone who may well have other good books to come. But I don’t think it’s on as it stands.”
Clapp played a crucial role in reducing the text. “All the qualities one associates with his style were there from the beginning,” she says. “A teasing hovering between fact and fiction; a combination of a very spare syntax and short simple sentences, with a rich flamboyant vocabulary, lots of arcane words, lots of peculiarities and a non-chronological, rather elliptical structure. The question in editing the book was to try and maintain that structure he called Cubist – in other words, lots of small pictures tilting away and toward each other to create this strange, angular portrait, and yet at the same time to introduce a sense of progression and drive.” She and Bruce went through the book, cutting and rearranging. “Bruce was very responsive,” says Clapp. “He would often decide on the spot to take something out. Quite alarmingly he would strike through a whole page and sometimes he would decide just as quickly to add – and he would come back with another ten pages in his haversack because something else had occurred to him. We reduced it by about a quarter to a third of its normal length.”
Bruce, who knew how to take advice, said he learnt a lot from Clapp. Eventually, she left Cape for the
London Review of Books
, but she would do preliminary work on his next book and also edit
Utz
.
London Review of Books
, but she would do preliminary work on his next book and also edit
Utz
.
On 26 August, Bruce wrote to a friend: “To my immense relief Jonathan Cape have taken my book on Patagonia.” Under the terms drawn up eight years earlier, Maschler agreed to pay an advance of £600. The publication date was set for 13 October 1977, with an initial print-run of 4,000 copies. He pressed advance copies on influential critics and editors like George Steiner and Jack Lambert, and on publication day sent a telegram to Bruce at Millington-Drake’s home near Siena:
I KNOW THAT IN PATAGONIA WILL BE A SUCCESS
.
I KNOW THAT IN PATAGONIA WILL BE A SUCCESS
.
Bruce never liked to be on hand for publication. “I’m chicken about reviews,” he told ABC radio. A fortnight later, a sheaf of them arrived from his publisher. Maschler’s “hunch” had paid off. “It is rare indeed for me to be able to say that the reviews reflect my own feelings about a book I admire as much as I do yours and yet this is the case.”
Paul Theroux wrote in
The Times
: “He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and strange and seldom visited like the Land where the Jumblies Live.” Theroux chose it as his Book of the Year. So did Jack Lambert in the
Sunday Times
. “Dreams, those who remember them tell me, are surrealistically clear; so are the weird scenes Mr Chatwin swiftly, often curtly, conjures up.”
The Times
: “He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and strange and seldom visited like the Land where the Jumblies Live.” Theroux chose it as his Book of the Year. So did Jack Lambert in the
Sunday Times
. “Dreams, those who remember them tell me, are surrealistically clear; so are the weird scenes Mr Chatwin swiftly, often curtly, conjures up.”
Several authors sent letters. Graham Greene wrote to say that
In Patagonia
was “one of my favourite travel books”. Harold Beaven appreciated the pressure of reading and experience pushing behind every line. “It’s an athlete’s book: taut, tough, elegant; not a travelogue exactly, nor a scholarly foray exactly, but an interpenetration of both, so skilfully filigreed that the travel becomes part of the research as the research part of the quest in a continuous, yet sporadic, movement.” In Greece, Paddy Leigh Fermor did not want to let the sun go down “without writing to say what a marvellous book it is”. He thought it “splendidly original”, merely wished “you had let it off the leash a bit more, to luxuriate and ramify”. The sections were “
too
short”, so that he felt “a bit like a child being rushed through a picture gallery and always lagging behind, longing to dwell”. He offered this advice: “I think out of avoiding sloppiness you sometimes give things you are worried by and things that leave you cold the same deadpan or poker-faced treatment.” He urged Bruce next time to “let it rip”.
In Patagonia
was “one of my favourite travel books”. Harold Beaven appreciated the pressure of reading and experience pushing behind every line. “It’s an athlete’s book: taut, tough, elegant; not a travelogue exactly, nor a scholarly foray exactly, but an interpenetration of both, so skilfully filigreed that the travel becomes part of the research as the research part of the quest in a continuous, yet sporadic, movement.” In Greece, Paddy Leigh Fermor did not want to let the sun go down “without writing to say what a marvellous book it is”. He thought it “splendidly original”, merely wished “you had let it off the leash a bit more, to luxuriate and ramify”. The sections were “
too
short”, so that he felt “a bit like a child being rushed through a picture gallery and always lagging behind, longing to dwell”. He offered this advice: “I think out of avoiding sloppiness you sometimes give things you are worried by and things that leave you cold the same deadpan or poker-faced treatment.” He urged Bruce next time to “let it rip”.
Few showed greater enthusiasm than the French writer, and Patagonian Consul in France, Jean Raspail. He wrote “in a state of emotion” after finishing the book, bringing news of an award. “The Patagonian consulate which represents in France the government of H. M. Orélie-Antoine I, King of Patagonia and Araucania in 1863, has decided to award you the first great prize of Patagonian literature.”
Most surprised were Bruce’s colleagues from the art-world, for whom the news that he had written a book had somewhat the same impact as hearing that he was to be married. “I was astonished,” says Richard Timewell. “I would never have thought of it.” This reaction was shared by Hewett, Muensterberger, Nash and Erskine. “I was extremely surprised and quite frankly jealous,” says Lucie-Smith. “Why can’t
I
write like that?”
I
write like that?”
There were some dissonant voices. On Christmas Day, 1977, James Lees-Milne “dipped into Bruce Chatwin’s
Patagonia
which has had undeservedly rave reviews. No form to the book, a random selection of unpleasant incidents. What a ghastly country it must be.” Steiner, writing to Maschler, also expressed reservations. “My problem with it is simply this: the highly mannered style, the off-beat and wry brevities, the archness of personal valour and the carefully-paced eruditions (bitten off self-deprecatingly) – all this is that
New Yorker
formula which I have been seeing from the inside these past twelve years!”
Patagonia
which has had undeservedly rave reviews. No form to the book, a random selection of unpleasant incidents. What a ghastly country it must be.” Steiner, writing to Maschler, also expressed reservations. “My problem with it is simply this: the highly mannered style, the off-beat and wry brevities, the archness of personal valour and the carefully-paced eruditions (bitten off self-deprecatingly) – all this is that
New Yorker
formula which I have been seeing from the inside these past twelve years!”
By and large, these views were exceptional. The book’s success was summed up in a note from Wyndham: “Perhaps none of them
quite
get the hang of what you are doing, but as they say in
Vogue,
‘everyone’ is talking about it!”
quite
get the hang of what you are doing, but as they say in
Vogue,
‘everyone’ is talking about it!”
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