Bruce Chatwin (69 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce had a natural sympathy for people cut off, nursing loss and hurt. Jonathan and George would become the Lewis and Benjamin Jones of
On the Black Hill
who, after one abortive venture into it, shrank from the world and went into a retreat which lasted a lifetime.
On the Black Hill
who, after one abortive venture into it, shrank from the world and went into a retreat which lasted a lifetime.
Bruce and Betjeman arrived at a white farmhouse tucked out of sight below the Black Hill. It had a slate roof and window frames painted green.
“Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see,” wrote the nineteenth-century American author Henry Thoreau in
Walking
. “A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.” They found the brothers working the blackthorn hedges with a curly, dark-haired boy in sunglasses. Their great-nephew, Vivian, “a boy of really incredible good looks”, stood to inherit the farm.
Walking
. “A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.” They found the brothers working the blackthorn hedges with a curly, dark-haired boy in sunglasses. Their great-nephew, Vivian, “a boy of really incredible good looks”, stood to inherit the farm.
“How are you, my boys?” cried Betjeman.
Jonathan winked at Vivian. “She calls us ‘my boys’, but we’re older than she is.”
Invited inside for tea, bread and jam, Bruce entered a parlour in which nothing had changed since the war. “It was a squint at the nineteenth century,” he said later. The small room was dominated by a William IV piano with broken strings. There was an oak settee with brass studs, a side of bacon hitched up to the rafters, and on the wall a photograph of their parents’ wedding in Dorstone in 1907. The room smelled of resin from the pine logs and a “musty masculine smell”. There was no bathroom and the brothers washed in a tin tub.
Vivian, who would ride up on his motorbike from Dorstone, was suspicious of Bruce. “Bruce sat with his back to the piano and said he was a writer. He didn’t say he was going to write about
them
.”
them
.”
The brothers impressed Bruce. His notes say that they wore identical Wellington boots scrubbed of mud; that they both had on their father’s flannel shirts, fastened at the neck with a copper stud. Their waistcoats and jackets were woven from the same thick brown tweed, and their chocolate corduroy trousers came from a measure-yourself company in Harrogate. The only difference was in their hats. George in his “best” with trilby hat and suit looked “exactly like the picture of James Joyce in Paris”.
George was younger by a year, and smaller. His baldness emphasised the birthmark on his forehead, and half his teeth were gone. But a serene smile gave him an “air of saintly
detachment
”.
detachment
”.
Jonathan, the boss, was the less quizzical. Straight-backed, pronounced veins in his temple, he could not breathe properly following a bicycle accident which, says Vivian, “put his nose all over the place”. The brothers talked freely, about their past. They were born in the nearby house and moved to New House in the 1920s. “They went to no school, learned everything from their mother in the house, to read and write, but did go to Sunday School in the Chapel on Sundays,” wrote Bruce. “In the days of their father they had two teams of shire horses and a cob. Their grandmother, born in the 1840s, remembered working oxen to the plough which was far slower and was liable to attacks of fly which made them mad.”
The only person they saw day to day was their great nephew. “They wouldn’t say a bad word against anyone,” says Vivian. “But if ever they had a bad dealing they would never deal with that person again.” They were generous in other ways. Vivian sometimes turned up with his blonde girlfriend on the back of his Yamaha. “When Sue’s grandpa died, they overheard her saying she couldn’t afford a hat so they went into the kitchen and came back with 50 pound notes and put them on the table. ‘Buy a handbag as well’.” Bruce in his novel would convey the brothers’ gentleness and their father’s hardness.
George Edgar Howells was the model for Amos in
On the Black Hill.
As a young man, he had rented 13 ewes. By the end of the Depression, he owned a flock of 300. He would buy sheep at the auctions in Brecon and take them back on the train to Hay and drive them up over the bluff. A cantankerous know-all, his pleasure was to sit of an evening at table and carpenter frames for his prints. Two of these, “Divided Affection” and “Wait a Minute”, were hung on the wall, their frames chiselled out of beams taken from the big hall in Glasbury. George had died in 1958. At the top of a narrow staircase his bedroom stood untouched, his boxes of shoes not opened.
On the Black Hill.
As a young man, he had rented 13 ewes. By the end of the Depression, he owned a flock of 300. He would buy sheep at the auctions in Brecon and take them back on the train to Hay and drive them up over the bluff. A cantankerous know-all, his pleasure was to sit of an evening at table and carpenter frames for his prints. Two of these, “Divided Affection” and “Wait a Minute”, were hung on the wall, their frames chiselled out of beams taken from the big hall in Glasbury. George had died in 1958. At the top of a narrow staircase his bedroom stood untouched, his boxes of shoes not opened.
Their mother, Mary Ann, was a Radnorshire girl who had worked in London as a maid and also for a vicar in Snodhill Court, four miles away, from whom she had bought the piano. She collected silver and green willow china and was “honest as a dye”. She lived to be 90 and the brothers had looked after her in her failing years.
Jonathan and George were the eldest of four children. They had always lived together, separating once, for a six-month period of convalescence, when Jonathan was 15 and his horse took off and the end of the shaft pierced his leg. “People used to say they’re an old married couple,” says Vivian. Bruce was intrigued to learn that they slept upstairs in the same bedroom, a room with two beds, a sloping roof and a window looking up to the hill.
The farm consisted of 298 acres with 400 wool sheep and 26 cows. This was the Howells’ world and they had rarely left it. If they ventured out, it was most usually to Hay twelve miles away. Neither brother drove, but George piloted the tractor in to Hay on Fridays, parking in the Co-op yard while he did the shopping.
On Mondays, as children, they had gone on bicycling tours dressed in blue serge suits, caps and bicycle clips. They had once been to Stow-on-the-Wold, but never abroad and never to London. “I doubt whether they had seen the sea,” says Vivian. The one obsession they had was for aeroplanes. “We never went in a bus, we never went in a train, oh, no no, but we went in a plane,” they told Bruce. “And then I discovered that in fact that they had gone for their 75th birthday in a light aircraft as a sort of joy ride and . . . had a huge scrap book which dealt with every air crash, nearly, of the twentieth century.” It was this conversation, Bruce said, “which is what really prompted me to write the book.” The novel “is about people who are forcibly settled, as it were, but yet they wander in their imagination.”
* * *
Bruce installed himself in the area. One Sunday, he walked alone across the Cefn Hill. The snow was deeper than he expected and he fell through to his knees. Inky clouds banked up behind Lord Hereford’s Knob, but as he looked back into England the fields were green. “The two brothers were mucking out the cowshed onto the dung pile. They seem incapable of doing anything apart . . . They showed me the granary and stable that they built in 1937. I had asked whether hired labour used to sleep there, but they never had a hand, only their brother and sister.” Sitting on the settee, they discussed the world. They kept in touch with events from the television on the piano and knew all about how Yugoslavia was divided.
Bruce drew a plan of the interior in his notebook and promised to visit again. “Tacit agreement that I shall satisfy their craving for knowledge about the outside world and they will provide me with something of theirs.”
The Howells always seemed pleased to be interrupted by Bruce. “My uncles loved talking about the past.” Vivian was not so content to have his work disrupted. “And then Bruce started turning up. He tried to haul bales, but he was a waste of time, he just didn’t know how to do it. Then he wants to learn to hedge, he says. But he’d do bugger all except talk. A hedge we’d do in a week took a month to do. He used to drive me round the bend, to tell the truth, because I couldn’t get on and do anything.”
It surprised Vivian to learn that Bruce had grown up on a farm. “He came back in the spring and Uncle Johnny put him on a tractor, a little 414 International, and taught him to drive – but Bruce couldn’t brake. We used to keep cattle in the Pikes [a nearby farm], eight to ten months old. I’d grab the bullock by the nose and Uncle Johnny’d pour in a bottle of mineral bullets. ‘Can I have a go?’ said Bruce. He got his arm round the neck and the bullock took off, dragging him round the shed. He didn’t give no impression he’d been on a farm before.
“I used to say to my uncles after he’d gone, ‘Why’s he asking these questions for?’”
The Howells’ farm reminded Bruce of his own remote upbringing at Brown’s Green. In
On the Black Hill
he gave a version of what might have been. The novel is about two brothers who do
not
wander, who do
not
marry, who complete each other in a way Bruce himself seemed to have longed for. It explored what would have happened if he had never left home.
On the Black Hill
he gave a version of what might have been. The novel is about two brothers who do
not
wander, who do
not
marry, who complete each other in a way Bruce himself seemed to have longed for. It explored what would have happened if he had never left home.
Even with Elizabeth to anchor him he was, as Hodgkin observed, “terribly lonely”. “I used to think it was the loneliness of someone doing what he did and I would think it was something we had in common, but it wasn’t that. He was dead lonely and he took it with him into the desert. It was the one thing Elizabeth couldn’t do anything about.”
Nor could Hugh. Climbing with his brother among the sheep above Casde Farm in the 1960s Bruce had said to him: “I am Abel, the shepherd, the free spirit, the keeper of high ground and birdsong. Who are you?” The question dumbfounded Hugh. “I shut up. I wasn’t supposed to say anything.” Hugh had become a surveyor for the City firm of Weatherall, Green & Smith: he was a setder. He worked in the company for 20 years. Like Bruce, Wilfred Thesiger had a brother who lives a regimented life. Brian Thesiger joined the regular army.
On the Black Hill
began as a short story about the two bachelor brothers. “I started out writing a few paragraphs and then, suddenly, I wrote that the brothers were identical twins,” he told Bragg on the South Bank Show. “I don’t know why I wrote it, but it just occurred to me that they might be. And having written that line, which is a separate paragraph to itself, I suddenly realised that this was a novel and not a short story and that what I’d done sort of predicated a book of 450 pages instead of 30.”
began as a short story about the two bachelor brothers. “I started out writing a few paragraphs and then, suddenly, I wrote that the brothers were identical twins,” he told Bragg on the South Bank Show. “I don’t know why I wrote it, but it just occurred to me that they might be. And having written that line, which is a separate paragraph to itself, I suddenly realised that this was a novel and not a short story and that what I’d done sort of predicated a book of 450 pages instead of 30.”
He may have got the idea of twins from the Greenway family who lived a mile from Betjeman at Wernagavenny and whose telephone ensured that Bruce returned repeatedly. “I always go over to Olive to use the telephone,” said John Betjeman. Bruce likewise. “He would go for a walk in the morning to clear his head at 10 a.m. and come for coffee,” says Olive. Bustling in and out of her kitchen were Olive’s 26-year-old twin sons: Russell, a builder, and Colin, a carpenter.
At Marlborough, Bruce had known three sets of twins. In Dahomey, he discovered that twins were not regarded like ordinary men but considered gods (when visiting the Porto Novo museum with Kasmin he saw wooden effigies to Ho Ho, the sacred deity of twins, to be carried at all times by the survivor if one dies). As a child, Bruce had told stories to his imaginary friend, Tommy. He never, one suspects, altogether abandoned Tommy. “He’d galvanise himself into the activity of writing with early-morning yells,” says Matthew Spender, one of Bruce’s hosts in Italy. “You’d hear cackles, laughs, cries of pleasure and encouragement. ‘Now, now.’ He was talking to himself as if he was outside and he had to boss himself around. ‘Now what we’re going to do is this . . . No, that’s
quite
wrong.’ You’d wander out of your bedroom thinking there were visitors for breakfast and no, it was Bruce getting up.”
quite
wrong.’ You’d wander out of your bedroom thinking there were visitors for breakfast and no, it was Bruce getting up.”
Out of the same compulsion, Bruce would invent an intimate, inviolable Other. “The novel is between Bruce and Bruce,” says Jonathan Hope. “He would have loved to have had an identical twin.”
The twins Lewis and Benjamin, though the most fully realised, are not the first “doubles” to appear in Bruce’s work: in
The Viceroy of Ouidah,
the Viceroy becomes a blood brother of the king of Abomey, while his favourite twin daughters are sent back to Bahia, finding work as prostitutes. Bruce was attracted to the erotic possibilities of twins. He was delighted when his Finnish publishers proposed to change
On the Black Hill
to
Erototammatomatt
– “which of course was the title I’d been looking for all the time!” – and communicated this to Sontag, who wrote to him: “I look forward with the greatest impatience to ‘the novel about the incestuous brothers’ as it was referred to by John Richardson the other night.” Edmund White recorded that the first oral sketches of
On the Black Hill
and
The Songlines
“were pretty gay, whereas the final versions were dully normal”. Bruce’s notebooks contain hints – “Novel is of
incest
. . . Twins – one queer, the other not” – as well as this paragraph: “Though the pleasure Jonathan takes in being embraced by Lewis puts him into raptures, he prefers to follow, not to walk side by side, to tread in his footprints, to gulp of air knowing it to be the gulp he had exhaled, to sing on and in the same trajectory – to do everything in imitation – to put his head on the rumpled pillow.” Bruce toned down the incestuous element, but the device of twins allowed him to explore an intense male relationship which John Updike, in the
New Yorker
, would interpret as “a homosexual marriage”.
The Viceroy of Ouidah,
the Viceroy becomes a blood brother of the king of Abomey, while his favourite twin daughters are sent back to Bahia, finding work as prostitutes. Bruce was attracted to the erotic possibilities of twins. He was delighted when his Finnish publishers proposed to change
On the Black Hill
to
Erototammatomatt
– “which of course was the title I’d been looking for all the time!” – and communicated this to Sontag, who wrote to him: “I look forward with the greatest impatience to ‘the novel about the incestuous brothers’ as it was referred to by John Richardson the other night.” Edmund White recorded that the first oral sketches of
On the Black Hill
and
The Songlines
“were pretty gay, whereas the final versions were dully normal”. Bruce’s notebooks contain hints – “Novel is of
incest
. . . Twins – one queer, the other not” – as well as this paragraph: “Though the pleasure Jonathan takes in being embraced by Lewis puts him into raptures, he prefers to follow, not to walk side by side, to tread in his footprints, to gulp of air knowing it to be the gulp he had exhaled, to sing on and in the same trajectory – to do everything in imitation – to put his head on the rumpled pillow.” Bruce toned down the incestuous element, but the device of twins allowed him to explore an intense male relationship which John Updike, in the
New Yorker
, would interpret as “a homosexual marriage”.
So the short story became a novel he had to research. “I had to get all the twins literature out.” He read Musil (“a twin has 25 times less chance of being famous”) and Gogol’s “The Nose” (“to be pursued by oneself”) and he discovered Elvis Presley was a twin.
As ever, Bruce needed to test his theories on a pre-eminent authority. “Some of the details,” he assured ABC radio, “were checked for me by the greatest expert in the world on twins.” He described to Wyndham, to whom he dedicated the novel, how “when I went on to read the psychoanalytic literature on twins, the only book that really impressed was by a Professor Zazzo, written, I think in the ’40s. Last January, I went to lunch with the translator of
The Viceroy
in Paris, and there, on his desk, was
Météores
[by Michel Tournier]. ‘Funny,’ I said, ‘I’m writing a book about twins.’ ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘my wife is a psychiatrist who works with the leading expert on twins, one Professor Zazzo.’ We rang for an appointment. The professor was in his eighties. Utterly charming! I apologized for disturbing him. My questions were those of a novelist. I wanted to make sure my story held together. ‘But Monsieur,’ he replied, ‘I have 1,200 case histories on twins, and if I had your talents, I would be Balzac.’ He then put me right on a number of points, and mentioned Tournier. It seemed that Tournier had also been obsessed by his book and had checked his plot with Zazzo, as I did mine.”
The Viceroy
in Paris, and there, on his desk, was
Météores
[by Michel Tournier]. ‘Funny,’ I said, ‘I’m writing a book about twins.’ ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘my wife is a psychiatrist who works with the leading expert on twins, one Professor Zazzo.’ We rang for an appointment. The professor was in his eighties. Utterly charming! I apologized for disturbing him. My questions were those of a novelist. I wanted to make sure my story held together. ‘But Monsieur,’ he replied, ‘I have 1,200 case histories on twins, and if I had your talents, I would be Balzac.’ He then put me right on a number of points, and mentioned Tournier. It seemed that Tournier had also been obsessed by his book and had checked his plot with Zazzo, as I did mine.”
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