Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Bruce Chatwin (93 page)
Many of his purchases celebrated the leap Bruce had himself made, only recently, into the Christian faith.
One of Bruce’s hallucinations, following his collapse in Zurich, was of the Christos Pantokrator. He described his vision to a figure who became important for him in these months: Kallistos Ware, a Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church living in Oxford. “He felt he was lying in the middle of the church in the Serbian monastery of Chilandari during a vigil service. There were candles and lamps and monks were singing.” His vision had brought back to Bruce his experience on Mount Athos, convinced him of its authenticity.
His short visit to this centre of monasticism, Bruce told Ware, had marked a turning point in his life. “I think Bruce felt when he went to Athos: this is the truth,” says Ware. “While there he seemed a different person, transformed, marked by total happiness.” As a result, Bruce had decided to become a member of the Orthodox Church. “This was not a passing fancy but a clear and firm intention, a hope, an objective during his illness.”
There are 2,000-3,000 lay English members of the Greek Orthodox Church. The usual practice is to receive people by baptism. Ware receives four or five converts a year. “His plan was to go to the Holy Mountain to be baptised there. For him, it was definite that he must be received there, because his whole conversion to Orthodoxy was bound up with Athos. I remember thinking, looking at him, that getting him there was going to be a complex business, with little boats and a jetty. I did say to Elizabeth: ‘Does he understand what he’s doing? Does it represent his considered judgement?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ Obviously, had he been in good health I would have wanted to talk to him much more thoroughly. I would have been interested in his motivation; how he saw his future life as an Orthodox; why he really wanted to be one. It would have meant going to divine liturgy in principle every Sunday, keeping different feasts, and going to a spiritual father for confession.
“Normally, when someone becomes Orthodox I do ask them to make a confession of their whole life. I feel if people are making fresh start they would start with a fresh slate. He never himself said, ‘I have AIDS.’ To me this wasn’t important, why he was ill. The view of the church is: all sins can be forgiven. What matters is not our own worthiness but our desire. Nothing on his part would have constituted an obstacle. What sort of Orthodox he would have been, that’s another question. I wouldn’t have thought his parish priest would have had an easy task.”
Ware received Bruce several times over the summer and arranged for Father Mitrophon to meet him on the shore of Mount Athos in September. Meanwhile above his hospital bed, Bruce kept a prayer written by David Jones: “MAY THE BLESSED ARCHANGEL MICHAEL DEFEND US IN BATTLE LEST WE PERISH IN TERRIBLE JUDGEMENT.”
Hand in hand with his conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith and the hasty assembling of the Homer Collection went Bruce’s urgent desire to find the origins of his illness. “In a Bruce-like way, he latched onto AIDS as something he was going to find a cure for,” says Francis Wyndham.
At the end of July, friends of Bruce around the globe received a curious circular asking for contributions to “The Radcliffe Medical Foundation – ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Medicine’”. Headed by a list of patrons who included Lord Goodman, the Duke of Marlborough, and the Bishop of Oxford, the letter was signed by Bruce. “I would like to think of this letter as an endless chain. If you have friends or relations who you think would be interested, I would gladly send it to them.”
In the manner of a Victorian explorer, he sought funds to mount an expedition into an isolated community of central Africa, unspecified but most probably the Sahel in Eastern Chad, where he hoped to locate the origins of the HIV virus and so produce a vaccine.
“We live in a time of new viruses: a time of Pandora’s Box,” his circular began. “Climatic change is the motor of evolution, and the sweeping changes in climate that have affected many parts of Africa offer ideal conditions for a virus that may have been stable over many thousands of years to burst its bounds, and set off to colonize the world.
“The most pressing medical problem since tuberculosis is HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus), vulgarly known as AIDS. The word AIDS should never be used by the medical profession, since it plays into the hands of the gutter press, and causes panic and despair: in France, not even M. Le Pen could do much with ‘
le SIDA
’. There is, in fact, no cause for panic. HIV is not a late twentieth-century
Götterdämmerung
: it is another African virus . . .
le SIDA
’. There is, in fact, no cause for panic. HIV is not a late twentieth-century
Götterdämmerung
: it is another African virus . . .
“As you probably know the virus constantly mutates and there seems little hope at present of preparing a vaccine. Excellent results have been achieved by the laboratories in describing the virus; but in the future we shall have to look elsewhere. The stable form of the primordial HIV must exist in Africa, and we intend to find it. The pessimists will say it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The problem may be simpler: that of the archaeologist who knows where to dig.”
The man in charge of the expedition to the Sahel was to be Bruce’s doctor at the Churchill, David Warrell. “He is one of the finest clinical physicians in this country. He has spent many years in the Far East, working in the field to advance the study of cerebral malaria. He is a world authority on snake-bite; but he has recently returned to Oxford to lead a team of researchers into HIV.”
On his retirement in November, Juel-Jensen had handed Bruce over to Warrell as a special category patient. Although he received his treatment on the National Health, Bruce behaved like a private patient. “Bruce was the most demanding patient I’ve ever had in a way,” says Warrell. “He commandeered the whole system. The force of his personality held you in a room talking to him. He had ideas about almost everything. At first I was dazzled by the diversity – as anyone was for the first time on meeting him or reading his books. As he went on I noticed a repetition, a paucity of originality, a recycling of concepts again and again. This was the only real evidence that he was ‘mildly demented’ in the medical sense.”
Bruce was anxious to share with Warrell his theory of HIV. He wrote in his last notebook: “Any ‘new’ species – a man, a swallow or HIV virus must begin its career in a very limited core area – before bursting out on the world.” Man had emerged from Africa. Why not HIV?
Warrell listened, fascinated. “One had to explain how such a devastating virus remained quiet for many years. The anthropological side of Bruce was intrigued by the idea of an isolated community which suddenly made contact with the outside world. He thought it was a palaeontological problem.”
Warrell agreed that an “archaeological logic” pointed to Africa. Although he judged Bruce’s scientific evidence thin, he was drawn in. “Bruce was a non-scientist with a very active mind trying to be constructive to save himself. His imagination was not limited by any scientific discipline. He made me feel very clay-footed and conventional. There is this idea of a creative step or jump one has to make for a discovery. I was aware I didn’t have it and he might. Central to his relationship with me was a mystical feeling that this knowledge might enable us to defeat the disease.”
Bruce knew the perfect man to help them track down the “primordial” virus: the palaeontologist Bob Brain. He interested Warrell in Brain’s work and described the day on which Brain and he had discovered man’s first hearth at Swartkrans. “All of us who came into contact with Bruce felt that sort of magic might touch us,” says Warrell. “I tried to fit Bruce’s design into some scientific structure. I thought: ‘It’s bad for mankind if I don’t’.”
Excited, Bruce telephoned Brain in Pretoria and invited him to move to Oxford where, funded by the Radcliffe Medical Foundation, he might start work on the epidemiology of the AIDS virus. “He thought that the distribution of the virus in Central Africa could be traced to racial groupings and this could go back a long time in human history,” says Brain. “I couldn’t think of any conceivable handle for this theory.” He declined.
Not put off, Bruce plunged into the composition of his fund-raising letter. “I couldn’t restrain him from writing it in my name,” says Warrell. The letter went out on 25 July. Over the next few days, Bruce kept in close touch with Warrell. “I don’t normally give patients my telephone number, but one was very vulnerable to his enhanced expectations. He used to ring me often at home to give revised estimates, upping the numbers. ‘I think I’ve recalculated the sum of money.’ The profits from some projected book mentioned the figure of £20 million. That was worrying. It was clear evidence that he was demented.”
“Being Bruce, he could see the funny side,” says Elizabeth, but to her distress works of art continued to pile up at Homer End. A piece of the Red Fort, a portable twelfth-century altar from Lausanne, a Han tortoise ink-well, a £70,000 icon of Saint Paraskevi wearing a glowing tomato-coloured robe. “They were for me; he knew I would never spend money on things like that; wonderful, wonderful things, but I couldn’t keep them.” Art worth over a million pounds at one point filled the dining room to bursting point, paid for with post-dated cheques. Bruce could never have hoped to honour these cheques. Behind his back Elizabeth started to return what he had bought even as it was delivered. Unwilling to involve Charles Chatwin, Elizabeth asked Robert Erskine to help. “We set up an arrangement to catch these things,” Erskine says. “‘Look, you’ll get them back, he’s not going to last long, so please let him have them’.” Elizabeth also called upon Hugh Chatwin.
*3
On 30 July, an exhausted Elizabeth flew to America to stay with Gertrude, leaving Bruce in the care of his brother for a fortnight. Once she was gone everything began to unravel.
*3
On 30 July, an exhausted Elizabeth flew to America to stay with Gertrude, leaving Bruce in the care of his brother for a fortnight. Once she was gone everything began to unravel.
On the eve of Elizabeth’s departure Hugh collected Bruce from Homer End and drove him to Stratford for the weekend to be nursed by his parents. Within three minutes of swinging out of the drive at Homer End, Bruce confessed to his brother. “Hugh, before I go completely mad, there’s something I must tell you. I have taken some risks in my time, but this time . . .” He told Hugh about “a priest called Donald” in New York. “He wouldn’t mention the word AIDS. He referred to it as HIV. I was stunned.” Hugh insists that he had not seen this coming. “Juel-Jensen had told us in 1986 that Bruce was HIV. We knew it could develop into AIDS, but until that moment I had gone along satisfied and hoping because he had had what seemed to be a total remission. He blew up into a proper size. Having done it once, he could do it again.”
Hugh did not tell his parents what he had learned. As the weekend went on, it became apparent to him that Charles and Margharita would have difficulty handling Bruce for the two weeks Elizabeth was away. “I could see he was going to cause them trouble. We were all worried. On Sunday, Bruce said he had to go to London ‘to finish his business’. I decided I’d better sleuth him.”
Hugh drove his brother to the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill Gate where Bruce had booked a room. The brothers shared this room for the rest of the week. “It was the first time we’d been at such close quarters since making models at Brown’s Green.” Hugh judged the situation grave enough to request three weeks’ leave. “I was there to look, listen and find out what was wrong. I knew from Elizabeth something was wrong, but as a surveyor you try and find out what the truth is before you arrive at any opinion.”
Bruce’s first appointment on Monday was at the National Gallery. He dressed in khaki drill slacks and a short herringbone coat and instructed Hugh to wheel him up the steps. “He brought with him an enamel snuff box which he had identified as coming from a painting by David,” says Hugh. Bruce outlined to the perplexed Director, Neil McGregor, his plans for the National Gallery to put on an exhibition of actual objects found in paintings and to embark on a comprehensive purchase of Russian icons. He also formulated the idea of creating a little room in the National Gallery to house the Homer Collection.
In the course of that week, Bruce embarked on a second buying spree. Their outings followed the itinerary established with Volans, now preoccupied with the Rimbaud opera. He bought a collection of 1920s Fortuny dresses, a medieval wall-hanging, some silver, a Cézanne watercolour – the last he painted of Mont Saint-Victoire and nearly all white – and a lump of amber with a fly in it. “I took that back a month later,” says Hugh. “I was sweeping up after what he’d arranged to buy with Kevin, but he was in control. Nobody could stop him. He was using his clout and taste to do it: ‘I’m getting my royalties, I’ve got my money coming in’.” And so Bruce assembled his collection, in the words of his psychiatric report, “without any appropriate consideration or bargaining”.
Sometimes he managed to escape Hugh’s surveillance. Francis Wyndham was walking down Westbourne Grove when a taxi stopped. “There was Bruce, frightfully skeletal. ‘I’m going to the Portobello Hotel!’ He was on the loose in his wheelchair. The driver looked worried.”
That evening Francis Wyndham turned up at the Portobello Hotel with David King. “Traders kept on arriving – like something out of the Arabian Nights. There was one man, one almost saw him in a turban, whose wares tumbled out onto the bed and something priceless rolled away and we were on all fours clambering for it.” Another dealer produced photographs of enormous gold lions in a restricted area of China: Bruce undertook to fund their removal at once. “Bruce kept on ringing up room service; he showed us a beaded Chanel suit he had bought for Elizabeth, like chain mail; he said Hugh was a genius. Then Robert Erskine came in. None of us gave the game away: he lifted us up into this realm of fantasy with the power of his storytelling and his sweetness. It was deeply disturbing and upsetting. He just wanted to get beautiful, rare things and put them in a museum. He was very happy.”
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