Bruce Chatwin (96 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
“He said: ‘Werner, I’m dying.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ And then he said: ‘You must carry my rucksack, you are the one who must carry it.’ And I said: ‘Yes, I will proudly do that.’ And I have his rucksack and it’s such a dear thing to me. Let’s say if my house was on fire, I would throw my children out of the window, but of all my belongings it would be the rucksack that I would save.”
In public, and with Bruce, Elizabeth kept up a brave face, ruthlessly nursing him. They were on that expedition still, together on that Himalayan slope. She treated him like a lark with a broken wing. “Elizabeth’s credo was what he wanted, he had,” says Shirley Conran. “If it was poppy seed from the Crimea to scatter on his cornflakes or special teas sent by Paddy Singh from India, or honey from a special bee on Hymettus, Elizabeth got it.”
“Instead of bursting into tears,” says Francis Wyndham, “she’d go in a car miles and miles to get milk when no one else wanted to eat. She kept the front up, which was like her and what Bruce saw in her.”
The others around the couple would never know the extent of Elizabeth’s grief. Only once, at the very end, would she lose control.
Bruce deteriorated fast. When Shirley Conran left Seillans for her home in Monaco on 31 December, he was functioning “normally”. She had showed him how her dictaphone worked so that he could continue with his novel. By the time Kevin Volans arrived a fortnight later, he was “dreadfully far gone”. He was incontinent, thin, exhausted by the coughing. The white fungus in his mouth made speaking difficult. When Volans played him
The Songlines
quartet, which had premiered at the Lincoln Centre in November, all he could say was: “Lovely.”
The Songlines
quartet, which had premiered at the Lincoln Centre in November, all he could say was: “Lovely.”
Shirley Conran arrived back the same afternoon in a black Jaguar. “She took one look at Bruce and climbed into bed with him and cradled him,” says Volans. “That took guts because he didn’t smell nice.” Shirley says: “He could not move. His face looked liked melted wax. He could just say ‘Granny’ which meant the rubber ring for his bottom and ‘Burnie’ which meant he needed the bottle. He had christened the pee-bottle ‘Birdie’ because it was shaped like a Picasso bird-vase, but it came out as ‘Burnie’.”
That night she read him the Lord’s Prayer. “Afterwards, he said: ‘So simple’.”
Later, he asked Volans to cradle him too. “I lay down with him and held him and he’d say, ‘Hold me, hold me, not enough . . .’”
Francis Wyndham and the Mellys arrived before lunch the next day, Saturday 14 January. Worried that Bruce would not last long, Millington-Drake had urged them to hasten immediately to Seillans. Wyndham says: “We stood making nervous conversation on the terrace and Diana asked: ‘Do they know he has AIDS?”’ This, Shirley told Wyndham, was the first time the word had been used. He says: “We realised the extent to which it had been covered up. It was such an odd situation that everyone was inconsistent. We were all neurotic and not making sense. Shirley was very much the hostess, but with three women in the same kitchen all trying to help, there was a clash of personalities. We got on about as well as people on the
Titanic
.”
Titanic
.”
Also at Seillans was a homeopathic doctor from London, David Curtin. Elizabeth had contacted Curtin to oversee Bruce’s return to England. She was hoping to fly back with Bruce on Monday and put him in The Lighthouse, an AIDS hospice off Ladbroke Grove.
They took turns to sit at his bed. Diana Melly fed him a morsel of salmon. “It sat on his tongue and he wouldn’t swallow.” Volans likened the atmosphere to “a circus”. At some point Prouvost-Keller arrived on his motorbike in his black leather bomber-jacket with “Do it to me, baby” patched to his sleeve. Shirley produced a crate of champagne and by Saturday evening everyone was slurring their words. Volans says: “Shirley, tanked up, would say: ‘Bruce, I know you want to die, but I’ve got to disappoint you because you’re
not
dying.’ And every time she said ‘dying’, he shrieked: he was petrified of dying.”
not
dying.’ And every time she said ‘dying’, he shrieked: he was petrified of dying.”
“It was the most awful thing I’ve ever experienced,” says Wyndham. “It was like being in hell and he was in hell.”
Bruce had been having recurrent nightmares. At night he had visions of a face, frightening him. Shirley wrote in her diary: “On Sunday a.m. I heard screams and went to B’s room at 6 a.m. before it was light. He was terrified of ‘the face’ that he saw in his dreams. Eliz slept in his bed, which comforted him . . .” Elizabeth says, “He would lie awake and didn’t want the light turned off It was a human face, like a personification of his pain.” She would shout at him: “He’s not here, Bruce! He’s not here!”
Volans says: “She was trying to force him to hold on. She was doing everything she could to keep him alive.” To Volans, it was at this point that Bruce’s life most closely mirrored Rimbaud’s. “As Rimbaud was passing through his ‘
saison en enfer
’,” Bruce had written during his first journey to the desert, “he realised that the Beast was winning.”
saison en enfer
’,” Bruce had written during his first journey to the desert, “he realised that the Beast was winning.”
In
The Viceroy of Ouidah
, Father de Lessa also suffered Rimbaud’s dark dreams. “He kept seeing an animal called the Zoo. The Zoo had the head of a monkey, a dog’s body, leopard’s claws, and it would sprawl lecherously across his path and twitter like a bird . . . Dom Francisco decided to ship him back to Bahia. But the Zoo was also in the sea; for when they strapped him aboard the canoe, he was still screaming: ‘The Zoo! The Zoo!’”
The Viceroy of Ouidah
, Father de Lessa also suffered Rimbaud’s dark dreams. “He kept seeing an animal called the Zoo. The Zoo had the head of a monkey, a dog’s body, leopard’s claws, and it would sprawl lecherously across his path and twitter like a bird . . . Dom Francisco decided to ship him back to Bahia. But the Zoo was also in the sea; for when they strapped him aboard the canoe, he was still screaming: ‘The Zoo! The Zoo!’”
Bruce spent most of Sunday 15 January, his last day conscious, lying in sunshine on the terrace. “He had been very disappointed not to have won the Booker Prize,” says Shirley. “Teddy Millington-Drake telephoned from Italy and said Alberto Moravia had loved
Utz
and had written a full page rave review. I went straight and told Bruce and he gave a long slow smile and he just said: ‘Better than the Booker’.”
Utz
and had written a full page rave review. I went straight and told Bruce and he gave a long slow smile and he just said: ‘Better than the Booker’.”
That afternoon Shirley was alone with him on the terrace when the sun went in. “It grew cold very quickly. Somehow I humped him over the steps.” She carried Bruce inside, into the summer salon, and lay him on a chaise longue, kneeling beside him. “I said: ‘I love you, Bruce,’ and to my joy he clearly said with an effort: ‘I love you, too.’ They were his last words to me.”
At 3 a.m. on the morning of Monday 16 January, Elizabeth came into Kevin’s room. She needed his help urgently. Bruce’s fingernails had turned blue. “He was in a coma. He was not responding and he never regained consciousness,” says Elizabeth.
An ambulance was called. Diana Melly and Shirley Conran ran out in their nightgowns and helped a coiffed stretcher-bearer to support Bruce’s body over the steps. Elizabeth climbed in the ambulance beside him and it disappeared, jolting down the steep, cobbled hill.
He was taken to the state hospital in Nice. “I was allowed to sit with him until the staff came, then told to leave,” says Elizabeth. She sat in the waiting room until mid-morning when the others arrived from Seillans. They filed in to see him. He was lying on a steel bed, peacefully asleep, his face attached to an oxygen tube. His skin had gone back to peach colour. “He looked suddenly so young,” says Volans.
Elizabeth did not go back to the hospital that day. “We felt she had been being generous in sharing Bruce,” says Shirley. “When she didn’t want to stay with him, nor should we. She was very quiet, in her own space.” Shirley booked Elizabeth into the Acropolis Hotel, close by, while Wyndham, Volans and Diana Melly returned to London. Meanwhile, Hugh was telephoned and asked to fly out.
Bruce was kept on oxygen throughout Monday and all through Tuesday night. Elizabeth had promised him he would not have his life prolonged artificially. On Tuesday morning, she cracked for the first time: “He’s already dead,” she told the hospital staff. “That isn’t Bruce. It’s a shell. They’re
making
it breathe.”
making
it breathe.”
On Tuesday afternoon shortly before five, Hugh Chatwin turned up at the hotel and then he and Shirley Conran went in to pay their last respects. “His eyes are closed. He is grey. He is quiet,” wrote Shirley in her diary. They returned with Elizabeth to Seillans.
At 10.45 on Wednesday morning, 18 January, Shirley wrote: “Bernard has telephoned E. B is being taken off everything. There is no point. It is a matter of hours. He’s breathing on his own.” At 1.35 p.m. she telephoned the hospital.
“Awful Swiss yodelling while on hold on hospital phone. Died 5 minutes before. That golden child of fortune, whose christening was attended by all the good fairies, has now felt the bad fairies come true. The darting dragonfly has been trampled. And the world is truly a sadder place because BC is no longer in it.”
“As far as I was concerned,” says Elizabeth, “he had died two days before.”
XLI
The Chatwin Effect
Heroic saga – a young man, bursting with vigour and often credited with superhuman audacity in childhood leaves home on a long journey. After a sequence of Walter Mitty-ish adventures in remote and fabulous lands, he faces the jaws of Death.
—BC, notebooks
ON 19 JANUARY, JAMES LEES-MILNE WROTE HIS FINAL ENTRY
on his old neighbour and walking companion: “Bruce Chatwin is dead. Not surprising from all accounts. A grievous loss to literature, the papers say. For one so comparatively young and only recently acknowledged the obituaries are amazingly long and eulogistic. You would suppose Lord Byron had died.”
on his old neighbour and walking companion: “Bruce Chatwin is dead. Not surprising from all accounts. A grievous loss to literature, the papers say. For one so comparatively young and only recently acknowledged the obituaries are amazingly long and eulogistic. You would suppose Lord Byron had died.”
When Bruce died many people felt a sense of loss out of all proportion to their expectation. “His energy, his enthusiasm, his passion was fructifying,” says Colin Thubron. “He was expansive; he opened horizons; you always felt with Bruce he was capable of coming back with the key to everything.”
On a train to Zurich, Clem Wood picked up a copy of the
Guardian
and saw a photograph of Bruce. “I was delighted. I thought it was another review. When I realised that I was reading his obituary, I burst into tears.” The art historian Hugh Honour was in Venice. “We came down to breakfast and the whole of the middle section of the
Corriere della Sera
was taken up under a single banner headline:
Chatwin è morto
.” Jack Lang sent a telegram from Paris: “
J’apprends avec tristesse la mort de Bruce Chatwin. Avec lui, c’est un esprit multiple qui nous quitte. Un homme dont les livres nous avaient appris mieux connaitre les hommes
.”
Guardian
and saw a photograph of Bruce. “I was delighted. I thought it was another review. When I realised that I was reading his obituary, I burst into tears.” The art historian Hugh Honour was in Venice. “We came down to breakfast and the whole of the middle section of the
Corriere della Sera
was taken up under a single banner headline:
Chatwin è morto
.” Jack Lang sent a telegram from Paris: “
J’apprends avec tristesse la mort de Bruce Chatwin. Avec lui, c’est un esprit multiple qui nous quitte. Un homme dont les livres nous avaient appris mieux connaitre les hommes
.”
The condolence letters registered a note of collective disbelief. “I’ve minded so much about his death,” wrote Ivry Freyberg. “I just haven’t been able to realise it’s true.”
Richard Bull was moved to describe his impact: “Despite the large number of people one meets as a doctor, it is only the very rare person who can be said to influence your life; and I feel Bruce was one of those people for me.” A friend from New York wrote: “He was a wild man, and somehow left everyone with two eyes in their head, working feet and a pen feeling that they had misspent their attention . . .” Peter Levi was inarticulate: “I can’t write this letter, I’m afraid.”
On 27 January a class of students from a junior school in Leicester sent Elizabeth a package of letters and drawings. “My teacher Mrs Fawcett told us about Bruce Chatwin and told us he liked books,” wrote one of the girls. “I like books too and I hope your
[sic]
feeling well.” Sirish Patel told her: “We did a play in our school about the Aborigines and how the world began. It was very good. Your husband’s book made it happen.” Farren Sunley was one of the actors: “I held the map up and shouted ‘I am a member of the Koala clan’, I started at Shark Bay and ended at Sydney.”
[sic]
feeling well.” Sirish Patel told her: “We did a play in our school about the Aborigines and how the world began. It was very good. Your husband’s book made it happen.” Farren Sunley was one of the actors: “I held the map up and shouted ‘I am a member of the Koala clan’, I started at Shark Bay and ended at Sydney.”
“He was one of the nicest men I ever met,” wrote Anne-Marie Mykyta from Adelaide. “It is not too much to say that I loved him. On the day I heard of his death, I lay on my bed and read
Songlines
again and wept.” Many of the letters were signed by unknown names. Elizabeth wrote back to one: “It comes as rather a shock to find that people think of him as a great man. I think he would have been surprised too.”
Songlines
again and wept.” Many of the letters were signed by unknown names. Elizabeth wrote back to one: “It comes as rather a shock to find that people think of him as a great man. I think he would have been surprised too.”
On 20 January, Leo Lerman cabled her from New York: “The longest journey this one, and he always loved journeys.”
“The stars know the time when we die,” Bruce had written in his notebook. Several saw an inevitability about his end. “Great people have an inbuilt instinct about how long they’re going to live,” said Pam Bell, “a sort of rhythm to the way they rule their life.” This explained the disciplined economy of his writing, his manic behaviour, his impatient appetite for experience. “He was like a little firework all the time,” says Barbara Bailey. “He never could stay long because he’d wear you away. That is why he died. You can’t be a beautiful firework and live on and on.” His dense, intense, short life had a preordained and mythic quality. It delighted him to lead everyone in his fantasies. By the end they had become a reality.
He died young; but not so young as most people think. At 48, he had outlived many of his influences: Humphrey Chatwin, Robert Louis Stevenson, T. E. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Robert Byron, Arthur Rimbaud. Had he lived, it is tempting to imagine Bruce as the polymathic André Malraux. He might have grown to resemble his description of Klaus Kinski playing the Viceroy of Ouidah: “a sexuagenarian adolescent all in white with a mane of yellow hair”. And behaved, perhaps, like Charles Milward the Sailor, home from the sea. “Charley the Pioneer with his restlessness gone, pottering round his garden, the Elms near Paignton.” Yet few of his friends could picture an elderly Chatwin. “I have great difficulty imagining him as an old man,” says Robert Hughes. “I think he would have been very crabby.”
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