Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

  857 E.C.: ‘A drawing for a carved box, of wild men and women in a tangle of leaves and owls.’

  858 Chatwin had met Marshall, a young documentary-maker, on 17 July 1987. H.M.: ‘We were going to make a film together and planned to go to Russia and look at the roots of modern Russian art in icons.’ The following day Chatwin signed a copy of The Songlines. ‘To Harry, a sequence of non-sequiturs’.

  859 In The Songlines Chatwin writes of his uncle Geoffrey Milward – a friend of Emir Feisal and who had fought with Lawrence – ‘who died, chanting the suras of the Glorious Koran, in a hospital for holy men in Cairo’.

  860 John Chanler’s son.

  861 The collection of French eighteenth-century drawings made by Gertrude’s father, Irwin Laughlin (half of which is now in the National Gallery in Washington), on which Chatwin drew the idea to form The Homer Collection. He planned to leave it to Elizabeth.

  862 Bail divorced in 1991; he m. 2nd Helen Garner.

  863 In March 1988 Rebecca Hossack opened a gallery in Windmill Street, the first in Europe to exhibit Australian Aboriginal painting.

  864 David Miller (b.1966), an undergraduate at Cambridge reading theology. His mother June MacLellan had worked with Chatwin at Sotheby’s. She moved after her marriage to Edinburgh, where Chatwin visited her and saw Miller in his cot.

  865 C.W.: ‘I had a thought that Bruce would like the poetry of Alun Lewis [1915 – 44] who died at the very early age of 28, in Burma, it is generally agreed by his own hand. The poem I could always quote was a romantic one which describes the last time Alun ever saw his newly-wedded wife Gweno in a boarding house in Liverpool the night before he left for India. It’s called “Goodbye”. Verse 5 reads: Everything we renounce except ourselves;/Selfishness is the last of all to go;/Our sighs are exhalations of the earth,/Our footprints leave a track across the snow.’

  866 Chatwin’s secretary at Sotheby’s, Sarah Inglis-Jones (b.1943) m. 1971 John Bennett.

  867 Philip Chatwin.

  868 Shakespeare’s novel The Vision of Elena Silves was published in September 1989 and dedicated to Chatwin.