LOT 165, an auction at Sotheby’s in 1989: 700 pages of miscellaneous papers by Bruce Chatwin (estimate £3,000–5,000). Bruce had given these in a rubbish sack to Justine Tomlinson, his neighbour, when leaving Holwell for the last time. On 17 July, Hugh Chatwin wrote to Bruce’s agent Gillon Aitken: “Elizabeth’s disbelief and mine is that Bruce would never have given away such personal and varied material as a gift to anyone. An over-riding consideration is that he was always so particular NOT to allow other people to lever any meaning out of his writings – other than by finished work. It was his abiding practice to destroy papers for which he had no further use.” The sale went ahead. Lot 165 was sold (to Elizabeth) for £14,300, the money being used to buy Justine a violin.
THE MANUSCRIPT PAGES included notes on the Animal Style. After Bruce’s death, Emma Bunker, his fellow curator of the Animal Style Exhibition in 1970, was making a trek through eastern Mongolia. “I came over a low rise and saw votive rags strung around the waist of an ancient, weather-worn statue. I had the strange sensation that Bruce might just materialise, and tell me some outrageous tit-bit of local lore.”
THE PITT-RIVERS CATALOGUE, listing accessions to the Farnham Museum between 1880 and 1900, has since been found and is now in Cambridge University Library, but not yet gifted.
PETER WILSON died in Paris, 3 June 1984. Bruce had visited him a few months before. “I’m glad B. went to see him,” wrote Elizabeth to Gertrude, “so they ended on a good note. They hadn’t spoken for nearly 18 years & both were a bit nervous, but it was all right.”
JOHN HEWETT died in 1994, STUART PIGGOTT in 1996.
DONALD RICHARDS died in 1990, Sebastian Walker in June 1991, Robert Mapplethorpe in March 1989, Teddy Millington-Drake in 1994 – all from AIDS.
AKBAR KHAN went back to Afghanistan, married an American girl and went to live with her in Shawnee, Kansas. Joyce Khan wrote to Elizabeth: “Kansas is a 9–5 prison of apt. complexes, suburban shopping centres, neighbourhood parks & decent schools. But it is so empty at our economic level . . . Akbar says we are too much affected by the six o’clock news – its media hype.” Akbar’s goal was “to get the hell out of here – as soon as possible” and go back to Afghanistan to help refugees. He would run a rickshaw to earn money. “We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.”
MA UTZ. In 1989, David Sulzberger was eating breakfast at a café in Washington. “What should I find but ‘Ma Utz’s home-made potato chips’. I felt it was a solution to what had happened to the old concierge.”
REBECCA HOSSACK called her next show “Songlines”.
THE STREHLOW COLLECTION. On 29 May 1992 government agents raided Kath Strehlow’s house in Adelaide and seized books, papers and objects pertaining to Australian Aborigines. “One of the things bugging them,” she says, “was my friendship with the English writer Bruce Chatwin.” One of the last things Theodor Strehlow had said to his wife was that he regretted ever having had anything to do with the Aboriginals.
IN PATAGONIA, Bruce’s first book, has had a positive effect on the Welsh community in Argentina. In 1980, six years after Bruce was there, Gaiman was a dusty grid of pale red houses, two of them tea-rooms. The Welsh language was spoken by fewer than 2,000 in the region and in danger of disappearing altogether. In the burial ground at Chapel Moriah, the headstones of the founders were pitched at an angle and vandalised plastic roses lay melted under the sun. The place was sinking back into the desert.
Today, the village spreads in a new development beyond the Bethel chapel. There are seven tea-rooms, including the ranch-style “Caerdydd” which was favoured with a visit from Diana, Princess ofWales, in November 1995. Twice a week in January, a Welsh choir performs to bus loads of tourists, among them 500 Americans on a Cunard cruise down the coast. Gaiman is firmly on the map and the eight pages Bruce wrote about it are quoted on board by the lecturer on the evening the ship docks in Puerto Madryn.
In August 1998, one of the smaller Channel Islands was invaded, in the name of the King of Patagonia, by a small group led by the French novelist, and one-time Patagonian consul in France, Jean Raspail.
THE RUCKSACK, bequeathed to Werner Herzog. In the summer of 1998, Herzog went on an expedition into the Peruvian Amazon in search of an aeroplane that had crashed 27 years before. “I was booked on that flight, with eight actors, Klaus Kinski and some musicians. We were all taken off the list at the very last moment. We were totally disappointed.”
The plane exploded mid-flight and 92 people died. There was one survivor, a girl. She was strapped into her seat, spinning through the sky towards the jungle, which she remembers as looking like cauliflowers. She was ten days on her own. Fortunately she was the daughter of a German biologist who had taught her the ways of the jungle. She knew that when the caymans splashed in the water there was no threat: they were running away from her. When she swam down the river to safety, she knew not to put her feet on the river bed because of sting-rays. Herzog found her in Bavaria and persuaded her to help him look for the site of the crash, which three previous expeditions had failed to locate. He put into Bruce’s rucksack the fragments that they found: part of a grey plastic food tray, a woman’s hair-roller, the high-heel of a shoe, a metal disc from the flight deck – and brought out of the jungle film of the girl describing her nights alone.
In 1998, paperback sales of BRUCE CHATWIN’s works in Britain exceeded one million copies. He is published in 27 languages, earning more for his estate than he was ever able to achieve in his lifetime.
BOB BRAIN’s discovery, in Bruce’s presence, of the “earliest use of fire” was the cover story of Nature magazine in December 1988. Bruce did not live to read it.
Brain continues his search for the roots of predation. He is now digging in Namibia for microscopic fossils about 550 million years old. “Humans are a flash in the pan,” he says. “We wouldn’t even register on the fossil record.”
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AOR = Anatomy of Restlessness
CT = Colin Thubron
CW = Cary Welch
DM = Diana Melly
DR = Deborah Rogers
EC = Elizabeth Chatwin
FW = Francis Wyndham
GC = Gertrude Chanler
IF = Ivry Freyberg
IP = In Patagonia
JI = James Ivory
JK = John Kasmin
MB = Murray Bail
NA = The Nomadic Alternative
ND = no date
OTBH = On the Black Hill
PLF = Paddy Leigh Fermor
SH = Suzanne Hayes
SL – The Songlines
SP = Stuart Piggott
SS = Sunil Sethi
TM = Tom Maschler
VOO = The Viceroy of Ouidah
WAIDH = What Am I Doing Here
I: Fire
Was he a . . . AOR, 161
This is a detective story . . . C. K. Brain, The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy (Chicago, 1981), 3
The most compelling . . . SL, 268
the most stimulating . . . BC to GC, 3.11.84
Good feeling at Swartkrans . . . BC notebooks, Box 35, 2.2.84
This bone is . . . BC to GC, 3.11.84
When visiting the excavation . . . BC to CT, 9.7.87
Do I take it . . . BC to Bob Brain, July 87
the earliest use of fire . . . Nature, vol. 336, December 1988
Shamanism has always . . . AOR, 99
Aren’t all true healers . . . Box 34, 1988
Man is a talking animal, a storytelling animal . . . Box 30
I hate T. E. Lawrence . . . BC to CT, taped interview June 1987
Being an Englishman . . . Granta 21, 1987
To be unfindable . . . Independent on Sunday, 14.5 .95
le tombeau vert . . . BC to SS, 18.6.78
a quick note. . . BC t
o MB, December 1984
but mon cul is international . . . Stella Wilkinson
The moment he got out . . . From “A Nomad Collector” in Bruce Chatwin: Searching for the miraculous, ed. Alessandro Grassi & Neri Torrigiani (Arti-Grif, Florence, 1995)
I’m at my happiest . . . BC to Nicholas Shakespeare, June 1987
I fixed her . . . BC to EC, August 1970
slaves to a rare, authentic . . . James Pope-Hennessy, Robert Louis Stevenson (Jonathan Cape, 1974), 18
I’ve always loved . . . BC to CT, June 1987
I always feel . . . Anthony Powell, Journals 1990-92 (Heinemann, 1997)
Nearly every writer . . . New York Times, 2.8.87
He wanted to be there . . . From “A Nomad Collector”
II: “Let’s Have a Child,” I said
He really is splendid . . . SP diary, 1.7.68
On the Yorkshire Moors . . . BC to CT June 1987
This book is written . . . Box 34
This is a strange country . . . H. E Chetwynd-Stapylton, The Chetwynds of Ingestre (Longmans, 1892), 231
My trouble is . . . BC to DR, 25.9.87
Peter was scorning Birmingham . . . 1969, Box 34
The extraordinary thing . . . BC to parents, 25.8.75
They are the eyes . . . WAIDH, 9
I adored him . . . Box 41
I like to think . . . Box 35
When people start talking . . . BBC2, The Book Programme, 26.9.79
A swaying nipple . . . SL, 203
I watched the convoys . . . AOR, 4
the carriage door closing . . . BC to CT, June 1987
fantastic homelessness . . . SL, 7
All my early recollections . . . BC to CT, June 1987
I knew that once . . . SL, 7
Quite definitely a scar . . . Box 34
Long before I could read . . . Box 35
She was a tireless reader . . . AOR, 7
My old great-uncle . . . BC to Sarah Bennett, 11.11.88
III: The Cabinet
The mother gives . . . NA, 250, Box 12
Two snippets of red and green plaid . . . From Philip Chatwin’s unpublished essay, “Traditional Stories about the ’15 and the ’45”
Richter’s Anchor Blocks . . . Information on Julius Alfred Chatwin from Philip Chatwin’s J.A. Chatwin (Oxford University Press, 1952)
the beau idéal of the family lawyer . . . Birmingham Daily Mail, 19 September, 1903
for grose incompitanse [sic] . . . Information from John Crowder, Milward’s grandson
He was a friend of Richter . . . IP, first edition only, 148
were of a most grave character . . . Birmingham Daily Mail, 12 December, 1902
Dressed as a courtier . . . AOR, 4
All were very intrigued . . . Box 30
Bruce tells us . . . Kenneth Rose, diary
A real operator . . . BC to Kenneth Rose, April 1968
Every writer is a cut-purse . . . BC to CT, June 1987
off it . . . a wild one! Mary Crowder to BC, ND
You know how . . . BC to Uki Goni, taped interview, 30.1.80
Never in my life have I wanted anything . . . IP, 2
For those who . . . Box 35
things on holiday . . . Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance” in Representing the English Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt, ed. (University of California Press, 1988)
If nature speaks . . . Anthony Alan Shelton in “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance collections and the incorporation of the New World” in The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, ed. (Harvard University Press, 1994)
The Imperial mantle of 1125! . . . BC to EC, June 1967
I want him . . . Utz, 18
a chronic restiveness . . . Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton University Press, 1994)
Things are substitutes . . . Box 31
this world of little figures . . . Utz
IV: War Baby
To Freud we owe. . . Box 31
desperate attempts. . . Box 34
gazing squarely at the camera. . . WAIDH, 9
didn’t quite belong. . . BC to CT, June 1987
He took us bicycling. . . WAIDH, 9
found a family. . . BC to CT, June 1987
The place I liked most. . . From “A Place to Hang Your Hat”, AOR, 15
He said you could hear. . . BC to Valerian Freyberg, Easter 1978
Now moved to tears. . . Box 35
The house and garden . . . School prospectus, 1943
the arrival of . . . rejection NA, Box 12, 250–1
a small and hideous cottage. . . Box 42
This is the room. . . Box 31
a pivotal point. . . Box 41
Sam said there was . . . OTBH, 52
I became convinced . . . Box 41
My subsequent travels . . . Box 41
V: From Brothel to Piggery
These restricted horizons . . . OTBH, 13
on the wrong side . . . Charles Chatwin
My bedroom window . . . Sydney Morning Herald, 15.1.83
The absolute hideousness . . . Box 35
fairly derelict . . . Charles Chatwin
Old Sam had come to live . . . OTBH, 46
Once a year . . . BC Marlborough essay, family papers
absolute fairness . . . BC to MB, 9.2.86
Imagine the horror . . . Box 31
a buxom woman . . . OTBH, 58
I was a tremendous fabulist . . . Box 41
the boy who never smiled . . . From Margaret Chatwin’s broadcast, “Life on the Gold Coast No.”, Daily Life, ND
sad end in Africa . . . AOR, 4
He was his mother’s darling . . . 4.10.71
One drizzly morning . . . OTBH, 64
golden headdress . . . AOR, 4
I am starting for a long journey . . . The figurine is in Box 40
VI: I Know Where I’m Going
Old Hall, Wellington . . . BC to parents, 2.5.48, family collection
Dear Mummy, this is . . . BC to Margharita, 4.5.49
He is rather . . . Fee-Smith, summer report 1948
In a low liturgical voice . . . OTBH, 85
The Broad and Narrow . . . OTBH, 89
a hard, relentless hitter . . . Old Hall School Record, Lent 1951
do or die spirit . . . Old Hall School Record, 1951
Dear Mummy, Please . . . BC to Margharita, 23 January, ND
We had a film called . . . BC to parents, 10 October, ND
Please could you get me . . . BC to parents, 29 February [1949?]
I have just got a book . . . ND
I took a very . . . ND
Please don’t send me . . . 4 February, ND
the odd ones, the Victorian ones . . . BC to CT, June 1987
one of the surrealist books . . . BC to CT
Some children obviously . . . BC to CT
sort of one’s back door . . . Washington Post, 4.11.87
Conjouring has taken . . . BC to parents, 4 March [1951?]
I am sure he . . . Fee-Smith, report, Lent 1951
On Monday I had the wacking . . . BC to parents, 3.10.50
I was awfully embarassed . . . ND
The play is going . . . BC to parents, 10.12.50
Yesturday the fireworks . . . BC to parents, 6 November [1949?]
I enjoyed the fireworks . . . BC to parents, November 1951
hold on to . . . Reprinted in Old Hall School Record, 1957–58
VII: The English Schoolboy
he had to sell . . . Celestine Dars
Although the boys . . . Marlborough College archives