Bruce Chatwin: Lines from a lost world
The travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin died 20 years ago something of an enigma. A collection of his letters,
co-edited by his widow, Elizabeth, illuminates him anew
By Rebecca Tyrrel
7:00AM BST 27 Aug 2010
Elizabeth Chatwin's wooden house sits on a plateau in Oxfordshire, and in the fields around it graze her Black
Welsh Mountain sheep. The view from the small, deck-like sitting-room at the back of the house is first of all down
into a valley, then rises up beyond a pasture to pale hills. They are not like the monolithic mound of Elizabeth's late
husband Bruce Chatwin's third book, the novel On the Black Hill, which was probably inspired by the hill that hulked
over their earlier house in Gloucestershire. It blocked out light for the three months of the year when the summer
sun wasn't reflecting off the fields. 'No, it is very different. There is so much light here,' Elizabeth says, settling us
with coffee and biscuits. 'I have to keep drawing the curtains.'
In the corner is a small desk-type arrangement with a white Apple Mac. This is where Elizabeth sits to send and
receive emails from Jonathan Cape, the publisher of Chatwin's books, the most famous of which are In
Patagoniaand The Songlines. Cape is publishing a new book, Under the Sun – The Letters of Bruce Chatwin.
Elizabeth is co-editor along with Nicholas Shakespeare, the author of Chatwin's 1999 biography. Shakespeare
knew Bruce towards the end of his life and was himself a recipient of a few Chatwin letters, the last of which is
dated December 1988 and sent from Seillans, near Cannes. 'We are here till mid-March with a trip for medication in
Paris at some stage,' Chatwin writes. He was already very sick. He had Aids, and he never did get back to this
wooden house, dying less than a month later, on January 18 1989, there in France, in the house of his and
Elizabeth's friend the novelist Shirley Conran.
Shakespeare has taken two decades to collect the letters for this book, which starts with 'Dear Mummy and Daddy,
It is a lovely school…' This was sent from the Old Hall School in Wellington, Shropshire, dated May 2 1948. He was
seven years old. Elizabeth may not have known him then, but she manages to provide relevant footnotes even to
these early boyhood letters – a request to his parents for balsa wood for his model of Mevagissey harbour, for
instance, provokes the following footnote: 'He had great skill with his hands. He could paint and sew and mend
things, stick handles back on, so that you could never see the join.'
Chatwin was a war baby, born on May 13 1940. While his father, Charles, a lawyer, was away at sea with the Navy,
he and his mother, Margharita, stayed with a series of elderly relations in and around Birmingham. It was his
paternal grandmother, Isobel, who first showed him the remnant of hairy skin apparently belonging to a Mylodon, an
extinct giant ground sloth, that had been discovered by a cousin in Patagonia. Its mystery would take Chatwin to
South America.
After leaving the Old Hall School he went to Marlborough and from there, after taking an interest in antiques, he
went to Sotheby's, where his first job was as a porter. Chatwin met Elizabeth Chanler, who was working on the front
desk there, in 1961. They married in 1965; he was 25, she was two years older.
She is now 71. She is petite with olive skin and short black-and-grey curls, which must once have been very black
curls. Her face is wise and amused. She is wearing a fresh, blue Indian cotton shirt and chinos, and she is smoking
an Indian bidi, a tiny, rolled, taupe-coloured leaf, filled with tobacco flake and tied up with cotton. Bidis come in a
colourful soft packet, which makes them look almost fresh and healthy. They aren't, though. They are much worse
for the lungs and skin than regular cigarettes. Elizabeth has tremendous trouble lighting hers. The first 10 minutes
of our interview are punctuated by the sound of her blue Bic lighter failing her. 'You can't buy bidis in this country
any more,' she says with a slight, gravelly pant of exasperation, 'and in Paris when they realised they couldn't tax
them because they weren't really cigarettes, they made them illegal. Can you believe it?' So she gets them herself
from Bombay, where she goes every January for a month. 'Bruce hated the English climate in winter,' she says,
'and so do I. And that is how I get my bidis.'
Elizabeth – Lib, as her family call her – came from a rather refined and well-to-do background. Chatwin thought it
Jamesian and intended to write an epic saga inspired by it. She is a descendant, on her father's side, of John Jacob
Astor, the first multi-millionaire in America, and she was brought up in a big family home in Geneseo, a place
Chatwin describes in one letter as 'the back of beyond in New York State, near the Canadian border'. Shakespeare
writes in his Chatwin biography that Elizabeth was shaped by female ancestors interested in art and travel rather
than her conventional immediate family. Her mother Gertrude's relations owned the country's largest steel mill in
Pittsburgh; her father, Hubert, was a rear admiral with a thing for Tiffany clocks and French poodles. The Chanlers
had eight children and Elizabeth was, according to her mother, 'difficult, precocious, with a good mind'. She went to
school in Massachusetts, rode to hounds and had an ambition to be a vet. But her father disapproved so she went
to Radcliffe College where, still cross that she couldn't be a vet, she didn't work very hard.
'I had this ambition to come to England,' she says, sitting forward, elbows on knees, recalcitrant Bic in one hand,
unlit bidi in the other, boyish posture. 'I wasn't planning to stay for ever then. The Sotheby's thing was a carrot. They
had already sold some of my grandfather's collection and they thought there was more to come.' She explains that
most of the young men and women who were given jobs at Sotheby's in the 1960s were people with connections.
'With Bruce it was through a friend of his father's. Anyway, I wasn't homesick so I stayed. There were three or four
of us in the office behind desks with typewriters. We used to type up refusal notes. Someone would come in and we
would say, "Can I help you?" and you would get the right person to come down, and we got to know everybody.'
Including Bruce Chatwin, a beautiful, blond young man who was working in Antiquities and Modern Art. 'We used to
go to a tea-room upstairs in the attics. I wonder if it still exists. It was very old-fashioned in lots of ways. He was fun.'
Elizabeth believes that part of her attraction for Bruce was that she was American, 'a curiosity'. But who is this
curiosity who married him? It was a mysterious marriage in that Chatwin was a) a traveller and rarely at home, and
b) an active bisexual. Writing in 1968 to his friend Cary Welch, an American collector, Chatwin mentions that he has
bought 'the largest coco-de-mer I have ever seen. Beautiful and obscene. We take it to bed.' At the bottom of the
page is a terse footnote from Elizabeth: 'Nonsense.' Still, Shakespeare does not believe it was a 'chaste' marriage,
and insists that Chatwin's relationship with Elizabeth was his strongest and closest. He is probably right given the
marriage survived 23 years, albeit with a brief separation in the early 1980s, and ended with devoted nursing from
Elizabeth and what those who witnessed it described as a complete love between them. It was an enigmatic love,
which was fitting because Chatwin was an enigmatic sort of man.
WG Sebald, the German writer and academic, summed things up pretty perfectly when he wrote, 'Just as Chatwin
remains ultimately an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure
and intentions place them in no known genre.'
In the early 1990s, a few years after Chatwin's death, Elizabeth and Shakespeare travelled together to South
America to see for themselves what inspired In Patagonia, in every way the Chatwin-defining book. While theNew
York Times described it as a 'masterpiece of travel, history and adventure', it also proved typically controversial as,
after publication, the Patagonians lined up to claim that the events described were not always entirely true. By the
same token, when The Songlines, Chatwin's account of his attempt to fathom the beliefs of Australian aborigines,
was nominated for a travel-writing prize, Chatwin was the first to insist that this was not actually a travel book
because it combined fact with fiction.
This intriguing, some would say disingenuous, weaving of truth and story, along of course with his wonderful gift for
writing, came to be something of a trademark for Chatwin. For legions of readers it didn't matter that it was hard to
define whether he was a novelist, a travel writer or an essayist. Neither did it matter if it was hard to understand the
personality. Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian academic and politician and Chatwin's friend, referred to 'the character
he fashioned for himself'.
Chatwin had a good eye. He was good at being an expert, perhaps at too many different things, which aroused
suspicion. Shakespeare, in both the biography and his commentary in Under the Sun, is all too aware that Chatwin
had his fair share of detractors and doubters.
But he had many long-standing friends and correspondents: Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose house is close to
Kardamyli in the Peloponnese where, by a Byzantine chapel, Chatwin's ashes are scattered; John Kasmin, a
London art dealer with whom Chatwin travelled; Tom Maschler, his British publisher; Francis Wyndham, a colleague
and mentor from Chatwin's days as aSunday Times journalist. There are letters to Diana Melly, the wife of the jazz
singer George Melly, whose house he stayed in when he was first separated from Elizabeth, and James Ivory, the
American film director. An ageing Stephen Tennant was a camp correspondent, the model Penelope Tree was a
friend in Australia. Disappointingly there are no letters to Jasper Conran, the designer and son of Shirley Conran,
with whom Chatwin fell deeply in love – a contributory factor in the temporary separation from his wife.
Elizabeth left Sotheby's in August 1965, and Chatwin, by then a director, left at the end of 1966. Elizabeth left
because it felt wrong to stay after they were married. Chatwin, however, gave a problem with his eyesight as one
reason for his departure. In Shakespeare's biography there are long, detailed explanations of a slow-burning
disenchantment, things he didn't quite approve of, but also a rising ambition to travel and the re-emergence of an
old yearning to be an archaeologist. He left to start a degree course at Edinburgh University. He and Elizabeth had
just bought their first house together in Gloucestershire, the one under the monolithic hill.
'When we bought Holwell,' Elizabeth explains, 'it was practically derelict, and on top of that Bruce was accepted at
Edinburgh on the exact date of completion It was awful. What do you do? So we just did both.'
In other words, she began organising the doing-up of Holwell while he went to Edinburgh, and so began the pattern
of their marriage, much of it spent apart. Elizabeth would go and stay with Bruce during term time, although Stuart
Piggott, the professor of prehistoric archaeology at Edinburgh at the time, hints in his diary (as researched by
Shakespeare) that Bruce was often pleased when she left because he would be free for other relationships and
'feeling rather gay and relieved about it'. He would return to Holwell in the holidays but only when he wasn't
travelling. Sometimes she would join him abroad after a series of letters suggesting impossible journeys and vague
schedules. One of her footnotes accompanying a particularly convoluted travel plan reads, 'I flew straight to Kabul.
Can you imagine me driving all that way by myself?'
You can almost hear her tutting, and I ask her if she minded that she spent so very many of her married years in
this apparent chaos and on her own. 'Oh well, yes,' she says a bit wearily, 'he would go and leave me with all the
extremely boring and tiresome things to do, which would sometimes make me awfully cross. I mean, I didn't mind
being alone, it's all right, but it's just when you have to do things and you haven't got anyone to help you with it.'
Chatwin seems to have been very good at sending rather bossy instructions about the house: 'I still think that the
9in tiles would be nice in the dining room… Also make sure they sink a space for a door mat (big) inside the back
door.'
'Bossy? No, no it wasn't that,' Elizabeth says. 'No, they were Bruce's good ideas and I was glad to have them.'
One long letter, sent to Elizabeth from Vienna, describes the wedding of a beautiful Moravian girl to 'an ineffectual
young German from Magdeburg with a fall-away chin and pointed shoes.' Twenty years later it was to inspire his
novel Utz.
'Elizabeth, probably more than anyone else in his life, was most interested in what he was doing and seeing,'
Shakespeare says. 'She was in virtually every respect as curious and intelligent as he was, if not more so, with the
same interests and sense of humour.'
It was a marriage that allowed so much. Chatwin once wrote, in his never-published book on nomads, 'The husband
who wanders is far more likely to be surreptitiously unfaithful when at home.' When, in the early 1980s, his
bisexuality and attendant behaviour did all become too much for Elizabeth she wrote him a letter asking him to
make himself scarce. She got herself a job in a garden centre; arranged a money-making trek, guiding with her
friend Penelope Betjeman in India; and, after a particularly bad snowstorm and no Bruce around to help, she sold
Holwell and moved to this wooden house that she still lives in 30 years later. He, too, eventually lived here. 'He
loved this house in the end,' Elizabeth says.
Salman Rushdie (there are no letters to him in the book) was a friend of Chatwin's in the early 1980s, and he was in
Australia when Chatwin told him, 'I've been very unhappy and for a long time I couldn't work out why and then I
suddenly realised it was because I'd missed my wife.' And so she had him back.
Much easier to understand is his relationship with his parents, who lived until the end of their lives in Stratford upon
Avon, not far from Bruce's childhood home. His younger brother, Hugh, lives near there still and is a Green Party
representative.
Elizabeth describes the Chatwins as 'absolutely sweet. Bruce was devoted to them.' His early schoolboy letters are
generally signed 'Love you pieces', and those towards the end of his life are poignant for what they don't contain –
the crucial information that he had Aids. 'He didn't want his father to know,' Elizabeth says. 'But it was Margharita
who minded about Aids because she was going to lose him. After she found out I don't think she cared if she lived
or died. She was terribly sad for ever.' She died six years later in 1995. Charles Chatwin died just over a year after
that.
There were a few explanations that Chatwin gave for his illness; the most famous is that it was caused by a fungus
he came into contact with in a bat cave in Bali. He was one of the first high-profile victims of Aids, and because it
had become politicised he was criticised for not speaking publicly about it.
Sitting with Elizabeth in this house, I wonder about the time, before they finally went to France together, when
Chatwin's mind was affected and he embarked on mad, illogical buying sprees, going wild in Bond Street shops and
galleries. 'We sent it all back,' Elizabeth says. 'It was part of his illness. He was manic.' Chatwin wrote to Elizabeth's
mother, 'I have been buying for your daughter the beginnings of an art collection which I hope will be wonderful.' It
was a hark-back to his Sotheby's days.
The Songlines, which had recently been published, did make him more money than he had ever had before. But, as
Elizabeth says, 'Bruce still added noughts to it and all this stuff kept arriving that he couldn't afford.' She says that
since he died she has bought one 'good' piece of Chinese furniture, a table, which she keeps at her flat in west
London. 'That would have made Bruce happy.'
She rarely goes to London. Her life is here in Oxfordshire with her 30-odd sheep. People come to see her; a man
from the Bodleian Library arrives just as I leave, something to do with Bruce's papers, which are there. And she
keeps up with current affairs; when I ask her what it was like to go to Afghanistan (she joined Bruce there in 1969)
she gives me vivid descriptions of the beautiful people, their impeccable manners, the amazing landscape. And
then I get a good five minutes on what has happened to that country since.
She is a great reader; Trains and Buttered Toast by John Betjeman is the one she has on the go. Elizabeth
remembers how sad it was for Bruce when Penelope Betjeman died in India where she was living. 'Bruce was
travelling there at the time and the first he knew was when he read of it in the third leader in the Calcutta Times.
Poor Bruce, he rang me up in floods of tears.' To Candida Lycett Greene, Betjeman's daughter, Bruce wrote in a
telegram, 'Penelope died sitting upright laughing at her pony which had strayed into a wheatfield.'
These days it would have been an email and, as Shakespeare points out, it would not have survived. 'These
constitute possibly the last letters by a contemporary author, from seven years old to shortly before his death, that
are written on card and paper and not on Microsoft Word.'
Under the Sun is published for no anniversary; if it had come out in January it would have been 20 years since
Chatwin's death. If it had been timed for May, he would have been 70. But it is timely because the fans – in the new
literati and the young travellers setting off with In Patagonia andThe Songlines in their rucksacks – are dwindling. It
is hoped that a book of letters will help return the author, as Shakespeare puts it, 'to a more central stage than the
one where he has curiously languished over the past few years.'
In the meantime that other guardian of the flame, Elizabeth, seems happy in her wooden house. When I phone later
to check some facts she is busy moving sheep.