CHAPTER TEN

On 7 November 1985 Chatwin flew with Elizabeth on the first leg of their journey to Kathmandu, where they had taken a three-month lease on an unfurnished house. They stopped off in Hong Kong to make an excursion into China, the New York Times magazine having commissioned a profile of Joseph Rock, the Austro-American botanist who lived from 1922-49 in the Lijiang Valley. By late November, they were back in Hong Kong. They went to the races – where Chatwin placed a bet and won: he spent his winnings on some rare tea and a trip to the Taipei Museum in Taiwan. Then, while Chatwin lingered in Hong Kong and visited the bird market, Elizabeth flew on ahead to prepare the house in Kathmandu. On his arrival, he found her sick with bronchitis and the original house let to someone else.

To Ninette Dutton

c/o Lisa van Gruisen | Tiger Tops | Kathmandu | Nepal | Christmas Day 1985

Dearest Nin,

Well, I finally got here from China and Hong Kong. We had an unbelievably fascinating time in northern Yunnan, on the borders of Burma and Tibet. I have put off going to China for so long, for fear that the China of my imagination, a kind of ideal China composed of such congenial spirits as Li Po ⁷¹⁵ and Tu Fu did not exist. But they are still there! We met a village doctor and herbalist,⁷¹⁶ a sort of Taoist sage who went gathering herbs in the mountains, painted orchids and bamboos and wrote calligraphies of the great Tang poems.

Hong Kong’s a bit of a nightmare, but not without a certain fascination. On the Kowloon side is the area known as Mong Kok the most densely populated square mile in the world, but it really is astonishing how people can, if pressed, live in such numbers without friction.

To my bitter disappointment, our house in Kathmandu valley fell through at the last moment. The owner, a British ex-army type let it over our heads for six months instead of our three. Typical! I knew the house, knew it was somewhere I’d work well in, and it was quite a blow. Instead, for the time being we are in a minuscule cottage, built for one of the Ranas as a student right in the middle of town. Dust everywhere! And quite a lot of noise! Plus the fact that Kathmandu is the world’s Number One capital of respiratory diseases (that I didn’t know). Elizabeth promptly got bronchitis, and has half given it to me. This country is so wonderful the moment you get out of the city that I can’t regret coming here. But I think we’re a bit unsettled and quite honestly I think the only thing is to put on earplugs and knuckle down to the book for the whole of January and then think again.

I keep worrying about Piers Hill. Do let me know if you think there’s anything I can do to help.

Had a card from Robyn [Davidson] and Salman, who are using Homer End as a weekend retreat. Bitter complaints from them about the London fog.

All my love to you, Bruce

PS Tomorrow night, for dinner, we are meeting a Mr Chang, the Number One official in charge of foreign travel in Tibet. Now that really would be something, if we can swing a trip on him. All the places I dreamed of going to: Kashgar, Urumchi, The Takla-Maklan, Lhasa – are suddenly OPEN.

Over Christmas, the Chatwins were joined in Kathmandu by Kasmin – Ninette Dutton and Chatwin’s parents having cried off. But Elizabeth’s bronchitis had worsened. ‘The city was cold and damp and polluted, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t lie down to sleep.’ Early in the New Year, Kasmin suggested that they leave. The three of them flew to Benares and drove to Delhi where Chatwin had arranged to meet Murray and Margaret Bail. Dropping Kasmin at the Oberoi Hotel, the Chatwins accompanied the Bails to Jodhpur.There, after inspecting several houses, Chatwin found the ideal place in which to complete The Songlines, a red sandstone fort 20 miles from Jodhpur.

To Francis Wyndham

Benares | India | [January 1986]

Have fled from disease-ridden Kathmandu: the world’s No 1 capital for complaints of the upper respiratory tract – and am now on the loose in India. I have, even with near pneumonia and the constant upheavals, done some writing.

Love as always, BC

To John Pawson⁷¹⁷

Dear John,

At last I have an address that may last a month or two. Our rented house in the Kathmandu Valley turned out to be a catastrophe . . .

Can you let me know if the flat is now empty? And if not when it will be? Next, can you work out what’s owing? As it’s been such a long time, frankly I don’t want to spend all of it on repairs. Some can go to pay off the mortgage.

Can you arrange the shower to be tiled first, and put completely in working order? The same tiles as you have in Drayton Gardens. I think it’s very important that the whole thing is leak-proof. The next step, I think, should be to prepare the surfaces for painting, filling in old plaster etc. But I feel we should wait till I get back for its final colour. I don’t think I want it dead white. Or if I did want it white, then I feel the colour of the floor should be changed, bleached or something.

I’ll take a decision as to what to do with the place when I get back. Frankly, it must either be arranged so it is lettable: company lets etc., in which case I must remove all my things and have it anonymous. But the business of letting anyone into so small a space, if the things are there, is really not possible. Or at least, it causes more angst than it’s worth. Everyone, in some way or other, is territorial, and there’s no point in having a place that isn’t one’s own.

I have, here, a suite of cool blue rooms in a Rajput Fort. Turtledoves cooing, peacocks honking, and little children with bells on their clothes playing hide-and-seek in the garden below. I battle on with the arid landscapes of Central Australia.

Do send other news. The baby? The projects in N.Y.? I’ve been completely out of touch now, without so much as a letter, only some asinine telexes from Vanity Fair, for three months.

as always,

Bruce

To John Kasmin

Dear Kassl,

I must say communication in this country is really very dicey. We had calls from you, and then cancelled, and then when we did finally make it to the receptionist in the [Hotel] Oberoi [in Delhi] we were told you’d just gone. The first stab at this mythical beast ‘the place to write in’ was a dud. Babji Jodhpur said he had a cottage with a swimming pool in a mango orchard halfway to Udaipur, in a place called Ranakpur, where there is an astonishing Jain temple. The whole thing sounded wonderful, but wasn’t; in that a bus load of tourists were liable to swoop on the place for lunch, and besides it was all a bit cramped and there was no place to spread.⁷¹⁸ We did, however, at H.H.’s birthday celebrations, meet an extremely pukkah gentleman, ex-zamindar type who said he had a fort in the country. Absolutely secluded, on a lake, with an ageing mother in the zennana, a kitchen full of cooks with traditions going back to the 17th century – and I might say, fabulous miniatures (though if you breathe one word to the other H.H. [Howard Hodgkin], I’ll brain you!). On the lake, spoonbills, cormorants, pochards, storks, three species of kingfisher. Slight ruckus from the peacocks in the early morning. Anglo-Indian furniture of the mid-19th century. A cool blue study overlooking the garden. A saloon with ancestral portraits. Bedroom giving out onto the terrace. Unbelievably beautiful girls who come with hot water, with real coffee, with papayas, with a mango milk-shake. In short, I’m really feeling quite contented. The cold and cough has been hard to shake off. A dry cough always is. But thanks to an ayurvedic cough preparation, it really does seem to be on the wane. Today was Republic Day, with Mrs Chatwin on hand to present the prize to the volleyball team, and sweeties to 500 schoolchildren . . . she’s gone today via Jaipur and Agra [to Delhi] leaving me to sahib-ish splendour. Over the past week I have at last been cutting some fresh furrows with the book, and I don’t think I have quite the same sinking feeling that all the rest of it was in chaos. Murray [Bail] was, in fact, a great help with Australianisms.⁷¹⁹ I’ll have to watch the whole thing like a hawk. What one can’t help feeling is the degree to which English has been Americanised, compared to Australia. I’ve always thought that Australian writing, on a page, looks a little archaic: now I’m beginning to realise why. They went off to Udaipur, and we came here.

Lots of love to B[eatrice] and G[regori Von Rezzori] – and I hope all goes well with the party. And to you, always B

PS I wonder what you’d think of Gadda ⁷²⁰, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. My pal Calasso says Gadda is wonderful. Murray lent it to me. I love it.

To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

Dear Charles and Margharita,

Well, all we can say is some little fly must have buzzed in your ear a warning, ‘Don’t go to Kathmandu!’ I don’t know if you’ve heard what happened. The house we were promised: an Englishman’s house with servants and sofas, in the country etc fell through and E. was then offered a cottage orné, in a garden admittedly right in the heart of the city, not far from the Royal palace. She had to furnish it etc, which all cost money; and when I arrived from Hong Kong, I had, I have to say, misgivings. Almost immediately the offer came up of a trek in the mountains to prospect a new route for Shirley Williams,⁷²¹ so I went off walking for six days, came back feeling wonderful, only to find a message at the airport that E. had bronchitis, which for her, is very unusual. Within a couple of days, I then had a lung collapse on the scale of my Christmas performance last year.⁷²² The house, it turned out, was sitting in a pool of pollution, plus the fact that over the wall was the city shit-house, plus the fact that they burned the shit and other refuse at night so that the fumes would settle in our throats. All I can say is that it brought back a kind of bronchial misery I associate with Stirling Road winter ’47.⁷²³

Kasmin, who misbehaved dreadfully, then came up trumps and suggested flight, at once, to India: not next week, now. The first flight we could get on was to Benares, and to Benares we went. I’ve become completely neurotic about overweight, seeing that I’m forty kilos over, in books: but we sailed through that, arrived; went to watch the Burning Ghat (which is not at all sinister, but calming. You literally stand within, say 15 feet, of half a dozen burning corpses: and after you get used to the smell – though I with my cold, could hardly smell a thing – it all seems perfectly natural and harmonious). We then drove to Delhi along the Grand Trunk Road (all planes and trains booked) in a taxi. I hoped to show Kas the Martinière which is an enormous ‘French’ 18th century chateau, now a boy’s school, but since the fog was such that we couldn’t see the bonnet of the car, there seemed little point.⁷²⁴ On to Delhi where we stayed with my pal, Sunil Sethi, a journalist whom I first met while ‘doing Mrs G[andhi]’, now the editor of a new newspaper The Indian Mail. He has a new and beautiful wife: all very soignée. Then our Australian friends, Murray and Margaret Bail, he a novelist, she seems to run the welfare department of Sydney, and we went off to Jodhpur, where they had already arranged to go and I know the maharajah. The palace in Jodhpur is the last great ruler’s palace to be built anywhere: at least as large as Buckingham Palace and completed, finally, in 1949. My friend H.H. (or Babji), a totally wonderful character, replied to my note at once, saying he was overcome with his 40th birthday celebrations. Would we come for a drink now? This minute? Which we did: to find him also entertaining a real lunatic, the Belgian ambassador to Iran. The question then was how to get rid of the Belgian, and keep us back for dinner – which I might say then developed into a farce, with the ambassador hoping he’d been invited, we knowing he hadn’t but too polite to say so, etc. It passed off. I said I was looking for somewhere to write, and Babji immediately proposed a cottage in a mango orchard laid out by his grandparents at a place called Ranakpur, about 75 miles away (we went there, later, with the Bails; but it wasn’t really very satisfactory. Every day, tourists staying in one of Babji’s hotels would descend for lunch, and there was nowhere really for me to spread my books). The next night, however, was the birthday; the maharanee choked solid with diamonds and emeralds;⁷²⁵ all the courtiers in whirligig Rajasthani turbans and real white jodhpurs; the musicians playing ghazals; polo playing colonels; the British Ambassador – Wade-Gery,⁷²⁶ distinguished for a change! And then we met a real charmer! Manvendra Singh.

He comes from a line of Rajput zamindars,⁷²⁷ which is to say, a little bit more than squire: courtier and landowner to be more exact. I did my usual babble about finding a place to write in, and he said, ‘I think I have the place’. He had, too. Although he lives four days a week in town, he has his family fort, a building going back to the 16th century, around a courtyard with neem trees and a lawn, its outer walls lapped by a lake with little islands, temples on them etc. The rooms we occupy are a self-contained flat, bluewashed, with 19th century Anglo-Indian furniture, photos of maharajahs, and a never ending procession of birds. The country is flattish, and almost semi-desert; and since there was no monsoon last year, the situation is quite grim. But the lake, which is filled from a canal, is one of the only tanks in the region, and the stopping off place for all the migrants on their way to or from Siberia. Almost within arms reach are ducks, spoonbills, egrets, storks, cranes, herons, bee-eaters, a dazzling kingfisher which sits in the nearest tree. Each morning brings something new. Tea arrives with the sun. Siesta. Buckets of hot water. Breakfast. Morning coffee (real). Lunch. Siesta. Walk. More work. Then in the evening you hear the muezzin being called from the Mosque, and incredible bangings and trumpetings from the Krishna Temple, then silence.

I have the most charming study to work in, and work I do. I have learned long ago not to make any prognostications about when this book will be finished. All I will say is that I’ve enlarged it considerably since I’ve been here. There’s a tricky passage to come, and after that . . . Well, who knows?

But I’m afraid this gypsyish life cannot go on. I shall have, whether I like it or not, to get a proper bolt-hole to work in. Otherwise I find I can fritter away six months at a time without achieving anything, and that only makes me very bad-tempered. In a way, I like being in Italy, but the climate’s quite tough in winter, and the villages (because I’m sure it must be in a village) are usually quite depressing. Our old stamping ground in the Basses-Alpes is not half bad. Uzès is another possibility. What it’ll mean, I’m afraid, is that the London flat will have to go. I’m after 3 rooms: one to sleep and work in; one to live in, and a spare room. It’ll have to have a terrace, somewhere to sit out at least; and walks in neighbourhood. Greece, I think, is too remote; especially when one sees the problems Paddy and Joan [Leigh Fermor] have to face.⁷²⁸ I know nothing about it: but I’m told the mountain villages of Majorca are still extremely attractive. It’s no use thinking I could have something like Les Chênes Lièges:⁷²⁹ because I do need at least the minimum of a working library, and that will take up space. The point is that it must be available for me to descend on, as and whenever, I, not anyone else, wants. It must not be let out – as I’ve had to do with the flat, because it’s my experience now that the moment you let anyone in to your surroundings, they are suddenly no longer yours.⁷³⁰ Anyway, the conclusion of this little moan is that, as and when the book is delivered to the publishers, I am taking off some months a. to try and teach myself some Russian b. to find the bolt-hole and set it up properly.

I’m sending a post-card to College Street, in case by any chance, you’ve left by the time this arrives. Our contacts are c/o the above: and there is an emergency phone no. 21161 Jodhpur for messages. Manvendra Singh speaks perfect English, as does his wife, who is usually there. There are times, though, when only the servants are in the house. A cable, in a garbled form, gets through, because we’ve tried it . . . I don’t intend to budge until I see my way through towards the downhill slopes. If it gets too hot here, I’ll take, as they always did, to the hills . . .

The peacocks are honking and the cymbals sounding in the Krishna Temple . . .

Much love XXXX

PS E. tried calling you from Delhi but was told the number was unavailable.

To Deborah Rogers

Dearest Deb,

Who was it made the witticism ‘Any letter answers itself after six weeks’? . . . I’m completely out of touch, which is, as you know, the way I like to be.

I wouldn’t mind going to Prague for my next effort (something quite small).

To Murray and Margaret Bail

Dearest Murray and Margaret,

Well, I have to say the Fort is a real piece of luck. We couldn’t be happier here. There is just enough going on, either in the courtyard or by the lake, to arouse one’s interest, and not too much to distract me. I have had the devil of a time, though, shaking off that cold – but it does now appear to be on the wane. E. is off to Bombay to see her friends for a week: but I refuse to budge. It is ironic that this book of mine, which is a passionate defence of wandering, as opposed to sedentary habits, should involve its author in a more or less limpet-like existence. The squirrels have got so tame that they crawl up on our chairs.

I feel so juvenile compared to these Indians. Manvendra Singh is one year older than me, almost to the day, yet he represents the male world of my father: in his absolute fairness and tireless, unostentatious work for others. It would also be ironic if India were the last refuge of ‘the gentleman’.

I have to say I did enjoy the Gadda. I’m not sure if it’ll reach you with or without this letter. E. is posting a lot of things back to England by sea-mail, and she’s going to see, whether it’s not too exorbitant, whether she’ll send it by air.

I don’t know what it was about The Awful Mess . . . that made me like it so: even the sawn off ending I felt was right. If it had been written by, say, Nabokov, I wouldn’t have endured the literary facetiousness for two seconds. But this one I felt comes off.

As for my own ‘Awful Mess’ I’ve now got to the critical stage in which there is a sudden shift from Australia, in order to answer Pascal’s assertion about the man sitting quietly in a room.⁷³¹ If it comes off, then I’m on the downward stretch. If not, then there’s a real crisis.

And as for plans, my aim is to get the whole book checked and edited, and then make a flying visit to Oz to check the language. It is strange how elusive ‘it’ is as a written language, and how very different, in the subtlest ways, it is from English spoken in England.

I must stop, I’m afraid, because we have to go to the post-master for a tea-party: a 20-year old bachelor desperately in search of a fair foreign wife who is perpetually badgering us to swap our clothes for his, our watch for his, our pen, our radio . . . etc then she’s off to spend the night in town before taking the plane tomorrow morning.

I wasn’t really on best form on our little jaunt a. because of my cold b. the uncertainty of what I was doing. E. and I have the idea of moving here for 3 months every year. She sends all her love, and mine.

Bruce

To Diana Melly

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | February 15 [1986]

Dearest Diana,

. . . I have been working like an express-train: I wouldn’t say it is over yet: but what I have done is to compress all my material out of the files, notebooks, card-indexes (where it has been accumulating for 20 years) and have got it – nearly all – in the folder. Almost all the ‘Australian’ part of the book is done: so it remains – and this is the hardest part – to weave in the outside stuff. More and more, I’ve been making the discovery that I can only concentrate if completely taken out of my surroundings. But this wandering uncertainty can’t go on: it wastes so much time for one thing: so when I come back, I’m to sell the flat and look for a bolt-hole, somewhere in the Mediterranean, to work in: a place where I can lock the door and go in at any time of year. Easier said than done! I have a feeling that the fatal thing is to go for somewhere ‘unspoiled ’ – as if one isn’t a spoiler oneself – because it takes so much money and emotional effort keeping it unspoiled. I wonder whether those mountain villages in Majorca might not be bad . . . Not that I’ve ever been there! but I might go and have a look.

I’ve never felt more out of touch: not the least because Elizabeth insisted on having 3 months’ worth of our post sent air mail to Nepal – despite the fact I told her not to – including cheques from American publishers, magazines and God know what else, and the whole lot’s gone missing: apparently all foreign businesses there send all their mail by courier. So that may be that! A letter from my mother got through with a very good review of Emma [Tennant]’s book,⁷³² plus a profile [in the Times] by Nick Shakespeare: otherwise zero. I am reading, properly for the first time, Proust.⁷³³ Just shows you where things have got to! E. goes visiting the village ladies, learns Hindi from the Brahmin school-teacher, and I’ve not seen her happier or more cheerful in 20 years (the time we’ve been married!) I think even she is coming round to the fact that those houses, and that particular way of life, are as bad for her as for me.

A post card takes about 5 days to reach here – and a trickle has already started. E has gone to Bombay to see friends for a week. Tomorrow begins the big push forward (with the book) – I hope! – so the evening I’ve taken off to write letters.

Love to Francis, George, Tom and Candy –

and, of course you xxx B

To John Kasmin

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 17 February 1986

Dear KAZ,

(Kaz – Turkic verbal root meaning ‘to nomadise ’ or ‘travel’: hence – Kazakh Cossack etc).

But what terrible news of G.⁷³⁴ I’ll write to them next, but Lord knows it’s difficult enough when you can’t assess the situation. My own view – and you should pass it on if – and only if – you think it would be helpful, is that they should give up going to New York. Whenever I’ve seen Grisha in America, he always looks fraught, fractious and ill. The whole business of getting into a plane, followed by that particular city, can, if you have a heart condition and a tendency to cancer, only be BAD. I was horrified by that whole ridiculous business of trooping round Middle America in search of Nabokov.⁷³⁵ He should be in his study in Tuscany doing his own work: not playing to the American gallery, because ultimately his reputation in America is less important than anywhere. When the winter at Donnini gets too bad, then they should move into a hotel. There must be perfectly adequate doctors in Italy; or if not in Switzerland, to which he can go by car – but to be at the mercy of American medicine, however good it may seem to be, is a terrifying prospect.

Enough of that! I adore it here. Lunch yesterday, for example, consisted of a light little bustard curry, a puree of peas, another of aubergine and coriander, yoghurt, and a kind of wholemeal bread the size of a potato and baked in ashes. A sadhu with a knotted beard down to his kneecaps has occupied the shrine a stone’s throw from my balcony; and after a few puffs of his ganja I found myself reciting, in Sanskrit,⁷³⁶ some stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita.⁷³⁷ I work away for eight hours at a stretch, go for cycle rides in the cool of the evening, and come back to Proust.

I envy you your talent for rug-dealing:⁷³⁸ there’s something in me that stops me doing likewise. I cannot explain what it is. But you will, I am sure, make far more money than you imagine with Kaputt.⁷³⁹ I will, if you want, write a foreword.

But this peripatetic existence of mine must stop. I must have mon bureau, mes fauteuils, mon jardin (pas des bêtes!) (as Flaubert writes in a letter) – somewhere in a relatively good climate, which means the Mediterranean, and I must have it soon. God knows how I’ll raise the cash, if it means the sale of my London flat + my art then tant pis pour eux! I have fallen, happily, on my feet here: but to be in the situation of Kathmandu just isn’t on. I only like doing my work: not reviews, not articles, not commissions – and however eccentric or unsaleable it may get, I intend to go my own way. The latest development to ‘Australia’ in which I take a world tour – and more! – is quite something! I’ve even squeezed in Luderitz!⁷⁴⁰ XXX B

PS Maybe Uzès, too! Or Catalonia?

To Roberto Calasso

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 18 February 1986

My Dear Roberto,

Forgive the almost interminable silence. Things, as usual, got on top of me in England: and, as usual, I fled. First to China – where, in the remoter parts of, say, Yunnan, the world of Taoist gentleman-scholars, plant-hunters, poets, calligraphers – still very much exists.

I’ve had a terrible time with the ‘Australian’ book: have torn up 3 successive drafts: only to find, borrowing a leaf from La Rovina di Kasch⁷⁴¹ that the only way is the ‘cut-up’ method. Not that I can see the end – yet. But at least I think I know what I’m doing. You’re the first person I want to show it to – as and if and when it’s ready – even perhaps before. My friend Grisha von R[ezzori] has been horribly ill, heart-attacks and I don’t know what, and I must come and see them. Possibly on the way back from here – end April, beginning May, but I’m not sure yet of the dates. Will you be there?

As always, Bruce

To Elisabeth Sifton

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 18 February 1986

Dearest Elisabeth,

Ay! Ay! News of Grisha – bad! I had a post card from our pal, Kasmin, who was with us in Nepal for Christmas and then flew straight to the bedside. Can’t we/you/all persuade him not to go racketing around America. There must be proper doctors in Italy and there certainly are in Switzerland (to which he can go by car). He should stay in his study, in Donnini – or if Donnini gets too cold in winter, now that Southern Europe has its annual Scandinavian freeze, in a hotel. All that Vanity-Vogue life is not good for anyone’s health, mental or physical.

News is that I’ve been beavering away for 2 months in a Rajput fort: overlooking a lake, flashing kingfishers, peacocks on roof, cool rooms with photos of maharajahs etc.. No comment on the book – except that, once again, it’s unrecognisable. A third method now being tried – with, I think, greater success. We’ll see.

I may appear in the U.S. for my favourite sister-in-law’s ⁷⁴² wedding mid-May. But not to N.Y. except for a second to see you only – if you’re there. Can’t tell yet, because I don’t fancy leaving here without something to show for it. I’ve decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: ‘The only country in which I do not feel at home.’ E. is beginning to feel the same way: so we’re going to look for a bolt hole: Has to be in Southern Europe. But nothing elaborate – like Donnini.

Don’t bother to reply to this unless something crops up . . .

Much love,

Bruce

To John Pawson

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | [February 1986]

Monday 10am. 1 week after receiving yours.

Dear John,

What a nice, expansive letter! The first I have had in 3 months because Elizabeth, against my advice, insisted on having our mail sent AIR to Nepal, – and it has, all of it, failed to arrive: cheques for thousands of $, invitations, etc. – all, temporarily at least, gone.

First things first. The flat. I know you and I will not agree on the question of dead white. I suppose it’s because I’ve lived at various times in the incomparably beautiful whitewashed houses of Greece and Andalucia that dead white walls, in England, always used to be just that: dead – because of the English light. I agree that the existing colour was too creamy: what I’d like is something the colour of milk (if there is such a thing) – and anyway it doesn’t matter too much. I’m sure you’re right: that the shower, all the minor repairs, and the painting should be done together – but what about hocking the books off the shelves – and the enormous labour of getting them back again? Elizabeth returns to England on March 15; and if the operations were to coincide with her arrival, she would make arrangements to have the books sent down to Homer End. If, on the other hand, the paint job could be done around then, I’d be a lot happier.

My only complaint vis-à-vis last time was that the venetian blinds were not sanded down, which made them a kind of dirt trap.

We’ve decided to hang onto the flat indefinitely, because at that price, a roof over one’s head in London is going to be quite irreplaceable. I’m just not interested in letting it again. But the news also is that somehow, we as a family (my parents are going to chip in) are going to try and find (build?) a bolt-hole for me to work in – somewhere in the Mediterranean – for the winters and probably most of the year. I get such terrible colds and bronchitis in the winter; and if they start in November, they go on till May. And the longer I go on, the less I want to be for ever searching for a suitable place to write. It happens, for this winter, we’ve found one: but that was a lucky fluke. It is funny, too, that you should mention Majorca. I’ve never been – and, although I love Catalonia, I wouldn’t want to live there. But I’m told that if you clear off the coast (into the mountains), there are many parts of Majorca which are like the South of France was in the Thirties. I had in mind, the moment this book was in shape, to go and investigate the possibility of land on which to build. I need a courtyard, a flat roof with walls with a room open to the sky, 2 bedrooms (1 a library-cum-bedroom) and a living-room-cum kitchen with an open fire. All simplicity itself like that Portuguese architecture from the Alentejo. So you can think about it.

There is no more wilderness in the Med: so one just has to make a compromise. Any house built there must turn in on itself.

You said ‘at last a building in the round’. Do you mind my saying that you haven’t – or strike me as not having – done enough to apply your unbelievable gifts for coping with interior space to the articulation of facades of buildings. I cannot quite imagine how a building by you would be.

You also list a catalogue of complaints about your partners: but I’m afraid you’ll have to face the fact, with your sense of style and fastidiousness, that you’ll have to be a one-man band. In order to do what you have to do, you have to be the tyrant who directs, not the partner who cajoles – and, in fact, many people would prefer working for you as an assistant rather than having a slice of the cake.

The only way to run a business these days is to keep a very tight ship – and not to sacrifice control. When scribbling off that article, I couldn’t help having misgivings about POSA:⁷⁴³ it struck me as a silly name, but that’s beside the point: the work on the flat was yours. Others may contribute very valuable bits here and there, but they are not stylists – or if they are, not in the same sense as you. They are, however, bound to be fractious if they are all supposed to be on one level.

I hate submarines – I’ve been down in one once – from Plymouth. Hate the claustrophobia: the same as the clum-pf of an aircraft door closing.

We had a wild dust storm this morning, but that has now cleared and the birds are chirruping again. I want to go on a tour of Rajput and Mughal architecture. The place we’re in is fairly marvellous, but it is ironic that my book which is a passionate defence of movement should involve its author in years of limpet like existence. as always, Bruce

PS I suppose, thinking about it, the choice of Venturi⁷⁴⁴ was almost a foregone conclusion. As I said, they were after something ‘Neo-classical’ and, I’m afraid, hell bent on an American – who are supposed to know so much more about Museums than Europeans – though with the exception of the Gardner Museum in Boston, I don’t think I’ve ever been in an American Museum whose pictures didn’t cry to be released from it.

I’ve written a very irreverent piece on the Norman Foster Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.⁷⁴⁵ As you may know it went over budget four times over – and is, I think, absurd: a maintenance nightmare, not a vision of the future at all, but a backward, thoroughly retrograde glance back to Soviet Constructivism plus a sort of nostalgia for the glorious days of the Royal Navy. I managed to find the ‘feng-shui’ man: that is to say, the traditional Chinese geomancer whose advice the Bank took – and ignored – before commissioning the architect – and you should hear some of the things he said about the cross-braces!

To Sunil Sethi

c/o Manvendra Singh | Rohet House | Jodhpur | India | 5 March [1986]

Dearest Sunil,

We’re coming to Delhi by train from Jodhpur, arriving on the morning of the 12th. E. leaves for London the night of the 13th, and I thought I’d see her off. Is that OK vis-à-vis the room for a few nights? If not we can easily stay – and after a most abstemious two months in whatever hotel. But unless I hear to the contrary, may we assume it is on? Could you, if not too terrible a bore, do something for me. Inquire how – and the quickest way possible – for me to extend my Indian visa? It runs out on April 6th and I will want to stay at least another month – preferably without having to nip up to Nepal and back. I rather dread the bureaucracy of the immigration dept, so maybe there’s a travel agent who can expedite it.

Anyhow, I’ve decided to come back here after Delhi, immediately after getting the visa, for another spell of work: at least until the end of the month. I have a vague sense that, in that time, I can get the whole thing between covers – which would mean I was free to pack up my notes and books etc., and be free to toy about with the manuscript. I can’t see any point in moving from here – even in the heat (there are some cool, almost subterranean rooms) – and one is so well looked after, and above all, CALM. A new place might disrupt things. After that, I thought I’d take to the hills for a bit, and then maybe fly direct to America, to my favourite sister-in-law’s wedding in mid May. Who can tell?

I wanted to write to you anyway to say how much I approve of the Indian Mail. No waffle! Clear, sensible English – such has not been seen in an English newspaper for the past 20 years – and none of the carping tone. You were absolutely right to leave India Today: re-reading it critically over three issues, I find the tone there both gloomy and trite: an unpleasant combination. It’s about time people realised just how wonderful India is – not in the exotic sense – but day to day realities. Watching Manvendra here coping with the drought is the kind of thing that Mr Naipaul ⁷⁴⁶ would never ‘see’.

We are still without post from Europe, but tant pis.

Much love, B

To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]

Dearest Paddy and Joan,

. . . We’ve managed to install ourselves in the wing of a Rajput Fort about 30 miles from Jodhpur, belonging to one of the old zamindar families: the grandfather, who is still omnipresent in the memory of the retainers, was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and one of the best polo players in the world. The suite of rooms we occupy is where he’d entertain his English friends. The walls are blue; there are punkah hooks, old dhurry carpets, chintz curtains, prints of the Quorn or Pytchley, others of Norwegian fjords and wolves: 18th century miniatures of the family, enthroned or on shikar [hunting] and replaced, gradually, by the same subjects taken by the Rajputana Photo studio. My study leads out onto a terrace along the battlements, about the size of Montaigne’s, from which there is a view of the lake, a Shiva temple on an island, the family memorials (in Mughal style) onshore and a rest house for visiting sadhus. There was an old rogue who arrived a few days ago, in saffron, with a hennaed beard ⁷⁴⁷ down to his ankles: a scion apparently of a great Rajput house who had quarrelled irrevocably with his wife and taken to the road. After a puff or two of his ganja I found myself reciting in Sanskrit the opening stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita.

The food is delicious and brought by delicious girls on solid mahogany trays. Last week, for example, we had for lunch a light Little Bustard curry, a purée of peas, another of aubergines and coriander, and bread rolls, the size of potatoes, baked in ashes. The lake is seething with duck – shovellers, scaup, pintail, pochard – awaiting the call to fly back to Siberia. Herds of black buck come down to drink with the camels. There are spoonbills, storks, cranes and ibis; and yet I long for walks in the Mani.

The temptation to take a siesta instead of a walk is irresistible. I’ve never been so immobile in my life. The afternoon sun is very strong; and the plain beyond, having missed last season’s monsoon, is an ashen wilderness with willy-willies blowing across it.

The book is by no means done; I’ve decided the only thing to do is to let it run its own course and shove everything in. I’ve been casting back over my old notebooks, and have managed to find a place for things like this:

Djang, Cameroon

There are two hotels in Djang: the Hotel Windsor and, on the opposite side of the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor

Or:

Goree, Senegal

On the terrace of the restaurant a fat French bourgeois couple are guzzling their fruits-de-mer. Their dachshund, leashed to the woman’s chair, keeps jumping up in the hope of being fed.

– Taisez-vous, Romeo! C’est l’entracte

Don’t bother to reply to this except, perhaps, a post-card to say when the book⁷⁴⁸ is coming out; and whether, if I broke my journey in late April or May, you’d be there. Elizabeth has to go to her sister’s wedding in the middle of May; and if I had something to show the other Elisabeth [Sifton] I should be tempted to go too. But that’s all too early to decide. I might even stay here, and take to the hills. I’ll be going to Delhi to prolong my visa and pick up mail around March 15th.

Much love, as always

Bruce (and Elizabeth!)

To Ninette Dutton

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extentsion | New Delhi | India | 5 March 1986

Dearest Nin,

I am sorry for the prolonged silence. At the beginning of the winter (northern hemisphere) things got terribly out of hand. As I think I jotted on a card, we had this house all fixed up in the countryside outside Kathmandu, with wonderful views of the mountains etc. But then the Englishman to whom it belonged (Perfide Albion!) welshed out on the deal and we were left with a kind of cottage orné in the heart of the city: pretty enough superficially, but terribly damp and with the most fragrant smells of the city sewer. Nepal really is one of the great unhealthies. Much more so than India, and both E and I were really quite ill, before deciding to flee to India. Nothing makes me in a worse temper than having set aside X number of months in which to work, then to find one is junketing round from hotel to hotel, looking for a place to settle. We did, however, meet up with Murray and Margaret Bail in Delhi. They had been in Simla for Christmas – against our advice! – in a freezing hotel three feet deep in snow. Anyway, we all went to Jodhpur whose Maharajah is an old friend of mine: we share a part of some really riotous times at the Cannes Film Festival of 1969.⁷⁴⁹ Although he has no political power he has now become a most magnificent ruler and also owns the biggest palace in India. At his 40th birthday party, we were introduced to all his courtiers, mostly polo playing types; thakurs that is landed gentry. Among them a total charmer (not a polo player) called Manvendra Singh, whose grandfather was Colonel of the Jodhpur Lancers and fought in Flanders etc.

I did my usual spiel about being desperate for somewhere to write, and he said ‘Why not write in my fort?’ We’ve been here now for 2 months: a 17th century Rajput fort, on a lake, with a Shiva temple on an island, every kind of birds: ducks, flamingoes, spoonbills, pelicans. A burble of life going on in the courtyard below: the buffalo to be milked, the laughter of children, the howling of peacocks – at seven as alarm call! I never left. I hardly even went to Jodhpur, only 20 miles away except to get typing paper. I won’t say I’ve finished the book: that would be going too far – but I do have the sense of an ending. The book is not just an ‘Australian’ enterprise, but sets down a lot of crackpot ideas that have been going round my head for twenty years. So this is not three years work but 20. We shall see. The terrifying moment will come when I dare to re-read what I’ve done.

We are, in fact, leaving tomorrow. Elizabeth has to get back to her lambing. The past week has really been too hot. It would be fine if I didn’t have something critical to do. But it’s too hot to take exercise, and the mind starts to go soggy too. So I’m taking her to Delhi and then going for the rest of the month and most of April to a guest-house⁷⁵⁰ we’ve heard of not far from Simla. Spring in the hills should be lovely, I hope! My aim is to get a rough first draft, and then take it to America. In the editing stages, I think I will have to come to Oz: when going through some of it with Murray, I realised just how easy it is for a Pom to slip up on the tiniest mistakes.

I’ll get the post from my pal Sunil in Delhi. It’d be lovely to get a scrap of news. Goodness I hope every thing’s gone OK vis-à-vis Piers Hill.⁷⁵¹

All my love to you, dearest. E sends hers.

Bruce

PS We have to leave! They’re all hotting up for the Holi festival. This means grinding accordion music all night!

To Charles Way

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 9 March 1986

Dear Charlie,

I had – feeling rather guilty – at one moment thought of getting on a plane and coming back again. But one of my (? unconscious) calculations was that the first productions of On the B.H. were by no means going to be the last. I had an immediate sense, on meeting you and the Made in Wales people, of the rightness of the enterprise: and obviously I was right!⁷⁵² Many congratulations! I long to hear, and see more. But don’t bother to reply to this, unless there’s something urgent. I shall be here: the above is a better contact for mail – until April 25th, when I’m coming back.

I had no idea, when I set out to do the current book, what an enormous enterprise I’d let myself in for. I, who liked to think of myself as a kind of miniaturist, am now faced with hundreds and hundreds of chaotic pages. But I think that’s the way it has to be. Every book – though of course not a play – seems to have its length predicated by the opening paragraphs, and one simply has to go on to the bitter end and then take stock of the matter. I do like being out of touch, though. Yours was the first – and welcome! – letter I’ve had in a month or so. I suspect the local P.O. of monkeying with the mail, but we have vaguely kept in touch with the weather in Britain etc . . .

As always, and again a thousand congratulations and thanks, Bruce

To Murray Bail

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 11 March 1986

Dear Murray,

Hello there! The Fort at Rohet has proved a resounding success. The rooms were cool. I shed my cold. The desk was at the right height. Coffee – real – came at the right moment. There were bicycles to take some exercise. The timeless scenes of Indian life went on from day to day. The arrival of a new species of Siberian duck on the lake and, one morning, flamingoes were about as much as we got in the way of excitement. We went to Jaipur in the car for two days: Jodhpur twice, for the afternoon. Otherwise, a hard slog. I won’t say I’m finished: but the experiment I was dreading so much, and have been putting off for months, is done – and there’s now a lot of book. I’m only capable of functioning away from all the hullaballoo – although I sometimes find myself envying your very calm house in the middle of all that hullaballoo. Considering I now hardly ever set foot in a bookstore, or read literary journals, it’s quite amazing how you and I pick up on the same things. I thought Kolyma Tales⁷⁵³ very wonderful; what I would love to try and get down someday is the rightmindedness of Russians in extreme adversity. Also Ray Carver⁷⁵⁴ has been a favourite of mine since the first collection came out and a girl who, herself, came from Washington State advised me to get them. He really does make most other American writers look like so much junk. He’s the only one who knows that there is such a thing as prose rhythm, and he has to be the most sensitive observer of the American scene. He’s apparently spawned a troop of imitators, none of them any good. I’m told he’s at work on a big novel, and it’ll be interesting to see.

[Mario Vargas] Llosa’s quite something, if you get a chance to meet him. Robbe-Grillet⁷⁵⁵ is something I’ve never taken in.

I’m off this evening to the hills: a guesthouse with separate chalets in a nature reserve at Bhimtal, owned and run by ancient refugee Czechs.⁷⁵⁶ E returns to England and her lambs. We shall see.

Forgive this chaotic note. Hot evening outside. Whirling with mosquitoes. Rohet, alas, has been unbearable for the past week with temperatures in the hundreds.

Write to England sometime but don’t bother here unless urgent. We are still without our backlog of three months post, and chasing letters round India is not a pastime for me.

Love from E. Love to Margaret and from me to you both.

Bruce

Magnus Bartlett (b.1943) had been the photographer on Bruce and Elizabeth’s trip to Yunnan. Based in Hong Kong, he was the publisher of a series of guides to or around China, including Tibet by Elizabeth Booz. He had persuaded Chatwin to contribute a short piece to a forthcoming illustrated guide to Hong Kong, ‘on a Feng Shui man “doing” the just-finished Norman Foster HSBC building’.

To Magnus Bartlett

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | 12 March 1986

New Delhi but as from: Homer End, Ipsden, Oxford

Dear Mag,

. . . I have, in the past, had requests for just one page of manuscript from well-wishers in the United States. At Rohet, where we were staying, I was often appalled by the way in which our servant would empty the contents of my waste paper basket from the rampart, littering a patch of ground in front of the lake with a kind of papierarie.

This is not a complaint – and not to be broadcast around – but I don’t think you have any idea of my intense loathing of magazines and magazine editors: there are, of course, individual exceptions, but each case must be judged on its merits. I would like to think that I never have to work for one again.

I want you to get Ducas ⁷⁵⁷ to get my piece back from the Connoisseur – though they must pay me (to England) the kill fee. And I want the original copy, too. I’m not interested in publishing it, and certainly don’t want him touting it round the New York magazines, thank you. If anyone’s going to do that, I will or my agent will – but I don’t want to get any crossed wires . . .

Otherwise, nothing dims the memory of Yunnan – and nothing would have been better than my 2 months in Rajasthan – in that I’ve got a terrific lot done. I’m now going to the hills till the end of April – hoping, at last, to break the back of it. All contact had better be through E. in Oxfordshire. She leaves first week in May for the US.

All the best to you and Paddy, Johnson and Prof Tea.⁷⁵⁸ The Tibet guide is first rate. I’ve read Elizabeth Booz’s introduction – a masterpiece of tact and common sense. Pictures A1 etc. E. would like to know more of what’s involved vis-à-vis the Silk Road project.⁷⁵⁹

To Magnus Bartlett

c/o Sunil Sethi | G9 South Extension | New Delhi | India | [March 1986]

Dear Magnus,

Postscript to last screed. I’m told by people here who’ve worked for them, that the editorial staff of the Connoisseur (the word is enough to make one squirm) are deeply bonkers: and that to do anything for them, even at a long distance, is to drive oneself into the looneybin with them. So please get the text back!

To John Kasmin

The Retreat | Bhimtal | Nainital | India | March 1986

Have moved up into the hills. Old English tea plantation now run as a hotel guest house by Czech adventurer type, ex inhabitant of Punta Arenas in Chile, refugee from Germany in the 30’s for having thrown a knife at Hitler. B

To Elizabeth Chatwin

Dearest E,

Quick note because some U.S. Embassy people are going down to Delhi and will post it, a saving of five days or so. Yes. It’s very nice here: not too cold. I have a house to myself, with a verandah and Banks’s rose clambering over it, a view of wheatfields etc. On the mountain above lives a charming sadhu, the father of the Forest, whose business it is to protect the trees. Old Smetacek has gone to Germany for four months. Sounds an incredible character. Hounded from Germany for throwing a knife at Hitler;⁷⁶⁰ Chilean citizen (resident of Punta Arenas, where else?). Ended up in Calcutta during the war, and married a Muslim girl through correspondence column in the newspaper. I think I’ll stay on as long as possible. There’s no point in lumping oneself to Manali, or even Nepal, when the Kumaon is obviously very fascinating. Badrinath is a two-day bus ride: besides this is Jim Corbett⁷⁶¹ country – and as I’m writing about man-eaters I appear to have landed in the right spot. Below the sadhu’s cave there is a leopard lair, but the animal is supposed to be very friendly. The Smetacek dogs though, if you take them on a walk, are inclined at certain places to get jittery.⁷⁶²

xxx B

To Elizabeth Chatwin

Dear E.,

Well, it’s still very nice here but the heat increases each day with hot dusty winds coming from the plain. I’ve done some very good work. The cut-up method does actually solve the problem. I’ve just been writing the tramp and the Arctic tern. I’m not going to finish needless to say, but I’ve done all the back-writing i.e. there are now few gaps in the narrative.

I’m not quite sure what to do. I’d like to go on a trek before returning and in a week or so I’ll be in the mood to pack the book in for a bit. I can go north of here into the Kumaon Himalaya with Peter S[metacek], youngest of the sons, or, I suppose I could go up to Nepal. But Peter has been ill with measles and the after-effects are slow. Manali, I gather, is out of the question. Chandigarh is cut off by the army: you can’t get to Simla, and they anticipate that no one will go to Kashmir the whole year. The situation is apparently quite dreadful, much worse than anyone anticipated. I certainly intend to be back by May 1st or so . . .

Will you tell [John] Pawson I do want to be able to use the flat in May and June. None of that hanging round waiting for them to finish.

Nice birds here on my terrace. A Himalayan magpie, blue and white with a tail 2 feet long. The scarlet minivet, the Himalayan barbet and the funniest whistling thrushes that look like Barbara Cartland.⁷⁶³ Then pheasants . . .

The V & A story⁷⁶⁴ . . . just shows you. Things are both tough and vulnerable but no safer in a museum than in some old Rajasthan fort.

This letter is going to be posted in England by some friends of S[unil] who are flying to London tomorrow night. Apparently the cheapest ticket now is Air France, but with a 6-hour stopover in Paris. I shall try and get Vayadoot⁷⁶⁵ down to Delhi because that Trunk Road is a nightmare to travel down, to say nothing of the cost . . .

My Dad has given us 6000 quid each from family capital: useful for paying off the mortgage: but I told them I’ll only accept it providing they can call for it back if needed.

Must stop because they’re going.

xxx with love B

PS I have an idea. I should like to go on holiday in Turkey in September with the car and windsurfer. So don’t make too many plans.

‘We’ve just had bad news from India.’ Back at Homer End Elizabeth was telephoned in April by Dinah Swayne, who ran the office for Penelope Betjeman’s trekking tours in the Western Himalayas. ‘I thought of Bruce immediately. Why do they know? But it was Penelope.’ Penelope Betjeman had died on 11 April while leading a tour in the Kulu valley. Soon afterwards, Chatwin telephoned from India.‘It was the only time I’d known him in tears,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He was shattered.’ In Wales, during his separation from Elizabeth, Penelope had become, he said, ‘a sort of mother to me’.

To Candida Lycett Greene⁷⁶⁶

Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | [April 1986]

PENELOPE DIED SITTING UPRIGHT LAUGHING AT HER PONY WHICH HAD STRAYED INTO A WHEATFIELD STOP IN ACCORDANCE WITH INDIAN CUSTOM HER ASHES WERE DIVIDED INTO TWO PARTS STOP ONE PART WAS SCATTERED AT KHANAG WHERE SHE DIED STOP THE SECOND PART INTO THE BEAS RIVER THIS MORNING TEN DAYS AFTER HER DEATH

To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

Kulu | Himachal Pradesh | India | 24 April 1986

My dear Paddy and Joan,

I got your card at the same moment as news of Penelope’s death – and decided to go up to Kulu at once. Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carried her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the R[iver] Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with Om mani padme hum⁷⁶⁷. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oakleaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.

The doctor, who was with her on the trek, gave ‘heart-attack’ as the cause of death: but the word ‘attack’ is far too strong for what happened. If ever there was a ‘natural death’, this was it. All morning she was in the best of spirits – although people in the party said she was already beginning to dread going back to England, to pack up her house etc. Around 10, she called in on her favourite Pahari temple. The priest, who knows her, welcomed her to join in the puja.⁷⁶⁸ She received the blessing and then rode on towards a place called Khanag. There she dismounted to rest, laughed (and scolded) at her pony which had strayed into a wheat field, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.

Although it’s nowhere finished, I had – only two days before – been writing the final chapters of the book: of how Aborigines, when they feel death close, will make a kind of pilgrimage (sometimes a distance of thousands of miles) back to their ‘conception site’, their ‘centre’, the place where they belong. In the middle of nowhere in the desert I was taken to see three very old Aborigines, happily waiting to die on three metal bedsteads, side by side in the shade of an ironwood tree.

Penelope, as I’m sure you know, would cheerfully discuss the pros and cons of going back to India to die: she could never quite work out how to arrange it. Over the past year or so, she would discuss, quite rationally, the building of her new ‘Anglo-Indian’ bungalow in Llandrindod Wells;⁷⁶⁹ I don’t think she ever believed in it. She had sworn never, ever to head another trek to Kulu, but when the offer came, her instinct must have told her to accept.

I’m writing this in a smoking tea-house waiting for the bus to take me and the Tibetan porters on a Penelope Memorial Walk.

Over the years I’ve heard so much about Kulu from her. On my first night, in the village behind Kranti’s house, there was a dance of young boys in pleated white skirts (like evzones)⁷⁷⁰ with cockades of monal pheasant feathers. The silver trumpets looked entirely Celtic, and the village houses with their dragon finials and mica-glinting roofs could easily be the Heorot⁷⁷¹ in Beowulf.

I said, months ago, that I’d go to Elizabeth’s sister’s wedding in Upstate New York on May 10. Since Delhi is about half way round the world, I’m going to slip off to Japan for a week (I have a Japanese publisher!). Then to England – at last! I do hope this catches you before you leave and that I’ll find you both in London around 20 May.

Much love

Bruce

To John Pawson

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 30 May 1986

1. Part of my anxiety about the shower stems from a previous experience. For my (or rather Christopher Gibbs’) cubby-hole in Albany, John Prizeman ⁷⁷² installed just such a shower with a zinc tray underneath. That, however, did not prevent it leaking and, over 10 years or so, causing dry rot damage to the tune of some thirty thousand quid – for which we were mercifully insured, but it did cause a very unpleasant scene.

2. [Can you ask] your people to rip out the existing shower as soon as possible or at least to make sure there are no drips. I also, as you may remember, have had an altercation with a dreadful woman downstairs over a leak when the plumbing was being put in.

3. We have used, very successfully, in the big room here an off-white which is Sanderson’s 7-13 P, and I would like to repeat the same in the flat.

Otherwise all is well. I’m sorry I didn’t come over: but with a lot of friends from abroad in London, I was on the run. Work on the book recommences this morning.

All my love to Caius,⁷⁷³ Bruce Chatwin

To Sunil Sethi

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 25 June 1986

Dear Sunilito,

I have you terribly on my conscience: the truth is, at the end of the day, when I’ve written myself into a standstill, I develop such a horror of words that to write a simple thank-you letter is worse than Tantalus rolling the stone. It absolutely goes without saying how incredibly grateful we are, to you and Shalini, for ‘the winter’, no less.

I have not been entirely idle on your behalf, however. I have talked to Shelley Wanger at House and Garden who is very interested in the Sarabhai house ⁷⁷⁴ – and positively wishes you’d write that famous letter. I have made tentative enquiries about the most discreet of ‘house photographers’ [Derry Moore] and believe he would love to do it, and work with you. So, the ball is in your court!

I have also been to Smythsons.⁷⁷⁵ There seem to me to be two possibilities: one an elongated address book with a green leather binding and space for oodles of numbers; the other a slightly more portentous affair with marbled end papers, less space, and more gilding. The choice is yours. Either’s fine by me. But how to get it out to you?

The book creaks on, at snail’s pace: but it is some book. I’m not too discouraged because it really is about something. E. is well, and obviously cock-a-hoop to be back among the sheep: not without the usual attendant dramas!

Japan was the nastiest place I’ve ever been, except, of course, to where I then went, the USA. The most decadent corrupt country in the world, well on the way to ruin, if you ask me. Europe on the other hand strikes me as being rather less hopeless: certainly with the Libyan bombing,⁷⁷⁶ the scales have fallen from people’s eyes. Paris without Americans was unbelievably charming – and the French, to my surprise, were revelling in their absence.

No possibility, I suppose, of your visit here!

Much love, to you and Shalini

Bruce

To Ninette Dutton

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 26 June 1986

Dearest Nin,

I’m sorry for the apparently endless delay in writing. The fact is that I’ve been straining to get the first draft finished: and by the end of the day, the nausea for words – even words to one’s dearest! – becomes positively stifling. Coupled with the hideous complications of our post – I may have told you, three or four months’ worth, presumably scattered somewhere on the streets of Kathmandu.

The news – no longer new – was that our best of all possible friends Penelope Betjeman, dismounted her horse while leading a trek in the Western Himalaya, sat down to rest on a mossy bank covered with violets and wild strawberries, hooted with laughter at her pony as the Tibetan boy tried to lead it up the path and, then, as he looked up, he was in the nick of time to see her curl up like a child going to sleep. Perhaps half a second and that was that. I was starting out on a trek of my own. We had saddled up, brought the provisions, when I bought The Times of India and found a perfectly beautiful third leader describing the death of the daughter of the Founder of the Modern Indian Army, Lord Chetwode. It was called ‘Journey to the beginning’. She had been there with her mother in 1933 and couldn’t really think of anywhere else as home. Her ashes, in accordance with Hindu custom, were half saved in a brass pot: so ten days later, I and her friend Kranti Singh stood on a rock in the river Beas, her favourite river in the world, and tipped her in. The ashes, I have to say, were not like the Western world’s idea of ashes. They were bits of skull and bouquets of budding English oak from the ex-Resident’s garden, the pheasant-eye narcissus and Tulipa cashmeriana. Anyway they all went into the rushing snow-water and we let out a loud Penelope-ish ‘ha! ha!’ – and that was that!

After leaving Kulu, I went down to Delhi by plane with a vague idea in my head that since, in a week’s time, I had to be at my sister-in-law’s wedding, it might be possible to make a stopover in Japan. Which it was, and which I’m afraid I hated. Such a treadmill, and so poisonously ingrown, that after the exhilarating breezes currently coming out of China, I profess myself a Sinophile and a Japanophobe (if that’s a word!). Not that rather wonderful things didn’t keep happening to me: but the $96 to the airport with no cheaper way, struck this mean old bastard with horror.

Then the USA where as you’ll know the really pleasant surprise was seeing Tisi [Dutton] about the only one too! What a madhouse! I was completely put off kilter by a friend of mine ⁷⁷⁷ for whom I had said, three years ago and in a moment of extreme weakness, that I’d write an article on her Tuscan tower, where I sometimes write. She needless to say wanted it in House and Garden so she could rent it to the rich. I was left holding the can, with an ultimatum that it had to be done by the end of the week: so all my days and quite a lot of the nights was consumed writing this wretched piece, which because it was so wretched was inordinately difficult to do. Alas! our planned lunch with T[isi] fell through. I hope she does get going with Bob and Victoria Hughes.⁷⁷⁸ They were here last weekend, reading the book too, with snorts and guffaws, so that was also quite encouraging. Robyn D[avidson] and Salman are in a split-up situation of high oriental drama. The passions of the Thousand and One nights have been generated and it’ll take quite a long time for the episode to simmer down . . . must end.

Elizabeth sends fondest love and I, B. When’s the American lap?

PS Invitation to the Perth Festival in Feb. Think I’ll miss. We may have a bit of time then: and if so will come anyway.

To Ninette Dutton

To Francis Wyndham

To John Pawson717

To John Kasmin

To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

To Deborah Rogers

To Murray and Margaret Bail

To Diana Melly

To John Kasmin

To Roberto Calasso

To Elisabeth Sifton

To John Pawson

To Sunil Sethi

To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

To Ninette Dutton

To Charles Way

To Murray Bail

To Magnus Bartlett

To Magnus Bartlett

To John Kasmin

To Elizabeth Chatwin

To Elizabeth Chatwin

To Candida Lycett Greene766

To Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor

To John Pawson

To Sunil Sethi

To Ninette Dutton

To John Pawson⁷¹⁷

To Candida Lycett Greene⁷⁶⁶