Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Nicholas Shakespeare [Shakespeare, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Literary Collections, Letters, Literary Criticism, General, Diaries & Journals, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780385498296
Google: bX48FRc8upMC
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2000-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

XXIII

I Don’t Know What You’ll Make of It

I recall that on the 31st August last you telephoned to say that you were now writing books and that your first story would be published on 21st September, and I am wondering, please, what monies you are expecting from this source. At the present time the Bank’s only security for your account is the guarantee of Mr C. L. Chatwin for £500 (unsupported) and a life policy surrender value £87.

—Lloyd’s Bank, Birmingham, to BC, 7 October 1977

ELIZABETH AND HER MOTHER JOINED BRUCE IN LIMA. HE HAD set off for Patagonia with a rucksack and a little duffel bag. “When we met him five months later in Peru he was in a small room and the walls were lined on at least three sides with stacked up books that he’d picked up. And he’d left a lot of stuff in Buenos Aires and he had to go back and pick that up.” Together they toured Peru in the Barnetts’ camper van. On 5 May, he arrived in New York, impatient to start writing.

Unwilling to work at Holwell, he rented a house on a private island off the Connecticut coast. Fisher’s Island was an enclave of Waspdom, “stuffy as all hell”, but he found the “dreamlike surrealist atmosphere” agreeable.

Stone Cottage belonged to a family of mattress makers and was the gatehouse to their “Norman castle”. It had a conical tower, gabled windows smothered in ivy and lay at the tip of the eight-mile island on a promontory surrounded by wind and sea “and flights of ferocious seagulls”. Elizabeth bicycled up and down to fetch groceries in her basket while he arranged his notes.

A number of eccentric writers had borrowed the gatehouse, named after a turn-of-the-century Tolkien called Stone who had created an imaginary language for his novel Islandia. “It is slightly like a set for a Hitchcock movie,” Bruce wrote in one of the very rare letters he sent from Stone Cottage. He apologised to his parents for the silence: “I’m sorry I’m so hopeless at writing. When you pore over the typewriter all day, it’s the last thing you want to do.”

On 25 August, he was able to tell them he had completed half the book. “There is a 3-inch pile of manuscript, much of which will have to be scrapped when I come to the revision. The island has been well worth while.”

He was reluctant to return to London until he had finished, but could no longer fend off the Sunday Times. He had written to Francis Wyndham: “I don’t want to receive any official S. T. correspondence in the Argentine.” To justify his $3,500 advance from the magazine, Bruce now submitted two profiles: on the Guggenheim family and on Maria Reiche, a German expert on the Nazca Lines whom he had visited with Elizabeth and her mother in Peru. He also planned a third article. “I am going to the West to Utah to do an article for the Sunday Times,” he wrote to his parents.

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