Bruce Chatwin Read online

  Then, in Vogue, Margharita read an article about a firm of fine art auctioneers. She canvassed Charles. “What about Sotheby’s for Bruce?” Mastering his reluctance to send Bruce to London, Charles contacted one of his clients, a chartered surveyor who had sold at Sotheby’s a Monet “of a train going over a bridge”. On 15 April 1958, enclosing Guy Bartleet’s letter of introduction, Bruce wrote to Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s. “I am very anxious to learn the best way of making a career in Fine Art. If you would find time to see me before I go back to school on May 1st, I should be most grateful.” A meeting was fixed.

  The interview went well. “I very much enjoyed meeting your son and shall look forward to seeing him again during the summer,” Wilson informed Charles on 7 May. He had asked Bruce to get in touch in June, when it would be known whether there was a vacancy. “If there does happen to be a job available,” Bruce wrote to Wilson, “I am very keen to take it.”

  And there matters rested. A meeting proposed by Wilson for 3 July fell in the middle of Bruce’s A Levels. (He would get passes in Latin, Greek and Ancient History). Two further appointments were cancelled at the last minute, one coinciding with the family’s sailing holiday to St Malo. At last, on Friday, 26 September, an interview took place with Richard Timewell, Head of Furniture in the Works of Art department.

  “I was told he had just left Marlborough,” says Timewell. “It’s very difficult, when you’re trying to engage someone, to ask the right questions. I said to him: ‘Do you know Avebury Manor?’ I’d had a lot to do with the sale of that house. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I used to go as a paid guide on Saturday afternoons.’* He was then able to go through the house room by room and describe everything and say what it was. I was enormously impressed. I took him on.”

  Bruce liked to remind Margharita that he had accepted the job with her in mind, to honour her wishes. “I was sent to Sotheby’s very much against my will by my mother who decided it would be much better for her precious little child to be working in the safe firm of fine art auctioneers than to travel to Kenya.” Years later, sick and dying, he told her: “Mummy, you ought never to have let your little boy go to London at 18.”

  VIII

  The Smootherboy

  An emporium where nobody expects you to buy, a museum where all the objects are changed once a week like the water in a swimming pool . . .

  —Cyril Connolly, Sotheby’s Yearbook, 1960–1

  A LITTLE AFTER 9.30 P.M. ON 15 OCTOBER 1958, SOTHEBY’S NEW chairman Peter Wilson raised his gavel to auction seven Impressionist masterpieces. He had staked his career on this moment, the culmination of two years of intense negotiation with the estate of the German-Jewish collector Jakob Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt’s executors had first approached Christie’s, traditionally auctioneers to the nobility, requesting a big social splash. Sir Alec Martin had pulled a long face at the suggestion of an evening sale with bidders in black tie and evening dresses, and was not impressed by the expectation of a lower than usual commission. The executors next sounded out Sotheby’s, auctioneers to the carriage trade. Peter Wilson revelled in special terms. He would arrange the sale on the far side of the moon if that was what the estate wanted.

  Maximum publicity, as stipulated, attended the event. The first evening sale since the eighteenth century; television news cameras for the first time; and 1,400 ticket holders in evening dress, including Margot Fonteyn, Kirk Douglas and Somerset Maugham.

  Wilson was a charismatic auctioneer. “He could make each person in turn think only you and he had this special understanding of this work of art,” says Peregrine Pollen, his former assistant. Within five minutes Wilson had sold three paintings. The sixth lot was Cézanne’s Garçon au Gilet Rouge. When the bidding stopped at £220,000, double the price ever paid for a modern picture, Wilson cast his gaze around the room. In a calm voice, he said: “What, will no one offer any more?”

  “That,” says Pollen, “snapped the elastic.” Gasps broke into applause. This was not only a world record, but by such a large margin that for a number of years Impressionist paintings did not go for auction anywhere else. In the span of 21 minutes the fortunes of Sotheby’s, the art world, and of London’s place in it, had shifted. It was, for Bruce, a piece of good fortune to be joining the firm that autumn.

  Until Wilson’s appointment as chairman, Sotheby’s had operated like a quiet and rather scholarly family firm in a more innocent time. It comprised four departments, a staff of about 60 and a representative in New York whose secretary forwarded letters. Publicity consisted of a modest advertisement placed in The Times. After the Goldschmidt sale, Wilson took Sotheby’s by the scruff of its neck and expanded the number of departments from four to 15. Marcus Linell, the porter whom Bruce was hired to assist, says: “It can only be described as the Wild West. We were a tremendously ignorant bunch of people with extraordinary confidence, being sent off to Paris, Switzerland, New York. It was the exceptional moment, rather than the exceptional person.” Linell likened the experience to riding in a troika. “You were panting behind, thinking, ‘My God! What a marvellous life this is’.”

  Bruce rode the crest of this expansion. “There is no doubt in my mind,” says David Nash, who worked alongside Bruce in the Impressionist department, “that Sotheby’s was the main stimulus of Bruce’s life, whether he likes to admit it or not.” He learned how to look at an object and to describe it compactly. Sponsored by Sotheby’s, he travelled to countries where these objects originated and in Robert Byron’s footsteps to Afghanistan. Sotheby’s enabled him to meet a network of aesthetically-minded, rich, enquiring young people. It also introduced him to his wife.

  Yet after three years the loathing set in. “I suddenly had a horror of the so called ART WORLD,” he wrote to a friend, “and though I went on to be a Director of Sotheby’s everything about the firm filled me with claustrophobia and disgust.”

  Bruce entered Sotheby’s as a numbering porter in the Works of Art department at a salary of £8 a week. For his first season, he took the tube from Ealing Broadway to Victoria. In the evening he returned to his uncle John’s house at III Cleveland Road, Ealing, a semi-detached Wimpey house built in the 1930s. He did not discuss his work. “He was finding his way,” says John Turnell. “He went into that job relatively cold.”

  The dealer Jane Abdy met him during these early days. “He was stocky, thickly built and looked like a country boy.” Speaking in a piping voice, Bruce struck Abdy as unsophisticated, with an enthusiasm and a bounciness which her Oxford contemporaries would have considered “most odd”. Brian Sewell, the art critic, that year started work at the rival house, Christie’s. “It is easy to forget how pure Bruce was at that stage,” he says. “There was a frankness and honesty about him. He would have made a very good priest.” To the dealer Robert Erskine, Bruce looked like a young curate “rather wet behind the ears”. The transformation from chubby-cheeked Marlborough ingénu to “Smootherboy” would take place, in the words of one who had known Bruce since childhood, “in a phenomenally short time”.

  Bruce’s first duties in the Works of Art department were to shift and dust European and Oriental ceramics, glass, majolica, and tribal antiquities. His job was to locate each object on the storage shelves where it might have stayed for months, dust it, place the owner’s name against a lot description, and safely stack it on the trolleys to take up to the sale room. “Whenever there was a sale,” he said, “I would put on my grey porter’s uniform and stand behind the glass vitrines, making sure that prospective buyers didn’t sticky the objects with their fingers.” Soon he was bored by the menial tasks required of him.

  For three weeks he shared a room with John Mallet, a junior cataloguer in ceramics. Mallet says, “We were supposed to be cataloguing ceramics, including Chinese; sculpture from the fall of the Roman Empire to Rodin, objects of vertu and miniatures. Bruce would go for the objects that appealed to him and leave me with the boring things.” Mallet found him bumptious, “a slightly phoney figur
e” interested in silly ideas. “He said he had written a thesis on ‘Sausages as phallic symbols’. This didn’t interest me a great deal. I had my doubts as to what he was up to. It seemed confidences of a most horrific kind were waiting to be prised out of him.”

  Marcus Linell, the department’s other numbering porter, was technically his boss. “Bruce would wander around where he wanted. When sales went on view, there would be 35 lots missing and things were misnumbered and dirty. After four months I went to Jim Kiddell and said: ‘This is hopeless, he simply won’t concentrate on doing the job.’ The next thing I’m told, he’s going to work in furniture.”

  The Head of the Furniture department was Richard Timewell, who had interviewed him, but hardly had Bruce landed there before Timewell was visited by Peter Wilson, who wanted to discuss his young charge.

  Wilson had great faith in the ideas of the young. He said to Timewell: “I really think that boy would do well in the Modern Picture department. Would you give him up?”

  “The fact Bruce was nice-looking didn’t do him any harm,” says Timewell. “For quite a while he was Peter’s very blue-eyed boy.”

  Just how Bruce attracted the Chairman’s attention is not certain. Bruce told Michael Cannon that he had caused a stir by translating the Greek inscription on an amphora. Since most public schoolboys of the period knew Greek – and Bruce’s Greek was not very good – this hardly sets him apart. He told Susannah Clapp that he remained unnoticed until, “loitering near a Picasso gouache of a harlequin, he was approached by a man ‘looking like a birdman in a blue fedora and suede shoes’ who asked him what he thought of the picture. ‘I don’t think it’s genuine,’ pronounced the porter.” The birdman was Sir Robert Abdy, art buyer for Gulbenkian. Abdy, impressed, passed on the comment to Wilson.

  In the spring of 1959, Wilson set about injecting energy in his two favourite departments, Modern Pictures, which included Impressionist sales, and Antiquities, where, in 1937, he had been given his own head as a cataloguer. “Wilson’s text told stories and made connections that went beyond the bare recital of facts,” wrote Robert Lacey. “One ring had been found in the tomb of a dramatically murdered duke, another in the bed of the river Oise . . .”

  Under Wilson’s wing, Bruce began to move between both departments as a junior cataloguer. Antiquities answered directly to Wilson and was “a convenient term which may denote anything from a Sumerian clay tablet to a carved head from darkest Africa”. It took up a tiny room in the basement and consisted of Bruce; a secretary, Felicity Nicholson; and an outside adviser whose job was to come in once or twice a week to give his expertise. This was Wilson’s friend, John Hewett. The two had been business partners since the 1950s; they lived next to each other in Kent and Wilson had been Hewett’s best man. Second only to Wilson, Hewett was a crucial figure in Bruce’s apprenticeship.

  Hewett was a Bond Street dealer, but he virtually ran Antiquities. A dapper figure with a spade beard, he liked to glide silently into a room and make a theatrical display of pulling from an expensive tweed pocket a waistcoat button or a fifth-century gold marvel or a shell. He did not ask Bruce, “What is it?” Rather, he dropped it into his palm and with his ox-eyes on him waited for Bruce to comment.

  Ted Lucie-Smith, who used to hang around Hewett’s shop and run errands for him, says, “He made objects available and he endowed them with magic. He was interested in natural curiosities almost as much as works of art. Bruce acquired from him the feeling that an object which was a wonder of nature was as satisfying as a work of art.” Hewett’s taste, not confined to any period or culture, was for simplicity of form.

  One clique thought Hewett a genius. He did not disabuse them. He relied on his taste and on his gravitas, supported by long silences, to a greater extent than on his expertise, which though real was not as encompassing as his supporters might believe. He could be generous, often allowing Bruce to buy an expensive object and pay over a long period, or to exchange a lesser thing for a finer one. But, says Lucie-Smith, “there always came a day when he was determined to screw you for a better deal.”

  Hewett was an odd ally for PCW, as Wilson was known. “He was a rampant heterosexual,” says Lucie-Smith, “and came from a different layer of the English class system.” A self-taught man who still spoke in “a faint Cockney whine”, Hewett had remade himself as a shaman-dealer. Raised in Ealing, where his grandfather had a horse and cart removals business, his first love was botany – a passion he also encouraged in Bruce. Before the war he had worked as apprentice gardener in a great house in Middlesex. Wounded while serving as a batman in the Scots Guards in Algeria, he convalesced in Naples, and there discovered his aesthetic appetite. He was an expert in fifteenth-century carpets, the history of travel in the South Seas and Africa. His special love was for tribal and ethnographic specimens collected by botanists and sailors.

  Bruce’s photographic memory acquired a new depth of focus under Hewett’s tuition. He learned to look with close attention to detail and to remember what he had seen. “Hewett taught Bruce how to hold something in your hand and feel it and really look at it,” says Elizabeth. “Not just look, but look intensely. Bruce used to look at something in changing lights until you got pretty fed up, but it did mean that he never forgot a thing.” The designer John Stefanidis once discussed with Bruce some chairs in the Villa Malcontenta that he was keen to copy. “You don’t have to copy them,” said Bruce. “I’ve got the precise measurements.”

  In 1828, Joseph Haslewood drew up for his friend Samuel Sotheby Hints for a Young Auctioneer of Books. His first rule: “Consider your catalogue as the foundation of your eminence and make its perfection of character an important study.” One hundred and thirty years on, John Hewett made the Sotheby’s catalogue just that. In the Antiquities cubby-hole, he taught Bruce to condense an object to its purest form and to use few words vividly so that there could be no mistaking one item for another. Bruce had to produce a succinct description of the object’s history, weight and size so as to maximise its value. By the process of cataloguing thousands of objects and dipping into arcane reference books, he learned how to transfer graphic ideas into words. It was the exact skill of a botanist or a sniper.

  The entries were distilled and spare, at first glance dull.

  A Syrian limestone relief of an antelope being attacked by a spotted beast of prey, 15 in by 11½ in 1st millennium BC

  – found at Amouda, North of Aleppo, in September/October 1959

  But the Chatwin style begins here.

  A Bajokwe wooden figure of a squatting ape, baring its teeth and holding a fruit in its hand, the eyes inlaid with bone. 13 in.

  Many of the skills Borges acquired through cataloguing books for the Miguel Cané municipal library, Bruce picked up in Antiquities.* As his first editor, Susannah Clapp, observed: “The cataloguer’s habits – of close attention, the chronicling of a mass of physical detail, the search for a provenance and the unravelling of a history – can be seen in the structure of his paragraphs and plots, and in his project of objectivity.”

  Hewett also gave Bruce licence to go out and ham it up. He encouraged him to attach a story to each object: where it came from, why it was interesting, who owned it. Bruce soon grew nimble at exploiting the connection between story and salesmanship. Brian Sewell envied his gift of the gab. “He had extraordinary social grace and not the smallest embarrassment in dealing with anybody. He picked a thing up – a wretched bit of terracotta – and handled it in such way that the intending buyer felt it must be by Michelangelo.”

  Bruce took as much interest in the owner as the object. Until Peter Wilson’s arrival as chairman, few members of the general public attended auctions. This now changed. Spear-headed by Brigadier Stanley Clark, a deft advertising campaign coaxed into the saleroom anyone who had £100 to spend. Works of art were promoted as affordable and, better still, as investments. About the whole performance – for a spectacle is what it became – was woven a spell of fun and the hint o
f rags turning into riches. Sotheby’s continued to welcome Armand Hammer, but he had to rub shoulders with “the little old lady with the Ming vase which had always been used as an umbrella stand”.

  The little old lady was Bruce’s speciality. He explained to Colin Thubron how important Sotheby’s had been to fashioning his narratives. Antiquities began to supply a daily stream of characters with amazing stories. “When I was there the whole of life became in its better moments a sort of treasure hunt and that technique of treasure-hunting and being rewarded or not rewarded is, I suppose, the way in which I do research on a story.

  “For example a letter comes from an old woman in an old folks’ home in Tunbridge Wells saying she’s seen in the papers Sotheby’s have sold a Benin head. She has a Benin head because her father was a doctor on the Benin expedition and so you go down and see this marvellous old lady.

  “She says: ‘Do you smell something here?’

  “I say, ‘Not particularly.’

  “‘Yes, you can. Sniff. Smell it.’

  “So I went like that. ‘What is it?’

  “‘I’ll tell you what it is. Caca. Everybody in this place is incontinent’.”

  The woman pointed to the Benin head on the floor and asked how much it would fetch. “It’s perfectly genuine. We were in Cape Town and I remember my father telling the servants to wash it down because it was covered in blood, human blood. And they put the hose pipe on it and the yard was red with blood for days.”

  The head was genuine, Bruce sold it and the woman used the money to sail back to South Africa. “She had a marvellous time in Cape Town and she died on the way back and was buried at sea. Many people in the world are yearning for that kind of destiny.”