Bruce Chatwin Read online

  Recognised in amateur dramatic circles, Leslie believed you could produce Shakespeare by employing village actors with no previous theatrical experience. He tested his theory, annually, in Northfield village hall.

  In the evenings, once supper was cleared, he set about writing his own plays. In 1913 the Birmingham Rep produced Leslie’s Re Pilgrage, about the inventor of an anti-fouling paint, designed to make ships cleave faster through the water. “It wasn’t very successful,” said Bruce’s father. Stephenson’s kettle inspired another one-act play. As the pressure rose, Charles Chatwin had to make the kettle ratde with a stick and wire.

  Sailing was Leslie’s other passion. At Merton in 1890, he had founded the Oxford University Yacht Club. He designed his boats on the dining table in West Heath Road and built them in the garage, his children holding down the wood so that he could hammer in the rivets. He named his boats after herons and grebes and raced them every weekend on the reservoir at Barnt Green, four miles away.

  Through his marriage Leslie Chatwin would be tainted by a scandal which affected his legal practice. In the First World War, he found a job forwarding post to soldiers. “We were very much the reverse of well-to-do,” said Charles.

  Isobel Milward’s photograph album.

  The family albatross was the Law, thrust around the Chatwin neck by the Milwards. In 1902, the 31-year-old Leslie married Isobel Milward. She was 32, and belonged, as the newspapers put it, “to one of the oldest and best-known families in Worcestershire”. Their union fulfilled the ambition of her father, Robert Harding Milward, to draw in “the builder Chatwins” to his powerful legal clan. The cabinet was probably his wedding present. Almost immediately Leslie discovered he had married into a family with things to hide.

  The Chatwin virtues were memory, craftsmanship, business nous – open, sedentary qualities. Through his Milward grandmother, Bruce had acquired the genes of adventurers, corner-cutters and embezzlers.

  Isobel’s album was locked in a drawer. A photograph, dated 1898, shows a slender woman posing on a camel in Egypt. Her father, at the time a prosperous solicitor, stands stiffly in front of her. A few months separate him from a scandal that had repercussions well into Bruce’s lifetime.

  The Milwards came from Redditch where they had made needles and fish hooks since the eighteenth century. In 1703 John Henry Milward started his firm at Washford Mills. A forward-looking proprietor, he was credited with the creation of the August bank holiday and with initiating the payment of wages on Friday afternoon, to ensure that his men went home to tea. Soon everyone was making needles in Redditch.

  Isobel’s father, “one of Birmingham’s most prominent figures”, had not gone into the needle business, but like her husband had studied law. The senior partner of Milward & Co., employing 50 clerks, Robert Harding Milward was held in high esteem in the Midlands. “It is questionable whether a more remunerative practice existed outside London and the whole of the country.”

  Milward acted for the firm that laid the first Atlantic cable and was trustee of several large estates, the money of which passed through his books. “In those days, your solicitor acted as banker,” said Charles. “If he went bust, your money went too.”

  An ambrotype of Milward at 25 shows strong, sensuous features: black mutton chops, hands contentedly on chest – and eyes which steer away from the camera. Suave, imperturbable, courteous, a man of beaming affability, he was promoted at his trial as “the beau idéal of the family lawyer”.

  By far his most prestigious client was the Duke of Marlborough, whose marriage to the heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt he brokered. Milward suggested she would need money to spend, say, a million pounds. And a personal wedding present to the Duke of £10,000, to clean his dirty lake. The advantageous terms he established were to plant in generations of East Coast American breasts a suspicion of Englishmen – as Bruce discovered when he married into the Chanler family, friends of the Vanderbilts.

  At some point Milward appears to have overreached himself. In 1897 the Duke wrote him a letter dispensing with his services “for grose incompitanse [sic]”.

  Thanks to his ducal connections, Milward had built up “an ample standard” of comfort. He kept substantial house near Bromsgrove, with 13 servants, and was treasurer of the Birmingham Triennial Festival, putting on a special train for the convenience of principal singers. His clients’ money often backed his largesse and he used it to entertain well. Bruce wrote, “He was a friend of Richter, the Wagnerian conductor; of Madame Patti, and of Charles Gounod . . .” His dismissal knocked the stuffing out of him.

  Milward’s extravagance matched his recklessness. After losing his most important client, he was caught by the slump at the end of the Boer War. Drawn into a number of wildcat schemes, he became desperate in his speculations. When the Indian rubber tyre came out, he made the fatal miscalculation of sponsoring, instead, the leather tyre. At the Cox Tyre Company, losses accumulated rapidly. He began to dig into the money entrusted to him by his remaining clients.

  On Saturday, 27 September 1902, Milward was arrested at Ashton Under Mill on his way to meet the 11.39 train from Evesham. Dressed in a grey lounge suit and white gaiters, he was driven by horse and trap to a court where, as usual, he cut a splendid figure. The charges to be considered “were of a most grave character”. He was not given bail.

  At his trial, he was accused of defrauding 200 creditors, owing one £38,000. His gross liabilities amounted to more than £100,000. All he had in the world, he said, was £2 11s 11d.

  Pronounced guilty, he was asked to say a few words. His mutton chops had greyed and he appealed for leniency in “a somewhat weak and nervous manner”: “I am in my 65th year. My mother died at 65, my brother at 65. I have only just recovered from a terrible attack of brain fever and apoplexy caused by these terrible events.”

  The Lord Chief Justice, ignoring his appeal, committed Milward for his “haphazard business methods” to six years in Parkhurst Prison. He left the dock with the warder’s help.

  At Parkhurst, Milward became prison librarian, but the authorities released him after he suffered two further paralytic seizures. He died on 18 September 1903, speechless with aphasia. But his death was not the end of the matter.

  The effect of the “Milward affair” on the Birmingham Quaker circles which comprised Leslie Chatwin’s clients was explosive. Milward’s wife moved to Malvern to escape the pointed fingers, while the question occupying Edgbaston was whether his glamorously dressed daughters would continue to worship at Edgbaston Old Church. Bruce’s grandfather, who had just married into the family, felt a special kind of horror.

  “Now this has happened,” Leslie asked a relative of the convicted man, with whom he used to commute to Five Ways station, “would you mind if we didn’t travel in the same carriage?”

  But he could not avoid the scandal undermining his business. Through the Law and through his marriage, the Chatwins were associated with the Milward mess. At West Heath Road, Leslie kept his shame hidden. In 50 years, it was a subject concealed from his children and grandchildren, never to be mentioned. Leslie’s son Anthony learned of it first as a teenager, from a girlfriend. The story reached as far as Sheffield, where, 36 years later, it mortified Charles to discover the scandal was known to his in-laws. He refused ever to discuss his grandfather with his children. “That’s all from long ago,” he would say if Milward’s name came up. “His name was taboo,” wrote Bruce.

  The image of his great-grandfather loomed over Bruce Chatwin’s life. After Isobel died in 1953, he found Milward’s court suit and sword in a tin trunk, last used when the Duke of Marlborough became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. “Dressed as a courtier, sword in hand, I dashed into the drawing room shouting ‘look what I’ve found!’ – and was told to ‘take those things off at once!”’ It was the one time Bruce saw his father angry.

  Milward’s disgrace became a Chatwin party piece. In 1962, at a dinner in Istanbul, Bruce used it to delight a daughter of the last Turk
ish Sultan, after which he noted with satisfaction in his journal: “All were very intrigued to hear of my great-grandfather . . .” Six years later, at a lunch with Kenneth Rose and two South American girls, he was at it again. Rose wrote in his diary: “Bruce tells us that his great-grandfather was a celebrated swindler, who cheated the then Duke of Marlborough out of many millions as his family solicitor. ‘He cheated old women out of their few pounds, too . . . ’ Bruce has tried to get his father to talk about the case, but cannot get a word out of him. He asks me to see what I can discover.”

  Rose at the time was working on the Churchill archives. Bruce responded enthusiastically to what he was able to uncover. “A real operator – £I08,595.I5.II is no mean sum. If only he hadn’t been found out!”

  Friends noticed that what appealed to Bruce was the idea of a conman ripping off a lot of toffs. “Every writer is a cut-purse,” he was fond of saying. “The art is to make one’s thefts as invisible as possible.” Theft, plagiarism, pick-pocketing, these were writers’ skills. The art critic Ted Lucie-Smith knew him from 1959. “Bruce was a great intellectual thief. He had no respect for intellectual property.”

  Another friend, Stella Wilkinson, says: “He did have a dodgy side, a tremendous lot of the street urchin in him. A quality that education can’t give you.”

  * * *

  Isobel Chatwin took consolation in a large family. She was one of ten children. Her sisters were models of rectitude, and married pillars of the church; her brothers rather the reverse. After “the surprise”, as it was referred to by the Milwards, they scattered.

  With the help of Philip Chatwin and an elderly aunt, Bruce unravelled their fates. Henry fled to South Africa where he became town clerk of Durban, dying of fever soon after. Geoffrey worked as a barrister in Cairo where his wife went “off it” and died by swallowing a small bit of chain. Bickerton, an engineer in the Broken Hill gold rush, “did a 100 things and nothing”. At 44, he enlisted in the Great War and was badly gassed, after which he lived “rather rakishly” in Gloucestershire. Robert – “a wild one!” – was a wanderer with a gift for languages and a large stomach. He could hold his liquor better than anyone else and held a great deal. He was in charge of the railway between Alexandria and Damascus and went mining turquoise in Egypt, south of Wadi Haifa. Emir Faisal gave him a dress of honour, the robe eventually taking pride of place in Bruce’s dressing-up box.

  But Isobel’s favourite relation was an insubordinate, snub-nosed cousin who travelled further than the lot of them.

  A scrap of Giant Sloth from Puerto Natales, Patagonia.

  Isobel’s cousin, Charles Milward, the son of a Birmingham vicar, rebuilt his life on the uttermost part of the earth. Birched as a child for telling lies, he escaped his father’s vicarage and went to sea aged twelve. He sailed the Horn 40 times, until he was shipwrecked there in 1898, on his first voyage as captain. Sacked by the shipping company, he settled in Punta Arenas where with a German partner he bought a forge to repair ships. For twelve years he was British Consul.

  In the year of Robert Harding Milward’s trial, Charles Milward befriended a German gold-panner who was blowing up a cave near Puerto Natales to obtain specimens of a prehistoric animal. The discovery, in perfect condition, of a Giant Sloth, or mylodon, excited European scientists into believing the animal must recently have been alive. Scraps of mylodon were sought by natural history museums and Charles Milward was in a position to supply them.

  Sometime in 1902 or 1903, he sent a piece of this mylodon to his cousin Isobel as a wedding present. The skin, a good-sized tuft, was a fragment of reddening, coarse hair attached to a card with a pin. It was wrapped in paper and kept in a pillbox.

  “We knew it came from abroad ’cause it was in the cabinet, see,” says Irene Neal, one of whose duties was to dust and polish the contents. “Everything in the cabinet had come from abroad. It was Mrs Chatwin’s pride and joy, even to the piece of fur.”

  Neal was not sure what the fur was. “Whatever it was, we knew it was precious, same as all the little knick-knacks that were in there. The housekeepers, especially the one Edna, she couldn’t look at it. Oh no! I had to pick it up and move it when they were cleaning the cabinet out. It used to put the creeps up me, an old bit of blacky, browny, bristly stuff as didn’t look very nice at all, the sort of thing you didn’t want to pick up. It was not until I had me grandsons as I learnt about dinosaurs. I thought it was only monkey fur.”

  Charles Chatwin believed the slothskin to be a dinosaur’s. “The one thing I could think of was the ditty: ‘When the brontosaurus saw us in the prehistoric days . . .’.” His father’s misattribution landed Bruce in hot water. “You know how all children dream about monsters,” he told an Argentine interviewer. “I had this very, very highly developed fantasy about what this animal looked like – and then, of course, my bitter disappointment to discover brontosauri were reptiles and I was told by my science master not to tell terrible lies.”

  The hairy remnant became Bruce’s favourite object. “Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin.”

  For Bruce, the lockable cabinet in West Heath Road was a sustaining metaphor and it informed both the content of his work (faraway places, one-offs, marvels, fakes, the Beast) and its style (patchwork, vitreous, self-contained). The shelves and drawers were a repository for collecting, movement and story. Bruce’s life would enact all three. “For those who are awake, the cosmos is one,” he wrote in his notebook, quoting Heraclitus. He hated to see a collection broken up.

  The art critic Robert Hughes says, “a very important component of Bruce’s imagination is his admiration for Wunderkammer”. Hughes remembers Bruce’s enthusiasm for a little-known, meticulous drawing by Dürer, of the mutant pig of Landser: a portentous creature with eight legs. “He liked the off-beat. He liked the monstrous. He liked things that suggested an inadvertent crack in the seamless world of cause and effect.”

  The phenomenon of the Wunderkammer began in Vienna as a response to the wonder of America. It domesticated our terror of a dangerous new world, the monsters seething on the peripheries of the medieval map. To create a Wunderkammer was to cast the world in your own light. It contained, according to historian Steven Mullaney, “things on holiday, randomly juxtaposed and displaced from any proper context . . . Taken together, they compose a heteroclite order without hierarchy or degree, an order in which kings mingle with clowns.” A defiance of category was crucial.

  These cabinets of curiosities were also mirrors. They reflected the collector’s extraordinariness, his journeys to marvellous places, his encounters with marvellous people, and – important when considering Bruce – they offered up a neat metaphor of a world picture that they replicated in miniature. “If nature speaks through such metaphors,” wrote the seventeenth-century musicographer Emmanuel Tesauro, “then the encyclopaedic collection, which is the sum of all possible metaphors, logically becomes the great metaphor of the world.”

  The collections Bruce most admired were the Pitt-Rivers museums in Oxford and Farnham; the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris, where he proposed to his wife; the Volkerkunde in Vienna. In 1967, like the narrator of his novel Utz, Bruce stopped off in Vienna on his way to Prague: “The Imperial mantle of 1125!! with gold lions attacking camels on a scarlet ground is the most wonderful thing I ever saw,” Bruce wrote to his wife. “The sword of Charles the Bold has a narwhal tusk sheath and handle, and I must say I am more than resigned to the extravagance of a tusk since seeing the unicorn presented to the Emperor Rudolf, one of the inalienable treasures of the Habsburgs together with a sumptuous Byzantine agate bowl, once considered to be the Holy Grail.”

  Isobel Chatwin’s mahogany wedding gift from Chamberlain, King and Jones was in the solid tradition of these Wunderkammer. With the development of British maritime power and the scientific voyages of Cook, Darwin and Huxley, most middle-class drawing rooms had a flat, glass-topped table which lifted to reveal “conversation pieces” to
prove where the traveller had been. Some of the marvels turned out to be fake – the mermaid tail inevitably a piece of dried hake with a monkey sewn on. But many were genuine curios.

  Isobel’s family museum was as formative in its influence on Bruce as the collections of the Habsburg Emperors in Vienna and Prague were on the Meissen collector, Utz. In his last novel Bruce reaches back to his four-year-old self, to the young Utz visiting his grandmother’s castle outside Prague and standing on tiptoe before her vitrine of antique porcelain and saying: “I want him.” The slothskin has been recast as a Meissen harlequin with a leering orange mask. “He had found his vocation: he would devote his life to collecting . . .”

  Werner Muensterberger, a friend of Bruce and the author of a study of the psychology of collecting, suggests that the collector is only too aware of the futility of his compulsion: “a chronic restiveness that can be cured only by more finds or yet another acquisition”. Muensterberger, himself a collector and intimate with the “tyrannising” dedication of his calling, believes the collecting passion is an instrument “to allay a basic need brought on by early traumata”. The infant looks to alternative solutions for dealing “with anticipations of vulnerability”. For the young Bruce, always on the move, the objects in the cabinet became a fixed compass. In desiring to hold on to them, he alleviated, temporarily, his dread of being alone. “Things”, he wrote in his notebook, “are substitutes for affection.”

  In his grandmother’s dining room in West Heath Road, Bruce became one of the Prague curieux, seeking an explanation for all things. The building bricks, Isobel’s photograph album, the tartan scraps were all part of the same plaid. No less than for Utz, his porcelain collector, “this world of little figures was the real world” – and the bombardments of the Second World War were “so many noises off”.