The first grown-up book I read from cover to cover was Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World. This was followed by John C. Voss’s The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss, by Melville’s Omoo and Typee, then Richard Henry Dana and Jack London. Perhaps from these writers I got a taste for Yankee plain style? I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.
One summer when I was thirteen I went alone to Sweden to talk English to a boy of my age whose family lived in a lovely eighteenth-century house by a lake. The boy and I had nothing in common. But his Uncle Percival was a delightful old gentleman, always dressed in a white smock and sun hat, with whom I would walk through the birch forest gathering mushrooms or row to an island to see the nesting ospreys. He lived in a log cabin lit by crystal chandeliers. He had travelled in Czarist Russia. He made me read Chekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation, also Duff Cooper’s biography of Talleyrand.
The great English novelists were left unread, but were heard, very much heard – Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice— on gramophone records, in plummy English voices, as I lay in the Birmingham eye hospital with partial paralysis of the optic nerve-a psychosomatic condition probably brought on by Marlborough College, where I was considered to be a dimwit and dreamer. I tried to learn Latin and Greek and was bottom of every class. There was, however, an excellent school library, and I seem in retrospect to have come away quite well read. I loved everything French—painting, furniture, poetry, history, food—and, of course, I was haunted by the career of Paul Gauguin. For my seventeenth birthday the owner of the town bookshop gave me a copy of Edith Sitwell’s anthology, Planet and Glow-worm, a collection of texts for insomniacs, to which I can trace a number of literary fixtures – Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud, Li Po and other Chinese ‘wanderers’, Blake and Mad Kit Smart, the encapsulated biographies of John Aubrey and the seventeenth-century prose music of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.
For a time I went along with the suggestion that I follow the family tradition and train as an architect; but, because I was innumerate, my chances of passing the exams were remote. My parents gently squashed my ambition to go on the stage. Finally, in December 1958, since my talents were so obviously ‘visual’, I started work as a porter at Messrs Sotheby and Co., Fine Art Auctioneers, of Bond Street, at wages of £6 a week.
I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculpture. I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered Before long, I was an instant expert, flying here and there to pronounce, with unbelieveable arrogance, on the value or authenticity of works of art. I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake. We sold the collection of Somerset Maugham, who, at dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, told a story about a temple boy, himself and a baby elephant. On Park Avenue, a woman slammed the door in my face, shouting, ‘I’m not showing my Renoir to a sixteen-year-old kid.’
The high points of my fine arts career were:1. A conversation with André Breton about the fruit machines in Reno.
2. The discovery of wonderful Tahiti Gauguin in a crumbling Scottish castle.
3. An afternoon with Georges Braque, who, in a white leather jacket, a white tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird.
In the summer holidays I travelled east, as far as Afghanistan, and wondered if I was capable of writing an article on Islamic architecture. But something was wrong. I began to feel that things, however beautiful, can also be malign. The atmosphere of the Art World reminded me of the morgue. ‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,’ they’d say—and I’d look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth. Or people would compliment me on my ‘eye,’ and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out. After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half blind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I’d been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons? Africa, perhaps? The chairman of Sotheby’s said, ‘I’m sure there is something wrong with Bruce’s eyes but I can’t think why he has to go to Africa.’
I went to the Sudan. On camel and foot I trekked through the Red Sea hills and found some unrecorded cave paintings. My nomad guide was a hadendoa, one of Kipling’s ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’. He carried a sword, a purse and a pot of scented goat’s grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate ; and by the time I returned to England a mood of fierce iconoclasm had set in.
Not that I turned into a picture slasher. But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. I quit my job and enrolled as a first-year student of archaeology at Edinburgh University.
My studies in that grim northern city were not a success. I enjoyed a year of Sanskrit. By contrast, archaeology seemed a dismal discipline – a story of technical glories interrupted by catastrophe, whereas the great figures of history were invisible. In the Cairo Museum you could find statues of pharaohs by the million. But where was the face of Moses. One day, while excavating a Bronze-Age burial, I was about to brush the earth off a skeleton, and the old line came back to haunt me:And curst be he yt moves my bones.
For the second time I quit.
Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’ that would enlarge on Pascal’s dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory ‘drive’ or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this ‘drive’ was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers – Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis – had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.
The book grew and grew; and as it grew it became less and less intelligible to its author. It even contained a diatribe against the act of writing itself Finally, when the manuscript was typed, it was so obviously unpublishable that, for the third time, I gave up.
Penniless, depressed, a total failure at the age of thirty-three, I had a phone call from Francis Wyndham of the Sunday Times magazine, a man of outstanding literary judgement, whom I hardly knew. Would I, he asked, like a small job as an adviser on the arts? ‘Yes,’ I said.
We soon forgot about the arts, and under Francis’s guidance I took on every kind of article. I wrote about Algerian migrant workers, the couturier Madeleine Vionnet and the Great Wall of China. I interviewed André Malraux on what General de Gaulle thought of England; and in Moscow I visited Nadezhda Mandelstam.
She lay on her bed, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, gritting a song of triumph between her blackened teeth. Her work was done. She had published, abroad it was true, but her words would one day come home. She looked at the thrillers I’d been told to take her and sneered: ‘Romans policiers! Next time, bring me some real trash!’ But when she saw the pots of orange marmalade, her mouth cracked into a smile: ‘Marmalade, my dear, it is my childhood!’
Each time I came back with a story, Francis Wyndham encouraged, criticised, edited and managed to convince me that I should, after all, try my hand at another book. His greatest gift was permission to continue.
One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache.
‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ I said. ‘So have I,’ she added. ‘Go there for me.’ I went. I cabled the Sunday Times: ‘Have Gone to Patagoni
a’. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia and Hemingway’s In Our Time. Six months later I came back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published. While stringing its sentences together, I thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. I am older and a bit stiffer, and I am thinking of settling down. Eileen Gray’s map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.
1983
A PLACE TO HANG YOUR HAT
Sometime in 1944, my mother and I went by train to see my father aboard his ship, the Cynthia, a US minesweeper which had been lent to the British and had docked in Cardiff Harbour for a refit. He was the captain. I was four years old.
Once aboard, I stood in the crow’s nest, yelled down the intercom, inspected the engines, ate plum pie in the ward-room; but the place I liked most was my father’s cabin – a calm, functional space painted a calm pale grey; the bunk was covered in black oilcloth and, on a shelf, there was a photograph of me.
Afterwards, when he went back to sea, I liked to picture my father in the calm grey cabin, gazing at the waves from under the black-patent peak of his cap. And ever since, the rooms which have really appealed to my imagination have been ships’ cabins, log cabins, monks’ cells, or – although I have never been to Japan – the tea-house.
Not long ago, after years of being foot-loose, I decided it was time, not to sink roots, but at least to establish a house. I weighed the pros and cons of a whitewashed box on a Greek island, a crofter’s cottage, a Left Bank garçonnière, and other conventional alternatives. In the end, I concluded, the base might just as well be London. Home, after all, is where your friends are.
I consulted an American – a veteran journalist, who, for fifty years, has treated the world as her back yard.
‘Do you really like London?’ I asked.
‘I don’t,’ she said, in a gruff and cigaretty voice, ‘but London’s as good as any place to hang your hat.’
That settled it. I went flat-hunting—on my bicycle. I had but five requirements: my room (I was looking for a single room) must be sunny, quiet, anonymous, cheap and, most essentially, within walking distance of the London Library – which, in London, is the centre of my life.
At house agents, I talked to fresh-faced young men who might have had carnations in their buttonholes. They smiled politely when they heard my requirements, and they smiled contemptuously when they heard how much I had to spend. ‘The bedsitter’, they said, ‘has vanished from this area of London.’
Beginning my search to the west, I visited a succession of studio conversions, each more lowering than the last, all outrageously priced. I had visions of being ground down by mortgage payments, or by yakking children on the next floor landing. Finally, I explained to a friend of solid Socialist convictions my reasons (which seemed to her perverse) for wanting an attic in Belgravia.
I wanted, I said, to live in one of those canyons of white stucco which belong to the Duke of Westminster and have a faint flavour of the geriatric ward; where English is now a lost language; where, in the summer months, men in long white robes walk the pavements; and where the rooftops bristle with radio antennas to keep the residents in touch with developments in Kuwait or Bahrain.
It was Sunday. My friend glanced down the property columns of the Sunday Times; her fingers came to rest beside an entry, and she said, ironically, ‘That is your flat.’
The price was right; the address was right; the advertisement said ‘quiet’ and ‘sunny’; but when, on Monday, we went to view it, we were shown a room of irredeemable seediness.
There was a beige fitted carpet pocked with coffee stains. There was a bathroom of black and bilious-green tiles; and there was a contraption in a cupboard, which was the double bed. The house, we were told, was one of two in the street that did not belong to the Duke of Westminster.
‘Well,’ my friend shrugged. ‘It’s the kind of flat a spy would have.’
It did, however, face south. The ceiling was high. It had a view of white chimneys. There was an Egyptian sheikh on the ground floor; and outside an old black man in a djellabah was sunning himself
‘Perhaps he’s a slave?’ said my companion.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Anyway, things are looking up.’
The owner agreed to my offer. I went abroad and learned from my lawyer that the flat was mine.
On moving in, I had to call my predecessor over one or two minor matters – including the behaviour of the phone.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The phone is rather odd. I used to think I was being bugged. In fact, I think the man before me was a spy.’
Now, once you suspect your phone of being bugged, you begin to believe it. And once you believe it, you know for certain that every bleep and buzz on the line is someone listening in. On one occasion, I happened to say the words ‘Falkland Islands’; on another, ‘Moscow’ and ‘Novosibirsk’ (I was planning a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway), and, both times, the phone seemed to have an epileptic fit. Or was it my imagination? Obviously it was. For when I changed the old black Bakelite model for something more modem the bleeps and buzzes stopped. I lived for some months in seediness before starting to do the place up.
Very rarely – perhaps never in England – I’ve gone into a modem room and thought, ‘This is what I would have.’ I then went into a room designed by a young architect called John Pawson, and knew at once, ‘This is what I definitely want.’
Pawson has lived and worked in Japan. He is an enemy of Post-Modernism and other asinine architecture. He knows how wasteful Europeans are of space, and knows how to make simple, harmonious rooms that are a real refuge from the hideousness of contemporary London. I told him I wanted a cross between a cell and a ship’s cabin. I wanted my books to be hidden in a corridor, and plenty of cupboards. We calculated we could just make a tiny bedroom in place of the green bath. The room, I said, should be painted off-white with wooden Venetian blinds the same colour. Otherwise, I left it to him.
I came back from Africa a few months later to find an airy, wellproportioned room, rather like certain rooms in early Renaissance paintings, small in themselves but with vistas that give an illusion of limitless space. I bought a folding card table to write on, and a tubular chair, which, when not in use, could live out on the landing.
Then I bought a sofa.
Long ago, I used to work for a firm of art auctioneers; and from time to time I still sneak into Sotheby’s or Christie’s – if only, hypocritically, to congratulate myself on my escape from the ‘mania of owning things’. One morning, however, on a trip to the London Library, I looked in on a sale of French furniture at Christie’s – and there was no escape.
I saw the kind of sofa you might see in a painting by David. It had rigorous classical proportions and its original pale grey paint. It was stamped by the firm of Jacob-Desmalter and its stretchers were covered with inventory marks from the Château de Versailles – from which one could gather that it had been made for the apartment of the Empress Marie-Louise. Fortunately for me that morning, M. Mitterrand had been elected President of France, and the Paris dealers were not in a buying mood.
Obviously such an object should be upholstered in blue silk damask with gold Napoleonic bees. But the sofa arrived from the upholsterers covered in muslin; and since the chances, either of paying for the damask or of getting it back downstairs, are so remote, the muslin will have to remain.
As for other furniture—although the room needed none—I already had an old French chair, of the Régence, in its original but bashed-up condition. And I had a birchwood table and stool—of the kind my mother used to call ‘Swedish Modern’.
I used to see this furniture, sometimes, in the flats of Jewish refugees in Hampstead or Highgate – people who had arrived in London in the late thirties with nothing in their luggage, except their clothes and perhaps a Klee or Kandinsky. It is, of course, designed by Alvar Aalto, and was marketed in London before the war by
a firm called Finmar. It was the cheapest modem furniture one could buy: my mother remembers paying five shillings for the stool when she furnished her own one-room flat in 1936.
In my ‘art-world’ days I was a voracious collector, but only a few pieces remain. Sold the Egyptian relief Sold the Archaic Greek torso. Sold the fifth-century Attic head. Sold the Giacometti drawing. Sold the Maori carving, which once formed part of Sarah Bernhardt’s bed. They were sold to pay for books, or journeys, or simply to eat, during the years of pretending to be a writer.
I cannot regret them. Besides, in my late twenties, I was sick of things; and after travelling some months in the desert, I fell for a kind of ‘Islamic’ iconoclasm and believed, in all seriousness, that one should never bow before the graven image. As a result, the things that survived this iconoclastic phase are, for the most part, ‘abstract’.
I still have, for example, a hanging of blue and yellow parrot feathers, probably made for the back wall of a Peruvian Sun Temple and supposed to date from the fifth century AD. In 1966, I saw a similar piece in the Dumbarton Oaks collection and, on returning to New York, went to see my friend John Wise, who dealt in pre-Columbian art in a room in the Westbury Hotel.
John Wise was a man of enormous presence and a finely developed sense of the ridiculous.
‘I’d give anything for one of those,’ I said.