Under the Sun Read Online Free Page B

world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.’

    The process of hunting down Chatwin’s correspondence began in 1991, when I was commissioned to write his authorised biography. I spent seven years working on his life as a matter of choice and made liberal use of letters gathered in the course of interviewing people in 27 countries. Almost everyone – there was one exception – gave me permission to make full transcriptions. Some of his correspondents I talked to for long periods; others, I never bumped into. A notice placed in the Times Literary Supplement , following the biography’s publication in 1999, attracted five replies, plus copies of Chatwin’s letters to Michael Davie, David Mason, Charles Way and J. Howard Woolmer. This book represents about 90 per cent of material collected over nearly two decades. Our hope is that it might result in the discovery of more. A day after the manuscript was delivered to the publisher, a cache of four letters and a postcard written to Susan Sontag was traced to an archive in Los Angeles; we have been able to include these.
    Chatwin’s principal correspondents were his parents Charles and Margharita, who in the early 1960s moved from Brown’s Green Farm outside Birmingham, to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they remained for the rest of their lives; Elizabeth Chanler, to whom Chatwin was married for 23 years, despite a brief separation in the early 1980s; her mother Gertrude Chanler, who lived in Geneseo, New York State; Cary Welch, an American collector who was married to Elizabeth’s cousin Edith; Ivry Freyberg, the sister of Raulin Guild, his best friend at Marlborough; John Kasmin, a London art dealer with whom he travelled to Africa, Kathmandu and Haiti; Tom Maschler, his publisher at Jonathan Cape; Diana Melly, his hostess in Wales; Francis Wyndham, the writer, who worked with him at the Sunday Times magazine and was the first to be allowed to see his finished manuscripts; the Australian writers Murray Bail, Ninette Dutton and Shirley Hazzard; James Ivory, the American film director, who stayed with him in France in the summer of 1971; Sunil Sethi, an Indian journalist whom he met in 1978 while on the trail of Mrs Gandhi.
    The business of love affairs is not prominent. Chatwin is often at his most intimate with those encountered fleetingly in faraway places. ‘You do not find pining lovers among the Gipsies,’ he wrote in a notebook. ‘Romantic love is played down as to be almost non-existent.’ Any letters he may have written to Donald Richards or Jasper Conran have not come to light, if, indeed they ever existed (‘He never wrote to me,’ says Conran); those to Andrew Batey were destroyed in a flood in the Napa Valley.
    Missing as well are letters to Penelope Betjeman, Werner Herzog, David Nash, Robin Lane Fox, Gita Mehta, Redmond O’Hanlon, David Sulzberger; and from the archives of Sotheby’s and the Sunday Times magazine during the years of Chatwin’s employment there.
    Incorporated in the footnotes are Elizabeth Chatwin’s comments on the text. These are intended to have the effect of an ongoing conversation. The poet Matthew Prior put it well in ‘A Better Answer to Chloe Jealous’:
    No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my visits; but thou art my home.
    In order to include as many letters as possible and to avoid repetition, we have pruned, sometimes heavily; all cuts are marked by ellipses. On the occasions when Chatwin wrote the same version of events to several people, we have chosen the fullest or most interesting. At other times – notably in descriptions of Penelope Betjeman’s death, the house that Chatwin rented in India while finishing The Songlines , and his illness – we have included different versions in order to show that these are not duplications so much as demonstrations of the way his elaborating mind worked. In one