Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell E-Book
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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Bruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our time. He lived through the Iranian Revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan, could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight and spoke Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency. His curious combination of talents – linguist, musician, translator and teacher – were duplicated by an international network of friendships with scholars, poets, spies, aid-workers, archaeologists, diplomats, artists and writers. Bruce could quote Hafez from memory, rustle up a lethal cocktail, lose himself in Brahms, open any door, organise a concert within days of arriving in a foreign city or walk across a mountain with just walnuts and dried mulberries in his pocket. He was a true original, remembered here with affection, humour and wonder by over eighty of his friends and collaborators.
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1
TALES FROM THE LIFE OF BRUCE WANNELL
ADVENTURER, LINGUIST, ORIENTALIST
Edited by Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring
SICKLE MOON BOOKS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
11
Bruce Wannell was the greatest orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our own time. He lived in Iran through the revolution and worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Speaking Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili, be amiable in Amharic, Spanish and Greek and could lecture fluently in French, Italian, English or German. Bruce could also sightread and transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy.
He had lived, not just travelled, through many of the lands of Islam and could reference their cultural artefacts against the artistic treasures of Europe. His curious combination of talents – linguist, musician, translator and teacher – were reflected in an international network of friendships with scholars, poets, aid-workers, archaeologists, diplomats, artists and writers. He was also a sponger of the first water, whose various achievements as a tyrannical house guest exceeded the collective literary tradition of Dickens’s Skimpole, Evelyn Waugh’s John Beaver or Olivia Manning’s Prince Yakimov.
In the last fifteen years of his life, he combined all these skills and became the resident amanuensis of William Dalrymple, staying for months at a time in his house outside Delhi. Working together against a backdrop of tame goats, a brilliant cook, parrots, visiting fans, passing musicians (not to mention the presence of three Dalrymple children and their artist mother Olivia Fraser), they created four books about the Mughal Empire. It was a unique achievement, which combined fresh archival scholarship with a rollicking page-turning narrative, that both entertained and instructed a vast international readership, whilst subtly inoculating them with historical revisionism and scholastic multi-culturalism. In volume after volume – White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Return of the King, The Anarchy – William Dalrymple saluted the vital contribution of his scholar-house guest, who he acknowledged to be ‘the best translator of eighteenth-century Persian’ and ‘probably my best friend in the world’. Bruce could be maddening. I remember William rather regretting paying him an advance (on which he immediately disappeared off to Ethiopia for months until lack of funds brought his return). Similarly, Bruce could be annoyed by the rock-star status of William in India, ‘surrounded by sycophants until 12dawn.’ Bruce was always wilful, spending months translating a Sufi poet fantasizing about being loved by a lion in the desert (knowing it was not likely to be of any use) but time after time made up for these ‘diversions’ by the most extraordinary discoveries, creating original translations of ‘five Afghan histories in the book market in Kabul; the unused Mutiny Papers in Delhi and a bunch of first person eighteenth-century histories of late Mughal India.’
I think Malaysia and Indonesia were the only gaps left on Bruce’s map of the Muslim world. His arena of greatest expertise was Iran and the old Empire of Persianate culture that surrounds it, such as Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan and the principalities within Moghul India. He had a special facility for the deciphering of timeworn inscriptions, and an innate understanding of the influences that had inspired late medieval calligraphers: the interlayering of Persian, Turkic and Arabic literary and spiritual traditions and grammar, alongside local dialects. For Bruce knew at first hand the workings of a still intact traditional Muslim civilization: how a waspish poet, an enlightened mystic, a fawning historian or troop of musicians all fitted into the household of a ruler; how literature, for all the formal honour that it was given, in practice worked as little more than the prompt for a much more virile oral tradition; and how this recited language was itself interlaced with the giving and receiving of hospitality, of the civilized roles of food and music presided over by the host.
Aside from Dalrymple, he worked with a number of scholars to whom he would become a living legend. I witnessed a fund-raising evening organised by Amnesty International in an elegant City of London office, where he provided simultaneous translations from poet-exiles reciting in half-a-dozen languages. He had not even had time to change, for his plane had been delayed. It had caught fire leaving Kabul, where he had been teaching traditional calligraphy to young Afghan craftsmen, working to restore their city. On another occasion I accompanied him to a conference organised by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, around an exhibition of sacred and esoteric objects, and noticed over the day how he was greeted with special affection and respect by every single speaker and half of the audience. It was wonderful to see how well regarded and cherished Bruce was in this otherwise competitive academic world. In one way or another he had assisted them all in their researches, checking an inscription on site, working out a variant transcription or offering a fresh translation.
Bruce had converted to Islam as a young man on the North West Frontier. He had studied beside traditional Sunni scholars, taken up residence in the zaouia of hereditary Sufi scholars and throughout his 13life immersed himself in the rich literary tradition of Iranian poets and Shiite sacred texts. His work as a translator always fitted into this tradition of Islamic scholarship, where a succession of commentators, all working to understand a sacred tradition, form a golden chain. I began to think that the years of labour he put into translating the sacred cosmology of Imam Ali was never really designed to be finished but was a form of worship.
Within the world of Anglo-Islam, Bruce was saluted as a savant, a spiritually wise friend who was often called upon to help others in their quest for a fully lived life. In the end I think he believed more passionately in civilization than in any organised religion and was as interested in the commentators (be they Hafiz, Mozart, Rumi, Schubert, Ibn Arabi or Beethoven) as the Prophets and Kings. His essay on the references to paradise within the Quran (published by Critical Muslim), his selection of Sufi verse (published by Amnesty International), his translations in Persian Poems (with Robert Maxwell) are bookmarks on this long personal journey. He loved working with other minds, and I notice that all his published works were achieved in some sort of intellectual partnership. He was kind enough to give my biography of the Prophet Muhammad, and a later work on the first four Caliphs, a critical reading. The proofs came back not just corrected but ornamented with elegant spirals of calligraphy in coloured ink, which had themselves been annotated by later readings. I am not alone, indeed British writers on Islamic themes tend to divide into two factions: those who happily acknowledge their debt to Bruce, and those who bear the hidden scars of a Bruce book review.
Bruce had enthusiasm, he had stamina, he had knowledge, he had an ear and a delight for music, language and poetry. What he did not have was money or any interest in making it, let alone submitting to the slavery of a salary. He never owned a car, contributed to a pension fund or found himself burdened with a mortgage. As a young man straight out of university he taught English in foreign universities for five years, before working as a freelance translator-amateur musician-professional house guest in London for four years. For the next eight years (1985– 1993) he was based in the North West Frontier of Pakistan: for the first two years as an administrator for Afghanaid, then as a freelance scriptwriter, translator and researcher into the complex internal politics of Afghanistan. When he left Pakistan, he accepted a commission from his friend, the publisher Nick Robinson, to write a travel book that would embrace the Islamic World, and travelled in Egypt, Syria, Sudan and the Yemen. The book was never published, for although he spent years on it, it became vast and he strangled it with footnoted 14scholarship that flickered between half-a-dozen scripts and a dozen languages. This failure must have been difficult to digest, but my wife did at least manage to extract, then edit and publish, a section from his Sudan travels. The Independent selected Bruce’s essay to be serialised, which was a happy incident.
His home for the second half of his adult life was a narrow loft at the top of a terraced house in York owned by a housing trust. This cell would not have disgraced the vows of poverty of a hermit-scholar or a medieval medicant. It had no bed but was beautifully scented, with fragrances wafting out of his collection of Asian and African textiles, while the walls were entirely hidden by bulging shelves filled with a highly discerning library, three books deep. If you were lent one of these volumes, you invariably found several pages of Bruce’s notes tucked into the back, plus references to other works and a photocopied article paper-clipped to an academic book review. I don’t think there was a book in this loft that had not been properly read. There was certainly nothing second rate in that room. On a number of occasions young heroin addicts, his housemates, would break in and steal his books to sell in order to feed their addiction, but over the years the second-hand book dealers in York got to recognize Bruce’s most valuable volumes and were able to return them. Bruce in his turn decided to feed the addicts, putting out food for them ‘like the birds’ and even visiting them in prison. He succeeded in his unlikely mission of civilising his English neighbours, furnishing the communal kitchen with Bokhara rugs and serving up delicious stews until the household became a model of its kind, winning prizes for best garden on a tight budget.
Bruce could sleep anywhere, and even when at home, simply wrapped himself up in a cloak and lay down on a hand-knotted woollen carpet from the mountains of Luristan. This habit of sleeping anywhere is one of the most enviable resources of a traveller, and makes a hotel of any cave, but it could also be alarming, for he might quite happily nod off while riding pillion on the back of a motorcycle. He knew nothing about engines or the mysteries of the gear box, which made him a very grateful and appreciative passenger, but also meant that all his friends had been ‘wannelled’ in their day. To be wannelled was to be coaxed into some wonderfully romantic quest – to identify some lost tomb of a legendary prince or some such thing – only to realise halfway through the journey that you were in fact being used as an unpaid chauffeur, conducting your guest safely to his next lodging. For one of the features of Bruce was that although he always appeared immaculately dressed, he travelled very light, never giving away his intentions by the size of his baggage. Other aspects of being ‘wannelled’ could be more 15fiscally alarming, like the time I was met at the door of a country hotel to be informed that ‘all your other guests have already arrived Sir’, or suddenly finding yourself in charge of the bill after a convivial lunch for six of Bruce’s friends. But for a man of his slender means he was also extraordinarily generous with the little he had, giving away prized textiles and ceramics, though his favourite method of exchange was the gift of some carefully wrapped parcel of food, homemade or sourced from his travels: rock salt quarried from the Sahara, dried mulberries from Baltistan, pistachio nuts acquired in the covered souk of Aleppo, or some delicacy sourced from Leila’s café-cum-shop in the East End, all assisted with detailed instructions on how they should be served. Like a nomad herdsman he could recognize when the ground needed a rest, and there were half a dozen houses in London where he placed himself by rotation. May they find their reward in the garden beyond.
Our office, in central London, would often be used as a bag drop, or as a base from which to extract a visa from an embassy, or for a teatime pause between lunch at someone else’s club and the early evening lecture. He also loved to buy books from us before Christmas, leaving behind a Child & Co. cheque which would invariably bounce, so we ended up using them as bookmarks. I seem to remember that Bruce’s Belgian grandfather had worked for a Catholic publishing house, and it became an important annual ritual picking up a book for his mother from a similar environment. We once made the mistake of trying to employ Bruce for a week, checking the accuracy of various translations within Fanny Parkes’s Indian travel book. He would arrive very late, then make long, rather loud and piercing social calls, arranging meals and outings for himself over the next few days. After a lunch outing he would return, and then make a little textile nest for himself in the middle of the office floor and slumber. It was a period when we were employing half-a-dozen earnest apprentice publishers, who in the late afternoon he would feed with slices of polenta cake and bowls of rare tea. Just as they were leaving, he would finally settle down to work. It was fun, and good training for our young staff to meet a real traveller, walking around the office barefoot and wrapped in a shawl. But we made a resolution to hereafter cherish him as a friend and never to make the mistake of employing him again.
Bruce loved things that had been created with love and integrity, with authenticity and craft. He was seldom seen without some beautifully woven linen and silk scarf that had been picked up in an Eastern marketplace. He wore kaftans off the shoulder and a sarong with the balance and swagger of a native tribesman, though there was always something faintly offkey to his English wardrobe, as if Dick 16van Dyke was playing an Edwardian gentleman. Bruce also wore the slender moustache of a cad, the type which may once have been fashionable in the heyday of David Niven. The moustache did at least give some advance warning of the lethal amounts of charm that could be brought into play. Site guardians instructed to allow no-one near the archaeological trenches, bored security guards holding the key to the fortified gate of an embassy compound, body-built shaven-headed bouncers patrolling access to the palazzo would soon be reduced to conspiratorial giggles and become mere puppies in a Bruce escapade. One of his many successful social skills was an uncanny ear for identifying a regional accent and then talking about their homeland – be it Calabria, Baltistan or Khuzestan – with affectionate and intimate knowledge. He could also launch an artillery barrage of names, known, dropped or recently acquired, but pronounced with a flourish that connected the drawing rooms of Kensington with the courtyards of Khartoum, Sana’a, Venice, Aleppo, Isfahan and Beirut. But he was more, an aesthete on mission, much more interested in their gardens, libraries and pictures (not a social snob).
One of Bruce’s survival tactics was to scent out a grand piano insufficiently used by its owners. He would infiltrate such a household as a gifted amateur musician, would begin to graciously accept trays of china tea, and by degrees advance to the status of pampered house guest. His delight in using the best silver and china, in sweeping out the floor of the neglected summer house in order to prepare an impromptu picnic, in boldly swimming in rivers and lakes, and in mixing lethally strong cocktails served at dusk on the lawn, would gradually bewitch the whole household. For he had the ability to teach people to enjoy what they were and what they already possessed. He also had a genius for appreciating real work, be it by musicians and cooks as good as himself, or much put upon cleaners and gardeners, whom he would charm and befriend. On several occasions in his life, he was the guest who came for the weekend but stayed for three years (George Lemos), six months (Susanne Drayson) or eighteen months (Juliet Crawley). I believe George had to sell his house in Islington in order to politely remove Bruce, who had somehow contrived for his piano to also be included in the household. Juliet Crawley appreciated his presence as a permanent house guest for she had been twice widowed and had two young children to bring up, as well as horses and dogs that needed care. But she became increasingly infuriated by his slow annexation of all the best furniture in the house, which Bruce spirited into his growing suite of rooms when she was off on a ‘foreign mission’. Bruce once confessed to me that the thing he hated most was being put up 17in a bedroom filled with children’s clothes and toys. It was a curious ‘cuckoo-like’ revelation, for I can think of at least four households where he became a beloved avuncular presence. I gather he was not such a popular presence with his two sisters-in-law but certainly proved to be an angel to his godson, who lost his mother just before going to prep school. In William’s words ‘I lost Mum but gained Bruce.’ Bruce was planning the music for William’s wedding well into his last week on earth, without really consulting the couple as to whether they wanted a whole service devoted to Brahms.
The greatest love of Bruce’s life was his Belgian mother, followed by a handsome bearded Pashtun warrior, who was already married but managed to also cherish Bruce on the North West Frontier for a number of years. Listening to Bruce’s memories of this friend, going through his martial exercises on the summit of a hill, framed by the peaks of the Hindu Kush, was like listening to Patroclus talking of his love for Achilles. Other affairs always paled in comparison with these two ideals of requited love though he had some spectacular successes, such as the secret policeman set to spy on his movements, whom he turned into a lover. As a teenage boy he had been seduced by one of the masters at Wellington, but looked back with affection on this man, who had introduced him to pleasures without any sense of shame. Bruce could quote the urgent, sensual, amoral poetry of Catullus with evident relish (‘Just now I found a young boy stuffing his girl, I rose, naturally, and (with a nod to Venus), fell and transfixed him there with a good stiff prick, like his own.’) I think when he quoted Simon Digby’s preference for sex with men who were neither of his class nor of his nation, he was also speaking for himself. Bruce also had extraordinarily fine taste in female friendships, and made lifelong relationships with dozens of strong-minded, elegant, clever, capable and artistic women, which you will find out for yourself as you read this book. The intensity, longevity and importance of these loving friendships would not have been possible if he had settled down and committed to a single partner. And the way that he was cared for at the end of his life proved just how very strong those bonds were.
Bruce was the third child in a family of four, traditionally a place of comparative neglect for parental attention. As a child he managed to ascend a pedestal, through his brilliance as a musician and as a scholar. He won a set of straight A grades at Wellington, capped by a scholarship to Oxford. But by the time Bruce left university (including a year perfecting his French in Paris and a year his German in Berlin), a rift had opened between James Wannell and his effete, talented but lazy, sensual and homosexual son.18
I am not capable of writing about Bruce’s relationship with music but could recognize it as the central passion of his life. If Bruce had put this book together himself, the trunk of the narrative would have been based on a listing of sublime concerts, out of which stemmed all the secondary branches of his life – travel, friendships or work. I have however been fortunate enough to be carried along in the slipstream of Bruce’s passion on many happy evenings, be it in a Turkmen yurt, before Kurdish shepherds, as opera guests at The Grange in Hampshire or in a jubilant Dalrymple-hosted picnic party at Garsington, in the baroque splendour of a Hawksmoor London church or an impromptu gathering arranged in some hospitable London drawing room. On each occasion, though transfixed with pleasure, excitement and emotion, I also realised that we existed on entirely different universes of musical comprehension. Fortunately, this book is enriched with dozens of essays from lifelong friends who fully shared his knowledge and his passionate engagement, and happily there are also some comic sketches and complaints which allow those as ignorant as myself to have a laugh at Bruce’s gamesmanship on the keyboard. A friend of his warned me that ‘Some musicians found him unbearable to play with. I am not that great, but I could not cope with his extremes of rubato – he probably felt I was too mechanical – and his complete indifference to whether the composer had marked a section PP or FF, but he was always improving and adapted amazingly well to arthritis in his fingers.’
If this book reveals nothing else, it shows the fundamental importance of music throughout his life, which kept him alive, passionate, competitive, minxy and interested to the very last. In the last week of his life, I had arranged a rather nice lunch laid out on the round table in the centre of our attic publishing office. I wanted to talk to Bruce about this book and so had forbidden him to sweep in any additional guests from the street and also got him to promise me that there would be no other conflicting dates in his diary that afternoon. Although pretty weak and clearly in considerable pain, Bruce rose to the challenge of these instructions, and halfway through the meal a beautiful Australian musician joined us, and before we could settle down to any editorial chat over coffee, I found myself helping him with his bags and navigating him to a hospitable London house to practise Brahms. So I never got the chance to check facts and dates, which I tentatively list below. They have not been footnoted by Bruce, but fortunately this book is a work in progress. We all hope for a proper biography of Bruce by Lisa Chaney informed by his letters and diaries. Now that he is no longer present to obfuscate the work of any editor, his Islamic Travels might even be published one day, in which case he 19will (at long last) be revealed to the world as the twentieth-century Ibn Battuta of the West. In the meantime the royalties from this book will help to support an annual Bruce Wannell Memorial Lecture in Persian Studies, to be held at the University of York, an idea championed by Richard McClary.
Barnaby Rogerson Editor
CHRONOLOGY
Bruce was born on 25 August 1952 at Sandringham, a beach suburb of Melbourne, during his father’s three-year experiment in emigration to Australia. Bruce’s mother was Andrée Celine Moreau, one of two daughters of Luc and Jeanne Moreau. Bruce’s father was William James Wannell, born 24 November 1916, one of the two children of Benjamin and Alice Wannell.
Andrée and Jim met at the end of the war and were married in Hamburg on 10 March, 1950.
Bruce was educated at Aldro prep school, Godalming, then Wellington College, Berkshire, where he achieved five A-graded A levels and a scholarship to Oxford. His family – which included a twin elder brother and sister, James and Corinne, and a younger brother, Julian – lived in Cyrene House, Surrey. Upon retirement the Wannell parents moved to an apartment in Oxton House, Kenton, Devon, and in their old age migrated to France to live beside their eldest son, James.
Bruce took a ‘year off’ to improve his German, then read French and German at Oriel College, Oxford (1971–5) which included another year of lotus eating, this time in Paris. No oriental element was yet apparent in the life of Persian Bruce apart from his study of Goethe’s West-East Divan.
After university, Bruce taught English in Italy, 1975–7. Liceo Linguistico, Rome. James Ramsay sent me a flavour of these years. ‘Bruce meeting me off the overnight train from Verona, and we walked unforgettably to his flat via Santa Maria Maggiore … the only way to admire 5th-century mosaics, I realise, is through clouds of incense on a sunny morning with a High Mass involving several cardinals in full swing (I wasn’t churchy at the time, so have no idea what the Feast was) followed by breakfast in a superb little pasticceria. Bruce was adamant that it was not worth visiting the forum et al when one only had a few days: so we concentrated on early mosaics (one accessed via a most unpromising door on a boring street) and the baroque. To recover from neck-twisting adoration of Borromini we resorted one day to a totally charming and somehow affordable trattoria, with lunch slightly abruptly ended by an announcement that Bruce had to go to Voice of America to do his “culture slot”. As we walked along I asked what he was going to talk about, and he said, “I thought I’d talk about eighteenth-century gentlemen’s private libraries.” “What do you know about THEM?” I asked. Bruce was vague. 24“Oh well, of course… I’ll be asking for your thoughts.” The mixture of pasta, wine, and Borrominian perspectives made it impossible to think of how to get out of this bit of press-ganging. When he gave his talk it was clear he had in fact done some preparation – and talked about stamped leather bindings and the texture of old paper. Bruce’s strategy for seeing the Sistine Chapel (this may no longer be possible) was of course to be at the head of the queue in the morning, then go straight to the Chapel – which you would have gloriously to yourself until the first tour had worked its way through. The strategy for our second visit was to visit other rooms first, then time arrival at the chapel just before closing time – so that visitors less brass-necked than Bruce (i.e. nearly everyone) would have left, and one could placate the infuriated staff with questions such as “Did they enjoy working in such a wonderful place, and had they noticed how Ghirlandaio and Botticelli both…” at which point the guard would be taken to the back of the chapel to appreciate whatever it might be – what was remarkable was that because Bruce asked them their opinion, a relationship would develop, and the mood became quite relaxed and positive. Friends of mine in Verona still remember Bruce as “the barefoot scholar”.’
Then a year in Germany, 1977–8, teaching research presentation skills in English at Max Planck institute for Education Research. Berlin. I think this was the period when Bruce smashed his front teeth playing squash. Memories of this period were overwhelmed by the tragic death of his sister Corinne, twin to his elder brother James. Bruce remembered that his sister left behind two letters after her suicide and for the first time he ‘watched the carapace of strength drain from the face of my father.’
Two years in Isfahan, Iran, 1978–summer 1980 – teaching English and French at Isfahan University. Artemis Cooper seems to have provided Bruce with a useful personal introduction to Paul Gosht who invited him to teach English in Isfahan through the British Council. This happy task lasted for two years and seems to have been on a suitably ad hoc basis. Every third month, Bruce crossed a Persian frontier travelling into Afghanistan, Pakistan or India for a bit, then returned to the Iranian frontier to collect a fresh three-month tourist visa.
Bruce survived attempts to denounce him as a foreign agent, supported by all his students at Isfahan. But the violence of the revolution eventually caught up with him. In Isfahan he lodged in the house of Rev. Hassan Barnaba Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop of Iran, Jerusalem and the Middle East. It was a family house, home to his four children: Shirin, Susanne, Goli and Bahram. The bishop was an intriguing character. He had been born to a poor Muslim family of slipper makers in the village 25of Taft but had been sent to a series of Anglican mission schools after the early death of his mother who had converted to Christianity. He formally converted as an eighteen-year-old, and his fluency in English made him a natural middleman during his period of military service (1943–5) which coincided with British military occupation. After studying for the priesthood he was ordained at Cambridge in 1949 and in 1952 married Margaret, the daughter of William Thompson, the English Bishop in Tehran whose job he took over in 1976. The revolutionary regime did not approve of either the bishop or the centuries-old network of Anglican schools and charities within Iran. The bishop was accused of corrupt practices and in October 1979 a gunman visited their house. The bishop narrowly escaped assassination in his bed (three bullet holes punctured his pillowcase) and his wife was wounded in the hand by another bullet, leaning over to protect him. The following year their only son, Bahram, who taught at the University in Tehran, and worked part time for NBC news, was abducted and killed, symbolically shot twice in the head outside the walls of Evin prison on 6 May 1980. Bruce helped Susanne (Bahram’s colleague and closest friend) claim his body and escort it to the church in Isfahan. Bahram, who had been educated at Oxford and Harvard and taught economics, was aged just twenty-four.
It was time to go home.
Back in England Bruce sat the Civil Service exam, hoping for employment in the British Council or the Foreign Office, but was sent to Inland Revenue, Finsbury Park, north London. He didn’t last long.
Freelance translation work, 1981–5 This is the ‘middle period’ of Bruce as a professional house guest and amateur musician, largely based in London.
Manager for Afghanaid. University Town, Peshawar, 1985–7 Specific projects included working within the refugee camps in Pakistan, creating employment for war widows and the fitting of prosthetic limbs for war casualties, but also providing convoys of cash to support war-damaged farming communities within Afghanistan, especially the farming hamlets of the upper Panjshir valley under the control of Ahmed Massoud. Bruce’s fluency in Persian won him this job but after two years he had to return to London (to be cured at the Institute of Tropical Diseases) which gave the director, Romey Fullerton, the opportunity to replace him with Juliet Crawley. Despite this, Bruce remained a friend to Juliet, most especially evident after the assassination of her French husband, Dominique Vergos.
Freelance consultant, monitoring aid projects in Afghanistan, for UN and other agencies, 1987–90 Bruce converted to Islam in this period, had himself circumcised, taught himself classical Arabic 26with which to read the Quran and lived like a local. He was a figure straight out of the Great Game, complete with his own horses, hawks and a knowledge of the best Afghan cooks and musicians. This period includes his celebrated journey, riding through North-Western Afghanistan (September 1989 to January 1990) working as the translator for Hugh Leach (an ex-Arabist from the Foreign Office), which included meetings with two of the most celebrated commanders of the Afghan resistance. Bruce considered Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to be evil personified but delighted in the company of Ahmed Massoud. Two years later he completed another major journey through Afghanistan (Ghur, Gharjestan, Chesht and Herat) inspecting and reporting on agricultural, educational and health projects. The letter he later wrote to Fynn Vergos, explaining the circumstances of his father’s assassination, reveals just how familiar he was with all the complications of the North West Frontier in this period, thick with spies, researchers, journalists, diplomats and well-meaning aid workers.
Researcher, script-writer and translator, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1990–93 Specifically a series of Pashtu and Dari ‘soaps’ for the BBC World Service (‘sexed-up Archers for Afghanistan’) which were designed as propaganda-light, a subtle attempt to marry Islamic culture to Western values.
Travelling in the Middle East, 1993–5, researching a book on Islamic culture for Nick Robinson of Constable but also immersing himself in life. Egypt, Syria, Sudan and Yemen and probably bits of North Africa, Caucasia and Turkey.
Living in Healaugh, Tadcaster, Yorkshire, March 1997–summer 1998 Helping Juliet Crawley, now twice widowed, look after her two children (Fynn Vergos and Lettice Peck) while revising and adding to his travel book.
Dragoman tour guide and guest lecturer, specialising in the Islamic world, 1997–2020 Initially Bruce worked for Martin Randall Travel which is without doubt the world’s leading company for art, architecture, music and archaeology tours, complete with concerts and evening lectures. Later he also worked for Eastern Approaches run out of a cottage in the Scottish Borders by Warwick Ball, who had excavated in Iraq and Afghanistan before setting up a tour company that seemed to specialise in conflict zones. Bruce was at first rather dismissive of the ‘paid’ role of tour guide, but in the end he turned it into one of his passions and brought enchantment to hundreds of travellers. All the old social tricks of the ligger-guest: his ability to open doors, plot meals, arrange concerts and impromptu poetry readings, now merged with his brilliance as a linguist, his toughness as a traveller and his desire to 27teach, to ‘open eyes’. He could flirt in all the languages of Europe and recite in half the dialects and tongues of the Middle East. He loved good food but could also survive off ‘Taliban marching powder’ – little handfuls of dried mulberries and walnuts. He was a fearless, interested, brave and kind host, except when it came to canned music, against which he waged perpetual war. As a tour guide he had two principal failings: an inability to suffer fools gladly and an indifference to time-keeping. Clients who wanted to tick off historic sites like a shopping list, leave their hotel at 9.00 a.m., lunch at 12.30 and be dropped back at their hotel at 5.30, would write impassioned letters of complaint to head office, denouncing the wilful and capricious Bruce Wannell. But six months later, many were booking onto a tour ‘wherever Bruce is going.’ After Warwick closed up shop in order to concentrate on Afghan studies, Bruce transferred his skills to Spiekermann Travel in the USA, which specialises in the Middle East.
His attic room in 46 Holgate Road held his books and tour-notes in between foreign travels and forays as a musical guest. I always thought of it as a bolt hole, but it became a real home. I showed an early draft of this to a mutual friend who wrote back with some corrections. ‘I don’t think you make clear that his room in York was in a Housing Association house, hence the drug and mental problems. An unsung part of Bruce’s achievement in life, in my opinion, is the way he created a kind of almost therapeutic community there assisted by his neighbour Mark Speak … that’s possibly overstating it, but it was remarkable. Eventually the Housing Association would actually consult him on proposed new tenants, as they valued his role in creating a stable atmosphere.’
This was combined with several months (sometimes half the year) in Delhi, working beside William Dalrymple 1999–2019, translating original Indian documents and histories that had been written in Persian, which were used in the texts of White Mughals, The Last Mughal, The Return of a King, The Anarchy.
These strands of his life combined with his own freelance research and writing. The most distinctive products of this fruitful period include Calligraphy and Epigraphy in Iran and Afghanistan (2009) and The Elite Burials of Herat and Kabul (2013), topped up by translations of poetry (Persian Poems with Robert Maxwell), Sufi poetry (Amnesty International), articles on Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan for the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopaedia, a third of the text of the Odyssey Guide to Iran and book reviews in learned journals. Lectures delivered at Durham University, Goldsmiths College, Oxford University, Galle, the Institute of Ismaili Studies, Astene conferences 28and others. This body of work, annexed to the prodigious amount of original historical documents translated for William Dalrymple, was recognized with an Honorary Doctorate at York University, the year before he died.
A STUDENT OF LANGUAGE AND LIFE
A litter of gourmands
Julian Wannellis Bruce’s younger brother and currently lives in Cape Town with his wife, two children, two dogs and several guitars.
My mother was an intelligent, witty, beautiful woman with a keen sense of ethics and a carnivorous, at times mischievous, sense of humour. She was a gifted musician, earning distinctions at pre-concert level in piano in Brussels in her late teens and continuing to play until arthritis in old age made it impossible. She then donated our fabulous family Steinway grand (on which we all cut our musical teeth, a wonderful gift of love to her from my father) to Bruce, who subsequently neglected it and allowed it to fall into a state of such disrepair as to render restoration economically unviable, yet the instrument almost unplayable.
My mother could adopt a persona of beatific quietude from time to time, preferring to live inside her thoughts. This could have been partially as a result of her being interested more by indoor pursuits, but also as she never learned to drive, relying always on others for transport outside of her home. Therefore, with my father frequently away and children at boarding school, she often had to amuse herself as best she could at home – and there was always enough to amuse her, as she had a voracious appetite for reading and loved to cook and make clothes, not to mention the hours she could while away with music.
There is an unlikely but true story of her turning up at Wellington with my father, an hour before Speech Day was due to start, in her brand new Mini (a birthday present from him). The idea was for my father to give her a driving lesson before the ceremonies commenced. Sadly, she crashed her new car straight into a huge boulder, decoratively placed on the perfectly edged lawn facing the main, imposing entrance to the heart of the school. That put a stop to her nascent driving career. She was not in any way a practical woman, needing assistance with anything much more complicated than a toaster – a trait she passed on in full to her middle son. When my parents moved to France and they both became 32frail – my father eventually bedridden with acute Alzheimer’s – she gained notoriety for several times calling out the local fire brigade, at all hours, merely to change light bulbs etc.
She grew up in Brussels with a cook, so barely knew how to boil an egg when she got married. But as a wife and mother, and for a self-taught cook, her tastes and the products of her labour were wonderful. As a result, she produced a litter of gourmands! She had a keen eye for interior design and in later years, when children would come to visit from afar, her drawing room never looked the same as on the previous visit, restless as she was for fiddling with ornaments, furniture positioning and picture hanging. She was very loving and whilst she was neither sporty nor particularly outdoorsy, she contributed to us all receiving a rounded upbringing, with a very strong musical sensibility which we have all carried with us into adult life. Her beauty remained throughout her life, through sadness and joy, and she was always being complimented on her appearance – her children would glow with pride as their friends said she looked twenty years younger than the truth. Often wearing her own homemade clothes, she was normally very elegantly dressed. She was devoted to her husband and family and many of us only found their love letters from war time on the sad occasion of their deaths, only six months apart, but having lived a full life into their mid-nineties. When our father died, she surprised all of us with her pragmatic response and fortitude, revealing an inner strength which was admirable.
Brown-haired and strikingly aesthetic
Oxford, 1971
John Martin Robinsonis a writer and architectural historian, and lives at Beckside House on the Lancashire–Westmorland Frontier, where Bruce was a regular visitor during his English perambulations, most recently at New Year 2020.
Bruce became a friend at Oriel, Oxford, nearly fifty years ago. I was a graduate student there from 1970 onwards, and Bruce came up a year later, brown-haired and strikingly aesthetic, even then, in his pronunciation, mannerisms and general views. He was different from most Oriel undergraduates who tended to be a bit on the beefy side. Oriel was then (and remains) the rowing college par excellence, and the rowers set a tone of hearty hooliganism with regular revels in the quads (of a type which would currently be frowned upon) with the burning of boats on the lawns, or the theft of the bursars’ red geraniums from the window boxes. They had their own table in the hall where they consumed their own hunk-building food: chunks of raw steak and that kind of thing, while the rest of us were served pies with bland fillings. To appreciate Bruce’s full impact, he needs to be seen against that noisy backdrop, in his rooms in the Robinson Building in the second quad, exuding precise elegance and culture, definitely not a red-faced John Bull.
Bruce immediately set out to be the leader of the college aesthetes, admittedly a small group. He held regular poetry readings in the evenings and the sort of entertainments where you had to perform obscure short English plays, translating into French at sight as you went along. This was easier for Bruce to shine in, as he was bilingual, his mother being French-speaking Belgian, whereas some of us found our A-level French a little rusty. He was reading modern languages, and already developing the interests of his maturity in Persian poetry and Sufi mysticism.
These poetry and drama evenings were the understated end of Bruce’s entertainments. He specialised in more ambitious fancy dress 34parties. One year he gave a fête champêtre which spilled over into the garden of the quad. It was made memorable by the inclusion of a real sheep which he had borrowed from a real shepherd encountered on a walk at Witham, near Oxford. I have forgotten how he managed to smuggle it into college past the observant NCO-type porter who could be very firm about that sort of thing, Sir!
Equally memorable was a Decadence Evening, where we all had to go as fin-de-siècle poets and read our works; Baudelaire and Verlaine as it were. Being ginger I went as Swinburne in a black velvet jacket, and even grew a little red beard to emphasise the authenticity (I am embarrassed to say that I so liked it, I kept the beard and the black velvet jacket for some time afterwards). Wine in large quantities (at discount from JCR) played a strong role in these entertainments and was part responsible for their light-hearted and hilarious character. Bruce, himself, was a great imbiber at that stage, which seems unlikely in retrospect, knowing of his later conversion to Islam. The after-effect of one such evening caused a small embarrassment. He had spilt a bottle of red wine all over his white shirt and sent it to the laundry without thinking. At the time Oxford was engulfed in a Ripper-type murder scare, and the laundry encountering a violently red-stained shirt, thought they must have the culprit and called the police. Bruce was surprised by a visitation from the constabulary. ‘Oh no officer, not blood, just wine … a perfectly ordinary little party, you understand: we were all dressed as Aubrey Beardsley, I in my best white shirt, and, yes, there was a sheep in the room, but…. just a glass of claret…’
Bruce always had a twinkly sense of humour which was one of his most endearing features. He was teasable, even about his family, which had its tragic side. Though he was close to his mother, he did not get on with his businessman father, and his older brother was ‘ordinary’. I use that in the comparative sense in which I once heard Desmond Guinness describe his Mitford aunts: ‘Well Unity was a Nazi, and Decca a Communist…but Debo was perfectly ordinary; she was a Tory!’
Coming from the Wuthering Heights myself – Lancashire, Scotland and the Wilds – I liked to tease Bruce about his living in Surrey which I thought ‘suburban’:
‘Look at your address’, I said, ‘Cyrene House; on the way to Jerusalem is it?’
‘Oh no’, said Bruce. ‘It was built in the 1930s by a local couple who named it after themselves. He was Cyril and she was Irene.’
Picnics on the rooftop
Oxford and Paris 1971–5
Matthew Harraginmet Bruce at Oxford, where they both read French and German at Oriel. They became close friends in their year abroad in Paris and shared a house on the Thames in their final year with Neil Stratton. Bruce was godfather to Matthew’s son William.
My first memory was the sound of his voice issuing from our French tutor’s study. Bruce was early for once. I paused outside the door and heard this pretentious monologue, almost dowager like, which I assumed would be our tutor speaking. It was Bruce. My first impression was not overwhelming: long, thick, darkish hair; broad shoulders; slightly stout – too much Berlin Kartoffel in his gap year? I could see his sharp eyes taking me in. He was the open scholar, mine an incestuous closed one. I could see him grading me. My long hair and tan from working in a French port. Interesting. What was clear was that he had got the measure of the tutor, Arthur (I won’t demean him with a surname). Arthur’s French was execrable. Both of us were fluent. It was slightly embarrassing. Bruce decided at that moment not to waste valuable academic time writing essays for Arthur. To my knowledge he never wrote a single essay. Yes, he wrote notes. And from these notes and prodigious memory, he ad-libbed his essays to Arthur. We derived a system. I always read my essay first. Then if Arthur ever asked Bruce to repeat a line of his non-existent essay, I would interrupt with a red-herring question. It worked for our entire time at Oxford.
It didn’t work with our brilliant German don, David Luke, who recognised Bruce’s dilettantism as quickly as Bruce had nailed Arthur Crow (oops, sorry Arthur). David was the head German don in Christ Church, Oriel being too small, or poor, to afford one. So we would cross Oriel Square for shared tutorials in his modernist rooms. We were all impressed, if a little unsettled, by the stuffed viper that occupied a glass jar on top of his wardrobe. It seemed symbolic. For a time David even refused to teach Bruce, but in the end they saw eye to eye, perhaps 36through their shared love of Wagner. Bruce admired David’s stripping down of German literature to key writers: Goethe (natch), Schiller, Kleist, Kafka, Mann, whom David translated very successfully, and Rilke. David became a good friend to us both and Bruce never forgot his outrageously mad performance of Penthesilea (Kleist) in the house that Bruce and I shared in our final year. Less successful was David’s invitation for us to meet W. H. Auden. David had been instrumental in persuading Auden back to Christ Church, where he lived gratis in a sweet cottage within the college walls. David got Auden to invite us as two of his best (hardly) undergraduates. From the outset it didn’t go well. I asked Auden for a match to light my cigarette. Auden had a hissy fit. Bruce settled back to enjoy the show. Auden prepared us two strong dry martinis and then proceeded to wheel out a few of his stock stories. He wasn’t going to waste any creative juices on us. He had become time-obsessed and suddenly he realised he only had a quarter of an hour to slipper-shuffle to high table. He had just refilled our glasses and we were a bit surprised when he seized them and threw the contents down the sink. Bruce and I chuckled as we made our way back to Oriel. Bruce was not overawed by academic celebrity, particularly if it was running on empty. He had Pierre Boulez in his family after all.
Bruce was famous in Oriel for a fête champêtre that he gave complete with bright green artificial grass from the butcher in the covered market and a live lamb provided by my girlfriend, Lucy. Needless to say the lamb bleated throughout and watered the grass. Bruce loved the mix of artifice and reality, at least he did until some Downside heavies, obviously attracted by the sound of sheep, burst in and were sick all over Bruce’s treasured bookcase. Brideshead Central.
In our third year we both went to Paris to teach in lycées. Again Bruce realised immediately that this was a waste of time and spent most of his teaching time travelling around France. He had a delightful chambre de bonne on the left bank and used to hold picnics, his favourite, on the rooftop. We would all follow his fearless exit through the window and lying with our backs on warm slate eat the deliciousness that he had bought from Jane McCaskie at Fauchon, looking across the river to the grey roof of Notre-Dame. How lucky were we? I still remember our departure from Paris. I had hired a deux chevaux and we crammed as many of our possessions in as we could, handing out the rest to our friends who had come to wave us off from Place Saint-Michel. We drove via Bruce’s favourite Normandy monastery at Le Bec-Hellouin (picnic with white swans). At Calais we had to take all our possessions out of the car, which were stowed under a tarpaulin on the deck. We felt like refugees. Bruce loved it.37
In our final year we shared a house with Neil Stratton by the river. The location was perfect. We had swapped the Seine for the Thames. Revising was impossible. In the mornings we would try to go to the modern languages library, but Bruce would fall asleep in the bath and by the time he arrived at George’s in the covered market, I would have finished breakfast and be off to study, almost immediately falling asleep and dribbling over my textbooks. By the time Finals arrived, neither of us was really prepared. Bruce used to infuriate me by turning up to every exam twenty minutes late. I would hear the commotion at the back of the Examination Schools and know it was him. When I asked him why, he said he was too busy revising. He didn’t care about degrees. It was knowledge that interested him.
Our last hurrah at Oxford was pure Bruce: a Venetian party with people arriving by punt. He had commissioned our good friend James Ramsay to write a masque for the occasion, which we performed mid-party. There were fireworks, champagne popping and laughter. And who can forget Bruce’s laughter? Slightly camp, gurgling, encouraging, encompassing, inclusive, for it included everybody. It always would.
Isis, but thousands of miles from Egypt
Neil Strattonshared the downstairs flat in Isis House on Folly Bridge in Oxford with Bruce and Matthew Harragin in 1974–5, having just completed his first degree in zoology and started a research degree in developmental genetics. He subsequently put his years as an Oxford biologist to good use by moving to London and becoming a translator. He now lives in the Scottish Borders.
I met Bruce over forty-five years ago because, perhaps like many of you reading this, I lived in a house on which his eye had fallen. My house, however, was no stately pile nor an exquisite Palladian gem. In fact, it wasn’t even a house at all but a flat; a cold, damp flat tucked away behind a boatyard; a cold, damp flat on an island in a river that, though it styled itself Isis, was separated by thousands of miles and years from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. What then could have drawn Bruce’s eye to so workaday a dwelling?
In the summer of 1974 I found myself in sole possession of the ground-floor flat in Isis House but without the means to pay for it. I had moved in the previous autumn with two fellow students who were leaving that summer to get proper jobs whilst I, quite late in the summer term, found myself the recipient of a research scholarship that would allow me to live in penury but free from the drudgery of 9-to-5 for several more years. The flat, though cold and damp in winter, was idyllic in summer with riverside garden and mooring for punt. Did I take on a flat I couldn’t afford or decamp to the Cowley Road? Messing about on the river trumped toadstools sprouting on walls and a hot water cylinder that struggled to fill the kitchen sink, let alone the bath. I took the plunge. Something or somebody was bound to turn up.
Sure enough, that August, just when Oxford was at its emptiest, somebody did turn up. I looked out of a window to see a strange figure standing in the garden. Unbeknownst to me, Bruce and his friend Matthew Harragin had just returned from teaching in Paris and now were in search of somewhere to live for their final year. I had a flat with 39two empty rooms. They were two wandering scholars with nowhere to rest their quill pens. It didn’t take long to realize there was a deal to be done. And so it was.
What, however, perhaps makes my story a little different from your own experience of Bruce descending on your house is the fact that the stranger standing in my garden all those years ago was Matthew, not Bruce.
Bruce himself arrived with the start of the new term and there followed a year of madrigals, banquets cooked on nothing much bigger than a Baby Belling, interspersed with a modicum of work, though not necessarily of the sort Oriel’s tutors would recognize; and then, as the days lengthened and warmed, evenings punting down the river to Iffley and the Isis Hotel.
All culminated in a fête champêtre
