Anatomy of Restlessness Read Free Page A

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.
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    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