Bruce Chatwin - Death

Death

Around 1980, Chatwin contracted HIV. He told different stories about how he contracted the virus, such as that he was gang-raped in Dahomey, and that he believed he caught the disease from Sam Wagstaff, the patron and lover of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He was one of the first high-profile people in Britain to have the disease. Although he hid the illness – passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat, a typically exotic cover story – it was a poorly kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and suffered increasing bouts of psychosis. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house belonging to Shirley Conran, the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.

A memorial service was held in the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia in West London. It happened to be the same day that a fatwa was announced on Salman Rushdie, a close friend of Chatwin's, who attended the service. Paul Theroux, a one-time friend who also attended the service, later commented on it and Chatwin in a piece for Granta. The novelist Martin Amis described the memorial service in the essay "Salman Rushdie", included in his anthology Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.

Chatwin's ashes were scattered near a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese. This was close to the home of one of his mentors, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.