Bruce Chatwin (97 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Dying early, his good looks for the most part intact in the public mind, Bruce stood for the promotable ideal of the literate adventurer. In Berlin, a travel bookshop, “Chatwins”, opened up in Goltzstrasse. In Amsterdam, an art gallery in Prinsengracht called itself “Songlines”, while in Paris a publishing house took the name “Utz”, publishing an edition of Walter Ralegh’s
El Dorado
in 1993. Patagonia, once a joke, has become the brand-name of an upmarket range of French wind and rainwear and a company in Italy now manufactures his moleskin notebooks, a Chatwin quotation in the back flap.
El Dorado
in 1993. Patagonia, once a joke, has become the brand-name of an upmarket range of French wind and rainwear and a company in Italy now manufactures his moleskin notebooks, a Chatwin quotation in the back flap.
He was emblematic of a way of thinking and of being. He was inquisitive, spiritual and global and the grass was always greener where he had travelled. He incited others to follow him. The Land Council in Alice Springs received requests from the French Foreign Legion for permits and maps “to walk the songlines”. He became an archetype for the urban traveller and a voice for Generation X. “You know Bruce said we should keep moving around,” sang the English pop group Everything But the Girl in their 1991 song “One Place”. He appealed to the world of youth, healthy-living, alternative life-styles; to both men and women. In Montreal, the Chatwin marriage was held up to an impatient girlfriend by a restless young traveller, Patrick Blake, teaching now in Korea, as “the perfect marriage”. To others, he represented the transforming potential of a chance encounter. A few weeks after his death, an advertisement appeared in the
Village Voice
, between a message to Doris to throw away her sandwich board and a thank-you to St Jude: “
Bruce Chatwin aficionado
now studying law, we talked for a block on 7th Street. Meet again?”
Village Voice
, between a message to Doris to throw away her sandwich board and a thank-you to St Jude: “
Bruce Chatwin aficionado
now studying law, we talked for a block on 7th Street. Meet again?”
One of Bruce’s inimitable legacies was “the campaign chair”. In July 1983, Clinton Tweedie, the art dealer from Brisbane, was in a queue in the Lix ice-cream parlour in the Piccadilly Arcade. Bruce, standing in front of him dressed in a lemon-coloured sweater, spun round. “You’re French, obviously.” “No, Australian.” Waiting for Tweedie when he came outside, Bruce invited himself to tea. Extraordinarily, Tweedie was staying in the Covent Garden flat belonging to Bruce’s old boy friend Donald Richards. Copies of Bruce’s books lay scattered about, although Tweedie had never heard of their author. That afternoon Bruce took Tweedie to the Essential Cubism exhibition at the Tate and then showed him his attic flat in Eaton Place. There Tweedie sat in a comfortable deck-chair with a sweat-stained leather seat. Bruce, who had unfolded it from nothing, explained how it was designed in London in 1856. He had acquired the chair from Mussolini’s daughter in Capri and the sweat was that of Il Duce himself, who had used the chair while directing his conquest of Ethiopia.
Visiting London again some years later, after Bruce’s death, Tweedie recognised the chair when he walked into Lord Macalpine’s gallery in Cork Street. Remembering Bruce’s story, he bought it for £1,000, took it back to Australia and now manufactures copies from a factory in Djakarta with canvas seats designed by Mambo.
The chair story is quintessential Chatwin: several bizarre coincidences, an arresting provenance, a stylish object. In her memoir
With Chatwin
, one of Bruce’s editors, Susannah Clapp, invoked an adjective to describe this phenomenon: “. . . at about the time the word ‘Thatcherite’ entered the English language, so did the term ‘Chatwinesque’.”
With Chatwin
, one of Bruce’s editors, Susannah Clapp, invoked an adjective to describe this phenomenon: “. . . at about the time the word ‘Thatcherite’ entered the English language, so did the term ‘Chatwinesque’.”
Bruce’s popularity was reflected in posthumous sales of his books. Published the spring after his death, his collected journalism
What Am I Doing Here
sold 31,688 in hardback in the British market, more than any of his other books.
What Am I Doing Here
sold 31,688 in hardback in the British market, more than any of his other books.
The success encouraged Maschler in 1993 to publish an edition of Bruce’s photographs, with extracts from his notebooks edited by Francis Wyndham. Three years later, Cape published a further selection of essays and stories:
Anatomy of Restlessness.
In Italy, Adelphi sold more than 50,000 copies of both of those books. But in London and New York there grew concerns that Bruce in death was threatening to be more prolific than he was in life. His American editor, Elisabeth Sifton, who had worked with him line by line on
On the Black Hill
, articulated the difficulty of speaking about “the published Chatwin” in that, she felt, “some of it was not ready for publication”. In the
New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani reckoned that
Anatomy of Restlessness
did nothing to enhance his reputation. “Sounding a lot like a flower child with a smattering of scholarly training, Chatwin is decidedly not at his best in this sort of theoretical writing.” There was, she hinted, the whiff of a fully scraped barrel.
Anatomy of Restlessness.
In Italy, Adelphi sold more than 50,000 copies of both of those books. But in London and New York there grew concerns that Bruce in death was threatening to be more prolific than he was in life. His American editor, Elisabeth Sifton, who had worked with him line by line on
On the Black Hill
, articulated the difficulty of speaking about “the published Chatwin” in that, she felt, “some of it was not ready for publication”. In the
New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani reckoned that
Anatomy of Restlessness
did nothing to enhance his reputation. “Sounding a lot like a flower child with a smattering of scholarly training, Chatwin is decidedly not at his best in this sort of theoretical writing.” There was, she hinted, the whiff of a fully scraped barrel.
In
What Am I Doing Here
, Bruce wrote of how “Malraux’s breathless career has left lesser spirits far behind – and irritated.” Bruce, who was himself an exceptionally generous author when it came to discussing the works of others – “I have no memory of Bruce ever saying anything nasty about anyone,” says Rushdie – was perhaps inevitably the victim of jealousy. Wyndham, who had launched Bruce on his writing career, was among the first to worry about a backlash. He feared that Bruce’s premature death and the quality of his early books had inflated his reputation, created a cult. “He is right to worry,” wrote John Ryle in the
Independent on Sunday
on 24 October 1993. Ryle referred to a memoir by Paul Theroux in
Granta 44.
What Am I Doing Here
, Bruce wrote of how “Malraux’s breathless career has left lesser spirits far behind – and irritated.” Bruce, who was himself an exceptionally generous author when it came to discussing the works of others – “I have no memory of Bruce ever saying anything nasty about anyone,” says Rushdie – was perhaps inevitably the victim of jealousy. Wyndham, who had launched Bruce on his writing career, was among the first to worry about a backlash. He feared that Bruce’s premature death and the quality of his early books had inflated his reputation, created a cult. “He is right to worry,” wrote John Ryle in the
Independent on Sunday
on 24 October 1993. Ryle referred to a memoir by Paul Theroux in
Granta 44.
Theroux insisted he had written his memoir as a friend. (“He was an inspiration to me,” Theroux had written to Elizabeth.) The article was described by Graham Coster in the
London Review of Books
on 8 February 1996 as “an assassination” – a “fierce appreciation of a bore, an incessant chatterer, an embellisher of fact, a callow enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway”.
London Review of Books
on 8 February 1996 as “an assassination” – a “fierce appreciation of a bore, an incessant chatterer, an embellisher of fact, a callow enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway”.
Casually approaching a subject that neither Bruce nor Elizabeth took casually (“we had met his wife, but the fact of Bruce having a wife was so improbable that no one quite believed it”), Theroux recorded Bruce’s “lively belief in homosexuality”. He found “rather disturbing” Bruce’s decision never to speak about his private life – although, as Ryle pointed out, it was questionable whether the fact that Theroux had chosen to write about his own sex life had any bearing on Chatwin’s right not to talk about his.
A sense that he had lied about his illness hatched the suspicion that he might have lied in his art. Under the headline “Chatwin accused of hit and myth” the
Daily Telegraph
’s Peterborough column reported the exaggerations which John Pilkington claimed to have uncovered in
In Patagonia
: “To be blunt, much of this book was invented.” Bruce in death was starting to resemble, in some minds,
In Patagonia
’s mythomaniac hero Louis de Rougemont, compère of the show “The Greatest Liar on Earth” for whom “dream and reality had fused into one”. A critical perception in England, that Bruce was engaged in a similar hoax, was not one that would find fertile ground on the Continent where there is much less obsession with category. “If one had to object to people making things up, we’d kill literature,” says his Italian publisher and author, Roberto Calasso. Nor was this attitude encountered in America. “Americans by force of their history and landscape do not think like that,” says Elisabeth Sifton. In Sifton’s view Bruce actually made up very little. He had the imagination to tell stories, to connect them, to enlarge, colour and improve them, but not to invent. “He was an artist, not a liar.”
Daily Telegraph
’s Peterborough column reported the exaggerations which John Pilkington claimed to have uncovered in
In Patagonia
: “To be blunt, much of this book was invented.” Bruce in death was starting to resemble, in some minds,
In Patagonia
’s mythomaniac hero Louis de Rougemont, compère of the show “The Greatest Liar on Earth” for whom “dream and reality had fused into one”. A critical perception in England, that Bruce was engaged in a similar hoax, was not one that would find fertile ground on the Continent where there is much less obsession with category. “If one had to object to people making things up, we’d kill literature,” says his Italian publisher and author, Roberto Calasso. Nor was this attitude encountered in America. “Americans by force of their history and landscape do not think like that,” says Elisabeth Sifton. In Sifton’s view Bruce actually made up very little. He had the imagination to tell stories, to connect them, to enlarge, colour and improve them, but not to invent. “He was an artist, not a liar.”
David Plante, who wrote a portrait of him for
Esquire
in 1990, attributed the backlash to an English desire to knock Bruce down a peg. “There might have been something devilish about Bruce – that he wanted people to envy him. But he was a magical person and he was enviable and if you envy someone you want to see them destroyed.”
Esquire
in 1990, attributed the backlash to an English desire to knock Bruce down a peg. “There might have been something devilish about Bruce – that he wanted people to envy him. But he was a magical person and he was enviable and if you envy someone you want to see them destroyed.”
“Something about Bruce infuriates other writers,” says Wyndham, “as if he’s getting away with something and never did the things he said. But Bruce wasn’t a
mythomane.
Why shouldn’t he turn something that does happen into something with shape and story? It’s not as if he had a tremendously successful and happy life. He wasn’t a darling of the gods. His life wasn’t particularly enviable. He had great depressions.” Wyndham assigns at least part of the envy to the fact that Bruce thought internationally. “It’s the parochial resentment for the brilliant villager who goes and makes it in the big city.” As for the charge that Bruce might have hurt people: “Writers
do
hurt other people. Bruce’s record is much better than a lot of others.”
mythomane.
Why shouldn’t he turn something that does happen into something with shape and story? It’s not as if he had a tremendously successful and happy life. He wasn’t a darling of the gods. His life wasn’t particularly enviable. He had great depressions.” Wyndham assigns at least part of the envy to the fact that Bruce thought internationally. “It’s the parochial resentment for the brilliant villager who goes and makes it in the big city.” As for the charge that Bruce might have hurt people: “Writers
do
hurt other people. Bruce’s record is much better than a lot of others.”
“He was so individual, so much himself. That’s bound to polarise people,” says Rushdie. “When the self is as multi-faceted as Bruce, I guess there’s more to get up people’s noses. That’s the small change of being any good at what you do. And being an interesting person. Of my contemporaries he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind that I ever came across.”
Inevitably, it was a foreigner who asked the question: “Why should the disappearance of Bruce Chatwin make such a difference?” Writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
in June 1989, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said that it was not enough to say that Bruce died young or was full of promise. “Chatwin never delivered the goods that critics or publishers or the reading public expected. Not fearing to disappoint, he surprised us at every turn of the page.” What Enzensberger perceived was Bruce’s Englishness, not his foreignness. He concluded: “it is surely as a storyteller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed – a story-teller going far beyond the conventional limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and gossip. Underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev. When we return to Bruce Chatwin we find much in him that has been left unsaid.”
Times Literary Supplement
in June 1989, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said that it was not enough to say that Bruce died young or was full of promise. “Chatwin never delivered the goods that critics or publishers or the reading public expected. Not fearing to disappoint, he surprised us at every turn of the page.” What Enzensberger perceived was Bruce’s Englishness, not his foreignness. He concluded: “it is surely as a storyteller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed – a story-teller going far beyond the conventional limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and gossip. Underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev. When we return to Bruce Chatwin we find much in him that has been left unsaid.”
A decade after his death, Bruce’s reputation abroad continues to grow. “Of all the English writers in the last 30 years, the only one I take down and re-read is Bruce,” says Susan Sontag. “It’s a very valuable and enthralling voice.” Although old-fashioned, he is seen as ahead of his time because of this cultural daring which is today not only accepted but demanded. “His nineteenth-century energy and zest are valued and cherished,” says Elisabeth Sifton. “People are now rediscovering deep relationships between cultures over time and space. They are reconsidering the idea of a big unifying theme in a more modern way.” His work has gained currency in anthropological departments, to correct the paternalism of previously undisputed western methodologies. Ruth Tringham, his Marxist colleague at Edinburgh and former adversary, now uses
The Songlines
in her teaching at Berkeley. “It amazed me that he managed to transcend the other Bruce I knew and get further into the landscape and people than I ever imagined he could. It’s not the truth, it’s Bruce’s story, but as an idea of trying to grasp an entirely different way of thinking about space and time it’s just as good as anthropology.”
The Songlines
in her teaching at Berkeley. “It amazed me that he managed to transcend the other Bruce I knew and get further into the landscape and people than I ever imagined he could. It’s not the truth, it’s Bruce’s story, but as an idea of trying to grasp an entirely different way of thinking about space and time it’s just as good as anthropology.”
He has set free other writers and encouraged them not to be tamed by conventional boundaries. “People who study Chatwin feel liberated by him,” says Sifton. “Reading him gives you the courage of your own convictions.” The German anthropologist Michael Oppitz, now director of the Zurich Museum of Ethnography, knew him in Nepal. “The thing about Chatwin is that through his life he gave a new definition of the Writer as Hero.” An icon of the back-packer, he inspired myriads of young people to set off and live in Calcutta or Patagonia – “and then come out with a diary that no one publishes”. Oppitz believes this tailoring of the hero figure was a conscious desire. “On a sociological level it is at least as important as his books.”
He made life difficult for booksellers, but vastly more interesting to readers. He is perceived to be the most glamorous example of a genre in which so-called “travel writing” began to embrace a wider range: autobiography, philosophy, history,
belles lettres
, romantic fiction. But unlike Colin Thubron, Jonathan Raban, Redmond O’Hanlon, Paul Theroux, Andrew Harvey, he does not put his travelling self at the centre. His stance is unflappable, detached, discreet – “a pose rather than a subject,” writes Manfred Pfister, the result of a “brilliant self-stylization rather than the self-reflective depth and emotional richness of subjectivity”. Bruce’s lack of introspection is old-fashioned, but his style is contemporary. This unusual blend accounts for his distinctive voice. “He does not seem to owe anything to anybody,” says Thubron. Yet other writers are open about their indebtedness to him. The Italian philosopher Claudio Magris turned to Patagonia for his first novel
Un altro mare.
In
Mundo del Fin del Mundo
, the Chilean writer Luis Sepùlveda has his hero set out from Hamburg airport to South America with Chatwin’s
In Patagonia
in his hands. In Britain, he has inspired a younger generation of “travel writers” like Philip Marsden and William Dalrymple. “In many ways
In Xanadu
would never have happened without my having discovered and loved his writing,” Dalrymple wrote to Elizabeth. “His inheritance was actually his adventurousness,” says Thomas Keneally. “Modern fiction is sometimes too house-trained. Chatwin’s fiction was not house-trained.”
belles lettres
, romantic fiction. But unlike Colin Thubron, Jonathan Raban, Redmond O’Hanlon, Paul Theroux, Andrew Harvey, he does not put his travelling self at the centre. His stance is unflappable, detached, discreet – “a pose rather than a subject,” writes Manfred Pfister, the result of a “brilliant self-stylization rather than the self-reflective depth and emotional richness of subjectivity”. Bruce’s lack of introspection is old-fashioned, but his style is contemporary. This unusual blend accounts for his distinctive voice. “He does not seem to owe anything to anybody,” says Thubron. Yet other writers are open about their indebtedness to him. The Italian philosopher Claudio Magris turned to Patagonia for his first novel
Un altro mare.
In
Mundo del Fin del Mundo
, the Chilean writer Luis Sepùlveda has his hero set out from Hamburg airport to South America with Chatwin’s
In Patagonia
in his hands. In Britain, he has inspired a younger generation of “travel writers” like Philip Marsden and William Dalrymple. “In many ways
In Xanadu
would never have happened without my having discovered and loved his writing,” Dalrymple wrote to Elizabeth. “His inheritance was actually his adventurousness,” says Thomas Keneally. “Modern fiction is sometimes too house-trained. Chatwin’s fiction was not house-trained.”
Keneally, whose own fiction is stimulated by history, is aware of the penalty for transgressing genres. “There is a link between all fine writers and Prometheus. Critics know that creative people have stolen fire, that’s why they are so mean to them. Chatwin had stolen the fire – if you think of fire as the trigger for the tribal circle and stories. He had certainly plundered stories, but I mean, what do you want writers to do? That is almost the job description of writing. Economists think that economic indicators are the metaphor for humanity. Novelists think that stories are the true indicators of human existence. Chatwin correctly saw stories as paradigms of humanity.”
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