Fresh Air Fiend (61 page)

"Russia is going to have five thousand merchant ships in ten years," the captain says. "And we are going to have none." Another crewman says, "We can't compete with countries that pay sailors one dollar a day and feed them fish heads and rice." The enjoyment of reading this book is dampened by its lugubrious message: these people are more endangered as a species than the whales and green sea turtles they sail among.

McPhee is often praised for his economy of phrase and description. Certainly there is a patented McPhee simile, unusual and animal (and it probably helps to be wearing L. L. Bean clothes when you're reading it), like the men who "fanned out around the office door like fish at the mouth of a tributary stream," or the ship that had its end open "like the mouth of a sucker," or "big backhoes that look like thunder lizards." This is writing that might send some readers searching for an illustrated volume of natural history. There is no question that McPhee knows what he is talking about, but beyond that, there can be few writers today—Edward Hoagland and Peter Matthiessen are two exceptions—who would use the phrase "graceful as an alligator" with the assurance that they had hit the nail on the head.

Economy is a virtue in magazine writing. In a book it can seem like meagerness and insufficiency. These chapters all appeared as articles in
The New Yorker.
What is it about that magazine? It seems to do with ink and paper what morticians do with formaldehyde. When
New Yorker
articles and short stories are reprinted in book form, I always get a whiff of the clean inky smell of the magazine and can sense its cool smooth paper, and I hold the book differently, as though afraid I will be gouged by a loose staple.

I would have preferred
Looking for a Ship
to sprawl more. I could have had more of the captain and more of the crew—McPhee visited them at home but gives us only the merest glimpse of their family lives. Take that business about McPhee looking at the snow-capped peaks while the crew was drinking and misbehaving and—who knows?—using the Christian Science Reading Room. Had he conceived this as a book, I think he would have seen the necessity of including such boisterous scenes. What looks like prudence and humility could be journalistic economy. McPhee has written thumping big books, and he has reprinted shorter articles between covers. This is an example of the latter. I wanted more. That might sound like criticism. I mean it as praise.

W
HEN I THINK
of Bruce Chatwin, who was my friend, I am always reminded of a particular night, a dinner at the Royal Geographical Society, hearing him speak animatedly about various high mountains he had climbed. And this struck me as very odd, because I knew he had never been much of a mountaineer.

I was some way down the table, but I heard him clearly, for Bruce had a voice that carried sharply and always rose above any others in a room, like a chattering bird call. That night he spoke in his usual way, rapidly and insistently, stuttering and interrupting and laughing, until he had commanded enough attention to begin speechifying. Being Bruce, he did not stop with the peaks he had scaled. He had plans for further assaults and expeditions, all of them one-man affairs, no oxygen, nothing frivolous, minimum equipment, no delays, rush the summit. As he appeared to hold his listeners spellbound (they were murmuring "Of course," "Extraordinary," "Quite right"), I peeked over to see their faces. On Bruce's right was Chris Bonington, conqueror of Nanga Parbat and numerous other twenty-thousand-footers, and on his left Lord Hunt, leader of the first successful expedition up Everest.

"Chatter, chatter, chatter, Chatwin," a mutual friend once said to me. He was smiling, but you could tell his head still hurt. Bruce had just been his houseguest for a week. "He simply never stops."

This talking was the most striking thing about him, yet there were so many other aspects of him that made an immediate impression. He was handsome, he had piercing eyes, he was very quick—full of nervous gestures—a rapid walker, highly opinionated, often surprisingly mocking of the English. Of course Bruce talks a lot, people said. It's because he's alone so much of the time. But he wasn't: his official biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, demonstrated in 1999 that Bruce was seldom alone, and nearly always traveled with a friend. Because Bruce was given to sudden disappearances, everyone assumed he was alone. In any case, I believed he talked to himself, probably yakked nonstop, rehearsing his stories and practicing funny accents and mimicry—a habit of many writers and travelers. I am sorry I never asked him whether he did this. I am sure he would have let out his screeching laugh and said, "Constantly!"

Chatwin's funeral remains for me the most significant single literary event I knew as a writer in London. It was a cold bright day, Valentine's Day, 1989. Bruce was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up, but when he died many people published their memories of him—and the portraits were so different. It was amazing how many people, old and young, many of them distinguished, a number of them glamorous, gathered to mourn him, in the Greek Cathedral of Santa Sophia in London, in a ceremony rich in religious fetishism. Every English writer I knew or had heard of turned up. Writers, especially London writers, look so odd, so pale, so twisted and defenseless in the open air. Salman Rushdie sat in the pew in front of me with his then wife. Just the day before, the Ayatollah Khomeini had decreed his death—I thought it was a hollow condemnation, and I joked about it. Judging from the congregation, Bruce had known everyone—the aristocracy, the gentry, the editors, the art crowd, the auction people, and the riffraff to which most of us as writers belonged.

Holding an Order of Service, we joined in the Kontakion, which contained the lines "O Lord, give rest to the soul of Thy servant Bruce, in a place of light, a place of verdure, a place of repose, whence all pain, sorrow, and sighing have fled away."

It was the sort of place he never wrote about, nor did any of us writers who traveled.

There was no buzz in the pews. In life, Bruce had flitted from one to another, keeping everyone separate, making a point of not introducing us but often dropping our names.

He did not merely drop Francis Bacon's name, he went one better and mimicked him, which suggested how intimately he knew the great painter. "Oh," he would say with an epicene hiss, "a million quid for one of my paintings—I'll just spend it on champagne." Bruce could get two or three boasts into a single statement, as in, "Werner Herzog and I just hiked two hundred miles in Dahomey," or "David Hockney told me that his favorite painter is Liotard, an eighteenth-century Swiss. He's brilliant, actually. I often go to the Rijksmuseum just to look at his work." (This must have been true, because one day in Amsterdam Bruce showed me a Liotard painting.)

Postcards are the preferred medium for many self-advertisers, combining color, cheapness, and an economy of effort—something like a miniature billboard. Bruce was a great sender of postcards. He mailed them to me from France, from China, from Australia, and from the artists' colony Yaddo.
Feverish lesbian sculptors doing vulvaic iconography in plastic,
he wrote from Yaddo. He encapsulated a theory about an Italian writer in Yunnan. From Australia he wrote,
You must come here. The men are awful, like bits of cardboard, but the women are splendid.
And on another postcard from Oz (this one of a bushranger):
Have become interested in an extreme situation, of Spanish monks in an Aboriginal mission and am about to start sketching an outline. Anyway the crisis of the "shall-never-write-another-line" sort is over.

In his writing, he was in a state of permanent crisis. Perhaps he had started to write too late in life, perhaps he lacked confidence. A writer talking to another writer about the difficulty of writing is hardly riveting—you just want to go away. Bruce was at his least interesting bemoaning his writer's block, and I often felt that he was not really bemoaning it at all but rather boasting about the subtlety of his special gift. His implication was that it was so finely tuned it occasionally emitted a high-pitched squeal and seemed to go dead. But no, it was still pulsing like a laser and had simply drifted a fraction from its target. I had no such story to tell. I was producing a book a year, turning the big wooden crank on my chomping meat grinder. How could I talk about a literary crisis when all I had to do to continue was grab the crank and give it a spin?

Bruce did write like an angel most of the time, but he is never more Chatwinesque than when he is yielding to his conceit. In
The Songlines
he mentions how he happened to be in Vienna speaking with Konrad Lorenz (in itself something of a boast) on the subject of aggression. Considering that Lorenz was the author of
On Aggression,
this was pretty audacious of Bruce. Yet he was unfazed in the presence of the master, and went further, cheerfully adumbrating his own theory of aggression, with much the same verve as he described his mountaineering exploits to Lord Hunt.

"'But surely,' I persisted, 'haven't we got the concepts of "aggression" and "defense" mixed up?'" Bruce asks pointedly, implying that Professor Lorenz has been barking up the wrong tree in sixty-odd years of scientific research. Bruce then boldly sketches his Beast Theory: man needing to see his enemy as a beast in order to overcome him, or needing to be a "surrogate beast" in order to see men as prey.

It seems astonishing that the world-renowned zoologist and philosopher did not find Bruce's Beast Theory conventional and obvious (as it sounds to me). Instead, "Lorenz tugged at his beard, gave me a searching look and said, ironically or not I'll never know: 'What you have just said is totally new.'"

Bruce claimed to have the usual English disdain for flattery and praise, which was disingenuous, because he actually adored it, and of course—praise is cheap and plentiful—it was lavished upon him. To need praise is human enough. Bruce solicited it by circulating to his friends bound proof copies of his books prior to publication. We would read them and scribble remarks in the margins. I remember the scrib-bled-over copy of
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
My remarks were anodyne, but some other snippets of marginalia were shrieks of derision: "Ha! Ha!" or "Rubbish!" or "Impossible!" He said he didn't care. But he was at his most unconvincing when he was dismissive of praise.

Here he is in Dahomey, speaking to an African soldier, in his sketch "A Coup":

 

"You are English?"

"Yes."

"But you speak an excellent French."

"Passable," I said.

"With a Parisian accent I should have said."

"I have lived in Paris."

 

Much of Bruce's reading was in French, usually obscure books. It would be something like Rousseau's
Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker),
Gide's
Les Nourritures terrestres,
Rimbaud's
Les Illuminations,
or—one of the strangest travel books ever written—Xavier de Maistre's
Voyage autour de ma chambre (ATrip Around My Room).
When he found a book that few other people had read, he tended to overpraise it. He might dismiss a book precisely because it happened to be popular.

His ability to speak French well was of course part of his gift for mimicry, and it delighted me, though it irritated many who felt that he was showing off. When Bruce appeared on the Parisian literary TV show
Apostrophe,
he was interviewed in French and replied with complete fluency, talking a mile a minute.

He was full of theories. One was highly complex and concerned the origin of red as the official color of Marxism. This theory took you across the ocean to Uruguay. It involved butchers in Montevideo, peasants on horseback, Garibaldi, and the Colorado Party. I think I've got that right. The theory then whisked you back to Europe, to Italy, to Germany, to Russia and the adoption of—was it a red apron? was it a red flag? It was all very confusing, though Bruce told the story with precision, and always the same way. I know this, because I heard him explain it at least four times. He told it to everyone. It was tiresome to hear the theory repeated, but it was even more annoying to realize that he had not remembered that he had told you the story twice before.

That was something his friends had to endure. If he couldn't recall that he was repeating something to you verbatim—shrieking each predictable thing and looking eager and hopeful—it seemed to indicate that he cared more about the monologuing itself than about you. The worst aspect of monologuers is their utter lack of interest in whomever they happen to be drilling into. Because it hardly matters who they are with: everyone is a victimized listener, great and small.

Bruce was a fairly bad listener. If you told him something, he would quickly say that he knew it already, and he would go on talking. Usually he was such a good talker that you didn't care that he alone bounced the conversational ball.

While most of us knew his stories, great gaps existed between them. There is a nice English quip to express befuddlement: Who's he when he's at home? Everyone knew Bruce was married—we had met his wife, Elizabeth. But what sort of marriage was this? "A
mariage blanc
," a friend once said to me, pursing his lips. In his way Bruce was devoted to his wife, but the very fact that he had a wife was so improbable that no one quite believed it.

One night at dinner, just before he left the table, I heard Bruce distinctly speak of his plans for the near future and say, "I'm going to meet my wife in Tibet." Afterward, one of the people present said, "Did he say his wife was dead?" and another replied, "No. He said his wife's in bed."

He was not so much reclusive as selective. We heard the colorful stories of a born raconteur. But what of the rest of it? We wondered what his private life was really like, and sometimes we speculated. His first book,
In Patagonia,
embodied all his faults and virtues. It was highly original, outrageous, and vividly written. He inscribed a copy to me, writing generously, "To Paul Theroux, who unwittingly triggered this off"—and he explained to me how a book of mine had inspired him to go to Patagonia. But his book was full of gaps. Life was never so neat as Bruce made out. What of the small, telling details that gave a book its reality? I used to look for links between the chapters, between two conversations, between pieces of geography. Why hadn't he put them in?