Fresh Air Fiend (63 page)

Early death is frequently seen as a sort of martyrdom. Bruce Chatwin's tragic death in 1989, at the age of forty-nine, is often depicted that way, and the acolytes who have gathered around his flame have proven to be passionate in advancing the solemn personal myth that Chatwin sometimes helped along and sometimes mocked. Smirk even for a moment at the stained-glass window these people have put together out of ill-assorted chunks of colored glass and you risk being attacked, as I was for the little portrait I wrote of Chatwin a few years after his death.

His audacity was part of his crazy charm. How else could he have gotten along with the likes of Werner Herzog, Robert Mapplethorpe, and (so he reported) Georges Braque? I enjoyed him for his contradictions, but I found that the more he admired someone, the more he talked. I liked being with him, and I was exhausted and grateful when he hurried away—to stay at someone's castle or to observe a fruit bat in Madagascar or, as he tells us in his last collection,
Anatomy of Restlessness,
to hold "a conversation with André Breton about the slot machines in Reno."

Chatwin insists, in that book and elsewhere, that he spent his life flying by the seat of his pants (a poor student, a muddler, a bit of a con man at Sotheby's). You get the impression that he wants you to contradict him, yet I have no trouble seeing him airborne, whizzing skyward, propelled by only his pants. I think nervousness, not arrogance, made him a poseur. "I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists.... I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake," he said.

It was not surprising that such a restless person was a traveler. Some of us are so much happier alone. He was self-conscious in the company of others. He wanted to impress you with something you didn't know: he giddily corrected my pronunciation of "Gouda," and in
Anatomy of Restlessness
we are told, "The word fetish derives from a Portuguese expression
feticceio
" — not a lot of people know that, you see. He talked nervously, interestingly; he boasted, joked, gossiped; his mind was always teeming. And then he would need the respite of solitude, or else new listeners.

Needy, yet also self-sufficient, he was mad about contradictions. The beauties of
In Patagonia, Utz,
and
The Songlines
are their oddities—the arcane lore, the unexpected incident, the queer etymologies. Of course, Bruce tended to recycle his discoveries. In
Anatomy,
surely the bottom of the Chatwin barrel, for the umpteenth time Bruce tells us how he figured out the source for the name Patagonia. It was one of his etymological coups.

Quite often Bruce got the wrong end of the stick, but he still managed to build a whole edifice on it. Nomads interested him. He worshiped the nomadic impulse. One of his longest and most complex historical essays on the traveling spirit is built on the fact that "the word Arab means 'dweller in tents.'" But anyone with an Arabic-English dictionary could have told him that, etymologically, "Arab" means "people who express themselves"—derivations of the root
arab
mean Arabic, a clear speaker, a clarification, an expression—nothing to do with tents. Bruce goes on: "as opposed to
hazar
"—a man who lives in a house—"with the original implication that the latter was less than human." This again is misleading and untrue.

He had an unstoppable energy for curious inaccuracy. I agree that such waywardness at first blush makes for better reading. But in the long run, the truth is usually very weird indeed, which makes his judgments merely lame. He says that Robert Louis Stevenson is "a second-rater" and
Treasure Island
is "second-rate." In fact, his elliptical description of Stevenson is like a self-portrait. In one essay he goes on endlessly about the Hsiung-nu, a nomadic central Asian people, but nowhere does he add that they were the avatars of the Huns. Had he done so, he perhaps would not have written, as he does here, "Nomads rarely, if ever, destroyed a civilization."

Anatomy of Restlessness
is not a book for people coming to Chatwin for the first time. Those readers ought to start with
In Patagonia
and work on from there, taking the books chronologically. They are wonderful books. And it hardly matters how he lived his life, except that it was a great deal odder and more interesting than the keepers of his flame are willing to admit. It seemed that he was either the life and soul of a London party or else living in a tent in Wagga Wagga. Of course, the real Bruce Chatwin—hidden, calculating, intensely perambulating—was somewhere in between.

"W
HEN THEY WERE WRITING
in the Sunday papers about the death of the last Marx brother, one of whose film characters was Otis P. Driftwood," Vivien Greene, Graham's former wife, told his biographer, "I thought, 'That's the name for Graham'—never staying in the same place for more than weeks together."

It is a rum idea, the greatest living novelist as the fifth Marx brother, wearing a funny hat and flapping shoes, with a false nose and an exploding Bible, tripping all over the world—today Berkhamstead, tomorrow Haiti, next week Budapest—Otis P. Driftwood the ambidextrous writer, scribbling novels with his right hand and travel books with his left, and occasionally doing a lifelike imitation of Gustave Flaubert in the French writer's most notable feat, of copulating with a woman, writing a letter, and smoking a cigar
at the same time.
After all, wasn't it Greene himself who pointed out, in a preface to a volume of his plays, how near tragedy is to farce?

There is something farcical about an authorized life of Greene—indeed, about his having an official biographer. Professor Norman Sherry was once a lecturer at the University of Singapore. I know this because I inherited his office there, and some of his students were passed on to me. Stories were told in the Staff Club (and by the way, this is the tone Sherry himself adopts when writing of Greene) of how, researching the background of Conrad's novels, Sherry would set off for Surabaya, to see whether there had been a real-life prototype for, let us say, Axel Heyst's cook Wang in
Victory,
or whether there had been three mysterious strangers like those in the novel. Actually, Conrad had nicked the three villains from a minor Robert Louis Stevenson novel,
The Ebb-Tide.
Sherry was less interested in literary antecedents than those he might find in equatorial back streets, and his eagerness to embrace little-visited countries, exotic people, and the possibility of contracting amebic dysentery so impressed Graham Greene that on the publication of
Conrad's Eastern World,
Greene got in touch with Sherry and eventually authorized him to write his biography.

The years of a writer's struggle and failure often spell success for the biographer. There is no question but that in his following in the footsteps of Greene's life, and in possession of all the Greene papers, Sherry has lucked out: he has a career, a subject, an income, and he is sole proprietor of the official life.

If
The Life of Graham Greene
were not so long and so plodding, it would not be necessary to raise these points. At this moment, Greene himself is stonewalling the publication of a racier—unofficial—biography by one Anthony Mockler. Norman Sherry's book is one of those monumental works that appear to be so exhaustive that you are almost certain something crucial is being left out. William Faulkner's biographer also took two long volumes to anatomize a life in which he mentioned every insignificant detail imaginable yet failed to find space for the fact that over a period of about thirty years Faulkner was an ardent adulterer and had a long-standing affair with a woman who apparently mattered very much to him. It is impossible to read Sherry's book without thinking that a similar sleight of hand is being practiced.

A large portion of the first volume of Greene's life (covering the years 1904 to 1939) is given over to the courtship between Graham and his future wife, Vivien. Am I alone in finding it comic that Greene's hundreds of love letters have been sold to and solemnly catalogued by the University of Texas? Sherry offers us many lengthy and gushing passages from these letters (showing a tender, romantic, vulnerable side of the novelist most people regard as a cold fish), but he does no more than suggest that at the same time Greene was living quite a different life—with "tarts," girlfriends, and drifting women. Indeed, any reader of Greene's work can easily guess that he is well acquainted with the one-night stand as well as the protracted affair, and that his libido has had quite a workout over the years. Where it is possible to document Greene's comings and goings, Sherry gives us great helpings, but clearly Greene had not wished to discuss many episodes, and so we are forced to witness the sorry sight of the biographer reading Greene's diary and reporting, "The rest of this entry has been torn out"—or scribbled over or amended or whatever—reminding me yet again that there are often more lacunae in a long book than in a short one.

Greene's selective autobiographies,
A Sort of Life
and
Ways of Escape,
were wonderful in their way, but I also felt they suffered from being somewhat elliptical. Greene had the strongly self-dramatizing streak that characterizes travelers more than it does novelists, and I never quite believed those seemingly well-polished stories about Russian roulette, failure, and school bullying. As for the nervous breakdown, it seemed to me that Greene's interest in dreams would sooner lead him to a psychiatrist, out of sheer curiosity, than would a nagging neurosis. Greene tells many stories about how he hated and suppressed certain books he wrote in his early years, and I felt these stories, too, to be exaggerations for effect.

Sherry's biography not only substantiates these facts in Greene's life but adds detail to them. The manic-depression and suicide attempts were real, the sense of failure was repeated, and the suppressed novels apparently quite dreadful. After struggling with poetry and even publishing a book of it,
Babbling April,
Greene turned to journalism and fiction, made a success of his first novel,
The Man Within,
and then suffered the ignominious fate of writing one dud after another, culminating in his writing a life of Lord Rochester that lay unpublished for more than thirty years. Down and out is not merely a glib phrase to describe Greene's early writing life, for at various times he pondered the alternatives to writing—perhaps teaching in Bangkok or Norway or Japan or Burma—and he saw the folly of his having chucked his well-paid subeditor's job at
The Times.

With the writing of what he felt was his potboiler,
Stamboul Train,
Greene achieved popular success, but it was to be short-lived. This first volume of Greene's life tells two stories: Greene's courtship and marriage, and his first ten years as a novelist. Vivien said that Greene had a splinter of ice in his heart—it was that which made him so effective and truthful a writer. By the end of the first volume Greene appears to be coming to the end of marriage and just beginning to find real fame as a writer. The splinter of ice is now a daggerlike icicle.

Greene's decision in 1935 to walk through the hinterland of Liberia was crucial. The unexpected feature of it was that he chose as a traveling companion his cousin Barbara. This young socialite proved amazingly equal to the task, nearly as tough and resourceful as Graham, and her own account of the trip,
Land Benighted
(reprinted as
Too Late to Turn Back),
should be read alongside
Journey Without Maps.
Going to Liberia proved to Greene that he could endure hardships, that he could be brave and take risks, that there was an attraction in squalor and seediness. Having put his mind to it, he had convinced himself that he had something of Jim Hawkins as well as Stevenson in him. One of Greene's most attractive traits was his willingness to put himself on the line. In the quietest sort of way he was a man of action, making the most of any experience. At the end of this first volume, after his five weeks—only—of travel in Mexico, he produced two of his best books,
The Lawless Roads
and
The Power and the Glory.

The unhealthiest aspect about a burning curiosity to know every last detail of a writer's life is that it often signals an utter indifference to a writer's work. Do we understand Greene's books better or like them more after knowing (as Sherry tells us) about the brothels and prostitutes in San Antonio in 1938, complete with names and addresses, adding, "No doubt some of those girls were still living there when Greene went to explore the street"? I am not convinced of this. Yet I found this biography fascinating in the same way that Greene must have found Lord Rochester fascinating, and I read it with the same enthusiasm that animated Greene when he went to a freak show in San Antonio to see two dead gangsters (mummified), Siamese-twinned sheep, and "a frog baby born to a lady in Oklahoma"—in other words, impure enthusiasm.

"I'm afraid that at the moment my health is pretty lousy," Greene wrote to me from his hospital bed in Vevey. "I am not supposed to drink at all, which is painful, and my days seem taken up with blood transfusions, vitamin injections and four different kinds of pill. I suppose one could expect worse at my age."

True—he was eighty-six years old. But even reading that dire description, I felt he was still indestructible, and I did not seriously fear for his life. He was unlike any other writer I have known in his being physically fit, without effort. When anyone asked him how he managed to stay in such good health, he said that he ate and drank whatever he liked, and he boasted—to, among others, Fidel Castro—that he never exercised. In fact, he was an energetic walker his whole life, but he loathed outdoor types and was stuck on the idea of being dissolute. "I'm in the mood for a pipe," he sometimes said after a good lunch, meaning a puff of opium.