What Am I Doing Here? (44 page)

But, I was a boy who, at the age of eight, sang ‘The Stately Homes of England' to the wind-up gramophone. I sang ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen' in falsetto: after puberty, having an extra male hormone or two, I couldn't get my tongue around Dig . . . arig . . . arig . . . arig . . . arig . . . adoo.

For writers who want to write dialogue, I can recommend nothing better that the breakfast scene in
Private Lives
.

Of course, I longed to meet the Master — and did so. It was his last lunch party in London before he crept off to die in Jamaica. The hostess was Anne Fleming, widow of Ian. The other members of the cast were Merle Oberon, Lady Diana Cooper, myself and him. I laughed so much the grouse came down my nose. He and Lady Diana did a dialogue about how, in the 1920s, they appeared in Chicago, he in
The Vortex
, she in
The Miracle
.

On the way out from lunch he said, ‘I have very much enjoyed meeting you, but unfortunately, we will never meet again because very shortly I will be dead. But if you'll take one parting word of advice, “Never let anything artistic stand in your way.”'

I have always acted on this advice.

 

1988

The stories and articles in this book originally appeared, some in a different form, in the following publications:

 

A Coup:
Granta 10
; The Albatross and Chiloe:
Granta 24
; Until My Blood Is Pure and Nadezhda Mandelstam: A Visit:
Bananas
; Madeleine Vionnet, Maria Reiche: The Riddle of the Pampa, André Malraux, George Costakis: The Story of an Art Collector in the Soviet Union, Heavenly Horses, Shamdev: The Wolf-Boy, The Very Sad Story of Salah Bougrine and On the Road with Mrs. G.:
Sunday Times
; Konstantin Melnikov: Architect: American House
& Garden
; Werner Herzog in Ghana:
Interview;
Rock's World:
New York Times
; Nomad Invasions:
History Today
; Donald Evans and Ernst Jünger: An Aesthete at War:
New York Review of Books;
On Yeti Tracks:
Esquire
. A Lament for Afghanistan was first published as the introduction to the Penguin edition of
The Road
to Oxiana
by Robert Byron; Howard Hodgkin was first published as a ‘portrait of the artist' to accompany the catalogue for the Tate Gallery exhibition ‘Howard Hodgkin's Indian Leaves'.

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:

“The Volga” by permission of
The Observer.

Lines from
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
. Copyright © 1962 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Lines from “If You Were the Only Girl” by Clifford Grey and Nat D. Ayer. Copyright © 1916 by B. Feldman & Co., Ltd. Copyright renewed; extended term of copyright assigned and effective January 4, 1980 to Range Road Music Inc. and Quartet Music Inc. All rights administered by Herald Square Music Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Available for the first time in book form, this collection of essays, critiques, and short stories spans Chatwin's career and reveals not only the masterful narrator, but the impassioned reviewer, discerning critic, and audacious essayist.

An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land.

The ordinary lives of two brothers, identical twins who farm a property on the English-Welsh border, are captured in this rich novel.

Part adventure story part philosophical essay this extraordinary book takes Chatwin into the heart of Australia on a search for the source and meaning of man's restless nature.

In this elegant novel, an enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain is as much owned by his precious cache as it is by him, as much a prisoner of the collection as of the Communist state.

Francisco Manoel da Silva exceeds his dreams of becoming a slave trader and is soon the Viceroy of Ouidah, master of all slave trade in nineteenth-century Dahomey. But the ghastly business slowly consumes his wealth and his sanity in this vivid, powerful novel.

A collection of profiles, travelogues, and stories written by Chatwin, who was forever in quest of the extraordinary, the exotic, and the unexpected.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety — the very best in publishing today.

 

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