Bruce Chatwin Read online

  He called England “le tombeau vert”, the green tomb, and to a friend in Sydney began a letter: “a quick note in extremis, i.e. from London”. The wife of Carlos Fuentes assured him, “You’re not English at all.” He looked pleased. He liked to misquote the actress Arletty, telling how his nationality was one thing – “but mon cul is international.”

  He was everything the English distrust. Stylish. Passionate. A lover of theory and of the French; and obsessive, which we dislike in particular.

  Not long after the momentous meeting with Brain, Chatwin stepped off a plane to Melbourne and for 48 hours non-stop, it seemed, he talked to the German film director Werner Herzog. “It was a delirium, a torrent of storytelling,” says Herzog. “It went on and on, interrupted by only a few hours of sleep. When I think of Bruce Chatwin now, I think of the ultimate storyteller. It’s the resonance of the voice and the depth of his vision that makes him one of the truly great writers of our time.”

  In Italy, he liked to descend without warning on the art historian Hugh Honour. “The moment he got out of his car he began talking,” wrote Honour. “He never made any conventional opening remark. There was never any ‘how ghastly the traffic is nowadays on the autostrada’. He would launch straightaway into an account of some new friend he had just made, of some new place he had just seen or some wonderful and extraordinary object he had found – and bought for a song. A brilliant mimic with a sharp ear for absurdities of phrase and voice, he could impersonate people I knew so brilliantly that I never doubted the accuracy of those I hadn’t met, Jacqueline Kennedy or Mrs Gandhi for instance, who were two of his stand-by party turns. And his gossip was without malice. He cherished his sacred monsters as part of his mental collection of the unusual. For he collected people just as he collected objects – and ideas and words. He was fascinated by the idea of the Schatzkammer, those sixteenth and seventeenth-century collections of natural and artificial curiosities and his own ‘collection’, which mostly remained in his head, rather resembled them. His mind was filled with an extraordinary jumble of the abstruse, the exotic, the savage and the sophisticated.”

  “I’m at my happiest,” Chatwin used to say, “having a good old yakking conversation.”

  Telling stories was how he gave of himself. “For all his hypocrisies, snobberies and curmudgeonliness, he was a giver,” says the Indian journalist Sunil Sethi. For the writer Sybille Bedford, “Having him around was having extra oxygen in the air.” He reflected his listeners back on themselves in heightened colours. “He made you participate in what, in that moment, did not seem to be a fantasy,” says Francis Wyndham, who in 1972 recruited him to the Sunday Times. “One was included in it, even though he did all the talking. But he made me feel he was talking because of me, which explained the sense of exhilaration. That was part of his charm: he made me feel pleased with myself.” Nin Dutton drove with Chatwin over four days from Adelaide to Brisbane. “The whole time we were driving, Bruce never stopped talking, and he was never boring ever, ever. His over-exuberance was one of his gifts, that’s why a lot of women adored him. He made them feel three times their size.”

  Chatwin’s storytelling engaged all his faculties: his youthful looks, his savage mimicry, his peacock voice – both invigorating and crushing at the same time, and “always on the edge of mirth”. To the novelist Shirley Conran, the combination was impossible to ignore. “He looked like a knight of medieval legend and if you found yourself sitting next to him on a bus you’d find it disconcerting and you’d drop your shopping bag. And you’d be likely to find him on a bus, discussing the merits of Sainsbury’s cream crackers and how much cheaper they were in Fortnum’s; and two weeks after you’d given him your address, you’d receive a box of Fortnum crackers and a note: ‘This is what I mean’.”

  As a young man he was stocky and resembled a big baby. He had fair hair brushed flat over a square head, which was slightly too big for his body, and huge blue eyes that never seemed to blink. “I fixed her with my well-known arctic stare,” he wrote of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. “It made her profoundly nervous.” People have compared the adult Chatwin to a German admiral, a curate, a fallen angel, an unfledged baby sparrow, a farmer, a St Bernard, but the image fixed in most minds is that of a pink-cheeked schoolboy, slightly bumptious, with Robert Louis Stevenson’s ability to render those he met “slaves to a rare, authentic and irresistible charm”. He had, like Stevenson, a child-like rather than a childish approach to life. “His style was to be the beautiful soft child-boy who’s not quite real, like a boy in an English school whom others have a crush on,” says the film director James Ivory. “He was like that and he stayed like that. He was a Rupert Brooke.” His looks matched the way he dressed. “He had a perfect outfit that nanny could have put out for him: khaki shorts, white polo shirt, wonderful white floppy hat, sandals, socks,” says Jessie Wood, with whom he stayed in Greece in the 1960s. “He had a theory you didn’t get corns if you wore socks.” There was always the sense he was conscious of his effect. “You’re like Baron Münchhausen,” Howard Hodgkin told him once. “How?” Bruce asked. “Was he pretty?” Vain he was, but not completely confident about his looks. “Well, I suppose I’m fairly good-looking, but not that handsome. And rather moley,” he told the art critic Ted Lucie-Smith. He felt his British voice sat on his personality “like a layer of slime”. For all that, a great many thought him irresistible. “He was amazing to look at,” says Susan Sontag. “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthral. Your stomach just drops to your knees, your heart skips a beat, you’re not prepared for it. I saw it in Jack Kennedy. And Bruce had it. It isn’t just beauty, it’s a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.”

  Part of his appeal was his humour, a combination of innocence, vulnerability, mimicry, rescued from slapstick by an English taste for the absurd. “He was one of the two funniest people I’ve known,” says Salman Rushdie. “He was so colossally funny you’d be on the floor with pain. When his stories hit their stroke, they could simply destroy you.”

  He was a superb mimic. In his imitations there was the hilarity of the jousting knight who was sometimes less St George than he was Don Quixote. “He had a laugh like a wild hyena, whoops and away it went,” says Nin Dutton. “In the outback, he’d have had a chorus of kookaburras to keep him company. They sit in a tree and laugh like mad. They’d have imitated every word he said.”

  Chatwin had Evelyn Waugh’s “delicious gift for seeing people as funny”. His most common word in conversation, noticed the Australian novelist Murray Bail, was “mad”. “It was a description of honour. He didn’t like ordinary people. He wanted them extraordinary. ‘Everyone’s quite mad,’ he would say, speaking in italics and bulging his eyes.” He could give others the same impression. “There was something inhuman about him when he got excited,” says Sybille Bedford, “a mad horse, large eyes with lots of white.”

  The performance was physical. As he watched his audience come forward on their chairs, affirming him, he grew and so did his stories. “He went straight into a performance,” says his friend Jonathan Hope. “He’d sit bolt upright, ramrod back, his eyes popping, and roar off in fourth gear on his idée fixe of that week or hour.” His voice had the speed of the eighteenth-century Sotheby’s auctioneer George Leigh, pitched, it was said, “somewhere between the affettuouso and the cadenza.” He reminded Hope of Danny Kaye, a Chatwin favourite, who was able to convince an audience entirely by phonetics that he was speaking in Hungarian. Hope could seldom follow Chatwin’s stories to their conclusion. “But he would conjure up incredible images. Evening in the Atlas mountains, the sky an exquisite cerulean blue, the stars coming out one by one and the wonderful sang de boeuf of the North African desert. Sometimes it would get so exhausting that I’d say: ‘Could you just show me a photograph?”’

  He rehearsed his stories “like Churchill, muttering in the bath,” says Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth. “He was always pla
ying a kind of role: you could see him cooking up how he was going to do it. He was so excited when he got to someone’s house: he’d drive up, slam on the brakes, jump out and rush into the house – and I’d have to turn the engine off and shut the car door.” Elizabeth Chatwin did not believe he intended anyone necessarily to believe his stories. “But if they did, he went further.”

  Chatwin was a storyteller first, but not until the last third of his life did he write the stories down. “I’ve always loved telling stories,” he told Thubron. “It’s telling stories for what it’s worth. Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.”

  Stories were Chatwin’s central obsession: digging for them, bringing them to the surface, sharing them. “He was looking for stories the world could give him and that he could embellish,” says Salman Rushdie, who travelled with him through Central Australia. “He didn’t give a damn whether they were true or not; only whether they were good.”

  Chatwin was very theatrical, but he was also deeply serious. His stories concealed as much as they revealed and he hid inside them. He talked as he wrote, to keep something at bay, with an intensity to convince whoever was listening, or reading, that his dragons were not peculiar to him. He told his stories right to the last, going up to bed, stopping on each step of the stair for five minutes, going out to the car, as he drove off, leaning out of the window, till the moment he died.

  In this he shared the malleability of all-knowing Proteus, eluding questions by changing into a lion, a serpent, or fire. “His whole life was spent transforming,” says the actor and theatre director Peter Eyre. As long as he was talking he could not be questioned.

  As with a child, he could invoke in his audience a tenderness towards something easily shattered. “He was very scared,” says Rushdie. “He was telling stories to keep the Jungle Beast away, the false sabre-tooth, whatever it is.” Rushdie had no doubt what this Beast was: “The Beast is the truth about himself. The great truth he’s keeping away is who he is.”

  Say almost anything of Bruce Chatwin and the opposite is also true. There seem to be as many Bruce Chatwins as people he met. “I sometimes think he wasn’t a person: he was a scrum,” says the art critic Robert Hughes. “I think I hardly knew him, there were so many of him,” says Sheila Chanler. The American artist Michèle Laporte likened him to a mirror. “Often people talk about him and end up talking about themselves.”

  “Something in him spoke to an impulse, a fear that is universal,” says his American editor, Elisabeth Sifton. “The Beast is the truth about ourselves, for each of us.” Perhaps this accounts for why so many feel proprietorial about him. According to Wyndham, it is a rare person who remains neutral. “People feel some attitude has to be taken about Bruce, as if you define yourself by how you react to him.” Rushdie says: “You have to agree or disagree. Everything he did, he did very noisily and that creates a response.” Anthony Powell recorded in his diary after watching On the Black Hill on television: “I always feel there was something a bit phoney about Chatwin.” Andrew Harvey, reviewing The Songlines in the New York Times, spoke for a younger audience. “Nearly every writer of my generation in England has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin; wanted, like him, to talk of Fez and Firdausi, Nigeria and Nuristan, with equal authority; wanted to be talked about, as he is, with raucous envy; wanted above all to have written his books . . .” He was, wrote Harvey, “a writer no one who cares for literature can afford not to read”.

  Bruce’s endeavour might seem to be old-fashioned, uniting him to the earliest fireside storytellers, but there is something prescient in his insistence that everything is linked. In his best stories, he gives us licence to travel freely. He introduces us to people and to texts we would not otherwise have encountered. He makes the world tidier, simpler, more exciting: a place to sample, at ease with anybody. His vision is both aristocratic and populist. And it is adventurous. In some ways he was a tremendous snob, but he was not a climber. “He wanted to be there, to know everything,” wrote Hugh Honour. “He had a great appetite for life.”

  What is compelling about Bruce Chatwin is easily lost in a din of bright lights and colours, incessant chatter and a crowded address book where Jackie Onassis is listed next to an Oryx herder. He is so noisy that you cannot hear him; so good-looking that you cannot see him; his work so restrained and cool that you cannot feel him. “His fastidiousness is a disguise,” says Rushdie, “and, oddly, that disguise is what most readers would think of Bruce. They refer to the characteristics of the prose.”

  Where the work is transparent, unencumbered and deceivingly clear, his life is deliberately opaque. “We know nothing about him at the book’s end,” Alasdair Reid grumbled in the New Yorker when reviewing In Patagonia. In fact, Bruce is himself more mysterious and subde than anything he wrote. It is this elusive quality which had led him to the cave in South Africa.

  Returning to Swartkrans a decade on, Bob Brain reflects on the day there with Bruce. “Such moments come to you in remote places. It’s as if the curtain that separates us from a broader vision is briefly lifted. We’re tied to a sequential time sequence, it’s the only way evolution can work – otherwise everything happens at once. But every now and then the process falters and we look through a chink at, I suppose, the eternity religions speak of. When this happens, it’s such a startling experience that you hanker after it when you’re back in the world of sequence. I think that’s what Chatwin did: when he returned to the sequential world, he found it tiresome and set off on another expedition.”

  II

  “Let’s Have a Child,” I Said

  Do you know, my dear, that “Chatwin” is Old English for “spiralling ascent”?

  —BC to his wife

  BRUCE CHATWIN CAME FROM A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY WITHOUT pretensions, but in his imagination – and sometimes in his behaviour – he was exalted, a young prince. In July 1968, he accompanied Stuart Piggott, his professor of archaeology at Edinburgh, to Moscow. “He really is splendid & resourceful & gloriously autocratic,” Piggott noted in his journal. “When on the train an inspector speaking German asked if we were Erste Klasse Bruce said haughtily, ‘Of course we are! Look at us!’ He was under the impression that the man had asked if we were aristocrats!”

  The impulse to recreate himself was present from an early age. “On the Yorkshire Moors aged three or four, I remember my grandmother shouting to my mother over the field: ‘Be careful! Be careful! The gypsies will take him.’ And seeing a whole line, just over the hedge, of gypsy caravans moving up a lane and then a gypsy boy, very brown, on a piebald pony stripped to the waist riding by and being envious in some way or another.”

  To be stolen by gypsies was a better fate than to be Bruce Chatwin from Birmingham. In one of the five schools he attended before he was eight, he told pupils he was an orphan.

  In Australia, the man on whom he had based the hero of The Songlines – that is to say the closest he came to using the device of an alter ego – tried to find out about Chatwin. “Bruce was not the sort of person who liked talking about himself. If you wanted to ask him what he thought about something or what he knew, you could never shut him up. But if you wanted to find out about where he came from and about his family, somehow the subject drifted on to something else and before you knew it he was drawing out information from you. He didn’t say anything to give you a handle on his inner personal life.” He talked sparingly, if at all, of his ancestry or his family. “For most of his life he wanted us to think him so unique that he didn’t actually have parents,” says Jonathan Hope. Some people supposed that he was hiding his family away. A German aristocrat, one of Bruce’s lovers in the 1970s, said: “A middle-class conventional morality haunted him. He had a chip on his shoulder about his background, a critical way of dismissing the years before.”

  From what he has wr
itten and said to friends, he was not ashamed so much as protective of his parents. Hard-working, honest and straightforward, they laboured after the Second World War to put behind them the mistakes and humiliations of their forebears and to build a new life. But as secrets gnaw so Bruce would have absorbed the unspoken. “We were taught at Marlborough,” says his brother Hugh, “that the sins of the fathers are wrought upon the sons even unto the third and fourth generations.” He was, in a sense, a grandchild of shame.

  * * *

  In one of many attempts to make sense of a book on nomads, which dogged him for 20 years and which he never published, Bruce wrote: “This book is written in answer to a need to explain my own restlessness – coupled with a morbid preoccupation with roots.” From his mother, he derived his restlessness; from his father, an appetite for genealogy.

  The Chatwins had a firm sense of their place. They were honourable sitters and servers: lawyers, architects, button-makers, builders who stayed put. If they strayed it was to bring back and to make Birmingham better.

  The name Chatwin is a variant spelling of Chetwynde and derives from a hill in Shropshire once owned by Lady Godiva. Bruce Chatwin’s passion for provenance led him to believe that his name came from the Anglo-Saxon Chettewynde and that it meant “a winding path” or “a spiralling ascent”. But he referred only to the suffix, windan. Chette is harder to fix. It might stem from Catta, a nickname for cat; or from Caté, “a chatterer”. Chatwin most probably meant “Chatterer’s Corner”.