The ObserverBruce Chatwin This article is more than 6 years old‘Dazzling and worrying’: my memories of Bruce Chatwin and In Patagonia
This article is more than 6 years oldForty years ago, Chatwin’s debut book transformed travel writing. But just 12 years later, its author was dead. The Observer theatre critic, Chatwin’s editor for that book, reflects on a brief, brilliant career
‘Does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days?” asked Blake Morrison, reviewing his letters seven years ago. Well, someone must: nearly 30 years after his death, all six of Chatwin’s books are still in print. But it is true that when the dominant writers of the 1970s and 1980s are discussed, Chatwin’s name is rarely among them. The penalty of once being fashionable is that you may come to be thought of as merely fashionable. Almost violently successful at first, his books are now less likely to be mentioned than the Moleskine notebooks in which he sketched and jotted.
Vintage’s 40th anniversary edition of In Patagonia is an invitation to look again at one of the most vivid but elusive writers of the late 20th century. Chatwin’s first book, it helped to change the idea of what travel writing could be. It appeared at a rich literary moment, when both reportage and the novel were beginning to fly high in new directions. I remember the time well – I edited In Patagonia and in doing so became friends with the author. Angela Carter and Ryszard Kapuściński, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were already publishing; Julian Barnes was preparing to take off. In Patagonia was in a category of its own. It was clearly not a novel, but it flirted with fiction. A collage of histories, sketches, myths and memories, with short scenes glinting towards each other, without judgment, conclusion or, often, links. Chatwin said he was trying to make a cubist portrait. It is paradoxical, in content and in style. The syntax is snappy but the vocabulary is orchidaceous. It holds back from intimate revelation – “I don’t believe in becoming clean,” Chatwin announced – but is fuelled by autobiography, lit up by personal obsessions.
In Patagonia begins with the infant Chatwin in Birmingham looking at a piece of “brontosaurus skin” and ends with the grown-up adventurer embarking on a ship at Punta Arenas. It examines the lives of the giant sloth and His Royal Highness Prince Philippe of Araucanía and Patagonia – a short chap in a brown tweed suit. It investigates new clues about Butch Cassidy, “who rode into a new life of wide horizons and the scent of horse leather”, and gives a lyrical account of the Welsh in Patagonia: hollyhocks, whitewashed rooms, ripe plums, pottery dogs and a harmonium. One of its final pictures is of “a boy from the Falklands with a sealskin hat and strange sharp teeth”. He declares: “’Bout time the Argentines took us over. We’re so bloody inbred.” That was five years before the Falklands war. Chatwin was often accused of being a fantasist. He was certainly not through-and-through rational, but he was often shrewd, often prescient.
Chatwin was a traveller, an art expert, a connoisseur of the extraordinary. He had not set out to be an author. At school – Marlborough – he had been considered “very much alive… he has a smooth and elegant style but is still too fond of the byways of historical accident”. At Sotheby’s, where he went to work at 18, he was a star: he had a quick eye for a fake, a sure eye for what was good, and rose to dizzy prominence in the impressionist and modern art (excluding British) and antiquities departments. He was also set to charm clients into buying and selling. At Somerset Maugham’s house on the French Riviera, Maugham’s secretary pleaded: “Bruce, do let Willy play with your hair.” He bolted from the auction house to Edinburgh University, to study archaeology. He bolted from Edinburgh after two years without taking his degree. In his 30s, he was taken on at the Sunday Times Magazine and, encouraged by Francis Wyndham, wrote sharp-edged, vivid, ingenious pieces: about the designer Eileen Gray, about George Costakis, an art collector in the Soviet Union, about Madeleine Vionnet, inventor of the bias cut. He bolted from the Sunday Times to Patagonia.
By the time I came across Chatwin, he was 36 and had done all these things. He had also accrued a reputation that, had I known about it, would have made me quail. He was celebrated for his looks: wide-browed, blond, strong blue eyes; his friend Howard Hodgkin thought he “looked like the captain of the first XI” – though he painted him, Chatwin noted, as “an acid green smear”. He was known for being particular about his outfits: his emerald jacket, his khaki safari shirt and shorts, his soft, toffee-coloured boots, and for the haversack in dark brown calfskin custom made by a saddler in Cirencester with each pocket carefully devised to house a particular item. He was famous for his sudden disappearances, his unexpected arrivals and for the whirling discourses that magnetised his audiences but which no one could quite summarise. His riff on red asked if the colour of revolution was inspired by blood or by fire, and took in the bonnet rouge of the French Revolution, Garibaldi, Uruguayan butchers, bullfighters and Buddhism. All too much, you might think, too exquisite. Yet he could capture convinced sceptics with his talk. Martin Amis had developed a rugged resistance to Chatwin before meeting him. When he saw “a very dinky little sleeping-bag with a club-class sticker” that the traveller had left behind him, he decided: “That just about sums him up.” But when he met him he melted. Six years after Chatwin’s death he keenly recalled an evening with him, talking about Romantic poetry. “He did,” Amis said, “remind you how intense the pleasures of conversation can be.”
I first met Chatwin in the drought summer of 1976. He swooped into the dingy room (next to the ladies’ lav) I occupied at the publisher Jonathan Cape, already talking and moving so fast he looked as if he were hiking through the room. He was carrying that calfskin haversack. In it was a paperback of L’or by Blaise Cendrars, a World Classics edition of Sydney Smith’s letters – and the bulky manuscript of what was then called “At the End: A Journey to Patagonia”.
I had written the reader’s report on the book. It had dazzled and worried me. It was exceptional – but it was enormous and it didn’t flow. I became his editor, with the task of making the book speed along. Over the next few weeks, we went through every line of the manuscript, reading it aloud in the Regent’s Park flat of the art dealer John Kasmin. Every night, the author went home merrily to hack away his stuff: he loved chucking out adjectives and anything that looked like a moody reaction shot. Every morning, he arrived having cut – but often having also added another episode; stories kept spilling out of him.
Nevertheless, judging by the sums I scrawled in the margins, I reckon we eventually cut between a quarter and a third of the typescript. The result was a swifter and consistently sleek volume: short phrases, short chapters, short book. Not much that went was wasted. Some of the cut material bobbed up in later work, in The Songlines, his baggiest and probably most famous book, and in On the Black Hill. That novel he wrote, he said, to escape the label of travel writer: “I decided to write something about people who never went out.” John Updike saw in this story of identical twin brothers the picture of a homosexual marriage. Chatwin, who had married at 25, had had male lovers.
For me, his great gift – on the page and in person – was visual generosity. He made you see different things and look at things differently. It was not works of art in galleries that interested him so much as objects, particularly those from which a story could be extracted. On the wall of his attic room in Albany, the apartment block in Piccadilly, was the king of Hawaii’s bedsheet: apricot-coloured, patterned with a shoal of jumping fish, looking like a Matisse. Chatwin had turned up at Christie’s on his bike to buy it in the 1960s. In the small Eaton Place flat designed by John Pawson – pleated like origami to hide his books – he hung pictures he had made by cutting coloured drawings from the catalogue of a broom manufacturer: rows of pinky-red-and-white toothbrushes, elegant and comic. In all his houses, he kept a prayer inscribed in Latin by the artist-poet David Jones: “May the blessed Archangel Michael defend us in battle lest we perish in the terrible judgment.” When he fell ill he took it with him in and out of hospitals.
In 1982, leafing through Time magazine, he came across an article about a “gay plague”. He later told his wife, Elizabeth, that he had immediately thought this applied to him. In his final years, sometimes feverish, sometimes high on the drugs he was prescribed, he became an exaggerated version of his already high-velocity self. He was full of plans and wheezes. He wanted to write a mighty novel featuring “four decadent countries – the USA, the USSR, France and Britain”. He had a scheme for an opera about Florence Gould, the grande dame from San Francisco who, during the second world war, presided over a multilingual salon in Paris, where guests included Jean Cocteau and German propaganda officers. It was to be an English opera in which hardly a word of English would be spoken. He wanted to give all his friends presents and went on wild shopping sprees. What he spent bore little relation to what money he had. “God is filling up my bank balance,” he told the jazz singer George Melly. Meanwhile, Elizabeth cancelled cheques and returned objects to art dealers.
In the midst of this tumult, he produced the intricate short novel Utz, which was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker prize. It is the tale of a secret life which I think contains a quiet tribute to his wife. It is also a wonderful evocation of austerity and calm. He asked me to edit it and I went down to his house in Oxfordshire with some small suggestions. We sat for cold bright mornings, making some tucks and trims, with Bruce beamingly anticipating some of my quibbles: “Beat you!” Halfway through spaghetti and bacon in the kitchen, he suddenly went completely blue. Huddled up in a blanket, looking tiny, he wailed: “I’m a child of the tropics!” The following weekend he was worse: “My stomach is like a calabash!” he declared, drumming on it rather proudly. A couple of months later, he was thin and disconsolate and in bed.
He died on 18 January 1989; he was 48. On 14 February, Elizabeth arranged an Orthodox service of commemoration in the Greek cathedral of Saint Sophia in Moscow Road, London. It turned out to be an occasion of drama. Two hours earlier, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie had been announced. Rushdie was at the cathedral, greeted by a horde of journalists as he came out. “Keep your head down, Salman, or next week we’ll be back here for you,” advised Paul Theroux.
It was also a mysterious event, unlike any other memorial service I have ever attended. Many thought it beautiful. Others thought its theatricality camp. Martin Amis saw this, homing in on “a religion that no one he knew could understand” as “Bruce’s last joke on his friends and loved ones”. The actor Peter Eyre, coming from a rehearsal of King Lear in a beard and clothes that would allow him to roll around – head to toe in black – was mistaken for a priest and approached by a member of the congregation about the possibility of conversion. The real black-robed priests talked of the end of pain, but there was no encomium, no evocation of the man who had died. The only word English speakers could be sure of was the repeatedly intoned “Bruce”. The author was absent from his service – as his admired Gustave Flaubert said that the artist should be absent from his work. And yet the occasion seemed full of his qualities. It was paradoxical, bringing together spareness and metropolitan bustle. Full of stories. Capriciously elusive.
The 40th anniversary edition of In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin is published by Vintage on 5 October (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.34 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Susannah Clapp’s memoir With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer (1997) is also published by Vintage
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