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A swell bunch of guys >> The many personalities of Bruce Chatwin
by JULIET WATERS
It's Valentine's Day, 1989. Salman Rushdie is sitting next to Martin Amis at a memorial service for Chatwin, who had died a month before of AIDS. It will be Rushdie's last public appearance. That morning he was informed of the fatwa on his life. He has snuck into the church at the last minute. At some point in the service, Paul Theroux leans over and says, "Well, Salman, I guess we'll be here for you next week." Even though Rushdie is still alive, somehow this scene feels like the beginning of the end. Not, obviously, of baby boomer British literature, but certainly of the fearless, perhaps naïve, transgression of boundaries that both Rushdie and Chatwin will be remembered for. In Chatwin's case, these boundaries were as much personal as literary. He, like his genre-defying work, became almost impossible to categorize. Although technically he wrote novels, there was such a non-fictional quality to his journeys that he was often called a travel writer--a label he despised. As for the man, writes Shakespeare: "Say one thing about Chatwin and the opposite is also true. There seem to be as many Bruce Chatwins as people he met." People who had descriptions of him ranging from a pretentious freeloading fake to, in Rushdie's words, "the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across" and "one of the two funniest people I've known." Werner Herzog called him the ultimate storyteller. Susan Sontag described him as "amazing to look at... There are few people who had the looks which enchant and enthrall. Your stomach just drops to you 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." A less rapt description is offered by friend and former lover Miranda Rothschild. "He's out to seduce everybody, it doesn't matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy." A description backed up in Chatwin's own notebooks. "I want to forget. I want to sleep with Negroes and Negresses and Indians, and Indian women, animals and plants." Yet the sum of Bruce seems in the end much less than the total of his parts. "Everyone needs a quest as an excuse for living," Chatwin believed. But what his quest was, other than the desperation to escape his ordinary middle-class past, is difficult to decipher. That the gifted charmer seems so often just a disguise for an ordinary jerk, in no way means that this book is disappointing. "Ordinariness" is, of course, just an abstraction. What seems ordinary to the Australian aboriginal of Chatwin's Songlines is exotic to us. What we bought last week at Pharmaprix would be a source of endless fascination to a tribe in Africa. A dilettante backpacker who leaves his wife at home and his job as a director of Sotheby's, as Chatwin did, seems radical to a reader in the '70s. In the '90s it's unusual, but not incredible. To quote the great Annie Dillard talking about some Great Men of Letters: "One would rather read these people. Or lead their lives, than be their wives." Shakespeare owes a lot to Elizabeth Chatwin for allowing him unlimited access to Chatwin's notebooks. He has repaid his debt to her with a book that neither sanctifies nor demonizes him. It is an exhaustively honest portrait of a fascinating man who was, in many, many ways, merely human. A flash in the pan, as are we all. To use paleontologist Bob Brain's words, with which Shakespeare closes the 550 page book that took him eight years to write--a species "that wouldn't even register on the fossil record."
Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare, Harvill, hc, 550 pp, $24.95
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There's a Big Chill moment at the end of Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin that feels like it should be the climactic scene in a nostalgic movie about a once-great Brit lit brat pack.