“I don’t believe in coming clean,” Bruce Chatwin once told Paul Theroux, who had suggested that Chatwin’s travel writing could benefit from more detail about how he got from one place to the next. During his brief literary career, readers usually sensed that Chatwin was hiding as much about himself as he displayed. Half the story appeared to reside in the white spaces between bejewelled little sections of narrative.
UNDER THE SUN
The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
By Selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare
Illustrated. 554 pp. Viking. $35.
- Excerpt: ‘Under the Sun’ (Google Books)
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Books of The Times: ‘Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin’ (February 18, 2011)
The appearance of Chatwin’s letters, 22 years after his death at the age of 48, revives a curiosity never fully satisfied by biographies from Susannah Clapp in 1997 and Nicholas Shakespeare (now the letters’ principal editor) in 1999. Here, a reader thinks, is another chance to follow the far-flung tracks that Chatwin so often covered.
Throughout the letters he mailed from Kabul and Kenya and Katmandu, one can find fast, sharp renderings of misadventures and mores: “I’m afraid that most traditional Russian hospitality is a deep-seated desire to see foreigners drunk.” And yet, this great traveler was probably too much on the move to become one of the great letter-writers. The postcard may have been more his epistolary genre than the shapely missive, since the task of describing his complicated logistics sometimes overwhelmed composition. Leisurely two-sided correspondences were difficult to sustain, with Chatwin roving from one poste restante to the next.
“You’re going to brain me when you get a chance,” he wrote to me in 1985, “but I’m afraid I’m going to chuck.” In those days I taught at Vassar, and he was backing out of a writer-in-residence position we’d offered him. “I am still stranded in the blistering Australian desert” was his charming excuse; the letter actually came from Oxford. He meant, of course, that he was too caught up in trying to finish “The Songlines,” an eccentric study of aboriginal life that he ended up calling a novel. All the landscapes he trod, from West Africa to the Welsh border, got fantastically rearranged inside his head and emerged somehow more real, if less verifiable, on the page.
Delicately beautiful, he was an odd combination of the wunderkind and the late bloomer. His earliest letters home make him seem less miserable than the average English public-school boy; a gift for self-concealment and a talent for appreciating objets find early expression in acting and model-making. At 18, Chatwin bypassed university and went straight from Marlborough College to Sotheby’s, where he began a quick rise through the ranks. His letters mix a shrewd sense of the high-end auction business with tremendous contempt for it. He compares bidders to “old men in nightclubs deciding whether they can really afford to pay that much for a whore.”
At 26, he gave up the art world to study archaeology as a “mature student” at Edinburgh. He did well enough for a couple of years but was finally no more suited to digging up rarities than he had been to selling them. Having already tramped through Afghanistan and curated an exhibition of “Nomadic Art of the Asian Steppes,” he was becoming engrossed in a consideration of human wandering — including the idea that peoples on the move make “a natural adjustment towards death, which the super-civilized have lost.” He began writing a book called “The Nomadic Alternative,” which he could never quite finish and never quite abandon. Some of its thinking would end up in “The Songlines.” The subject clearly had a personal dimension. A friend called him “a compass without a needle,” and Chatwin himself wondered, “Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two?”
Nothing prods the making of art like ambivalence, and Chatwin was lucky to have his roaming impulse countervailed by a strong “compulsion to return.” Then, whenever that was satisfied, the “malaise of settlement” would demand an antidote to the antidote. The emotional consequences of “transcontinental dislocation” had much to do with making Chatwin, eventually, a writer unlike any other.
Home, however intermittently, was for many years a 17th-century Gloucestershire farmhouse shared with his wife, Elizabeth, who has supplied a number of blunt, affectionate annotations to her husband’s letters. The marriage was complicated by the large fact of Chatwin’s homosexuality — the psychological equivalent, perhaps, of “abroad” — but it endured. Any marriage is poorly judged through the spouses’ letters, which don’t get written during periods of togetherness, but a reader of “Under the Sun” can’t help noticing when Chatwin orders Elizabeth around (“Rather low on shirts. Plus the things mentioned in my last letter”) or tries to keep her from intruding on his absences. In the summer of 1971, Chatwin is hoping that the filmmaker James Ivory will soon join him in Provence: “The snag . . . is that Mrs C wants to come to France,” he writes to Ivory, during the same month he’s asking for those shirts.
