A man beyond categories ; `Bruce Chatwin: A Biography' sheds light on the often-contradictory literary figure
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"Bruce Chatwin: A Biography"
By Nicholas Shakespeare
Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, $35
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When British author Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, the literary world knew it had lost something irreplaceable - but what exactly? A travel writer?
By the end of his life, Chatwin abhorred the label, though "In Patagonia" is a classic of the genre.
A novelist?
"Novelist" covers only three of his books - not including "The Songlines" which, while Chatwin tried to pass it off as fiction, reads much like a nonfiction meditation on Australian aborigines' nomadic navigation of their island continent.
Chatwin's tetchiness about labels expressed the impatience of a mind that wanted to take giant leaps, to escape the confines of any one tradition, genre or even nationality. In making these leaps, Chatwin drew almost no distinctions between observation and embellishment, hypothesis and invention. The result was a body of work that remains potent with suggestion and puzzling in its take on "truth" a decade after his death.
Chatwin's idiosyncrasies, as novelist Nicholas Shakespeare demonstrates in this meticulously crafted life of the writer, were conspicuous from the start.
At 3 years old, he attracted the notice of his kindergarten headmistress ("This child is different from the others"). Still earlier, his maternity ward nurse remarked: "He's so beautiful. He's almost too beautiful to live." In light of his death from AIDS at the age of 48, following a lifetime of bisexual promiscuity, the words have a sinister prescience about them.
Indeed, "Bruce Chatwin: A Biography" has the feel of a rise-and-fall fable, while fulfilling almost all the expectations one has of a 600-page literary biography.
Shakespeare pushes no particular agenda beyond conveying the contradictions and complexities of the controversial Chatwin. And he stays deftly out of the way as he orchestrates the dozens of responses - from enchantment to bitter disillusion - that Chatwin elicited from friends, family, colleagues, lovers.
"Say almost anything of Bruce Chatwin," Shakespeare quips, "and the opposite is also true."
Chatwin's various milieus - art world, book world, sexual underground, travel destinations on five continents - are all vividly evoked. Best of all, the origins of his five books published in his lifetime are traced with supple acuity. Authors Colin Thubron, Salman Rushdie, Murray Bail and others are called upon to evaluate the writing as well as the man, and the results are illuminating.
Charles Bruce Chatwin was born in May 1940 in Birmingham, England,to a middle-class background. His love of storytelling "embellishment" was evident early on, but in the classroom he proved a lackluster student. Unable to focus on any single field of study, he skipped university and went, at age 18, to London to work at the art-auction house of Sotheby's. There, his eye for collector's items ensured his rapid rise in his profession. His good looks helped, too, in wangling auctionable treasures from clients both male and female. His talent for "wrapping up something in a bit of a myth and making a story out of it" became so much his hallmark that it was dubbed "doing a Bruce."
Success was accompanied, however, by disillusion. A strong ascetic streak clashed violently with the art collector in him. His sexual nature was deeply divided, too, and he was never entirely comfortable with his homoerotic desires - hence his surprise marriage to American Elizabeth Chanler, with whom he had a loving rapport but to whom he showed no loyalty whatsoever. It was, as they admitted, a peculiar marriage, consisting more of prolonged separations than ongoing companionship. Nevertheless, it lasted until his death.
Upon quitting the art world, Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology, but proved "too manic" for academic discipline. Dropping out, he tried writing a book on nomadism - a three-year effort culminating in an unsalable manuscript. During all this time, he lived off his wife's family and his occasional art deals, including some smuggling.
Only with his entry into journalism in the 1970s did he begin to find his feet as a writer, fine-honing his style to the point where he could write "In Patagonia," his elliptical travel memoir about tracing the origins of a Chatwin family heirloom: a piece of brontosaurus hide.
Shakespeare pinpoints the allure of "Patagonia" and its successors: "the speedy in-and-out, the all-suggestive fragment, the speculative theory, the fascination with provenance and the origin of things." He also takes due note of the impatience that professional archaeologists and anthropologists have with Chatwin's intuitive skips through their fields, no matter how much they admire his prose.
Of the locals who turn up in his books, those in "Patagonia" and "The Songlines" feel grotesquely misportrayed, especially given the "nonfiction" category assigned these two titles. Yet those who served as models for Chatwin's clearly marked "novels" - "Utz" and "On the Black Hill" - feel he accurately caught their reality.
Chatwin may have hated being tied to the facts, but his passion for his vocation was never in doubt. Shakespeare's chapters on his last years, when he desperately outpaced his illness to write two final books, are deeply moving, and the account of his slide into AIDS-related dementia, when all his eccentricities expanded into a Lear-like madness, is wrenching to read.
In the crucial task of assessing Chatwin's achievement Shakespeare does a first-class job. Though the opus is small, its compass is large. Chatwin's books and essays address our urge to possess and yet be free of our possessions, our desire to wander and at the same time have a home.
If he emerges as a kind of petulant child, he remains a child who can dart straight to the heart of some riddle-like truth. And what more, Shakespeare effectively asks, could one ask of a writer?