Wanderlust

From the moment Bruce Chatwin burst upon the literary scene in 1977 with his blond hair, blue eyes, haversack and a strange little adventure called “In Patagonia,” he knocked the leaden shoes off travel writing. Not since Evelyn Waugh returned from Abyssinia, George Orwell from Burma or Graham Greene from Mexico had life in a remote corner of the world seemed suddenly so important. By the time he died, 12 years and five books later, Chatwin, famous for his extravagant energy, had become an international celebrity. “Chatwinesque” had entered the vocabulary. Most writers of his generation secretly wanted to have written his books, or so Andrew Harvey once conceded, and in Greece, one man went so far as to impersonate him. Quite simply, he had seduced readers and writers with his Rimbaud-like romanticism, wry existentialism and intriguing weaves of geography, history, sociology and personal impressions.

Yet after his death in 1989, the romance with Chatwin ended. Apocryphal stories about his fatal illness (a rare bone marrow disease contracted during a trip to China), his abrupt departure from his writing job with the Sunday Times of London (tersely expressed in a three-word telegram: “Gone to Patagonia”) and his equally sudden exit as a director with Sotheby’s auction house (psychosomatic blindness, he said) were happily debunked in the first spat of biographies and articles. It was AIDS. He was sacked, and he needed more money. By dying young and frail, Chatwin seems to have disappointed those who knew him, almost as much as life seemed to disappoint him. But rather than use that revelation to criticize Chatwin, Susannah Clapp has written a remarkably fair-minded account of his life without stooping to pat explanations or psychologizing.

Clapp, who edited “In Patagonia” and worked on “The Viceroy of Ouidah” and “Utz,” chronicles Chatwin’s life from a childhood spent shuffling between relatives and friends with his mother (Dad was at sea) during World War II to his death in the south of France. What emerges is a dizzy portrait of an art and literary scene, re-created with the help of Martin Amis, Edmund White, Salman Rushdie, Redmond O’Hanlon, Francis Wyndham and Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth Chanler, among others.

Chatwin’s life was anything but neat. He married when he was 25, yet he pursued a number of homosexual relationships. He wrote copiously (Mont Blanc pens on American yellow legal pads) yet enjoyed being edited. He longed to be still--”For a nomad,” commented a friend, “he spends an awful lot of time in one place”--yet he logged thousands of miles trekking from Afghanistan to West Africa, New York to Stalingrad, Yunnan to Katmandu. He loved possessions (among his favorites, a tapa cloth from Hawaii) yet eschewed collecting. “A desperate stratagem against failure, a personal ritual to cure loneliness,” he once wrote.

Clapp met Chatwin when he brought “In Patagonia” to the publisher, Jonathan Cape, and, in “With Chatwin,” she has struck just the right note, marrying memoir, biography and literary criticism. She wisely avoids documenting Chatwin’s famous journeys to Patagonia or Australia, an effort that would easily have overwhelmed the scope of this simple, affectionate story. Content to let readers discover Chatwin for themselves, she provides footnotes to the books, recounting a story of how Chatwin’s father, home from the war, drove the family into Wales (an event that planted the seeds for the lush Welsh setting in his 1983 novel, “On the Black Hill”) or of how Rushdie and Chatwin traveled together in Australia (Rushdie, Chatwin claimed, was the model for Arkady Volchok in “The Songlines.”)

In her careful reading of Chatwin’s books, from his earliest unpublished notes on nomads to his last short story, Clapp fleshes out the inner world of this secretive, curiously outward-looking man. No easy task. Influenced by Flaubert, Chatwin espoused impersonality in his writing. In his books, he was not, according to Rushdie, “the whole person he was when you met him.” Nor was he the whole person in person. Friends called him “Chatterbox” and “Chatty Corner,” sobriquets of both amazement and irritation. Less tactful biographers might construe this, together with his vaunted wanderlust, as a fear of intimacy, but Clapp takes a different turn.

Chatwin’s life and his writings were imbued with a certain melancholy: a world weariness and an horreur du domicile that somehow made interest in any landscape, especially one with shamanistic relevance, seem perfectly sensible. After all, here was a man who admitted that his passion for geography was awakened by the cobalt bombs and zones of destruction of the Cold War. He clearly spent his life searching for something. Not only did the nomadic lifestyle fascinate him (“What interested me most,” he admitted during his final illness, “were people who had escaped the archeological record--the nomads who trod lightly on the earth and didn’t build pyramids”), but he also wrote thoughtfully about the “morality” of things, the psychological and spiritual links the mind uses to anchor itself to objects in the physical world. Whether he found these anchors, or even peace in the journeying--like the three dying men at the conclusion of “The Songlines”--Clapp doesn’t speculate.

“With Chatwin” is less interested in mythologizing, or demythologizing, Chatwin than in presenting the lavish and difficult contradictions of his life. Clapp writes that Chatwin had a “deep suspicion that whatever is familiar is bound to be mediocre” and, in telling the story of his life, she presents the picture of a man whose vision of the world was too large and too eclectic to be encompassed in a conversation or even in a book.

Chatwin’s funeral was conducted in a Greek Orthodox church in West London. It was, Clapp writes, “capriciously elusive,” mysterious and camp. An hour and a half before the service, the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced the fatwa on Rushdie, who was present. Black-robed, long-bearded priests wandered the church, swinging censers, intoning prayers; most of the congregation hadn’t a clue what was being said; the most recognizable word was also the most repeated: Bruce. Fittingly Chatwinesque.