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Bruce Chatwin (1940
- 1989)
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 Bruce
Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare
Bruce Chatwin was the
golden child of contemporary English letters. Paradoxically,
however, his books appeared relatively late in his life: until
1977, when the 37-year-old author published In
Patagonia, this precocious, intense figure had occupied
himself as an art specialist at Sotheby's, a journalist with the
Sunday Times, an archaeologist, and a restless, perennial
traveler. Once he got started, of course, Chatwin made up for lost
time. By 1989, when he died of an AIDS-related illness, he had
produced seven books--including two superb novels and his sui
generis masterpiece, The
Songlines -- and won himself a worldwide audience.
As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in Bruce
Chatwin, his subject remained an obsessive art collector long
after he left Sotheby's. He was no less assiduous when it came to
the acquisition of human trophies, taking both male and female
lovers throughout the course of his marriage. Many a wife might
have resented these magpie impulses--and indeed, Elizabeth Chatwin
and her errant spouse endured some rocky times. Yet she remained
touchingly loyal to him, and it was her cooperation and tenacity
that enabled this biography to come about. Shakespeare captures
the author's peculiar charisma and his tendency to transform
everything--friendships, landscapes, meals, journeys--into
aesthetic artifacts. Even when Chatwin experiences a writer's
block while working on The
Viceroy of Ouidah, he does it with style:
To try to finish the book, Bruce rented a house
in Ronda for five months: "an exquisite neo-Classical
pavilion restored by an Argentinean architect who has run out of
money." He wrote in longhand on 20 yellow legal pads,
refilling his Mont Blanc from two bottles of Asprey's brown ink.
There is excellent, evocative writing throughout
Shakespeare's biography. The passages describing Chatwin's
miserable death are both harrowing and deeply moving, but
Shakespeare is no less adept at conveying, say, his subject's
disappointment at failing to win the Booker Prize for Utz.
(Chatwin cheered up considerably when a friend told him that
Alberto Moravia had given the book a glowing thumbs-up in an
Italian newspaper.) What comes across most, perhaps, in this
immense and excellent life, is the complete aloneness of the man,
an almost impenetrable solitude. Australian poet Les Murray may
have had the last word when he noted: "He was lonely and he
wanted to be. He had those blue, implacable eyes that said: 'I
will reject you, I will forget you, because neither you nor any
other human being can give me what I want.'" --Catherine
Taylor
 What
Am I Doing Here by
Bruce Chatwin
This is the last of Bruce Chatwin's works to be
published while he was still alive (he penned the introduction in
1988, a few months before he died). It's a collection of Chatwin
gems--profiles, essays, and travel stories that span the world,
from trekking in Nepal and sailing down the Volga to working on a
film with Werner Herzog in Ghana and traveling with Indira Gandhi
in India. Chatwin excels, as usual, in the finely honed tale.
Here is a journey into the interior of a
celebrated novelist and traveler, charged with all of the
narrative power and intellectual challenge of his fiction.
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From The
Knitting Circle
Excerpt:
At the age of 25, much to the surprise of many
of his friends he married Elizabeth Chanler who he knew at
Sotheby's. They had no children and Bruce Chatwin appears to blame
this on his own sterility without actually being tested. After
fifteen years of marriage she asked for a separation and sold
their farmhouse in Gloucestershire. However, towards the end of
Bruce Chatwin's life their relationship resumed.
He developed AIDS but went to great lengths to
hide the fact...
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By Kerry Ross Boren
Excerpt:
He has been called the greatest
novelist since Hemingway, and the foremost travel writer of modern
times. The American novelist John Updike has described his style
as "a clipped lapidary prose that compresses worlds into
pages." It is no exaggeration; there were worlds within Bruce
Chatwin.
Bruce was a friend of mine.
Probably no other person I have ever known had a more profound
effect upon my career as a writer, or upon me personally.
Certainly I am not alone in this. The novelist Andrew Harvey noted
in a New York Times review of Bruce's last travel book, "The
Songlines" (1987), "Nearly every writer of my generation
in England has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin, wanted
to be talked about, as he is, with raucous envy; wanted, above
all, to have written his books..."
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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