Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Something about Bruce infuriates other writers,” says Wyndham, “as if he’s getting away with something and never did the things he said. But Bruce wasn’t a mythomane. Why shouldn’t he turn something that does happen into something with shape and story? It’s not as if he had a tremendously successful and happy life. He wasn’t a darling of the gods. His life wasn’t particularly enviable. He had great depressions.” Wyndham assigns at least part of the envy to the fact that Bruce thought internationally. “It’s the parochial resentment for the brilliant villager who goes and makes it in the big city.” As for the charge that Bruce might have hurt people: “Writers do hurt other people. Bruce’s record is much better than a lot of others.”

  “He was so individual, so much himself. That’s bound to polarise people,” says Rushdie. “When the self is as multi-faceted as Bruce, I guess there’s more to get up people’s noses. That’s the small change of being any good at what you do. And being an interesting person. Of my contemporaries he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind that I ever came across.”

  Inevitably, it was a foreigner who asked the question: “Why should the disappearance of Bruce Chatwin make such a difference?” Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in June 1989, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said that it was not enough to say that Bruce died young or was full of promise. “Chatwin never delivered the goods that critics or publishers or the reading public expected. Not fearing to disappoint, he surprised us at every turn of the page.” What Enzensberger perceived was Bruce’s Englishness, not his foreignness. He concluded: “it is surely as a storyteller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed – a story-teller going far beyond the conventional limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and gossip. Underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev. When we return to Bruce Chatwin we find much in him that has been left unsaid.”

  A decade after his death, Bruce’s reputation abroad continues to grow. “Of all the English writers in the last 30 years, the only one I take down and re-read is Bruce,” says Susan Sontag. “It’s a very valuable and enthralling voice.” Although old-fashioned, he is seen as ahead of his time because of this cultural daring which is today not only accepted but demanded. “His nineteenth-century energy and zest are valued and cherished,” says Elisabeth Sifton. “People are now rediscovering deep relationships between cultures over time and space. They are reconsidering the idea of a big unifying theme in a more modern way.” His work has gained currency in anthropological departments, to correct the paternalism of previously undisputed western methodologies. Ruth Tringham, his Marxist colleague at Edinburgh and former adversary, now uses The Songlines in her teaching at Berkeley. “It amazed me that he managed to transcend the other Bruce I knew and get further into the landscape and people than I ever imagined he could. It’s not the truth, it’s Bruce’s story, but as an idea of trying to grasp an entirely different way of thinking about space and time it’s just as good as anthropology.”

  He has set free other writers and encouraged them not to be tamed by conventional boundaries. “People who study Chatwin feel liberated by him,” says Sifton. “Reading him gives you the courage of your own convictions.” The German anthropologist Michael Oppitz, now director of the Zurich Museum of Ethnography, knew him in Nepal. “The thing about Chatwin is that through his life he gave a new definition of the Writer as Hero.” An icon of the back-packer, he inspired myriads of young people to set off and live in Calcutta or Patagonia – “and then come out with a diary that no one publishes”. Oppitz believes this tailoring of the hero figure was a conscious desire. “On a sociological level it is at least as important as his books.”

  He made life difficult for booksellers, but vastly more interesting to readers. He is perceived to be the most glamorous example of a genre in which so-called “travel writing” began to embrace a wider range: autobiography, philosophy, history, belles lettres, romantic fiction. But unlike Colin Thubron, Jonathan Raban, Redmond O’Hanlon, Paul Theroux, Andrew Harvey, he does not put his travelling self at the centre. His stance is unflappable, detached, discreet – “a pose rather than a subject,” writes Manfred Pfister, the result of a “brilliant self-stylization rather than the self-reflective depth and emotional richness of subjectivity”. Bruce’s lack of introspection is old-fashioned, but his style is contemporary. This unusual blend accounts for his distinctive voice. “He does not seem to owe anything to anybody,” says Thubron. Yet other writers are open about their indebtedness to him. The Italian philosopher Claudio Magris turned to Patagonia for his first novel Un altro mare. In Mundo del Fin del Mundo, the Chilean writer Luis Sepùlveda has his hero set out from Hamburg airport to South America with Chatwin’s In Patagonia in his hands. In Britain, he has inspired a younger generation of “travel writers” like Philip Marsden and William Dalrymple. “In many ways In Xanadu would never have happened without my having discovered and loved his writing,” Dalrymple wrote to Elizabeth. “His inheritance was actually his adventurousness,” says Thomas Keneally. “Modern fiction is sometimes too house-trained. Chatwin’s fiction was not house-trained.”

  Keneally, whose own fiction is stimulated by history, is aware of the penalty for transgressing genres. “There is a link between all fine writers and Prometheus. Critics know that creative people have stolen fire, that’s why they are so mean to them. Chatwin had stolen the fire – if you think of fire as the trigger for the tribal circle and stories. He had certainly plundered stories, but I mean, what do you want writers to do? That is almost the job description of writing. Economists think that economic indicators are the metaphor for humanity. Novelists think that stories are the true indicators of human existence. Chatwin correctly saw stories as paradigms of humanity.”

  Bruce died on the eve of the transformation of Central Europe, bringing down the barriers of the old and new worlds. Missing are his despatches from the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, Poland, Prague in the Velvet Revolution. He died, too, before the revolution in information technology. He hated computers almost as much as he did the combustion engine, but he was in a sense a precursor of the Internet age: a connective super-highway without boundaries, with instant access to different cultures. The thirst for international experience and encounters may account in part for his appeal. He holds out the possibility of something wonderful and unifying. He inundates us with information and the promise that we will one day get to the root of it. “He posed questions that we all want answered,” says Robyn Davidson, “and perhaps gave the illusion that they were answerable.”

  Bruce was not intimate, but he valued the personal encounter. This is one quality that makes his unwritten books such a loss. His compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he had found it. “I wish there was so much more in a way I don’t wish with Robert Byron,” says Sontag. Jean-François Fogel says, “At long last he had accepted the fact he was a novelist. He was now going to look into the human heart and tell us how it works.”

  In Anecdotage, Rezzori asks the question: “What would his life’s work have looked like if he hadn’t died in his 40s after Utz but had gone on living and writing until the blissful age of 80?”

  Throughout his writing career Bruce flirted with the idea of chucking in his pencil. “I wish I could give up writing, don’t you?” he wrote to Bail. “More and more this book business tempts me into silence.” Driving through the outback near Broken Hill, he told Nin Dutton that nothing was permanent. “He said he mightn’t be a writer forever. He might be a truck-driver – and he meant it half seriously.”

  Salman Rushdie does not believe his friend’s protestations. “Bruce had just begun. We didn’t have his developed books, the books that might have come out of falling in love with his wife. We only saw the first act. He was just creating himself into a person he’d be happy to be. Out of all the people he’d exp
erimented being, he quite liked being the writer Bruce Chatwin.”

  And what of Elizabeth? “I think you know what you meant to him, which is everything,” Peter Levi wrote.

  Few understood Elizabeth’s role in Bruce’s life better than Gillian Walker. “This delight which we have all had from him in life and in his writing has had much to do with his relationship with you – your belief in him from the beginning – the support you gave him to find what he wanted to do and do it – at Sotheby’s – those gloomy cold days in Edinburgh with your hands red and swollen from the raw Scottish winter – bicycling laden with food out to the end of no-where in Fisher’s Island so that he could have the endless, unfettered time he needed for In Patagonia – you storing away his treasures so that he could have the illusion of nomadic existence while not having to give up his collector’s passion.” Utz had captured his mood of return. “He said on the phone that he didn’t want to travel again but rather to be at home with you, this after, I think, that first serious bout of illness – illness which ironically teaches appreciation for what one has rather than what one journeys looking for – his Penelope, your love for him and his for you, home.

  “I believe you made his life bearable, centred enough so that he could be as productive as he was – become what he had it in him to be – the magical writer – you protected the joyful child-like person he always was . . . I still believe he is 23 or younger – when we all first met – utterly beguiling – in some mad white kaftan he had found. He kept that extraordinary quality of a child’s humour, vision and mischief – curiosity – qualities he very much shared with you.”

  Shirley Conran wrote: “Real love was what I observed between you and Bruce, and whether or not or how it existed before between you, I observed the strength of it & the strength you gave him . . . It seems to me that what unhappiness has gone before is minor compared to this final relationship you had . . . It would be wrong to attribute this to Bruce’s physical dependence on you: but perhaps it was this dependence that enabled him to stay still and see you for the extraordinary person that you are.”

  Elizabeth was and remains reluctant to assume an elevated mantle. She was not indispensable to Bruce, she told Shirley. “He would have found someone somewhere to look after him while he was writing, as he certainly did while writing On the Black Hill. You probably don’t know that we hardly saw each other for years . . . When I got this house in September ’81, he helped me move in and then fled after a week and I hardly saw him until May ’83, though he came up to London. That was the beginning of a reconciliation; we got together late on and it was only the beginning of a proper relationship.”

  Bruce was cremated on 20 January in a non-denominational chapel at the end of a rocky cul-de-sac with evergreen trees near Nice. His body was taken from the hospital in an undertaker’s maroon station-waggon with a gold felt curtain at the window and appliqué stars. Elizabeth had found a young Greek Orthodox priest to officiate, who came from refereeing a football match and rapidly changed into his vestments which he carried in an attaché case. He chanted ancient chants and then they all went out to lunch.

  On 14 February, a memorial service was held at the Greek Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Bayswater. Shortly before 3 p.m., to an astonished congregation, Bishop Kallistos Ware spoke of Bruce’s plans to travel to Mount Athos in September 1988, there to be baptised into the Orthodox Church. “The rapid progress of the illness made this impossible, but God judges our intentions, not only our deeds. In intention and desire Bruce was indeed an Orthodox Christian and that is why we are celebrating. In the funeral service we say, ‘Blessed is the road on which you are travelling today.’ Bruce was always a traveller and he died before all his journeys could be completed and his journey into Orthodoxy was one of his unfinished voyages. What he did not complete in this life may he complete after death.”

  Apart from these words, the service was conducted in Greek. “I was surprised there were so many people,” says Bishop Ware. “It was a weekday in the middle of the day and not possible to get a full choir.”

  The congregation reflected the range of Bruce’s acquaintance. “One of the many things about that memorial service which was really striking to me,” says Salman Rushdie, “was how many groups of people there were who all believed themselves to be close to Bruce – and most of them didn’t know each other. It’s as if all these different bits of Bruce came together in that room which he had quite deliberately kept very separate in his life.” Few of them were aware of Bruce’s conversion to the Greek Church.

  Rushdie listened to the chanting beside Martin Amis, with Paul Theroux in the row behind. He was making his last appearance as a free man. At 10.30 that morning he had received a telephone call from a young woman reporter on BBC radio news. “How do you feel, Mr Rushdie, about the fact you’ve been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, don’t you know?”

  She read out the fatwa and asked Rushdie to comment. “I’ve no idea what I said. I ran downstairs, shutting the windows and locking the front door.” Rushdie spent the rest of the morning at the office of Gillon Aitken, the agent he shared with Bruce, avoiding camera crews. At 2.30, he was the last to arrive at Saint Sophia. “I was thinking very much about Bruce, especially as you couldn’t understand a word being said. It was all in Greek, swinging censers and cantating and every now and then the words ‘Bruce Chatweeeen’. Nobody said a word about Bruce in English. It was his last practical joke on all of us.”

  At some point in the service, Paul Theroux leaned over and said: “Well, Salman, I guess we’ll be here for you next week.”

  “By the time we left, the world’s press was outside.”

  A young woman of the Altai region known as the “Ice Maiden” was buried 2,500 years ago in Pasyryk. Miranda Rothschild watched a television documentary about her excavation. She says: “The coffin, made of a single acacia trunk, was immensely long in order to accommodate her high, woollen and golden head-dress – deer inspired, as were her long tattooed hands. Her clothes were of wild silk and wool, and dyed red. She was encased in ice. She was a storyteller, they said.

  “Of course, I thought of Bruce: how he would have been humbled, magnetised, adoring of her. Thinking of how some people seem to have considered him ‘empty’ and of why empty is used as a derogatory term rather than a complimentary one. He was receptive, permeable, objective: a true witness to the beautiful, the ancient, the elegant. He was permeable like a clay pot. You fill it and it becomes empty – the water drains away and leaves a residue. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been hurt when he neglected me – he had to keep filling himself up with new waters, and draining it all away by travelling along whatever track.”

  A fortnight after Bruce’s death, Miranda wrote to Elizabeth encouraging her to stay with the Leigh Fermors in Kardamyli. “It is nearly springtime now and it is a peaceful place to go – also they are among those rare people who do not disturb one in spirit or in person, yet give a kind of comfort which is not burdensome.”

  On 15 February, the day after the memorial service, Elizabeth flew to Greece. In accordance with his wishes, she brought Bruce’s ashes to one of his favourite places: the ruined Byzantine chapel dedicated to St Nicholas in Chora. The tenth-century church, its masonry topped with battered blue and russet tiles, was reached two miles up a mountain on the Mam not far from where he had written The Songlines.

  “You wouldn’t know where the ashes are,” says Paddy Leigh Fermor. Elizabeth had transported them to Kardamyli in an oak casket. He says, “the ground was too hard to bury that, so we dug a hole with the trowel under an olive tree very close to the church and put Bruce’s ashes in and we poured a libation of Retsina and said a prayer in Greek: ‘May the earth rest light upon him and may his memory rest eternal.’ Then we had a picnic, which I think he would rather have liked.

  “The place is surrounded by olive woods dropping away quite steeply and full of the mos
t wonderful flowers in spring: anemones, wild geraniums, wild garlic, seasquills, asphodel, celandin, star of Bethlehem, graveswell. He was amazing on botany. I remember at Kardamyli somebody coming into the room and asking, ‘What is that flower called?’ and Bruce looking up and saying ‘Magnolia grandflora Angustifolia’ – and going on writing.”

  Epilogues

  Ah, Chatwin . . . the English god.

  —Elderly Greek waiter, Kardamyli, 1997

  MARGHARITA CHATWIN told Hugh that she wanted to die before Bruce’s biography was published. She went with Charles for a last journey in Italy. On 15 October 1995, the morning after returning to their mobile home in Gassin, she woke up and clasped her side: “Oh, I think I’m going to die.” Her ashes were scattered outside the English church in Les Chênes-Lièges in the south of France, not an hour’s drive from where Bruce died.

  THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CABINET, made for a Burgher of Antwerp. It had been bought by Bruce’s great-grandfather, the architect-builder Julius Alfred Chatwin. Margharita stuffed it with wools, tapes, cottons, bobbins, buttons, elastics, needles and nappy pins. It had become known as The Spanish Cabinet and had always been earmarked for Bruce. “Once Margharita died, Charles regarded it as expensive junk,” says Hugh. “Like Bruce, he had no interest in repossessing the past.” It was sold by Phillips of Knowle, in September 1996, for £28,000, the proceeds being invested to fund a small, family gift-giving charity.

  CHARLES CHATWIN had just taken delivery of his new, diminutive, single person camper van. Elizabeth was staying for Christmas in 1996. With Hugh, they drank a bottle of port together, Cockburn 1967, which Charles and Margharita had bought that year in the Douro. On Christmas Eve, while Elizabeth was at Midnight Mass, Charles was filling a hot-water bottle for his lumbago when he suffered a heart attack. He was taken to Warwick Hospital. On Boxing Day, he said: “I just want to make one thing clear: where are we?” He died on 27 December. He had left his affairs in impeccable order. His last work as a lawyer had been to sort out Elizabeth’s will and to arrange the Chatwin Family Charitable Trust.