Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin (London: Harvill Press, 1999).
Bruce Chatwin, travel writer, journalist, art critic and novelist, was a man of many contradictions. He was a footloose wanderer who eschewed materialism, yet wrote only in moleskin covered notebooks, obtainable only from a small shop in Paris, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen. He despised the world of fine art collecting, yet would embark upon phases of accumulating artefacts, only to dispose of them in an equally impulsive manner. He was full of esoteric knowledge, but admitted to being a real idiot at school, and never completed his archaeology degree. As a subject for biography, he leaves a hard trail to follow.
Faced with such a subject, Nicholas Shakespeare has done a fine job. He has benefited from access to Bruce's widow, Elizabeth, and the boxes of famous notebooks that were deposited in the Bodleian Library on the death of their owner, and which are not to be read by the public until 2010. Although others will doubtless embark upon biographies and memoirs of this popular and fascinating figure, Shakespeare has produced what must surely be the definitive account until this material becomes more readily available.
Central to this book is the theme of Chatwin's sexuality, which becomes another of the contradictions of his life. Shakespeare asserts that he was always uneasy with his bisexuality, and his life was a long process of indulgence followed by distaste. Rather than admit to having AIDS, the terminally ill Bruce told doctors that his illness came from eating a 1000 year-old Chinese egg, or a liver fungus caused by a bite from a fruit-bat. To the very end, he wove a web of denial and brilliant exaggeration around his life. It is hard to decide whether such a process deserves condemnation for its duplicity or a grudging admiration for its brilliance.
Chatwin emerges from these pages as a man incapable of sticking to anything, a perpetual nomad in the physical and intellectual sense. His stay at Sotheby's was short and brilliant, and his rise to prominence in the Impressionist department happily coinciding with the boom in modern art. Before long, however, his distaste had reached the point where he could no longer function in the art business, manifesting itself in the strange blindness that afflicted him, and which gave the seed for his first story, Rotting Fruit. An impulsive decision to go and study archaeology in Edinburgh lasted for less than two years before he became convinced that he would never make an archaeologist, probably deterred by the levels of painstaking detail that took away the romance he had seen in the job. A stint with The Sunday Times came to an abrupt end in a telegram announcing his departure for Patagonia. His own phrase, perpetuum mobile can hardly be bettered as a summary of his life.
Yet out of this constant flux emerged a set of brilliant books. Not travel writing, criticism or fiction in the established sense, his output, like its author, defies categorisation. Yet, at the same time, it seems only partially complete, as though the rush of ideas overwhelmed the structure. His most successful work, The Songlines (1987), starts out as a discourse on aboriginal culture but becomes a treatise on the nomadic impulse and the origins of language, peppered with fragments from his notebooks. There was, one feels, too much to say and too little time. By the time he was telling you one thing, his mind was elsewhere, and his pen soon followed. Only in his final novella, Utz (1988), a work on the nature and morality of collecting, did he attain the blend of style and content that did justice to his ideas.
As a result of this continual movement, Shakespeare's book is never dull because its subject never gives it the chance to be so. Locations and people change at a moment's notice as they come into Chatwin's orbit and then leave. Reading it, one feels the giddy rush of Chatwin's mind in full flow, and is drawn in to his world of wonderful contrasts and contradictions. For anyone who has enjoyed Chatwin's books, or anyone who wonders why such a slim output is so highly praised, this biography will come as a welcome opportunity to enter the world of Bruce Chatwin which, for all its contradictions and denials, is still a fascinating place through which to travel.
