Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The hybrid form was welcomed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “To my mind it’s at the interstices of genres where the most interesting things happen,” he says. “Chatwin’s transgression is much more important than any avant-garde fumbling. He has elements of pretension, but these also have to do with freeing himself from very rigorous ideas of literature in England, where the mere fact that you write a book about a collector in Prague sounds pretentious. In psychological terms, Chatwin suffers from Beziehungswahn – a delirium of establishing connections. In In Patagonia somehow everything connects in a seemingly mad way, but in The Songlines, he took on more than he could integrate. In this escape from English culture, he had perhaps a penchant for rather obscure thinkers. I remember once we talked about Spengler. That is something which here in Germany one would consider not merely old hat, but lacking in any rigour, an intellectual indecency. He had a weak spot for such people. That in The Songlines disturbed me a little, but it was perhaps his overreaction to insularity. Once he had decided he wouldn’t be restricted by the English, he became rather defenceless. He gave up his philosophy, which is empiricist, but he didn’t have antibodies. Hence the freshness of Spengler. For him, Spengler wasn’t stale at all.”

  Robert Hughes, who himself challenged the academic establishment with his own magisterial picture of early colonial Australia in The Fatal Shore, applauded Bruce’s transgression. “I don’t think it matters in the least, as long as you grant that some of it is made up. Passages in The Songlines are extraordinarily beautiful. Bruce caught Australian generosity – ‘Have a steak and stay forever’ – with perfect truth. Turgenev couldn’t have done it.”

  In Australia, the book represented for many critics “the rapacity of Empire”. Christopher Pearson judged that Bruce did for the Aborigines what Robert Hughes had done for the convicts. “The Songlines is a work of arcadian sentimentality, a tremendous misuse of poetic licence,” and he quoted Stewart Harris: “If there is one person more damaging to the position of the Aboriginal Australian than the racist, it is the person who idealises them and romanticises them.” Ruth Brown bridled at Bruce’s colonial attitude and political naïveté. “Chatwin may have helped to put Aborigines on the map in Britain, but it is a map superficially exquisite and tasteful like a Mont Blanc pen, and as unrelated to everyday life.” Nor was Patrick White impressed. “One wonders where truth ends and fiction begins,” he wrote to Maschler. “I happen to know he was driven round the outback by Nin Dutton who turns into a tough guy of Cossack descent in the book. Some of the questions from other writers are interesting. Much of it is plain boring.”

  In Alice Springs, Bruce’s inability to penetrate Aboriginal culture disappointed those who had helped him, that is to say those who were most profoundly involved. “I got into trouble for telling everyone to tell him everything because he’ll write a beautiful book,” says Robyn Davidson. She resented the way he paid back those with whom he had had run-ins, such as Phillip Toyne and Daphne Williams. It was the first and only time she had seen a spiteful side to Bruce. “Maybe he wrote that out of the fact he was just scratching the surface and he was excluded. He found it very difficult as an idea that there were some things you couldn’t know. He felt that information should be free, that knowledge is out there for everybody. That’s not so. In Aborigine society, information is a currency.”

  Toyne says, “Many people who had nothing to do with Chatwin thought The Songlines was a great book, but it doesn’t go far enough to take on the true liberation of fictional writing. I think he has made a global reputation for himself literally by standing on the heads, shoulders, fingers and hands of people.”

  The most obvious example is Toly Sawenko. “I was completely floored by The Songlines. I had no inkling before during or after that Bruce had chosen to write a book about his adventures in Alice Springs. I had one postcard from Paris of a Picasso. After the book came out I never heard from him again. He didn’t send a copy.”

  Since 1987, Sawenko has had to endure a stream of back-packers knocking at his door. The appeal of Bruce’s mystical endeavour was not limited to middle-class white Australians for whom the book provided a window into Aboriginal culture. The back-packers arrive from all over the world. “Their attitude is: ‘Here’s a character a bit like me, more knowledgeable but with enough physical description to hang a mind adventure on. Let’s take a metaphysical journey’.” And so they want to meet Arkady. “What was only a three-day journey has become an unauthorised biography. Bruce doesn’t do anything to make the reader think this is a created character. He says of the narrator, this is Bruce who grew up in Sheffield. He’s just paying lip-service to the notion of fiction because the characters are so recognisable. It’s an occupational hazard for all fiction that writers are going to be basing their characters on real people. My question is: what kind of relationship should writers have with real people?”

  Not only for himself does Sawenko regret that Bruce was not open about his intentions. By basing his text so largely on Strehlow, Bruce risked committing, in Aborigine eyes, the same transgressions. “Bruce hadn’t sorted the protocols through. He hadn’t sat down with any Aborigine. He gets his information second-hand and repeats it.” Sawenko believes that Bruce missed a tremendous opportunity by not posing his conceptual questions directly to the people he was writing about. “Aboriginal people are capable of dealing with the world in a philosophical way. The problem is, he just wasn’t there long enough, he didn’t get involved at any depth. That was anathema to Bruce. He came with an interesting set of questions and I admire him for posing the challenge to himself, but he didn’t really carry it off, and how could he? There was never any way he was going to get it right considering the whirlwind time and baggage he brought with him. He would have needed to get to know some Aboriginal people, which he just didn’t do. He uses me as a convenient artifice, but it’s still a white man speculating over how interesting Aboriginal culture is.”

  Petronella, too, felt Bruce’s understanding could have been richer, more careful, given what he was capable of. “He has wonderful moments where he captures certain facets of people’s characters, but he doesn’t grant the Aborigines any voice at all. He reproduces the white-fella-as-boss colonial relation. The fallacy that they are going off into the netherlands because of an urge to walk is based on a misunderstanding that people wander aimlessly. But the people’s knowledge of the country is precise. They have a terrain which they regard as home. Bruce regarded their land as a kind of non-home. He didn’t deal with nomadism as a true concept. He’s dealing with the flight of prophets into the desert for visions and how this reflects on him.”

  Bruce’s failure to reach the source results in what Jenny Green calls “an interesting absence of song”. This absence, says Davidson, is the key. “One of the things he doesn’t describe is the journey of a dreaming, because it’s the one thing he couldn’t see. He wanted it to be what he had read in Strehlow, but when he went there, it wasn’t, and he had to make it up.”

  When pressed to describe the central image of his book, Bruce said: “It’s a low, rather beautiful ‘aaaahh’.”

  While Bruce’s political naïveté exposed him to attacks from those working closely with the Aboriginals, even critics like Toyne had to concede that his popularising of the songlines introduced many white middle-class Australians to the culture of the country they lived in. Murray Bail admits, “A lot of people hadn’t heard of the songlines – including myself.”

  For Mario Vargas Llosa, a novelist Bruce openly admired, it did not matter whether the songlines were strictly accurate or a charming literary fraud. “Because to pass off fiction as reality, or to inject fiction into reality, is one of the most demanding and imperishable of human enterprises – and the dearest ambition of any storyteller.” Reading The Songlines on a visit to Australia in the belief that it was an anthropological work, Vargas Llosa was reminded of Borges.

  In England, the book enjoyed a swift popular success. Cape had pai
d an advance of £20,000 and initially printed 10,000 copies. Hardback sales eventually reached 20,779. In July, it became number one on the Sunday Times best-seller list and was among the titles chosen for the Queen’s summer reading.

  Ostensibly, Bruce had completed his opus and unloaded what Rushdie called “the burden he’s been carrying all his writer’s life”, but he had trouble relinquishing it fully and even tinkered with the text in foreign editions, in the French edition omitting the marriage between Arkady and Marian. His dissatisfaction stemmed from his sense that the book had gone to press before it was ready. “There are masses of details I’d like to have checked, but physically could not,” he wrote to Nin Dutton. He had written the last third of the book, he impressed on Welch, “in semi-hallucination”. Handwritten messages in signed copies of the book conveyed a sense that he had needed more time, had not reached the heights he had aimed at. To Hugh Honour: “Remember – this is only the first draft!” To Harry Marshall: “a sequence of non-sequiturs”. There was an awareness that his illness, even as it had sapped his physical strength, had imposed the necessary deadline. “All in all The Songlines is a pretty odd production,” he wrote to Charles and Brenda Tomlinson. “The fact that I wrote the last chapter just before what was all but the last gasp gives it a very rough quality – to say the least! But I have an idea that what’s written is written, with all the glaring defects: and if I’d tried to deliver everything I had in mind, the result might be even more incoherent than it is.”

  Maschler, then in the throes of selling Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus and The Bodley Head to Random House, did not share Bruce’s anxiety. This was the book he had envisaged in 1968. “You called what I have ‘a draft’,” he wrote on first receiving the manuscript. “If that is what it is, then it’s the most perfect draft I’ve ever read as a publisher.”

  “Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines is recommended by many; is top of the poll,” wrote Lees-Milne in his diary on 1 December. “I must I suppose read it. But shall probably be irritated. Saw him in London Library last week. He came up to me in the reading room. Somewhat changed. Those fallen angel looks have withered. Rather spotty and poor complexion, but upright and active since severe illness. Poor Bruce. I said to him, ‘You are having a well-deserved swimgloat’.”

  XXXIX

  My Inexplicable Fever

  Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

  —Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

  AT THE SAME TIME AS THE SONGLINES TOPPED THE BEST-SELLER LIST, Bruce’s doctors in Oxford thought they were dealing with two different people. He had submitted his yellow fever specimens with his first name, Charles. “I apologise that some of his ‘stickers’ have Charles, which is his first name, on it, and not Bruce. It is one and the same person,” wrote Juel-Jensen to the pathologist. The mix-up was consistent with the confusion Bruce’s doctors had in dealing with his illness. Richard Bull thought it likely he had developed full-blown AIDS. He had written to Juel-Jensen on 27 February 1987: “His overall prognosis remains unknown as there is very little experience in this infection, but one can only presume that his disseminated fungal infection in the presence of HIV would constitute the criteria for a diagnosis of AIDS.” Juel-Jensen was more hopeful. In April, he had put Bruce on a new anti-viral drug, AZT, which worked, for a while, a miraculous effect. “He has no side effects so far from his pills. He can walk ten miles and climb a mountain of 1500 feet without any problems,” Juel-Jensen reported in July. “I feel at present pretty optimistic and I think it is a good idea that he should go off to France where he can write in peace. He has been more productive recently than for many a year.”

  His “remarkable” improvement (which can now be recognised as characteristic of AIDS), Bruce attributed to a combination of the AZT and a change of climate.

  Like Stevenson and Rimbaud a century before, Bruce chose to convalesce in the south of France. From December 1986, he based himself when abroad at the Chateau de Seillans. The house, an eleventh-century fort, was built by hunters at the edge of a 6o-foot cliff so they might sleep with their back to it and know that no animal would climb up. In the nineteenth century, the house was occupied by the Comtesse de Savigny, who built a perfume factory in the hills behind. It was to perfume that Shirley Conran compared Bruce’s charm on their first meeting, “like a wonderful cloud of Miss Dior”. She says, “I reeled away, drunk on it.”

  Shirley, a best-selling author and divorced wife of the restaurateur Terence Conran, had known Bruce before he was involved with her son. They had met at an Author-of-the-Year party at Hatchards in the late 1970s. “Suddenly this fair-headed chap was at my elbow and I said ‘What do you think is the best way to see a country?’ ‘By boot.’ My first impression was that he was a Yorkshireman or Lancastrian and he’d said ‘By boat’.” She describes Bruce, to whom she bore a resemblance, as “the older brother I never dreamed of having . . . Bruce and I would talk in half sentences, like the Queen when discussing racehorses – no one else could understand.” While she never experienced the pain of falling in love with him, she did observe others whom Bruce held in his thrall, including her son. “A lot of people were in love with Bruce and I’m sorry for all of them. I saw the misery it brought. We have all loved people and left them, but when Bruce danced on to the next he had the ability to leave them feeling empty and bereft in a way I doubt they ever recovered from. He’d wander carelessly in and out of someone’s life in an afternoon and they’d be dazzled for the rest of their lives.” It was not only, she says, that he did not want exclusivity. “There was a dark side of him that wasn’t a scalp-hunter but was amoral. His wanting to externalise his personal frustration onto others was the result of some misery, some fury with himself. He did not know himself and did not care to know himself too closely. He was like Ariel: in this world but not of it.”

  Shirley was an equal and firm friend to Elizabeth. “Elizabeth can seem fierce because she’s so shy and modest. Her gruff voice and short-sighted scowl of condescension put people off, but it is the smokescreen of a remarkably knowledgeable and erudite woman who is a woman of action just as Bruce was a man of action. I admire Elizabeth’s adventurousness, her generosity, her morality, her kindness. She has a beautiful nature. She always bows into the shadows when Bruce takes centre stage. In fact, Elizabeth is the person most like Bruce I’ve met.”

  The way the Chatwins quarrelled very happily reminded Shirley “of my two young children in the back of my sports car: ‘You said you’d get it.’ ‘I didn’t. I said I’d get it if I was passing and I didn’t pass.’ Bickering was an important part of their child-like relationship.”

  Shirley says: “When I think of Bruce I think of integrity.” To some, then, it appeared bizarre that he should choose the house of his lover’s mother in which to convalesce. Here again he showed an ability to render normal the extraordinary, and vice versa. (“I could see the oddness of the situation, but it didn’t bother me,” says Elizabeth.) One note he left for Shirley reads like an instruction he might write to a housekeeper. She should take care in closing the front door. The white umbrella was a house gift. The champagne in the fridge was to be drunk. The plastic cushion was for the chair on the terrace – “Jasper thought it horribly vulgar, but it did for the convalescent.”

  The huge south-facing terrace looked over the tops of the village houses to the mountains. This was where he wrote Utz sitting on a Provençal cushion. He would return to it repeatedly until his death.

  Bruce worked well at Seillans, but he over-estimated his strength. He “gets carried away by feeling good and then overdoes it,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude on 27 February. Whenever he felt strong enough, he wanted to leave the terrace behind and travel.

  In February, he drove to Milan to see Roberto Calasso, his Italian publisher. Once on the move, his alertness to detail was restored. In Calasso’s visitors’ book, he wrote down a conversation overheard in a Nice restaurant. The audience were two sisters who
“would appear to share a remote ancestry with the piranha fish”. The speaker was a stout pharmacist who wore six rings. “Over coffee, he said the following:

  “‘Je vais vous raconter l’histoire d’un homme qui est parti pour son voyage de noces avec sa nouvelle femme, et, pendant le voyage, elle était tuée, meutriée par quelqu’un. Et lui, pour oublier ses tristes souvenirs est parti pour . . . and at this point one expected the words ‘Tahiti’ or la Nouvelle Caledonie . . . but no! . . . ‘il est parti pour la Bélgique où il est devenue président d’une societé de fabrication du chocolat . . . de la laiterie . . . et même les produits chimiques’.”

  In March, he was anxious to visit North Ghana where Werner Herzog was filming The Viceroy of Ouidah. “This poses problems of a new nature when it comes to protecting him adequately,” wrote a worried Juel-Jensen, who saw him in Oxford on his way to Accra. In response to Bruce’s request for a wheelchair, Herzog had cabled back: “A wheelchair will get you nowhere in terrain where I am shooting. I will give you four hammockeers and a sunshade bearer.” Bruce seemed to be emulating his Viceroy.

  After ten days in Ghana, he embarked on a course of AZT. By May, his dry skin had improved. He no longer had an overwhelming feeling of tiredness. Elizabeth gave him some weights to exercise his arms and chest. “He’s really awfully well except for his feet which are still rather numb & stiff.”