LIKE any layabout, I wanted to write but my early efforts were a failure," wrote the late Bruce Chatwin in his short introduction to What Am I Doing Here (1989). It was to be his last book, and was published in May 1989, some months after his death at the age of 48. It was a fine book; several of the pieces were fitting testimony to Chatwin's odd, singular, at times even original mind, and certainly celebrated his particular form of fictionalised truth with its swings between the personal and the universal.
One of the more lamentable trends of publishing, however, has led to many authors, unbenownst to themselves, produce more than one last book. And Anatomy of Restlessness (Cape, £15.99 in UK) consisting of "uncollected writings", merely produces a sense of deja vu amongst work which was not, judged worthy of book publication during Chatwin's lifetime.
What is it then that renders these is any better now that the author is dead? Are we expected to dispense with all standards of criticism purely because we have admired the work judged worthy of publication by the author during his lifetime?
That it took two people to edit this slim volume of "previously neglected or unpublished Chat win pieces" is another mystery. Readers of Chatwin's work will recognise many of the assembled cuttings as earlier drafts of known pieces and will know variations of many of the anecdotes from In Patogonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987). Indeed, "The Morality of Things", the text of a speech delivered at a Red Cross charity auction in 1973 on the subject of collecting, predates the theme of his Booker shortlisted novel, Utz (1989).
Also palpably present is the mercurial Chatwin at his most self absorbed and most obsessional - and he could be obsessive. Chatwin was capable of taking an idea and beating it to death, not profoundly, not even systematically, though loading it with classical and philosophical cross references. In conversation, he was persistent without being particularly convincing or conclusive. For all his travelling and his clear eyed observations - often the best of a piece could be contained in one sentence - his favourite subject remained himself in particular, variations on the theme of the making of him as a writer, such as the famous and bizarre psychosomatic blindness caused by looking at too many works of art, and the cure which sent him off seeking long horizons; the young art dealer turned into a mature student archaeologist. The Chatwin ego parades the Chatwin myth unfettered throughout this book, and because these previously uncollected pieces are so obviously not his best, the tone is often shrill and the approach surprisingly pedantic.
Even so, he certainly delights in eccentric snatches of information; the quality most in evidence here is Chatwin's curiosity. He had no interest in ordinariness, yet his talent was for making us look twice at the ordinary.
The first section, aptly entitled "Horreir du Domicile", opens with another visit to Chatwin's early life. "I always wanted to go to Patagonia," recalls the unusual child who "lost teddy bears without a whimper, yet clung tenaciously to three precious possessions: a wooden camel known as Laura, brought by my father from the Cairo bazaar; a West Indian conch shell called Mona, in whose glorious pink mouth I could hear the wish wash of the ocean; and a book. The book was The Fsherman's Saint, an account of Sir Wilfred Grenfell's mission work on the coast of Labrador. I still have it. On the title page is written: To Bruce on his 3rd Birthday from the post man at Filey. For when he grows up, I imagined the book must contain some wonderful secret (which it did not), and it maddened me to have to wait all those years.
Chatwin was a restless person with a restless mind. As early as 969 he wrote a ten page letter to publisher Tom Maschler explaining his proposal to write a book about nomads. This letter, published here, was written not as entertainment, nor in order to inform any reader other than the publisher he was hoping to persuade to accept his book proposal. Should what is in effect a business letter be offered as a piece of prose writing? Should this letter have been published at all? Throughout most of the book the reader is aware of being privy to several pieces Chatwin had not intended to publish in book form, yet what is even more unsettling is the fact that we feel we have already read most or all of it. Above all, is it fair to as fastidious and as edgy a writer as Chatwin?
Travel writing was pioneered and refined by the travellers took over from the 19th century explorers. T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger helped shaped British genre, but Chatwin brought it a stage further. Perhaps this was because was the British answer to Paul Theroux, who with The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979) produced two instant classics. Interestingly, in Patagonia Revisited, a short travel two hander co written by Chatwin and Theroux, it is the American who most impresses. Meanwhile, another British travel writer, the unobtrusive Colin Thubron, has never quite captured the public imagination as readily as Chatwin with his affectations, his feel for class and his understanding of the very things he aspired to reject, yet never quite could such as wealth, status and objects.
Of four long reviews originally written for the TLS and published here, three amaze only by being turgid beyond belief. Yet in the one written of James Pope Hennessy's biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Chatwin is thinking, arguing and writing at his most lucid. It is an interesting review, but more importantly it is an astute reading of Stevenson's dilemma, caught in a marriage which depended on his submitting to being his wife's patient.
As a writer, Bruce Chatwin is a bit like a Faberge egg - at his best, winsome, elegant, a sterile exotic to be admired but not loved. His novel, On the Black Hill (1982), displayed a humanity absent from much of his beautiful, if coldly observational work. It is not easy to like the sad, random, mixed bag which Anatomy of Restlessness is. Though its title encapsulates Chatwin, the contents do little to enhance a reputation balanced on an original and delicate, though mannered and egocentric body of work.
