Bruce Chatwin By Nicholas Shakespeare Harvill, 591 pps, £20.00 in UK
Travel book or personal quest - or, probably both - the publication in 1977 of Bruce Chatwin's first book, In Patagonia, excited literary circles as few English books had since the second World War. It was credited with redefining travel writing - which it did. It also helped return travel writing, for so long a traditional English literary genre, home to England. There is no doubt, the British literary world needed Bruce Chatwin almost as much as he needed it. Blessed - or, more accurately - cursed with an almost eternal blonde beauty which turned many heads including his own, Chatwin, the restless, mercurial, bisexual son of a solid Birmingham solicitor seemed destined for discontent.
Small wonder fantasy, reinvention, evasiveness and secrecy appeared so attractive to him. Chatwin possessed a determined, nay relentless, flair for storytelling, and although there would be two fine novels alongside his three other intriguing if unclassifiable major works, the truth remains that his greatest fiction was himself. Nicholas Shakespeare, a literary journalist, novelist, and London literary world insider, has produced a weighty study of an individual whose chosen medium was light, air and space.
It must be conceded that the life of a writer who died at 48 could be explored in rather less than the near 600 pages it takes his biographer. But as Shakespeare - who has adopted an investigative rather than interpretative approach - possesses exceptional understanding of at least one of the worlds Chatwin frequented, he has had access to many people who knew him, from Salman Rushdie to Edmund White to Shirley Conran, who tended him at her home in France during his final days - and with whose son, Jasper, Chatwin had an affair. Shakespeare's wealth of sources, anecdote, quotation and insights have been offered by friends, acquaintances and enemies who are still alive. There was also the opportunity to interview Chatwin's parents, both of whom, however, died before this book was published.
Be warned: this is a work of forensic detail, much of it repetitive and heavily influenced by Shakespeare's resolve to be fair to New Yorker Elizabeth Chanler, who stayed married to a largely absent Chatwin for more than 25 years, although they did officially separate in the early 1980s. Details of Chatwin's quasi-camp behaviour, as well as his vanity, his rudeness, selfishness, snobbery and inconsistency, never mind his rampaging gay cruising, are carefully logged. All of which leaves the reader - as, apparently, did all who knew the Chatwins - wondering why on earth a woman from a Jamesian clan put up with this cold, absent husband. Not surprisingly, one of the biography's major themes is the strange marriage - but is this not their business? Aside from the fact that the Chatwin set is hardly the stuff of fascinating social history, the most unsettling discovery to emerge from this book is that Shakespeare dismantles Chatwin the writer, while leaving the monster intact.
Ten years have passed since Chatwin died of AIDS without ever admitting to having the illness, although it was widely known he had contracted it, despite his story about a rare Chinese fungus. At the time of his death, he was already well established as one of Britain's finest writers. There were those who disputed his standing, but the fact remains while In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) and, most famously, The Songlines (1987) defy classification, On the Black Hill (1982), his best book, is a beautiful, old-fashioned, elegiac story of lives unchanged by time, while Utz, which was short-listed for the 1988 Booker Prize, convincingly evokes the atmosphere of post-war Prague.
Even so, a sharp revision of Chatwin's literary reputation was expected. But Shakespeare does not reassess the books: instead, he offers the messy background to Chatwin's hectic approach to writing them; the people he angered, the haphazard research and travel which went into amassing the material, the crazed efforts which then went into finding a suitable place to write. There is no doubt that Chatwin lived in a constant state of crisis; he certainly wrote in one. Though self-absorbed, Chatwin - who could be the life and soul of the party as easily as one of his moods could empty a room - was not given to introspection. In his writing the observations which so often breathed life into the ordinary walked hand in hand with fascinating snatches of erudition. It was Chatwin who helped prepare readers for wondrous works such as W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1988). Ideas, information, history and myth were as important to him as the works of art and beautiful objects he coveted.
Yet the man himself - presented as neutrally as possible by Shakespeare - emerges as a highly-strung diva, and pretty much the man I met when arriving in Cambridge to have lunch with Granta editor Bill Buford in the summer of 1987. "You here to interview Bruce?" asked Elizabeth Chatwin. Over the lunch which followed, Chatwin, looking his age, demonstrated his ability to talk non-stop, leaping from subject to subject in a shrill voice like something out of Waugh, eyes glittering, loving an audience, any audience.
Shakespeare's diligent book is not the first study. With Chatwin, (1997) a biography less than half its length, contains most of the facts. Written by Susannah Clapp, Chatwin's former editor, it is irritatingly cloying, but those who have read it will find little new in Shakespeare's book, though his tone is less protective and less celebratory, and his major scoop is his revelations about the outrageous corruption prevailing at Sotheby's under the colourful chairman Peter Wilson. Chatwin rose from porter to director of Sotheby's in eight years and clearly enjoyed the travel, but eventually blamed his temporary blindness on looking at too many pictures.
Myth is central to understanding Chatwin's books which, like himself, were exciting and mainly cold, but interesting. His was a life glamourised by abrupt departures. Part of Chatwin lore is his having famously claimed to have announced "Gone to Patagonia" with an ease lesser folk reserve for going to lunch. The man who would shine was far duller as a much-loved first son who tolerated his younger brother and survived public school, though not well enough to make it to university. At 26, he did go to Edinburgh to study archaeology, but he soon left.
Such was Chatwin's elusiveness that even intimates were shocked by his skeletal appearance on the Booker Prize programme in September 1988. Frenetic and possessed, a contradictory globe trotter who claimed to like travelling light yet, as the Australian Murray Bail once said, travelled with as much luggage as Garbo, Bruce Chatwin remains far more contradictory than most. Capable of seducing with a smile, he was remote and easy to dislike. Yet his dreadful death at least allowed him to die young - albeit with the myth no longer intact. What remains is a small but important body of work crafted with immense effort. Shakespeare's dogged account chronicles the loyalty of others when faced with Chatwin's often repulsive behaviour. As a biography, it is as chill as its subject. Even so, admirers of Chatwin's exact, polished oeuvre should read it, if only as a prelude to returning to the work.
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