Bruce Chatwin Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fortnum crackers and a note: ‘ This is what I mean’.”
    As a young man he was stocky and resembled a big baby. He had fair hair brushed flat over a square head, which was slightly too big for his body, and huge blue eyes that never seemed to blink. “I fixed her with my well-known arctic stare,” he wrote of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. “It made her profoundly nervous.” People have compared the adult Chatwin to a German admiral, a curate, a fallen angel, an unfledged baby sparrow, a farmer, a St Bernard, but the image fixed in most minds is that of a pink-cheeked schoolboy, slightly bumptious, with Robert Louis Stevenson’s ability to render those he met “slaves to a rare, authentic and irresistible charm”. He had, like Stevenson, a child-like rather than a childish approach to life. “His style was to be the beautiful soft child-boy who’s not quite real, like a boy in an English school whom others have a crush on,” says the film director James Ivory. “He was like that and he stayed like that. He was a Rupert Brooke.” His looks matched the way he dressed. “He had a perfect outfit that nanny could have put out for him: khaki shorts, white polo shirt, wonderful white floppy hat, sandals, socks,” says Jessie Wood, with whom he stayed in Greece in the 1960s. “He had a theory you didn’t get corns if you wore socks.” There was always the sense he was conscious of his effect. “You’re like Baron Münchhausen,” Howard Hodgkin told him once. “How?” Bruce asked. “Was he pretty?” Vain he was, but not completely confident about his looks. “Well, I suppose I’m fairly good-looking, but not that handsome. And rather moley,” he told the art critic Ted Lucie-Smith. He felt his British voice sat on his personality “like a layer of slime”. For all that, a great many thought him irresistible. “He was amazing to look at,” says Susan Sontag. “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthral. Your stomach just drops to your knees, your heart skips a beat, you’re not prepared for it. I saw it in Jack Kennedy. And Bruce had it. It isn’t just beauty, it’s a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.”
    Part of his appeal was his humour, a combination of innocence, vulnerability, mimicry, rescued from slapstick by an English taste for the absurd. “He was one of the two funniest people I’ve known,” says Salman Rushdie. “He was so colossally funny you’d be on the floor with pain. When his stories hit their stroke, they could simply destroy you.”
    He was a superb mimic. In his imitations there was the hilarity of the jousting knight who was sometimes less St George than he was Don Quixote. “He had a laugh like a wild hyena, whoops and away it went,” says Nin Dutton. “In the outback, he’d have had a chorus of kookaburras to keep him company. They sit in a tree and laugh like mad. They’d have imitated every word he said.”
    Chatwin had Evelyn Waugh’s “delicious gift for seeing people as funny”. His most common word in conversation, noticed the Australian novelist Murray Bail, was “mad”. “It was a description of honour. He didn’t like ordinary people. He wanted them extraordinary. ‘Everyone’s quite mad,’ he would say, speaking in italics and bulging his eyes.” He could give others the same impression. “There was something inhuman about him when he got excited,” says Sybille Bedford, “a mad horse, large eyes with lots of white.”
    The performance was physical. As he watched his audience come forward on their chairs, affirming him, he grew and so did his stories. “He went straight into a performance,” says his friend Jonathan Hope. “He’d sit bolt upright, ramrod back, his eyes popping, and roar off in fourth gear on his idée fixe of that week or hour.” His voice had the speed of the eighteenth-century Sotheby’s auctioneer George Leigh, pitched, it was said, “somewhere