Bruce Chatwin Read Online Free PDF

between the affettuouso and the cadenza .” He reminded Hope of Danny Kaye, a Chatwin favourite, who was able to convince an audience entirely by phonetics that he was speaking in Hungarian. Hope could seldom follow Chatwin’s stories to their conclusion. “But he would conjure up incredible images. Evening in the Atlas mountains, the sky an exquisite cerulean blue, the stars coming out one by one and the wonderful sang de boeuf of the North African desert. Sometimes it would get so exhausting that I’d say: ‘Could you just show me a photograph?”’
    He rehearsed his stories “like Churchill, muttering in the bath,” says Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth. “He was always playing a kind of role: you could see him cooking up how he was going to do it. He was so excited when he got to someone’s house: he’d drive up, slam on the brakes, jump out and rush into the house – and I’d have to turn the engine off and shut the car door.” Elizabeth Chatwin did not believe he intended anyone necessarily to believe his stories. “But if they did, he went further.”
    Chatwin was a storyteller first, but not until the last third of his life did he write the stories down. “I’ve always loved telling stories,” he told Thubron. “It’s telling stories for what it’s worth. Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.”
    Stories were Chatwin’s central obsession: digging for them, bringing them to the surface, sharing them. “He was looking for stories the world could give him and that he could embellish,” says Salman Rushdie, who travelled with him through Central Australia. “He didn’t give a damn whether they were true or not; only whether they were good.”
    Chatwin was very theatrical, but he was also deeply serious. His stories concealed as much as they revealed and he hid inside them. He talked as he wrote, to keep something at bay, with an intensity to convince whoever was listening, or reading, that his dragons were not peculiar to him. He told his stories right to the last, going up to bed, stopping on each step of the stair for five minutes, going out to the car, as he drove off, leaning out of the window, till the moment he died.
    In this he shared the malleability of all-knowing Proteus, eluding questions by changing into a lion, a serpent, or fire. “His whole life was spent transforming,” says the actor and theatre director Peter Eyre. As long as he was talking he could not be questioned.
    As with a child, he could invoke in his audience a tenderness towards something easily shattered. “He was very scared,” says Rushdie. “He was telling stories to keep the Jungle Beast away, the false sabre-tooth, whatever it is.” Rushdie had no doubt what this Beast was: “The Beast is the truth about himself. The great truth he’s keeping away is who he is.”
    Say almost anything of Bruce Chatwin and the opposite is also true. There seem to be as many Bruce Chatwins as people he met. “I sometimes think he wasn’t a person: he was a scrum,” says the art critic Robert Hughes. “I think I hardly knew him, there were so many of him,” says Sheila Chanler. The American artist Michèle Laporte likened him to a mirror. “Often people talk about him and end up talking about themselves.”
    “Something in him spoke to an impulse, a fear that is universal,” says his American editor, Elisabeth Sifton. “The Beast is the truth about ourselves, for each of us.” Perhaps this accounts for why so many feel proprietorial about him. According to Wyndham, it is a rare person who remains neutral. “People feel some attitude has to be taken about Bruce, as if you define yourself by how you react to him.” Rushdie says: “You have to agree or disagree. Everything he did, he did very noisily and that creates a response.” Anthony