Bruce Chatwin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Powell recorded in his diary after watching On the Black Hill on television: “I always feel there was something a bit phoney about Chatwin.” Andrew Harvey, reviewing The Songlines in the New York Times, spoke for a younger audience. “Nearly every writer of my generation in England has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin; wanted, like him, to talk of Fez and Firdausi, Nigeria and Nuristan, with equal authority; wanted to be talked about, as he is, with raucous envy; wanted above all to have written his books . . .” He was, wrote Harvey, “a writer no one who cares for literature can afford not to read”.
    Bruce’s endeavour might seem to be old-fashioned, uniting him to the earliest fireside storytellers, but there is something prescient in his insistence that everything is linked. In his best stories, he gives us licence to travel freely. He introduces us to people and to texts we would not otherwise have encountered. He makes the world tidier, simpler, more exciting: a place to sample, at ease with anybody. His vision is both aristocratic and populist. And it is adventurous. In some ways he was a tremendous snob, but he was not a climber. “He wanted to be there, to know everything,” wrote Hugh Honour. “He had a great appetite for life.”
    What is compelling about Bruce Chatwin is easily lost in a din of bright lights and colours, incessant chatter and a crowded address book where Jackie Onassis is listed next to an Oryx herder. He is so noisy that you cannot hear him; so good-looking that you cannot see him; his work so restrained and cool that you cannot feel him. “His fastidiousness is a disguise,” says Rushdie, “and, oddly, that disguise is what most readers would think of Bruce. They refer to the characteristics of the prose.”
    Where the work is transparent, unencumbered and deceivingly clear, his life is deliberately opaque. “We know nothing about him at the book’s end,” Alasdair Reid grumbled in the New Yorker when reviewing In Patagonia. In fact, Bruce is himself more mysterious and subde than anything he wrote. It is this elusive quality which had led him to the cave in South Africa.
    Returning to Swartkrans a decade on, Bob Brain reflects on the day there with Bruce. “Such moments come to you in remote places. It’s as if the curtain that separates us from a broader vision is briefly lifted. We’re tied to a sequential time sequence, it’s the only way evolution can work – otherwise everything happens at once. But every now and then the process falters and we look through a chink at, I suppose, the eternity religions speak of. When this happens, it’s such a startling experience that you hanker after it when you’re back in the world of sequence. I think that’s what Chatwin did: when he returned to the sequential world, he found it tiresome and set off on another expedition.”

II
     
    “Let’s Have a Child,” I Said
    Do you know, my dear, that “Chatwin” is Old English for “spiralling ascent”?
    —BC to his wife
    BRUCE CHATWIN CAME FROM A MIDDLE - CLASS FAMILY WITHOUT pretensions, but in his imagination – and sometimes in his behaviour – he was exalted, a young prince. In July 1968, he accompanied Stuart Piggott, his professor of archaeology at Edinburgh, to Moscow. “He really is splendid & resourceful & gloriously autocratic,” Piggott noted in his journal. “When on the train an inspector speaking German asked if we were Erste Klasse Bruce said haughtily, ‘Of course we are! Look at us!’ He was under the impression that the man had asked if we were aristocrats !”
    The impulse to recreate himself was present from an early age. “On the Yorkshire Moors aged three or four, I remember my grandmother shouting to my mother over the field: ‘Be careful! Be careful! The gypsies will take him.’ And seeing a whole line, just over the hedge, of gypsy caravans moving up a lane and then a gypsy boy, very brown, on a piebald pony stripped to the