Fresh Air Fiend (62 page)

"Why do you think it matters?" he said to me.

"Because it's interesting," I said, and thought: It's less coy, too. "And because I think when you're writing a travel book you have to come clean."

This made Bruce laugh, and then he said something that I have always taken to be a pronouncement that was very near to being his motto. He said—he screeched—"I don't believe in coming clean!"

V. S. Naipaul felt that Bruce was trying to live down the shame of being the son of a Birmingham lawyer. I challenged this facile theory.

Naipaul said, "No, you're wrong. Look at Noël Coward. His mother kept a lodging house. And he pretended to be so grand—that theatrical English accent. All that posturing. He knew he was common. It was all a pretense. Think of his pain."

This might have been true in a small way of Bruce, but I think he was secretive by nature. It kept him aloof and helped him in his flitting around. He never revealed himself totally to anyone, as far as I know, and in this way he kept his personality intact. In any case, he never struck me as being thoroughly English. He was more cosmopolitan—liking France, feeling liberated in America, being fascinated by Russia and China, something of a cultural exile.

I am skirting the subject of his sexual preference, because it does not seem that it should matter. Yet it was obvious to anyone who knew him that in speaking tenderly of marital bliss, he was always suppressing a secret and more lively belief in homosexuality. That he was homosexual bothered no one; that he never spoke about it was rather disturbing.

In an ungracious memoir, the writer David Plante refused to see Bruce's sense of fun and perhaps even deeper sense of insecurity. Plante wrote at length about how they had gone to a gay disco in London called Heaven, but it is typical of the memoir's dark hints and hypocrisy that Bruce's behavior is regarded as sneaky and insincere, while Plante himself never discloses his own motive for going to the gay hangout.

I wanted to know more about Bruce's homosexual life, not because I am prurient but because if I like someone, I want to know everything. And while Bruce was secretive himself, he was exasperated by others who kept their secrets. He never wrote about his sexuality, and some of us have laid our souls bare.

 

When he called me, he always did so out of the blue. I liked that. I liked the suddenness of it—it suited my life and my writing. I hated making plans. I might not be in the mood that far-off day. I might be trying to write something. If he called in the morning, it was always with a proposal to meet that afternoon or evening. And then I might not hear from him for six months or a year.

It surprised me that he had agreed to give a lecture for the Royal Geographical Society, but he had done it on one condition, that it be a duet. Would I agree? I said okay, and I understood that we were both doing it so as to seem respectable among all those distinguished explorers and travelers.

Working together to prepare the lecture we called "Patagonia Revisited," I realized how little I knew him and what a ditherer he could be. He was insecure, I knew that, and it had the effect of making him seem domineering. "I can't believe you haven't read Pigafetta in full," he would say, and put the book in my hand and insist that I read it by tomorrow—and the next day, instead of talking about Pigafetta, he would say, "Our talk's going to be awful, it's hopeless, I don't know why we agreed to do this," and later on would say, "By the way, I've invited the duke and duchess of Westminster."

I found this maddening. I felt the lecture was a task we had to perform and that we would do it well if we were decently prepared. Bruce's moods ranged from somewhat tiresome high spirits to days of belittling gloom. "No one's going to come," he said. "I'm certainly not inviting anyone."

We got in touch with a dozen members of the RGS who had photographs of Patagonia, and we assembled eighty or a hundred pictures of the plains and glaciers, penguins, snow, and storms.

When the day came, it turned out that Bruce had invited many people, including his parents—his big, beefy-faced father had the look of a Dickensian solicitor—and he was miffed that the duke and duchess had not been able to make it. The lecture itself I thought was splendid—one of the happiest occasions of my life in London—not so much for the text but for the atmosphere, the Victorian oddity of it. We gave the talk in the large paneled amphitheater in Kensington Gore, where so many distinguished explorers had reported back to the society. We stood in the dark, a little light shining on our notes while big beautiful pictures flashed on the screen behind us. This was thrilling—just our voices and the vivid Patagonian sights.

There was loud applause at the end. Bruce, who would have been a wonderful actor—who perhaps
was
a wonderful actor—was flushed with pleasure. He had been brilliant, and I realized that he needed me to encourage him and get him through it. And when I heard him at dinner afterward regaling Lord Hunt and Chris Bonington with his mountaineering exploits, I thought, He's flying!

In our various travels we'd run into each other—in America, in Amsterdam. When he wanted to meet someone I knew well, he simply asked me to introduce him. Graham Greene he particularly wanted to meet. But Bruce thought Greene was gaga. He could not understand the mystique. He loved Borges. Later he needed glamour. He let himself be courted by Robert Mapplethorpe and liked the thought of his portrait appearing in Mapplethorpe's notorious traveling exhibition, along with women weightlifters and strange flowers and even stranger sexual practices.

He went to China—just a magazine assignment, but Bruce made it seem as if he had been sent on an expedition of discovery to an unmapped place by the Royal Geographical Society. I admired that in him. He took his writing assignments seriously, no matter whom he was writing for. He was the opposite of a hack, which is to say something of a pedant, but a likable one, who was fastidious and truly knowledgeable.

When he fell ill soon after his China trip, word spread that he had been bitten by a fruit bat in Yunnan and contracted a rare blood disease. Only two other people in the world had ever had it, so the story went, and both had died. Bruce was near death, but he fought back and survived. Now he had another story to tell at dinner parties, of being bitten by a Chinese bat. A tall, plummy-voiced resident of Eaton Square called me to say, "I just saw Bruce walking through the square carrying a white truffle."

Then the rare blood disease returned. "I was warned that it might pop up again," Bruce explained. What kind of bat was this exactly? Bruce was vague. He became very ill. Seeing him was like looking at the sunken cheeks and wasted flesh of a castaway. That image came to me again and again, the image of an abandoned traveler. The worst fate for travelers is that they become lost, and instead of reveling in oblivion, they fret and fall ill.

When I visited his bedroom in the pretty, homey Oxfordshire farmhouse that Elizabeth tended (she also raised sheep), his hands would fly to his face, covering his hollow cheeks.

"God, you're healthy," he would say sadly. But later he would cheer up, making plans. "I'm going to Arizona to see Lisa Lyon. She's fabulous. The woman weightlifter? You'd love her." And when I prepared to go, he would say, "I'm not ready for the Tibetan Book of the Dead yet."

"He expected to get better, and when he got worse he was demoralized and just let go," Elizabeth told me. "He was in terrible pain, but at the height of it he lapsed into a coma, and that was almost a blessing."

Hovering in this fragile state of health, he died suddenly. He had been handsome, calculating, and demanding; he was famous for his disappearances. His death was like that, just as abrupt, like Bruce on another journey. We were used to his vanishings—his silences could be as conspicuous as his talk.

Our friendship began like many friendships between writers, with a good review. I liked Bruce's
In Patagonia
very much and said so in print; he sought me out. He said that after he read my
Great Railway Bazaar
he was inspired to chuck everything and just clear off to South America. It surprised me that he needed any help at all in anything related to his travel. He was by instinct nomadic. He believed in what he called "the sacramental aspects of walking," and he had more of Ariel about him than anyone I have known. But he also liked the sweet life. He enjoyed glamorous company ("Jackie Kennedy's actually quite nice...")and betrayed his provinciality by being a bit of a snob. He had also worked at proper jobs, at Sotheby's and
The Sunday Times,
the sort that had allowed him to rub shoulders with the likes of Beatrice Lillie, Diana Vreeland, hard-up aristocrats, and others—the sort of enameled celebrities that make you hanker after the company of a Yaghan Indian or an aborigine, which of course represented the other side of Bruce's social life. Either the drawing room or the bush, nothing in between—or at least nothing that Bruce would admit to.

Very early on he asked me a very Chatwinesque question: what I did
not
like about his Patagonia book. I said straight off that it bothered me that he never explained the difficulties and in-betweens of travel—where he slept, what he ate, what kind of shoes he wore—and too many sentences of his were like this one: "From Ushuaia it was a 35-mile walk along the Beagle Channel to the Bridges' estancia." Twenty-odd miles is a good day's walk, so was this thirty-five miles easy or hard for him? Did it take a day or more (he suggests a day, surely not possible in Patagonian wind and cold)? And where did he stop? Bruce just laughed at me, because he was an inveterate leaver-out of things. I said I believed that a travel book ought to give enough information for the reader to be able to take the same trip. He didn't think so. I also liked having the right equipment: shoes, poncho, water bottle, sleeping bag, whatever. No, no, he said. Leave it out. He liked making everything connected with travel and his life a bit of a mystery.

All his writing had a fragmentary quality, not in a random sense but in the deliberately isolated way that a paragraph or an incident was a sort of collector's item he had found and worked over and buffed up. It was how he must have dealt with the pretty and precious objects he had seen all the time at Sotheby's auction rooms. He was essentially a miniaturist and, with that, a parer-down of description and emotion, sometimes eliminating them entirely. Even after you have read his six unclassifiable books, you still don't know him, though you know a lot about his world. This is also true of that other traveler and outsider and oblique snob, Wilfred Thesiger.

His posthumous collection
What Am I Doing Here
(the question Arthur Rimbaud asked himself in Ethiopia after he had abandoned poetry), because it is more ragged than anything else Bruce wrote, tells us more about him—his interests and friends, if not his passions. He writes of his mother and father, of his friend the distinguished painter Howard Hodgkin, and his tête-à-têtes with André Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstam—you see what I mean by having the right job placing you cheek by jowl with luminaries?

At his best, he gets a really bizarre bee in his bonnet, such as the rumor of a "wolf-boy" in India, or a Chinese
fengshui
geomancer in Hong Kong, or the notion of looking for a yeti. Then he sets off on a quest to establish the truth of the rumor. Much of Bruce's travel is in search of an unholy grail, something freakish, plainly an excuse, like the dinosaur fragment at the beginning of
In Patagonia.
Off he goes, and the piece is a winner.

More than half the pieces in
What Am I Doing Here
are winners, and the others can be classified as anecdotes, fragments, assignments, and bits of odd lore. This last category is a Chatwin specialty. He loved to explain the Nazca Lines in Peru, those gigantic ideograms on the mountainsides. And what about Joseph Rock in Yunnan, who inspired some of Ezra Pound's dottiest cantos? Or the charade of a West African coup? Bruce gets it all down: how he was slapped, pushed around, imprisoned, robbed, put on trial, starved, and finally released. He leaves with wonderful images and memorable lines and never tells us whether he suffered.

Scattered in these pages are mentions of his rare blood disease. "I was bitten by a bat," he told me enthusiastically after he recovered. It was something of a thrill to him that a bat had sunk its fangs in him, that he had been near death and only survived through a number of blood transfusions. The unusual in travel mattered to Bruce, because this was the stuff of travelers' tales. Travel is also ordinary, monotonous, exasperating, but Bruce never writes about that. Nothing of meals or hotels, tickets or money, only the Ariel-like comings and goings, and the dazzling summaries. I think of this as an English way of traveling—the ability to make one good story stand for a vast, messy ordeal. Such a way of writing can be misleading, because it is also about style and, hiding so much, it is often the opposite of the truth.

Just as seriously—and this is another problem for the English raconteur—the obsession with anecdotes lends a fragmentary quality to Bruce's writing. Narrative structure is sorely lacking, there is little forward movement, and there seems to be nothing at the center—perhaps no real motive. I think Bruce himself suspected this. He hated the term "travel writer," and he was at his happiest mixing fact with fiction.

"What makes Malraux a great figure is not necessarily his verbal performance or his writings," Bruce writes in one of the best pieces in this collection. "His life is the masterpiece."

One can see a real affinity in the young Chatwin talking to the old Malraux in 1974. Revolution, de Gaulle, Mao, China, suicide, history, war, travel, the Bomb, student revolt—it is a wonderful and wide-ranging conversation. Clearly Chatwin admired the man, who was a gentleman, a fine writer, a statesman, a socialite, and, best of all, a man of action—not an
homme de bibliothèque,
the worst sort of French intellectual. Malraux was also suspected of being a bit of a fraud, of having a dubious side.
So what?
Bruce would have said. Shady aspects thrilled Bruce and made him more attentive.