Under the Sun (2 page)

I simply don't know what he would have thought of computers and of using them to write books on. He might have felt it was more fun than anything to talk to any person anywhere in the world, or he might have hated it. When we were trekking in the Everest National Park in 1983 we were approached by a lone American who tried to attach himself to our camp (repulsed by evasion eventually). He said that within a few years Bruce would be using a word processor to write with. He got a mocking reply from us, and indeed Bruce never even looked at a computer as far as I know. But he observed that most books published after the advent of word processors were much bigger. Nothing wrong with them, but too long, as it was so easy to correct and adapt with the machine.

His system was to write by hand on yellow (American) legal foolscap and correct and delete and discard sheet after sheet. When he was fairly happy, he typed it out with large margins and then corrected and changed it some more. Then maybe another handwritten copy and definitely more typewritten ones. He threw away mountains of paper, so there are no working manuscripts to be seen.

He never showed his work to anyone till he was satisfied with it, but he read it aloud to me. Everything had to sound right and flow easily. The letters are the only unreworked writing of his. He felt that writing was a labour. A computer made it too easy.

And now that communication has become so fast and easy with mobile phones and e-mail, no one writes letters any more. No notes from the little darlings at prep school to treasure, maybe no love letters and no travellers' accounts. Does anyone print the communications they get for keepsakes?

So Bruce's letters, starting from a very young age and continuing through life, are a last example of a traditional form of communication which may now disappear.

 

ELIZABETH CHATWIN

 

A year before his death in January 1989 Bruce Chatwin opened a letter from his London publisher Tom Maschler and read the following:

‘I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there is simply no writer in England for whose work I have a greater passion than yours. This statement is made with all my heart.'

Twenty-one years on, Maschler finds no reason to alter his opinion. ‘Of what I call “my lot” – Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie – Bruce was the one I was most anxious to know where he was going to go. I think had he lived he would have been ahead of all of them,' he told me.

Chatwin's compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he found it. In his last months, wrapped in a shawl beside the stove at Homer End near Oxford, he lamented to Elizabeth: ‘There are so many things I want to do.' A work on healing to be called
The Sons of Thunder
; a triptych of stories after Flaubert's
Trois Contes
, ‘one set in Ireland in the days of Irish kings'; an Asian novel about the Austro-American botanist Joseph Rock who lived in China; another novel, based in South Africa, which would explore the gossip and jealousies of a Karoo dorp. And, of course, his Russian epic
Lydia Livingstone
, a love story first and foremost which was to weave in three cities – Paris, Moscow, New York – and attempt to fictionalise his wife's Jamesian family. ‘Bruce had just begun,' says his friend Salman Rushdie. ‘We didn't have his developed books, the books that might have come out of falling in love with his wife. We saw only the first act.'

One of the titles he liked, though he did not yet have a book for it, was
Under the Sun
.

It was a foreigner who asked the question: ‘Why should the disappearance of Bruce Chatwin make such a difference?' Writing in June 1989 in the
Times Literary Supplement
, Hans Magnus Enzensberger answered his own question in this way: ‘it is surely as a storyteller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed – a storyteller going far beyond the conventional limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and gossip.' For Enzensberger, with whom Chatwin had plotted a future walk along the Berlin Wall and down the East German border, it was not enough to say that he died young or was full of promise. ‘Chatwin never delivered the goods that critics or publishers or the reading public expected. Not fearing to disappoint, he surprised us at every turn of the page.' Enzensberger concluded: ‘Underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev. When we return to Bruce Chatwin we find much in him that has been left unsaid.'

While we shall never know the surprise of his unwritten works, Chatwin has left behind a body of writing that is striking for its freshness; an authentic conduit which allows us to return to him and even to be rewarded in the manner Enzensberger hints at: namely the letters and postcards that he wrote from his first week at boarding-school, two weeks shy of his eighth birthday, until shortly before his death at the age of 48.

Assigned in Nazi-occupied Paris to censoring civilian mail coming from Germany, Ernst Jünger, the subject of one of Chatwin's best essays, confided to his diary: ‘There's nothing people won't set down in letters.'

Whether typed on Sotheby's notepaper, or written with a Mont Blanc pen on sheets of blue stationery from a shop in Mount Street (with a proper die for his address), or scribbled on the backs of postcards with a blunt hotel pencil, Chatwin's correspondence reveals much more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books.

Alone in his letters did he make known that he had been present on a February day near Johannesburg when a cracked fragment of antelope bone was prised from the floor of the Swartkrans cave, soapy-feeling and speckled with dark patches as if burned: evidence, it turned out, of man's ‘earliest use of fire'. For all his brilliance, Chatwin could be disarmingly modest, hiding his light under the same bushel as his well-concealed darknesses. The Bruce Chatwin who appears in
The Songlines
,
In Patagonia
and
What Am I Doing Here
is his own best, most achieved character: observant, intelligent, sharp-witted, heterosexual, generous, intrepid. This persona was an essential part of the appeal of his writing. ‘In his books you were addressed not merely by a distinctive voice,' observed Michael Ignatieff, ‘but by the fabulous character he had fashioned for himself.' The Bruce Chatwin of the letters is less certain of who he is, more vulnerable but more human. Delicate about his health and finances; uneasy about his sexual orientation and his relationship with England; above all, restless almost to the point of neurosis.

In his passport, Chatwin put ‘farmer' as his profession, but his life was spent on the hoof, a sizeable proportion of it in the study of nomads. An internal memo circulated at Cape in October 1982 gives a flavour of his travels, their tern-like spread. ‘Publicity have no idea when Bruce Chatwin will be in Australia – neither does his agent! As far as we know he is still in Siberia/Russia.' He copied into one of his signature Moleskine notebooks this telling line from Montaigne: ‘I ordinarily reply to those who ask me the reason for my travels, that I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am looking for.' About the motivations for Chatwin's restlessness, I have not yet found a more convincing explanation than this, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyen Qui Duc. ‘Nomads in the old days travelled around looking for food, for shelter, for water; modern day nomads, we travel around looking for ourselves.'

Written with the verve and sharpness of expression that first marked him out as an author, Chatwin's correspondence gives a vivid synopsis of his interests and concerns over forty years. To read his letters and postcards is to be with him on the road: in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Niger, Benin, Mauretania, Tierra del Fuego, Brazil, Nepal, India, Alice Springs, London, New York, Edinburgh, Wotton-Under-Edge, Ipsden – in pursuit of the restless chimera that was Bruce Chatwin, that ‘haunting' and elusive presence who is at once ‘sparse and solitary and moving'.

A life revealed through letters is not nowadays so linear as a biography. It zig-zags through time and space rather in the manner of Chatwin's accounts of his journeys to Patagonia and Australia; it is messy, repetitive, congested, of the moment. Nor, frustratingly, can you rely on it to deliver letters when you want – from periods, and about incidents and people, just when their insight might prove most welcome. But it has this virtue: it is a life told at the time in the subject's own voice and words. It is the closest we have to his conversation.

The multifaceted narrator of Chatwin's books is a person who says remarkably little. He is virtually a mime artist, a character of laconic observations and lapidary asides that camouflage what he is thinking – ‘stepping back to hide himself,' as his friend Gregor Von Rezzori saw it, ‘in the cultivated impersonality of a newspaper article'. This impression is misleading. In his letters, as in life, Chatwin was no less voluble than was Marcel Marceau when not being silent on stage.

‘I don't believe in coming clean,' Chatwin famously told Paul Theroux. In his letters, he cannot avoid it. They are the raw matter of his thoughts, a way of trying them out on the page, the first version. They chart his struggle with who he was and what he wanted to be; art expert, husband, archaeologist, writer – first as an academic theorist, then as an unrepentant storyteller. They are as much a communication with whoever he is writing to as a continuing natter with himself.

Chatwin's Gloucestershire neighbour, Jim Lees-Milne, recorded in his diary the local Duke of Beaufort's opinion that ‘posterity should never judge people by their correspondence, as what they wrote one day was often the opposite of what they thought the next.' The shifting stream of Chatwin's mental processes is part of what injects his letters with their vitality. It is not uncommon for him to change his mind from one letter to the next, even between the paragraphs of a single letter. He changes his mind about his house, Australia, Africans, about whether to join his wife in India. ‘He's thinking on paper and clarifying his mind, like a conversation,' Elizabeth says. Especially volatile are his travel plans, more uncertain than the on-again-off-again sale of his Maori bedpost that once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt; or the saga of the longawaited cheque from James Ivory to cover the cost of a week's car hire in France. No sooner does he arrive anywhere than he is shouldering his rucksack, plotting to leave. ‘Everything is always perfect to begin with, but he gets fed up with a place very quickly and in no time at all he's picking holes.'

Then, sent as often as not from the next place – a postcard.

For Paul Theroux, with whom he once gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society, Chatwin's postcards have the effect of miniature billboards, being ‘the perfect medium for many boasters, combining vividness, cheapness and an economy of effort'; they allow him to stay in touch without the depth and commitment of letters. But another American writer, David Mason, is less sure that these postcards betray the vice of the self-advertiser. Mason met Chatwin just once, at a bus stop in Greece: ‘His terse correspondence with acquaintances like me was surely the product of a gregarious sensibility. Some writers become self-advertisers out of a grating neediness. What I sensed from Bruce was more akin to uncontainable enthusiasm.'