Lands that are sucked dry

Now there is a further selection from the notebooks, interspersed with a set of photographs by Chatwin. Judging by these new extracts, he was already scraping the barrel when The Songlines was published. It seems there wasn’t that much more to write home about: the fragments reproduced here read like out-takes, sentences that didn’t fit or quite make the grade. They cover expeditions to Mauretania—a country, Chatwin writes, that “nobody seems to have heard of”—and to Dahomey and Afghanistan.

“I like lands that are sucked dry,” he writes of these domains of drought and poverty. “They suit me. We complement each other.” There are paeans to camel dung, expressions of longing for hotel rooms and champagne, and the occasional iffy gust of verse:

O Niger, River of Slaves and Malaria
And Mungo Park
You are the most horrible green

Francis Wyndham’s introduction to this collection is a thoughtful and affectionate portrait of the author that wisely makes no elevated claims for the notebooks themselves. The photographs in the book are the high point, eclipsing the prose. Some show a sense of colour that can be compared to the polychrome sheen of Chatwin’s already published writing. (Nothing here quite as striking, though, as the black-and-white picture reproduced on the back cover of The Viceroy of Ouidah, where a Dahomean boy gazes out hauntingly from beneath the portrait of his slave-trading ancestor.)

The most arresting pictures in the present book are those of the celebrated notebooks themselves. What is the significance of these? Is it a sort of secondary fetishisation, the text itself inserted in a cabinet de curiosités, then reduced in its turn to the kind of object Chatwin loved to describe? The notebooks have recently been the subject of additional myth-making of a kind that Chatwin would surely have relished. One of his executors, the writer Redmond O’Hanlon, announced the existence of a secret diary written in code and deposited with the antiquarian bookseller Bertram Rota. However, according to Chatwin’s widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, there is no code: it is merely that the writing is illegible. (The episode is recounted in Nicholas Murray’s Bruce Chatwin, a short but handy biographical essay published earlier this year.)

The birth of a Chatwin cult?

In his introduction to the present book Francis Wyndham says he is concerned about the growth of a Chatwin cult. Chatwin’s early death and the quality of his books have turned him into a legend, he says, a mythic figure. He worries that the inflation of Chatwin’s reputation will produce a reaction.

For signs of the reaction we need look no further than Granta, a magazine that during Chatwin’s life did more than any other to promote his global reputation. In the current issue there is a demolition job by Paul Theroux under the guise of an account of their friendship. Theroux begins with a description of a Royal Geographical Society dinner. Here he portrays Chatwin blithely recounting to Chris Bonington and Lord Hunt—two of the world’s most celebrated mountaineers—a series of climbing exploits that Theroux says Chatwin could not possibly have performed. Chatwin is represented here as a poseur and braggart, a name-dropper who “could get two or three boasts into a single statement”.

Theroux cites two examples: “Werner Herzog and I just hiked two hundred miles in Dahomey”, he has Chatwin saying. Then this: “David Hockney told me that his favourite painter is Liotard, a 17th-century Swiss. He’s brilliant. I often go to the Rijksmuseum just to look at his work.”

Chatwin, we are told, was in a state of permanent crisis over his writing—and busy telling Theroux all about it. This, says Theroux, was Chatwin’s way of indicating how much more fine-tuned and delicate his gift was than Theroux’s. Chatwin also boasted about his command of French. He was a bad listener, Theroux says, and a bore who repeated his own stories, “shrieking each predictable thing and looking eager and hopeful”.

Moleskine night at Heaven

After this catalogue of failings, interspersed with assurances of his regard for Chatwin, Theroux takes on his subject’s personal life.

“We had met his wife,” he writes, “but the very fact of Bruce having a wife was so improbable that no one quite believed it.”

Chatwin was homosexual, says Theroux. His marriage, a mutual friend informs him “with pursed lips”, was a mariage blanc. Before giving us the low-down, Theroux tells us that he does not think it should matter one way or the other. What is disturbing to him, he says, is that Chatwin never discussed his sex life, showing that he lacked the courage to embrace the confessional mode—in contrast, that is, to Theroux himself.

“He never wrote about his sexuality,’ writes Theroux, “and some of us have laid our souls bare.” (My emphasis.)

So it continues. Theroux dismisses accounts of Chatwin by other friends of his, notably an “ungracious” memoir by David Plante, a writer who “refused to see Bruce’s sense of fun”. He singles out for criticism Plante’s account of a visit with Chatwin to “a gay disco called ‘Heaven’”. Shockingly, says Theroux, Plante “never discloses his own motive for going to the gay hangout” and his description of their visit is full of “dark hints and hypocrisy”.

(Why go clubbing at Heaven? I guess it was Moleskine Night. They really should have asked Theroux along.)

Contumely aside, there may well be a revisionist critique to be made of Chatwin’s writing. Such a critique might note some of the limitations to his much lauded style; it would acknowledge that the writing is—in general—diverting rather than affecting, dazzling rather than moving. It would examine the ethical dilemma posed by the use of real people and events in narratives that have an undefined relation to fact. And it might argue that these limitations and avoidances correspond to areas of silence in Chatwin’s own life. Yet Chatwin and the high, smooth, intriguing style he invented—call it the moleskine style—still remains a presence to be reckoned with. Whatever his vices of style, he deserves better than this Greek gift from a soi-disant friend. If that’s the alternative, we should all join the Chatwin cult right away. ★