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Charles Bruce Chatwin FRSL (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English travel writer, novelist and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982), while his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times ranked Chatwin as number 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".

Key Information

Chatwin was born in Sheffield. After completing his secondary education at Marlborough College,[2] he went to work at the age of 18 at Sotheby's in London, where he gained an extensive knowledge of art and eventually ran the auction house's Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. In 1966 he left Sotheby's to read archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, but he abandoned his studies after two years to pursue a career as a writer.

The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin in 1972. He travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and André Malraux. He left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, Argentina, a trip that inspired his first book, In Patagonia (1977). He wrote five other books, including The Songlines (1987), about Australia, which was a bestseller. His work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers such as William Dalrymple, Claudio Magris, Philip Marsden, Luis Sepúlveda, Rich Cohen, and Rory Stewart.

Life

[edit]

Early years

[edit]

Chatwin was born on 13 May 1940 at the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield, England, to Charles Leslie Chatwin, a Birmingham solicitor and Royal Naval Reserve officer during World War II, and Margharita (née Turnell), daughter of a Sheffield knife manufacturer's clerk. She was born in Sheffield and worked for the local Conservative party prior to her marriage.[3][4][5] The Chatwin family were well known in Birmingham, with Charles Chatwin's grandfather, Julius Alfred Chatwin, an eminent architect.[6]

Chatwin's early years were spent moving regularly with his mother while his father was at sea.[7] Prior to his birth, Chatwin's parents had lived at Barnt Green, Worcestershire, but Margharita moved to her parents' house in Dronfield, near Sheffield, shortly before giving birth.[8] Mother and son remained there for a few weeks.[9] Worried about The Blitz, Margharita sought a safer place to stay.[10] She took her son with her as they travelled to stay with various relatives during the war. They would remain in one place until Margharita decided to move, either because of concern for their safety, or because of friction among family members.[11] Later in life Chatwin recalled of the war, "Home, if we had one, was a solid black suitcase called the Rev-Robe, in which there was a corner for my clothes and my Mickey Mouse gas mask."[12]

One of their stays during the war was at the home of his paternal grandparents, who had a curiosity cabinet that fascinated him. Among the items it contained was a "piece of brontosaurus" (actually a mylodon, a giant sloth), which had been sent to Chatwin's grandmother by her cousin Charles Milward. Travelling in Patagonia, Milward had discovered the remains of a giant sloth, which he later sold to the British Museum. He sent his cousin a piece of the animal's skin, and members of the family mistakenly referred to it as a "piece of brontosaurus". The skin was later lost, but it inspired Chatwin decades later to visit and write about Patagonia.[13]

After the war, Chatwin lived with his parents and younger brother Hugh (1944 – 2012)[14][15][16] in West Heath in Birmingham, where his father had a law practice.[17] At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school at Old Hall School in Shropshire, and then Marlborough College, in Wiltshire.[18] An unexceptional student, Chatwin garnered attention from his performances in school plays.[19] While at Marlborough, Chatwin attained A-levels in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History.[20]

Chatwin had hoped to read Classics at Merton College, Oxford, but the end of National Service in the United Kingdom meant there was more competition for university places. He was forced to consider other options. His parents discouraged the ideas he offered: an acting career or work in the Colonial Service in Kenya. Instead, Chatwin's father asked one of his clients for a letter of introduction to the auction house Sotheby's. An interview was arranged, and Chatwin secured a job there.[21]

Art and archaeology

[edit]

In 1958, Chatwin moved to London to begin work as a porter in the Works of Art department at Sotheby's.[22] Chatwin was ill-suited for this job, which included dusting objects that had been kept in storage.[23] Sotheby's moved him to a junior cataloguer position, working in both the Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments.[24] This position enabled him to develop his eye for art, and he quickly became known for his ability to discern forgeries.[25][26] His work as a cataloguer also taught him to describe objects in a concise manner and required him to research these objects.[27] Chatwin advanced to become Sotheby's expert on Antiquities and Impressionist art and would later run both departments.[28] Many of Chatwin's colleagues thought he would eventually become chairman of the auction house.[29]

During this period Chatwin travelled extensively for his job and also for adventure.[30] Travel offered him a relief from the British class system, which he found stifling.[31] An admirer of Robert Byron and his book, The Road to Oxiana, he travelled twice to Afghanistan.[32] He also used these trips to visit markets and shops, where he would buy antiques that he would resell at a profit in order to supplement his income from Sotheby's.[33] He became friends with artists, art collectors and dealers.[34][35] One friend, Howard Hodgkin, painted Chatwin in The Japanese Screen (1962). Chatwin said he was the "acid green smear on the left."[36]

Chatwin was ambivalent about his sexual orientation and had affairs with both men and women during this period of his life.[37] One of his girlfriends, Elizabeth Chanler, an American and a descendant of John Jacob Astor, was a secretary at Sotheby's.[38] Chanler had earned a degree in history from Radcliffe College and worked at Sotheby's New York offices for two years before transferring to their London office in 1961.[39] Her love of travel and independent nature appealed to Chatwin.[40]

In the mid-1960s Chatwin grew unhappy at Sotheby's. There were various reasons for his disenchantment. Both women and men found Chatwin attractive, and Peter Wilson, then chairman of Sotheby's, used this appeal to the auction house's advantage when using Chatwin to try to persuade wealthy individuals to sell their art collections. Chatwin became increasingly uncomfortable with the situation.[41] Later in life Chatwin also spoke of having become "burnt out" and said, "In the end I felt I might just as well be working for a rather superior funeral parlour. One's whole life seemed to be spent valuing for probate the apartment of somebody recently dead."[42]

In late 1964 he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. He consulted eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper, who diagnosed a latent squint and recommended that Chatwin take a six-month break from his work at Sotheby's. Trevor-Roper had been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, and suggested Chatwin visit East Africa. In February 1965, Chatwin left for Sudan.[43] It was on this trip that Chatwin first encountered a nomadic tribe; their way of life intrigued him. "My nomadic guide," he wrote, "carried a sword, a purse and a pot of scented goat's grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate...."[44] Chatwin would remain fascinated by nomads for the rest of his life.[45]

Chatwin returned to Sotheby's, and to the surprise of his friends, proposed marriage to Elizabeth Chanler.[46] They married on 21 August 1965.[47] Chatwin was bisexual throughout their married life, a circumstance Elizabeth knew and accepted.[40] Chatwin had hoped he would "grow out of" his homosexual behaviour and have a successful marriage like his parents.[48] During their marriage, Chatwin had many affairs, mostly with men. Some who were aware of Chatwin's affairs with men assumed the Chatwins had a chaste marriage, but according to Nicholas Shakespeare, the author's biographer, this was not true.[49] Both Chatwin and his wife had hoped to have children, but they remained childless.[50]

In April 1966, at the age of 26, Chatwin was promoted to a director of Sotheby's, a position to which he had aspired.[51] To his disappointment, he was made a junior director and lacked voting rights on the board.[52] This disappointment, along with boredom and increasing discomfort over potentially illegal side deals taking place at Sotheby's, including the sale of objects from the Pitt-Rivers museum collection, led Chatwin to resign from his Sotheby's post in June 1966.[40]

Chatwin enrolled in October 1966 at the University of Edinburgh to study Archaeology.[51] He had regretted not attending Oxford and had been contemplating going to university for a few years. A visit in December 1965 to the Hermitage in Leningrad sparked his interest in the field of archaeology.[53] Despite winning the Wardrop Prize for the best first year's work,[54] he found the rigour of academic archaeology tiresome, and he left after two years without taking a degree.[55]

The Nomadic Alternative

[edit]

Following his departure from Edinburgh, Chatwin decided to pursue a career as a writer, successfully pitching a book proposal on nomads to Tom Maschler, publisher at Jonathan Cape. Chatwin tentatively titled the book The Nomadic Alternative and sought to answer the question "Why do men wander rather than stand still?"[56] Chatwin delivered the manuscript in 1972, and Maschler declined to publish it, calling it a "chore to read".[57][58]

Between 1969 and 1972, as he was working on The Nomadic Alternative, Chatwin travelled extensively and pursued other endeavours in an attempt to establish a creative career. He co-curated an exhibit on Nomadic Art of the Asian Steppes, which opened at Asia House Gallery in New York City in 1970.[59] He considered publishing an account of his 1969 trip to Afghanistan with Peter Levi.[60] Levi published his own book about it, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan (1972).[61] Chatwin contributed two articles on nomads to Vogue and another article to History Today.[62]

In the early 1970s Chatwin had an affair with James Ivory, a film director. Ivory gives an account of this in his memoir, Solid Ivory.[63] He pitched stories to him for possible films, which Ivory did not take seriously.[64] In 1972 Chatwin tried his hand at film-making and travelled to Niger to make a documentary about nomads.[65] The film was lost while Chatwin was trying to sell it to European television companies.[66]

Chatwin also took photographs of his journeys and attempted to sell photographs from a trip to Mauritania to The Sunday Times Magazine.[67] While The Times did not accept those photographs for publication, it did offer Chatwin a job.[62]

The Sunday Times Magazine and In Patagonia

[edit]
Further information: In Patagonia

In 1972, The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin as an adviser on art and architecture.[68] Initially his role was to suggest story ideas and put together features such as "One Million Years of Art", which ran in several issues during the summer of 1973.[69] His editor, Francis Wyndham, encouraged him to write, which allowed him to develop his narrative skills.[70] Chatwin travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as André Malraux, Maria Reiche, and Madeleine Vionnet.[62][71]

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map she had painted of the area of South America called Patagonia.[72] "I've always wanted to go there," Chatwin told her. "So have I," she replied, "Go there for me."[73]

Two years later, in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia, Argentina, a month later.[74] He would later claim that he sent a telegram to Wyndham merely stating: "Have gone to Patagonia." Actually, he sent a letter: "I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up."[75] This marked the end of Chatwin's role as a regular writer for The Sunday Times Magazine, although in subsequent years he contributed occasional pieces, including a profile of Indira Gandhi.[76]

Chatwin spent six months in Patagonia, travelling around gathering stories of people who came from elsewhere and settled there. This trip resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977). He used his quest for his own "piece of brontosaurus" (the one from his grandparents' cabinet had been thrown away years earlier) to frame the story of his trip. Chatwin described In Patagonia as "the narrative of an actual journey and a symbolic one.... It is supposed to fall into the category or be a spoof of Wonder Voyage: the narrator goes to a far country in search of a strange animal: on his way he lands in strange situations, people or other books tell him strange stories which add up to form a message."[77]

In Patagonia contains fifteen black and white photographs by Chatwin. According to Susannah Clapp, who edited the book, "Rebecca West amused Chatwin by telling him that these were so good they rendered superfluous the entire text of the book."[78]

This work established Chatwin's reputation as a travel writer. One of his biographers, Nicholas Murray, called In Patagonia "one of the most strikingly original post-war English travel books"[79] and said that it revitalised the genre of travel writing.[80] However, residents in the region contradicted the account of events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first time in his career, but not the last, that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were later alleged to be fiction.[81]

For In Patagonia Chatwin received the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[82] Graham Greene, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Paul Theroux praised the book.[83] As a result of the success of In Patagonia, Chatwin's circle of friends expanded to include people like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Susan Sontag, and Jasper Johns.[84]

Ouidah and the Black Hill

[edit]
Further information: The Viceroy of Ouidah
Further information: On the Black Hill

Upon his return from Patagonia, Chatwin discovered a change in leadership at The Sunday Times Magazine and his retainer was discontinued.[85] Chatwin intended his next project to be a biography of Francisco Félix de Sousa, a 19th-century slave trader born in Brazil, who became the Viceroy of Ouidah in Dahomey. Chatwin had first heard of de Sousa during a visit to Dahomey in 1972.[86] He returned to the country, by then renamed the People's Republic of Benin, in December 1976 to conduct research.[87] In January 1977, during the 1977 Benin coup d'état attempt, Chatwin was accused of being a mercenary and detained for three days.[88] Chatwin later wrote about this experience in "A Coup – A Story", which was published in Granta and included in What Am I Doing Here? (1989).[89]

Following his arrest and release, Chatwin left Benin and went to Brazil to continue his research on de Sousa.[90] Frustrated by the lack of documented information on de Sousa, Chatwin chose instead to write a fictionalised biography of him, The Viceroy of Ouidah.[91] This book was published in 1980, and Werner Herzog's film Cobra Verde (1987) is based on it.[92][93]

The southern part of the Grwyne Fechan valley in the Black Mountains, Welsh Borders

Although The Viceroy of Ouidah received good reviews, it did not sell well. Nicholas Shakespeare said that the dismal sales caused Chatwin to pursue a completely different subject for his next book.[94] In response to his growing reputation as a travel writer, Chatwin said he "decided to write something about people who never went out."[95] His next book, On the Black Hill (1982), is a novel of twin brothers who live all of their lives in a farmhouse on the Welsh borders.[96] For this book Chatwin won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, even though he considered his previous book, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a novel.[97] It was made into a film in 1987.[93]

In the late 1970s Chatwin spent an increasing amount of time in New York City. He continued to have affairs with men, but most of these affairs were short-lived. In 1977 he began his first serious affair with Donald Richards, an Australian stockbroker.[98] Richards introduced him to the gay nightclub scene in New York.[99] During this period Chatwin became acquainted with Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed him. Chatwin is one of the few men Mapplethorpe photographed fully clothed.[100] Chatwin later contributed the introduction to a book of Mapplethorpe's photographs, Lady, Lisa Lyon (1983).[101]

Although Elizabeth Chatwin had accepted her husband's affairs, their relationship deteriorated in the late 1970s, and in 1980 she asked for a separation.[102] By 1982 Chatwin's affair with Richards had ended and he began another serious affair with Jasper Conran.[103]

The Songlines

[edit]
Further information: The Songlines

In 1983 Chatwin returned to the topic of nomads and decided to focus on Aboriginal Australians.[104] He was influenced by the work of Ted Strehlow, the author of Songs of Central Australia.[105] Strehlow had collected and recorded Aboriginal songs, but he became a controversial figure when, shortly before his death in 1978, he sold photographs of secret Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to a magazine.[106]

Chatwin went to Australia to learn more about Aboriginal culture, specifically the songlines or dreaming tracks.[107] Each songline is a personal story and functions as a creation tale and a map, and each Aboriginal Australian has their own songline.[108] Chatwin thought the songlines could be used as a metaphor to support his ideas about humans' need to wander, which he believed was genetic. However, he struggled fully to understand and describe the songlines and their place in Aboriginal culture.[109] This was due to Chatwin's approach to learning about the songlines. He spent several weeks in 1983 and 1984 in Australia, during which he primarily relied on non-Aboriginal people for information, as he was limited by his inability to speak the Aboriginal languages. He interviewed people involved in the Land Rights movement, and he alienated many of them because he was oblivious to the politics and also because he was an admirer of Strehlow's work.[110]

While in Australia, Chatwin, who had been experiencing some health problems, first read about AIDS, then known as the gay plague. It frightened him and compelled him to reconcile with his wife.[111] The fear of AIDS also drove him to finish the book that became The Songlines (1987). His friend the novelist Salman Rushdie said, "That book was an obsession too great for him.... His illness did him a favour, got him free of it. Otherwise, he would have gone on writing it for ten years."[112]

The Songlines features a narrator named Bruce whose biography is almost identical to Chatwin's.[113] The narrator spends time in Australia trying to learn about Aboriginal culture, specifically the songlines. As the book goes on, it becomes a reflection on what Chatwin stated was "for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness."[114] Chatwin also hinted at his preoccupation over his own mortality in the text: "I had a presentiment that the 'travelling' phase of my life might be passing.... I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations, and encounters that amused me and obsessed me."[114] Following this statement in The Songlines Chatwin included extensive excerpts from his moleskine notebooks.[115]

Chatwin published The Songlines in 1987, and it became a bestseller in the United Kingdom and in the United States.[116] The book was nominated for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, but Chatwin requested that it be withdrawn from consideration, saying the work was fictional.[116] After its publication, Chatwin befriended the composer Kevin Volans, who was inspired to base a theatre score on the book. The project evolved into an opera, The Man with Footsoles of Wind (1993).[117]

Illness and final works

[edit]

While at work on The Songlines between 1983 and 1986,[118] Chatwin frequently came down with colds.[119] He also developed skin lesions that may have been symptoms of Kaposi's sarcoma.[120] After finishing The Songlines in August 1986, he went to Switzerland, where he collapsed in the street.[121] At a clinic there, he was diagnosed as HIV-positive.[122] Chatwin provided different reasons to his doctors as to how he might have contracted HIV, including from a gang rape in Dahomey or possibly from Sam Wagstaff, the patron and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe.[123]

Chatwin's case was unusual as he had a fungal infection, Talaromyces marneffei, which at the time had rarely been seen and only in South Asia. It is now known as an AIDS-defining illness, but in 1986 little was known about HIV and AIDS. Doctors were not certain if all cases of HIV developed into AIDS. The rare fungus gave Chatwin hope that he might be different and served as the basis of what he told most people about his illness. He gave various reasons for how he became infected with the fungus – ranging from eating a thousand-year-old egg to exploring a bat cave in Indonesia.[124] He never publicly disclosed that he was HIV-positive because of the stigma. He wanted to protect his parents, who were unaware of his homosexual affairs.[125]

Although Chatwin never spoke or wrote publicly about his disease, in one instance he did write about the AIDS epidemic in 1988 in a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books,

"The word 'Aids' is one of the cruellest and silliest neologisms of our time. 'Aid' means help, succour, comfort—yet with a hissing sibilant tacked onto the end it becomes a nightmare.... HIV (Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus) is a perfectly easy name to live with. 'Aids' causes panic and despair and has probably done something to facilitate the spread of the disease."[126]

During his illness, Chatwin continued to write. Elizabeth encouraged him to use a letter he had written to her from Prague in 1967 as an inspiration for a new story.[127] During this trip, he had met Konrad Just, an art collector.[128] This meeting and the letter to Elizabeth served as the basis for Chatwin's next work. Utz (1988) was a novel about the obsession that leads people to collect.[129] Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain.[130] Utz was well-received and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.[131]

Chatwin also edited a collection of his journalism, which was published as What Am I Doing Here (1989).[132] At the time of his death in 1989, he was working on a number of new ideas for novels, including a transcontinental epic provisionally titled Lydia Livingstone.[133]

Chatwin died at a hospital in Nice on 18 January 1989.[134] A memorial service was held at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia in West London on 14 February 1989; Salman Rushdie, a close friend of Chatwin's, attended the service.[135] Paul Theroux, who also attended the service, later commented on it and Chatwin in a piece for Granta.[136] The novelist Martin Amis described the memorial service in the essay "Salman Rushdie", included in his anthology Visiting Mrs Nabokov.[137]

In 1985, suffering from mysterious symptoms which at the time he did not know was HIV, Chatwin interrupted his writing to make a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. Until that point he had never struck friends as being religious, but the visit had a profound effect, and he eventually decided to become an Orthodox Christian. At the memorial service Bishop Kallistos Ware told the congregation: 'Bruce was always a traveller and he died before all his journeys could be completed… his journey into Orthodoxy was one of his unfinished voyages.'[138]

Chatwin's ashes were scattered near a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese. This was close to the home of one of his mentors, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.[1] Chatwin had spent several months in 1985 near there, working on The Songlines.[139]

Chatwin's papers, including 85 moleskine notebooks, were given to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.[140] Two collections of his photographs and excerpts from the moleskine notebooks were published as Photographs and Notebooks (US title: Far Journeys) in 1993 and Winding Paths in 1999.[141][142]

News of Chatwin's AIDS diagnosis first surfaced in September 1988, although the obituaries at the time of his death had referred to Chatwin's statements about a rare fungal infection. After his death, some members of the gay community criticised Chatwin for lack of courage to reveal the true nature of his illness, thinking he would have raised public awareness of AIDS, as he was one of the first high-profile individuals in Britain known to have contracted HIV.[143][144]

Writing style

[edit]

John Updike described Chatwin's writing as "a clipped, lapidary prose that compresses worlds into pages",[145] while one of Chatwin's editors, Susannah Clapp, wrote, "Although his syntax was pared down, his words were not – or at least not only – plain.... His prose is both spare and flamboyant."[146] Chatwin's writing was shaped by his work as a cataloguer at Sotheby's, which provided him with years of practice in writing concise, yet vivid descriptions of objects with the intention of enticing buyers.[27] In addition, his writing was influenced by his interest in nomads. One aspect that interested him was the few possessions they had. Their Spartan way of life appealed to his ascetic sense, and he sought to emulate it in his life and his writing, striving to strip needless objects from his life and needless words from his prose.[147]

Chatwin experimented with format in his writing. With In Patagonia, Clapp said Chatwin described the book's structure of 97 vignettes as "Cubist". "[I]n other words," she said, "lots of small pictures tilting away and toward each other to create this strange original portrait of Patagonia."[148] The Songlines was another attempt by Chatwin to experiment with format.[149] It begins as a novel narrated by a man named Bruce, but about two-thirds of the way through it becomes a commonplace book filled with quotations, anecdotes, and summaries of others' research, in an attempt to explore restlessness.[150] Some of Chatwin's critics did not think he succeeded in The Songlines with this approach, but others applauded his effort at an unconventional structure.[151]

Several 19th and 20th-century writers influenced Chatwin's work. He admitted to imitating the work of Robert Byron when he first began making notes of his travels.[152] While in Patagonia he read In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, whom he admired for his spare prose.[153] While writing In Patagonia, Chatwin strove to approach his writing as a "literary Cartier-Bresson".[154] Chatwin's biographer described the resulting prose as "quick snapshots of ordinary people".[155] Along with Hemingway and Cartier-Bresson, Osip Mandelstam's work strongly influenced Chatwin during the writing of In Patagonia. An admirer of Noël Coward, Chatwin found the breakfast scene in Private Lives helpful in learning to write dialogue.[156] Once Chatwin began work on The Viceroy of Ouidah, he began studying the work of 19th-century French authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, who would continue to influence him for the rest of his life.[157]

Themes

[edit]

Chatwin explored several different themes in his work: human restlessness and wandering; borders and exile; and art and objects.[114][158][159]

He considered human restlessness to be the focus of his writing. He ultimately aspired to explore the subject in order to answer what he saw as a fundamental question of human existence.[160][114] He thought humans were meant to be a migratory species, and once they settled in one place, their natural urges "found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new."[161] In his first attempt at writing a book, The Nomadic Alternative, Chatwin had tried to compose an academic exposition on nomadic culture, which he believed was unexamined and unappreciated.[161][160] With this, Chatwin had hoped to discover: "Why do men wander rather than sit still?"[162] In his book proposal he admitted that the interest in the subject was personal: "Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two?"[162]

Although Chatwin did not succeed with The Nomadic Alternative, he returned to the topic of restlessness and wandering in subsequent books. Writer Jonathan Chatwin (no relation) stated that Chatwin's works can be grouped into two categories: "restlessness defined" and "restlessness explained." Most of his work focuses on describing restlessness, such as in the case of one twin in On the Black Hill who longs to leave home.[163] Another example is the protagonist of Utz, who feels restless to escape to Vichy each year, but always returns to Prague.[164] Chatwin attempted to explain restlessness in The Songlines, which focused on the Aboriginal Australians' walkabout. For this, he returned to his research from The Nomadic Alternative.[165][166]

Borders are another Chatwin theme. According to Elizabeth Chatwin, he "was interested in borders, where things were always changing, not one thing or another."[167] Patagonia, the subject of his first published book, is an area that is in both Argentina and Chile.[168] The Viceroy of Ouidah is a Brazilian who trades slaves in Dahomey.[169] On the Black Hills takes place on the borders of Wales and England.[97] In The Songlines the characters the protagonist mostly interacts with are people who provide a bridge between the Aboriginal and white Australian worlds.[170] The main character in Utz travels back and forth across the Iron Curtain.[164]

"The theme of exile, of people living at the margins.... is treated in a literal and metaphorical sense throughout Chatwin's work," stated Nicholas Murray. He identified several examples. There were people who were actual exiles, like some of those profiled in In Patagonia, and the Viceroy of Ouidah, unable to return to Brazil. Murray also cited the main characters in On the Black Hill: "Although not strictly exiles.... [they] were exiles from the major events of their time and its dominant values." Similarly, Murray wrote, Utz is "trapped in a society whose values are not his own but which he cannot bring himself to leave."[158]

Chatwin returned to the subject of art and objects during his career. In his early writing for the Sunday Times Magazine, he wrote about art and artists, and many of these articles were included in What Am I Doing Here.[171] The main focus of Utz is on the impact the possession of art (in this case porcelain figures) has on a collector.[172] Utz's unwillingness to give up his porcelain collection kept him in Czechoslovakia even though he had the opportunity to live in the West.[129] Chatwin constantly struggled with the conflicting desires to own beautiful items and to live in a space free of unnecessary objects.[173] His distaste for the art world resulted from his days at Sotheby's; some of his final writing focused on this.[174] The topic appears in the final section of What Am I Doing Here, "Tales from the Art World", which consists of four short stories. At the end of What Am I Doing Here, Chatwin shares an anecdote of advice he received from Noël Coward: "Never let anything artistic stand in your way." Chatwin stated, "I've always acted on that advice."[175]

Influence

[edit]

With the publication of In Patagonia, Chatwin invigorated the genre of travel writing; according to his biographer, Nicholas Murray, he "showed that an inventive writer could breathe new life into an old genre."[176] The combination of his clear, yet vivid prose and an international perspective at a time when many English writers were more focused on home instead of abroad helped to set him apart.[177][178] Aside from his writing, Chatwin was also good looking, and his image as a dashing traveller added to his appeal and helped make him a celebrity.[179] In the eyes of younger writers such as Rory Stewart, Chatwin "made [travel writing] cool."[180] In The New York Times, Andrew Harvey wrote,

"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."[181]

Chatwin's books also inspired some readers to visit Patagonia and Australia.[182] As a result, Patagonia experienced an increase in tourism,[183] and it became a common sight for tourists to appear in the region, carrying a copy of In Patagonia.[184] The Songlines also inspired readers to travel to Australia and seek out the people on whom Chatwin had based his characters, much to their consternation, as he had failed to disclose such intentions to them.[185]

Beyond travel, Chatwin influenced other writers, such as Claudio Magris, Luis Sepúlveda, Philip Marsden, and William Dalrymple.[186] Nicholas Shakespeare stated that some of Chatwin's impact came from the difficulty of categorising his work, which helped to "set free other writers...[from] conventional boundaries."[187] Although he was often called a travel writer, he did not identify himself as one, or as a novelist. ("I don't quite know the meaning of the word novel," he said).[188] He preferred to call his writing stories or searches.[188][189] He was interested in asking big questions about human existence, sharing unusual tales, and making connections between ideas from various sources. His friend and fellow writer Robyn Davidson said, "He posed questions we all want answered and perhaps gave the illusion they were answerable."[186]

Posthumous influence

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According to his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin's work developed a dedicated following in the years immediately after his death.[190] By 1998 a million copies of his books had been sold.[191] However, his reputation diminished following revelations about his personal life and questions about the accuracy of his work.

The accuracy problem had arisen before his death, and Chatwin had admitted to "counting up the lies" in In Patagonia, though he stated there were not many.[192] While researching Chatwin's life, Nicholas Shakespeare stated he found "few cases of mere invention" in In Patagonia.[193] Mostly, these tended to be instances of embellishment, such as when Chatwin wrote of a nurse who loved the work of Osip Mandelstam – one of his favorite authors – when in fact she was a fan of Agatha Christie.[193] When Michael Ignatieff asked Chatwin his opinion of what divided fact from fiction, he replied, "I don't think there is [a division]."[194]

Some individuals profiled in In Patagonia were unhappy with Chatwin's portrayals of them. They included a man whom Chatwin insinuated was homosexual and a woman who thought her father was unjustly accused of killing Indians.[195] However, Chatwin's biographer found one farmer who was featured in the book who thought Chatwin's depictions of himself and other members of his community were truthful. He stated, "No one likes looking at their own passport photograph, but I found it accurate. It's not flattering, but it's the truth."[155]

Chatwin's bestseller, The Songlines, has been the focus of much criticism. Some describe his viewpoint as "colonialist", citing his lack of interviews with Aboriginals and reliance instead on white Australians for information about Aboriginal culture.[196] Other criticism comes from anthropologists and other researchers who spent years studying Aboriginal culture and dismiss Chatwin's work because he visited Australia briefly.[170] Yet others, such as writer Thomas Keneally, believe The Songlines should be widely read in Australia, where many people had not previously heard of the songlines.[197]

The questions about the veracity of Chatwin's writing are compounded by the revelation of his sexual orientation and the true cause of his death.[198] Once it became known that Chatwin had been bisexual and had died of an AIDS-related illness, some critics viewed him as a liar and dismissed his work.[199] Nicholas Shakespeare said, "His denial [of his AIDS diagnosis] bred a sense that if he lied about his life, he must have lied about his work. Some readers have taken this as a cue to pass judgement on his books – or else not to bother with them."[200] In 2010 The Guardian's review of Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin opened with the question, "Does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days?"[201] However, Rory Stewart has stated, "His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose are less hypnotizing [than they once were]. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance".[180] In 2008 The Times rated Chatwin No. 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".[202]

Legacy

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Chatwin's name is used to sell Moleskine notebooks.[179] Chatwin wrote in The Songlines of little black oilskin-covered notebooks that he bought in Paris and called "moleskines".[203] The quotes and anecdotes he had compiled in them serve as a major section of The Songlines, where Chatwin mourned the closure of the last producer of such books.[203] In 1995, Marta Sebregondi read The Songlines and proposed to her employer, the Italian design and publishing firm Modo & Modo, that they produce moleskine notebooks.[204] In 1997, the company began to sell them and use Chatwin's name to promote them.[205] Modo & Modo was sold in 2006, and the company became known as Moleskine SpA.[204]

In 2014 the clothing label Burberry produced a collection inspired by Chatwin's books.[206] The following year Burberry released a limited edition of Chatwin's books with specially designed covers.[207]

In September 2019 the documentary film Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, by Werner Herzog, was broadcast by the BBC.[208]

Works

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Posthumously published

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References

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Documentaries

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Bruce Chatwin

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Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English author celebrated for his distinctive travel writing and fiction that fused personal wanderings with anthropological insights and a penchant for mythic storytelling. Early in his career, Chatwin worked as an expert in Impressionist art at Sotheby's auction house, rising quickly before abandoning that path in 1966 to pursue journalism and literature full-time. His breakthrough came with In Patagonia (1977), a nonlinear account of travels in southern Argentina that won the Hawthornden Prize and drew acclaim for revitalizing the travel genre through its blend of history, anecdote, and invention. Subsequent works like On the Black Hill (1982), a novel about elderly twin brothers in rural Wales, and The Songlines (1987), an exploration of Australian Aboriginal songlines and nomadism, further established his reputation, though critics noted his frequent embellishment of facts, which blurred lines between reportage and fabrication. Chatwin's nomadic lifestyle, bisexuality, and restless curiosity defined his persona, but his life ended prematurely at age 48 from an AIDS-related illness, a fact he initially obscured, leading posthumous scrutiny of his veracity and personal deceptions.

Early Life

Childhood and Family Background

Charles Bruce Chatwin was born on 13 May 1940 in , , to Charles Leslie Chatwin, a solicitor from Birmingham, and Mary Margharita Turnell, the daughter of a Sheffield knife manufacturer's clerk who had worked for the local Conservative Party. His father, aged approximately 31 at the time, maintained a professional law practice in Birmingham, while the family resided in a middle-class household reflective of their professional status. Chatwin's early childhood coincided with , during which his father served in the Royal Navy, necessitating frequent relocations for Chatwin and his mother, who stayed with friends and relatives across . Chatwin later described himself as beginning life as a "," passed "from aunt to aunt like a parcel" amid these disruptions, an experience shaped by his mother's nervous disposition and the exigencies of wartime evacuation practices. A younger brother, Hugh, was born in 1944, adding to the family dynamic during this unsettled period. After the war, the family settled in West Heath, Birmingham (then in ), where Chatwin's father resumed his legal practice, providing a stable suburban environment. A notable influence from his extended family was a piece of preserved skin—remnant of an extinct giant sloth—displayed in his maternal grandmother's , sent to her by her cousin, the explorer Milward, from ; this artifact captivated the young Chatwin, igniting an enduring fascination with remote travels and ancient mysteries.

Education and Formative Influences

Chatwin attended , a boarding school in , , from 1953 to 1958, having passed his that summer. There, he developed an early fascination with history and artifacts, though his academic performance was insufficient to secure a to or . Upon leaving school at age 18 in 1958, he opted against university, instead joining auction house as a porter, where his innate for identifying antiques—honed from childhood judgments alongside his father—quickly advanced him. His early years were marked by frequent relocations during , as his father served in the Royal Navy, leaving Chatwin and his mother to move between family homes and temporary lodgings, fostering a sense of restlessness and adaptability. From boyhood, he collected eclectic objects such as toggles and ancient spears, reflecting an innate curiosity about distant cultures and that later underpinned his nomadic pursuits. In 1966, at age 26 and after rising to director at , Chatwin briefly enrolled in prehistoric archaeology at the to formalize his growing interests in ancient civilizations and nomadism, though he abandoned the program without a degree after a short period, prioritizing travel and writing. This interlude crystallized his aversion to sedentary academia, channeling instead toward empirical exploration of artifacts and landscapes, influences evident in his later works on human origins and wandering.

Professional Beginnings

Career at

Chatwin joined auction house in in October 1958, shortly after leaving at the age of 18, beginning his tenure as a porter responsible for tagging and numbering property under supervisor Marcus Linell for the first two years. He subsequently transferred to the Furniture Department before becoming the firm's first dedicated cataloguer of Impressionist art under chairman Peter Wilson, who was expanding from four to fifteen departments during this period. By 1962, Chatwin had advanced to cataloguer in the Impressionist and Department, where he contributed to the sale of the William Somerset Maugham collection on April 10 of that year. His rapid ascent was marked by a sharp eye for authentication, enabling him to identify forgeries such as two purported paintings in collaboration with colleague Michel Strauss and a fake Egyptian granite head. Chatwin also published an article titled "The Bust of " in annual The Ivory Hammer in 1966, reflecting his growing expertise in . By the time of his departure, he had been promoted to director—one of the youngest in the company's —overseeing both the Impressionist art and departments, with Wilson leveraging his charm in client interactions. During his eight years at the firm, Chatwin met Elizabeth Chanler, a secretary there whom he later married. Chatwin left in 1966 at age 26 following a of from prolonged close work, recommended by ophthalmologist Patrick Trevor-Roper to take an extended break from such tasks, which prompted his pivot away from the auction world. This abrupt exit ended a promising trajectory in art dealing, where his talents had been instrumental in departmental growth and high-profile valuations.

Shift to Archaeology and Anthropology

In 1966, at the age of 26, Chatwin resigned from his position as a director at , where he had overseen departments in Impressionist art and antiquities, to enroll in the program at the . This decision followed a period of dissatisfaction with the art auction world and coincided with health concerns, including an illness that prompted medical advice to travel, leading him first to before committing to formal studies. The archaeology course at Edinburgh was a rigorous four-year honors program demanding intensive fieldwork and academic rigor, with students attending 10 to 15 lectures weekly, often extending until evening, alongside required reading and examinations. Chatwin's enrollment reflected his growing preoccupation with prehistoric human migration, nomadic societies, and material remnants of ancient cultures, themes that would later permeate his writing. Although the curriculum emphasized archaeology, his pursuits incorporated anthropological elements, such as the study of tribal artifacts and ethnographic parallels to early human dispersal. Chatwin abandoned the program after approximately two years without completing a degree, citing the constraints of academic structure as incompatible with his restless temperament and emerging vocation as a . This interlude nonetheless equipped him with foundational knowledge of excavation techniques, , and , informing subsequent travels and literary explorations of human origins and displacement.

Journalism and Literary Career

Work at The Sunday Times Magazine

In 1972, The Sunday Times Magazine recruited Bruce Chatwin as an adviser on art and architecture, a role that leveraged his prior expertise from . He commenced employment on 1 November 1972. His initial duties encompassed proposing story concepts and curating illustrated features, capitalizing on the magazine's era of robust funding and prominent . Under the guidance of literary editor Francis Wyndham, Chatwin transitioned from advisory to authorial contributions, crafting incisive profiles and reports marked by personal observation and ingenuity. These pieces often stemmed from global assignments, enabling extensive travel that informed his emerging literary voice. Notable among them were interviews with high-profile subjects, including a month shadowing Indian Prime Minister on her election campaign alongside photographer , and a 1974 encounter with the 73-year-old at his home in Verrières-les-Buissons. Additional profiles covered figures like ethologist and Nazi hunter , alongside explorations of niche topics such as obscure art collectors. Chatwin's tenure, spanning roughly four years, cultivated his narrative style through deadline-driven , though tensions arose over editorial cuts to his anecdotal approach, as in his Gandhi profile. In 1976, he departed the publication to pursue independent writing, dispatching a terse telegram—"Gone to "—that presaged his seminal travelogue . This exit marked the culmination of his journalistic phase, with many Sunday Times dispatches later republished in collections like What Am I Doing Here.

In Patagonia and Rise to Prominence

In 1974, after years as a at The Sunday Times Magazine, Bruce Chatwin resigned his position and embarked on an extended journey to , departing by night bus in December of that year at age 34. Motivated by a childhood fascination with a piece of preserved skin inherited from his grandmother—purportedly from a Patagonian —and a broader quest to uncover the region's fragmented histories and tales of , Chatwin spent four months traversing the area, often staying with locals and collecting anecdotes that defied conventional structure. This expedition, provisionally titled A Piece of , marked his deliberate pivot from to literary authorship, yielding a delivered to his agent in 1976. Published in October 1977 by with an initial print run of 4,000 copies, In Patagonia comprised 97 terse, untitled vignettes that wove personal observation, historical digressions, and mythic elements into a mosaic rather than a linear travelogue. The book eschewed self-indulgent introspection in favor of puckish wit and abrupt shifts, drawing comparisons to literary precedents like and . Early sales reached 6,000 copies in , with U.S. rights acquired for $5,000 by Summit Press; it received immediate acclaim, including praise from , who deemed it among his favorite travel books. The work's reception propelled Chatwin to literary prominence, earning the in 1978 for imaginative literature and the Award in 1979 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Critics hailed it for revitalizing the travel genre by prioritizing pattern and juxtaposition over plot or ego, influencing subsequent writers and even spurring to sites like Gaiman . Chatwin later acknowledged embedding "lies" or embellishments—such as fabricated details like a Mies van der Rohe chair—to enhance rhythm, though he maintained most accounts were rooted in verified stories reordered for effect, distinguishing the book as a hybrid of fact and artifice rather than strict . This debut established Chatwin as a singular voice in English letters, launching a career of nomadic inquiry and securing his reputation as a modern master of evocative, elliptical prose.

Subsequent Travels and Books

Chatwin's second book, , appeared in 1980 from , presenting a stark on the Brazilian adventurer Manuel da Silva, who arrived in the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern ) in 1812 to engage in the slave trade and rose to become its viceroy before his fortunes collapsed amid local intrigues and personal excesses. The narrative, grounded in historical records of da Silva's life, stemmed from Chatwin's own visits to Dahomey starting in 1972, when he first encountered the figure's legend, and subsequent research trips to , during which he observed a military coup in 1967 or later unrest in the era. These journeys exposed Chatwin to the region's voodoo practices and coastal forts, elements woven into the book's atmospheric depiction of power's transience and cultural collision. Shifting from exotic locales to insular domesticity, On the Black Hill followed in 1982 as Chatwin's debut full-length novel, tracing the intertwined lives of identical twins Benjamin and Lewis Jones on a remote straddling the Welsh-English border from 1900 to the late 1970s. Spanning world wars, technological shifts, and personal eccentricities, the story draws on the stark landscape—observed during Chatwin's time living nearby in the —and evokes Hardy-esque rural fatalism without relying on extensive new travels, instead leveraging local observation and oral histories of border communities. It earned the , affirming Chatwin's versatility beyond nonfiction. In 1987, emerged from Chatwin's extended sojourns in central during the mid-1980s, blending firsthand reportage with speculative essays on Aboriginal oral traditions. The book details his traversals of the alongside a Russian translator named and interactions with Indigenous custodians, who shared how "songlines"—ancient melodic maps of terrain, water sources, and ancestral routes—encode survival knowledge across vast deserts, contrasting this peripatetic worldview with sedentary civilizations' discontents. These expeditions, involving drives along unsealed tracks and stays in remote settlements, yielded notebooks on nomadism's evolutionary roots, though critics later noted Chatwin's selective framing of Indigenous lore amid his health decline. Chatwin's output tapered as illness advanced, yielding the concise Utz in 1988, a framed around a British narrator's encounters in Cold War with Kaspar Utz, an obsessive collector of figures who navigates communist purges by feigning disinterest in his hoard. Rooted in a real Czech connoisseur's biography—gleaned from art-world contacts and possibly brief Prague visits tied to Chatwin's auctioneering past—the tale probes possession's futility under ideological threat, with Utz marrying his housekeeper to safeguard his treasures. Posthumously compiled and published in 1989 by , What Am I Doing Here? gathers 25 disparate pieces from Chatwin's peripatetic journalism, including dispatches on hunting the in Nepal's , tracing Genghis Khan's relics in , and ruminating on Bruce Chatwin's father amid or Andean shamans. These vignettes, spanning decades of opportunistic voyages, reflect his compulsion for motion—often by foot or improbable conveyance—while questioning purpose in an uprooted existence, with no unifying travels but a mosaic of fleeting immersions.

Personal Relationships

Marriage to Elizabeth Chanler

Chatwin first encountered Elizabeth Chanler in the early at auction house in , where she worked as a secretary to the director Peter Wilson. They began a amid Chatwin's rising prominence at the firm, and he proposed marriage despite his emerging nomadic inclinations and personal complexities. The wedding took place on 21 August 1965 at a Nuptial Mass in the Chanler family chapel at Sweet Briar Farm in , after Chatwin underwent religious instruction to convert to Catholicism, aligning with Elizabeth's faith. At the time, Chatwin was 25 years old and Elizabeth, from an established East Coast American Catholic family, was 26. Her background traced to prominent lineages, including descent from figures connected to early American wealth such as through familial ties. The marriage endured for 23 years until Chatwin's death in 1989, marked by periods of separation due to his extensive travels but also instances of companionship, as Elizabeth accompanied him to destinations including , , and Persia. The couple had no children, residing primarily in while maintaining ties to Elizabeth's family properties . Throughout, Elizabeth provided stability amid Chatwin's professional shifts from auctioneering to and authorship, though their union tested the boundaries of conventional domesticity given his restless lifestyle.

Extramarital Affairs and Bisexuality

Chatwin married Elizabeth Chanler, an American art historian and colleague, in August 1965 near , in a ceremony attended by 200 guests. Their union endured until his death in 1989 but involved extended separations owing to his nomadic pursuits, rendering it nontraditional in intimacy; some accounts describe it as largely celibate, though they remained close companions and frequent travel partners. Chatwin's manifested in extramarital affairs primarily with men, a pattern his wife knew of and accommodated without apparent rupture until tensions escalated in the late 1970s, prompting a brief separation in 1980. Biographical evidence, including Chatwin's correspondence, indicates his deeper erotic inclinations leaned toward men, with fleeting homosexual encounters during his Sotheby's tenure in the 1960s giving way to more sustained liaisons later. He maintained homosexual friendships, such as with American writer , and pursued a protracted affair with an unnamed Australian man, whom he evocatively recalled sharing a during a romantic interlude amid African wildlife. Chatwin briefly contemplated cohabitation with designer after 1982 but recoiled at the prospect of domesticity with a partner, affirming his despite these pursuits; no children resulted from the union, and he expressed hopes early on of outgrowing homosexual impulses to emulate his parents' fidelity. These relationships, while compartmentalized, fueled speculation about his sexuality among contemporaries, many of whom presumed him exclusively homosexual given the infrequency of documented female affairs post-marriage.

Health and Death

Onset of Illness

In 1985, following his second extended trip to to research The Songlines, Chatwin contracted a mysterious illness that marked the onset of his symptomatic infection, manifesting initially as fatigue and other unexplained ailments. Distressed by these symptoms, he interrupted his writing in and undertook a to the monastic community of Mount Athos, seeking spiritual renewal amid his deteriorating health. By August 1986, Chatwin's condition worsened dramatically; while in for treatment, he collapsed and received a formal diagnosis of positivity, though the full implications of AIDS were not immediately acknowledged by him publicly. To friends and in correspondence, he attributed the illness to a rare of the contracted during travels in earlier in the decade, concealing the true viral cause despite medical evidence to the contrary. This denial persisted even as symptoms progressed, reflecting his pattern of fabricating exotic etiologies for personal vulnerabilities.

Denial, Treatment, and Final Days

Chatwin persistently denied his 1986 AIDS , attributing his symptoms to a rare of the contracted during a 1982 trip to , which he described in letters and interviews as affecting only about ten known cases worldwide. This claim persisted publicly even as his condition worsened, with family statements following his death echoing the fungal narrative rather than acknowledging AIDS. Biographer later observed that this denial extended nearly to Chatwin's end, as he rejected the implications of AIDS in favor of a more exotic, self-mythologizing affliction aligning with his traveler persona. Treatment remained limited and inconsistent, shaped by Chatwin's refusal to accept the underlying cause; he endured over five years of declining health without pursuing aggressive antiretroviral therapies available in the late , such as early AZT trials, prioritizing instead the management of symptoms under the fungus pretext. In his final months, he experienced progressive physical deterioration, including confinement to a and eventual AIDS-related , which amplified his eccentricities into disorientation and grotesque decline. Chatwin spent his last days in a Nice hospital, nursed by his wife Elizabeth Chanler and , amid intensified suffering exacerbated by his prolonged denial. He died there on January 18, 1989, at age 48, marking the abrupt end to his literary career. A memorial service followed on February 14 at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia in .

Writing Style

Narrative Techniques

Chatwin's techniques emphasize fragmentation and episodic construction, eschewing linear for a of short vignettes that interweave personal observations, historical digressions, and mythical allusions. In (1977), this manifests as 97 untitled sections, typically limited to a single paragraph or a few pages, linked by thematic associations rather than geographical or temporal progression, creating a textual that mirrors the disjointed nature of exploration and memory. Similar structures appear in (1987), where embedded notebook excerpts and anecdotal tales of nomads disrupt conventional travelogue flow, prioritizing polyphonic voices and cultural juxtaposition over a unified quest . His prose employs lean, declarative sentences and short paragraphs, relying on precise word choice and rhythmic phrasing to compress expansive landscapes and histories into compact forms, often evoking a haiku-like AB structure that establishes an expectation before subverting it with ironic or paradoxical resolution. For instance, Chatwin minimizes metaphor in favor of direct sensory description—appealing especially to smell and sound—to ground vignettes in vivid, immediate environments that serve as backdrops for human eccentricity, as in depictions of Patagonian thorns emitting a "bitter smell when crushed" or whirring winds over still deserts. This visual and lyrical irony, drawn from his Sotheby's cataloging experience, fosters detachment through past tense and passive constructions, focusing narrative energy on artifacts, exiles, and liminal spaces rather than immersive psychological depth. Chatwin explicitly adapted techniques to non-fictional accounts, counting deliberate "lies" to enhance while maintaining an intimate, casual tone distinct from earlier writers' formality. In works like What Am I Doing Here (1989), this yields self-contained sketches of figures such as Marie Reiche, blending essayistic reflection with anecdotal framing to explore universal themes of transience without privileging autobiographical confession. Such methods, influenced by Japanese forms like waka, prioritize reinterpretation and linked digressions, resulting in structures that evoke perpetual movement and cultural multiplicity.

Blending Fact and Invention

Chatwin's nonfiction works, particularly (1977) and (1987), exemplify a deliberate fusion of empirical observation, historical research, and imaginative embellishment, where literal accuracy yielded to the pursuit of mythic or thematic resonance. He drew from personal travels—such as his 1974 journey through , covering over 8,000 miles by foot, bus, and —to compile vignettes that interwove verifiable events, like encounters with descendants of Welsh settlers or traces of Butch Cassidy's gang, with invented dialogues and composite characters to evoke the region's elusive spirit of exile and endurance. This method, which Chatwin likened to assembling "real gardens with imaginary toads," prioritized narrative vitality over strict verifiability, allowing disparate anecdotes to cohere into a revealing patterns of human restlessness. In , Chatwin extended this technique by framing the text as fragmented notebook entries from his 1983 Australian expedition, blending documented interactions with Aboriginal informants—such as discussions of alcheringa creation myths—with fabricated exchanges and speculative to argue for songlines as an innate mapping of territory and memory. While grounded in fieldwork, including interviews with figures like Arkady Volchok, the narrative incorporated invented episodes, such as extended philosophical rants by the fictionalized narrator, to dramatize Chatwin's hypothesis that nomadic song traditions predated sedentary violence in . Biographer , after cross-verifying sources for , identified only isolated instances of pure invention, attributing most alterations to Chatwin's compression of timelines or enhancement of motifs for structural unity rather than deceit. This blending stemmed from Chatwin's view that unadorned facts often obscured deeper causal realities, such as the archetypal drives behind migration or artifact ; he contended that invention could illuminate truths inaccessible to alone, echoing his essays on nomadism where mythic reconstruction served empirical insight. Yet, the approach invited , as in 's account of a preserved skin shipped to a Welsh —a detail Chatwin knew to be apocryphal but retained for its symbolic weight in illustrating transatlantic cultural grafts. Across his oeuvre, this practice distinguished his style from conventional travelogues, positioning his texts as hybrid artifacts that tested the boundaries of genre while risking accusations of distortion.

Core Themes

Nomadism and Human Origins

Chatwin viewed nomadism as intrinsic to , positing that early Homo sapiens evolved as migratory hunter-gatherers in arid environments, where survival depended on constant movement rather than territorial aggression toward fellow humans. He contrasted this with the transition to and settlement around 10,000 BCE, which he believed introduced , , and by suppressing innate . In his unpublished manuscript The Nomadic Alternative, Chatwin synthesized ethnographic observations of pastoralists and foragers to argue that small, mobile bands sustained egalitarian harmony and psychological health, while coerced —exemplified by historical enclosures of nomads—fostered deviance and conflict. This thesis permeates (1987), where Chatwin interprets Aboriginal Australian songlines as a vast, oral of creation: invisible "Footprints of the Ancestors" etched by totemic beings during the Dreamtime, who sang landscapes, waterholes, and life forms into existence while traversing the continent. These mnemonic pathways, he contended, not only encoded practical for and resource use but also preserved traces of humanity's primordial migrations, linking remote tribes through shared verses that evoke an unaggressive, desert-born restlessness. Chatwin extended this to broader human origins, suggesting that such cultural artifacts reveal an evolutionary legacy of migration over conquest, with modern unease stemming from alienation from this ambulatory heritage. He advocated a return to ascetic simplicity—eschewing material accumulation for the freedom of the wanderer—as a antidote to civilizational decay, drawing parallels to his own peripatetic life and encounters with outback Aborigines who maintained semi-nomadic routines despite colonial pressures. Critics later noted that Chatwin's romanticization overlooked empirical data on inter-band warfare among hunter-gatherers, yet his framework privileged firsthand accounts from nomadic groups over sedentary academic orthodoxies.

Artifacts, Myth, and Cultural Critique

Chatwin's engagement with artifacts often served as a portal to broader historical and migratory narratives, exemplified by the piece of brick-red hide—purportedly from a Patagonian guanaco but mythologized in family lore as brontosaurus skin—that he received as a child in 1944 and which ignited his lifelong quest to trace human wanderings. In In Patagonia (1977), artifacts such as ancient bones, relics, and found objects function as tangible clues to unravel myths of extinction, exploration, and displacement, with Chatwin treating them as "repositories of human history" that challenge linear Western chronologies. He critiqued the commodification of such items, drawing from his experience at Sotheby's auction house from 1957 to 1965, where he appraised tribal art and antiquities, observing how Western collectors stripped artifacts of their cultural vitality. Myths in Chatwin's oeuvre represent encoded systems of knowledge tied to landscape and movement, rather than abstract fables. In (1987), he describes Australian Aboriginal songlines as "a cross between a creation myth, an atlas, and an Aboriginal man's personal story," where ancestral beings in the Dreamtime sang the names of landforms, animals, and water sources, embedding practical geography within . These myths, for Chatwin, preserved nomadic wisdom against sedentary erosion, positing that early humans navigated vast territories through rhythmic chants that doubled as maps and totemic law. He extended this to global patterns, linking Aboriginal lore to myths from and , arguing that such narratives revealed humanity's innate restlessness over settled permanence. Chatwin's cultural critique contrasted the vitality of myth-bound nomadic societies with the alienation of modern, possession-heavy civilizations, asserting that "humans [are] fundamentally nomadic by , not to be encumbered by possessions." Artifacts and myths, in his view, critiqued Western by evoking pre-agricultural freedoms, where objects like boomerangs or paintings signified relational bonds to place rather than ownership. Yet this romanticization drew accusations of exoticizing non-Western cultures, with critics noting his selective emphasis on "bizarre and brilliant stories" overlooked colonial disruptions. Chatwin maintained that myths offered causal insights into human origins—prioritizing empirical traces like migration routes over ideological constructs—while dismissing sedentary myths as degenerative.

Works

Books Published During Lifetime

Chatwin's debut book, (1977), is a travelogue recounting his journeys through the remote southern regions of Argentina and , weaving personal anecdotes with historical vignettes and encounters with eccentric locals, often blurring lines between observation and invention to evoke the region's mythic allure. The work established his reputation for fragmented, evocative prose that prioritizes sensory detail over linear narrative. His first novel, (1980), fictionalizes the life of Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian adventurer who rises to power as a slave trader in 19th-century Dahomey (modern ), exploring themes of ambition, cultural clash, and decay through a terse, episodic structure spanning over a century. Critics noted its stylistic shift toward concise, fable-like compared to his debut. On the Black Hill (1982), another novel, chronicles the intertwined lives of identical twins Lewis and Benjamin Jones on a remote Welsh from 1899 to 1980, depicting their insular existence amid familial strife, conflicts, and modernization's encroachment. The book won the for its intimate portrayal of rural stasis and twin . The Songlines (1987) combines memoir, anthropology, and fiction to examine Aboriginal Australian "songlines"—oral maps of creation myths traversing the —drawn from Chatwin's travels with Indigenous guides and , positing these paths as ancient human navigation systems predating settled societies. It includes appended notebooks on nomadism's evolutionary role, reflecting Chatwin's interest in human restlessness. Chatwin's final lifetime publication, the Utz (1988), follows Kaspar Utz, a reclusive collector of under communist rule, who navigates regime pressures and personal obsessions, culminating in themes of artifactual fetishism and fleeting . Shortlisted for the , it exemplifies his late shift to compact, irony-laced narratives critiquing totalitarianism's absurdities.

Posthumous Publications

What Am I Doing Here?, a of short essays, articles, profiles, and travel pieces selected by Chatwin prior to his death, was published in September 1989 by Viking . The volume encompasses diverse topics, including encounters with figures such as and Bruce Weber, reflections on nomadism, and vignettes from global journeys, reflecting Chatwin's characteristic blend of observation and anecdote. In 1993, Far Journeys: Photographs and Notebooks appeared, compiling Chatwin's personal photographs alongside excerpts from his black notebooks spanning travels to regions like , , and . Published by Viking, the book offers visual and textual fragments illuminating his research process and nomadic pursuits, with images capturing artifacts, landscapes, and peoples that informed his writing. Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989, edited from unpublished manuscripts, essays, short stories, and travel notes, was released in 1996 by Viking and 1997 by Penguin. This collection traces Chatwin's early journalistic work at and evolving interests in restlessness and migration, including pieces on Chinese bronzes and , providing insight into his intellectual development. Though drawn from archives, selections prioritize thematic coherence over chronology, revealing recurring obsessions with movement and cultural displacement. Later, Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by his widow Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Jenkins, was published in 2010 by in the UK and Viking in the . Spanning 1966 to 1989 and sourced from over 500 correspondents across five continents, the 554-page volume documents Chatwin's peripatetic life, relationships, and creative struggles through candid correspondence with figures like and . It highlights his health decline and artistic ambitions, offering primary-source granularity absent in polished narratives.

Reception and Controversies

Initial Acclaim and Awards

In Patagonia (1977), Chatwin's first book, garnered immediate critical praise for its innovative blend of travel narrative, personal anecdote, and historical vignette, with hailing it as "one of my favourite travel books." The book sold 6,000 copies in shortly after release, marking a strong debut that established Chatwin as a distinctive voice in . It received the in 1978, awarded for imaginative literature, and the Award in 1979 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recognizing contributions to in the United States. Chatwin's transition to fiction with On the Black Hill (1982), a novel depicting the intertwined lives of elderly twin brothers on a Welsh border farm, built on this foundation and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1982, one of Britain's oldest literary awards. It also secured the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel that year, despite debate over whether Chatwin's earlier The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) qualified as his debut novel. These honors affirmed Chatwin's versatility and rising prominence in literary circles during the early 1980s.

Criticisms of Authenticity and Fabrication

Chatwin's travel writings, particularly (1977) and (1987), faced scrutiny for blending factual reporting with invention, prompting accusations that he deceived readers expecting authentic nonfiction accounts. Critics, including biographer , documented instances where Chatwin altered encounters, dialogues, and events to suit narrative purposes, drawing from interviews with individuals he portrayed. Chatwin defended this approach by classifying himself as a storyteller rather than a , stating in a 1988 interview that works like included "huge chunks" invented to convey broader truths about nomadism and human origins. In , fabrications were particularly contentious, as Chatwin drew heavily from secondary sources like T.G.H. Strehlow's anthropological work on Aboriginal s while presenting primary fieldwork as more extensive than it was. Residents of reported a "sour taste" from the book, accusing Chatwin of caricaturing locals aiding Aboriginal communities as exploitative and misrepresenting the sacred landscape by traversing it hastily. Aboriginal custodians expressed concern over his use of restricted knowledge, viewing it as a cultural transgression that risked spiritual repercussions; some, including Kath Strehlow, linked Chatwin's subsequent AIDS-related decline and death in 1989 to mishandling songline lore, which they believed demanded precise transmission. Figures like Russian émigré Anatoly Sawenko felt "floored" by Chatwin's unauthorized transformation of a brief three-day interaction into a detailed, fictionalized without consent or review copy. Shakespeare verified these discrepancies through direct interviews, revealing Chatwin's nine-week stay yielded limited authentic engagement with Aboriginal informants, much of the content extrapolated or invented. For In Patagonia, critics noted Chatwin's selective omission of personal details and fabrication of anecdotal elements to evoke a mythic Patagonia, diverging from verifiable history and encounters. Journalist Josh Benton argued that while Chatwin's inventions enhanced literary appeal, they undermined trust in the genre, as readers anticipated factual travelogues rather than "autobiografiction." Chatwin's biographer corroborated patterns of embellishment across works, attributing them to his nomadic ethos prioritizing essence over literal accuracy, yet acknowledging betrayal felt by real-life subjects whose stories were reshaped without permission. These revelations, detailed in Shakespeare's 1996 biography after eight years of global research, fueled posthumous reassessments questioning whether Chatwin's charisma masked ethical lapses in sourcing and representation.

Accusations of Cultural Insensitivity

Chatwin's The Songlines (1987) has faced accusations of cultural insensitivity for oversimplifying Aboriginal cosmology to advance his personal thesis on human nomadism, thereby misrepresenting . Australian archaeologist Mike Smith critiqued the book for offering a "bowdlerised version" of songlines that "escaped into the , eclipsing an earlier anthropological lexicon" and colonizing academic discourse on Indigenous traditions. Philip Jones similarly observed that the term "songlines" "arrived in Bruce Chatwin’s suitcase," portraying it as a Western construct imposed on Aboriginal concepts rather than an authentic derivation from Indigenous philosophy. Further critiques highlight Chatwin's romanticization of Aboriginal practices as exotic "" or rudimentary navigation aids, which distorts their profound ties to , spirituality, and restricted knowledge protocols. Indigenous scholar Shaun Angeles Penange argued that such portrayals perpetuate colonial exploitation by disseminating sacred cultural elements without the requisite contextual understanding or permission inherent to Aboriginal worldviews. These charges, emerging prominently in posthumous analyses, position the work as prioritizing Chatwin's narrative over respectful ethnographic depth, though defenders contend it sparked wider interest in Indigenous oral traditions despite its flaws. In In Patagonia (1977), Chatwin's depictions of indigenous groups, such as the Yaghan people encountered near , have been faulted for superficial engagement and a paternalistic tone that blends reverence with condescension. Critics describe his approach to Patagonian and Australian Indigenous populations as exhibiting a "contradictory mixture of sympathy and disdain, reverence and infantilisation," with explanatory interludes feeling outdated and presumptuous even at publication. The narrative's emphasis on European settlers and relics often sidelines indigenous histories, reinforcing perceptions of Chatwin as advancing a colonialist lens that exoticizes or diminishes non-Western subjects. Such evaluations, informed by postcolonial rereadings, underscore tensions in Chatwin's travel writing between aesthetic innovation and cultural oversight, though they remain debated among literary scholars.

Influence and Legacy

Impact on Travel Writing and Literature

Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977) marked a pivotal shift in travel writing by eschewing linear narratives and conventional reportage in favor of fragmented, vignette-style accounts that intertwined personal observation with historical anecdote, , and speculation, thereby elevating the genre toward literary experimentation. This approach, which biographer credits with reinventing , encouraged subsequent writers to prioritize stylistic innovation and subjective insight over exhaustive documentation of places. By 1987, further transformed English travel writing, integrating anthropological inquiry into Aboriginal Australian songlines with Chatwin's nomadic philosophy, rendering the form intellectually rigorous and culturally provocative, and reportedly making it "cool" after decades of perceived stagnation. His influence extended to emphasizing originality of form over novelty of destination, prompting a reevaluation of travel writing's mandate to explore human restlessness and cultural artifacts through hybrid genres blending memoir, , and . Writers such as , Marsden, and drew from Chatwin's model, adopting his method of personal journeys with broader existential themes, as noted by observers of his legacy. In broader , Chatwin's stylistic economy and mythic undertones impacted novelists; for instance, engaged deeply with his work in essays, influencing a lineage including Teju Cole's peripatetic narratives. Andrew Harvey observed that "nearly every writer of [his] generation in has wanted, at some point, to be Bruce Chatwin," underscoring the aspirational pull of his interdisciplinary fusion. Chatwin's oeuvre revitalized the genre in the 1970s through a restless curiosity that fused with philosophical depth, inspiring a wave of authors to merge introspective reflection with historical and , though his penchant for later prompted debates on veracity that nonetheless spurred formal experimentation. This legacy persists in contemporary literature's tolerance for subjective artistry, distinguishing it from earlier empirical traditions.

Posthumous Recognition and Reassessments

Following Chatwin's on , , from AIDS-related illness at age 48, his reputation as a storyteller expanded significantly in the ensuing decade, cultivating a dedicated that viewed him as a literary akin to a British . This posthumous acclaim manifested in renewed interest in his stylistic fusion of travelogue and myth-making, with admirers emphasizing his prose's evocative power over earlier debates on veracity. Nicholas Shakespeare's 1999 biography, Bruce Chatwin, drew on eight years of research across five continents, including unrestricted access to Chatwin's papers and interviews with associates, portraying him as a charismatic yet enigmatic figure whose obsessions with movement and artifacts defined his oeuvre. The work documented how Chatwin's career, peaking with books like (1977), achieved mythic status post-mortem, though it also illuminated personal deceptions that prompted reevaluations of his narrative reliability without diminishing his influence on genre-blending nonfiction. Shakespeare's later edition of Chatwin's letters, Under the Sun (2010), further sustained this interest by revealing his epistolary voice—witty, restless, and observant—across correspondences from the 1960s to 1980s. Werner Herzog's 2019 documentary Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin served as a personal tribute from the director, a longtime friend who retraced Chatwin's paths through , , and beyond, highlighting shared affinities for walking as revelation and nomadism as existential pursuit. The film, praised for its visual poetry and introspective homage, reframed Chatwin's legacy amid modern contexts, underscoring enduring appeals of his wanderlust-driven insights despite biographical revelations of embellishment. Anniversary reflections, such as the 2017 Guardian retrospective on In Patagonia's 40th year, affirmed Chatwin's transformation of travel writing from mere itinerary to philosophical inquiry, attributing sustained readership to his ability to evoke cultural displacement and human itinerancy. Reassessments post-biography balanced stylistic veneration—his fragmented, anecdote-rich form influencing subsequent authors—with acknowledgment of factual liberties, yet concluded that his prose's hypnotic allure preserved his stature as an innovative observer of marginal worlds.

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