Anywhere out of the world

The work of Bruce Chatwin

Jonathan Chatwin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719084263
• eBook ISBN: 9781526129789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By the time of his death in 1989 at the age of forty-eight, Bruce Chatwin had become one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Though his career spanned merely twelve years, his impact and influence was profoundly felt; Chatwin's first book In Patagonia 'redefined travel writing', whilst his later work The Songlines became one of the literary sensations of the 1980s. Incorporating original and extensive archival research, as well as new interviews with his family and friends, Anywhere out of the world provides the definitive critical perspective upon the literary life and work of this enigmatic and influential author. The work offers a chronological overview of Chatwin's literary career, from his first, ultimately aborted work The Nomadic Alternative – here discussed in detail for the first time – through to his final novel Utz. In subjecting his work to such analysis, the study uncovers a striking thematic commonality in Chatwin's oeuvre: his work is fundamentally preoccupied with the subject of human restlessness. This volume provides detailed insight into Chatwin's treatment of the subject in his work, identifying and discussing the biographical and philosophical sources of this defining preoccupation.

1

Winding paths

The quest for knowledge or any creative endeavour is a hunt through a dark night of uncertainty. The quarry is the solution to a problem. But the quarry is fleet of foot and never tires, and the hunter tires and is mortal. (4) Bruce Chatwin, The Nomadic Alternative

It was originally intended that, having completed his studies at Marlborough, Bruce Chatwin would follow the well-worn path of Old Marlburians and progress to an Oxbridge college. He had planned to try for a place studying Classics at Merton in Oxford; however, as National Service gradually ended in the late 1950s, competition for university places increased, and Chatwin was informed that he might perhaps have to wait for two years before going up. His youthful gaze thus turned to other horizons: Africa was considered, as was architecture – ‘the family business’ (H. Chatwin CCMM) – and, of course, a stage career. Ultimately, however, Chatwin elected to begin his career at a theatre of a different sort: Sotheby’s auctioneers in London.

Having secured an introduction through a school friend of his father’s, Chatwin began at the auction house in late 1958. He was hired as a porter, a post which, despite its lowly title, was considered ‘usual and fashionable’ (Maclean CCMM) at that time. In particular, it provided the potential for being noticed: ‘Setting recruits to work as porters was the no-cost training scheme that [the firm] had devised to uncover talent’, (96) writes Robert Lacey.

Various accounts exist as to Chatwin’s first distinguishing moment at the auction house; he told Susannah Clapp of an encounter with the collector Sir Robert Abdy, who, unrecognised by the young Chatwin, asked for his opinion of a Picasso gouache. Chatwin asserted – correctly, as it would turn out – that the picture was a fake. Abdy subsequently ‘spread the word about the talented youth, and eased his way within the firm’ (Clapp 1998: 82). In his essay ‘The Bey’ he tells of a similar encounter with the ‘Grand Chamberlain du Cour du Roi des Albanis’ (WAIDH 358). Whether there was in fact such a specific moment of recognition, or whether Chatwin rather gradually distinguished himself through his well-attested talents of appraisal, is unclear. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Chatwin’s progress within the auction house was rapid. Under the mentorship of Sotheby’s chairman, Peter Wilson, Chatwin was promoted first to a post as a junior cataloguer in the Antiquities department – with responsibility for the composition of brief and enticing descriptions of the objects to be sold – and then to assume overall responsibility for both Antiquities and the newly created department of Impressionists, or ‘Imps’ as it became known.

He was fortunate in joining Sotheby’s at a time of extraordinary growth. His arrival was coincidental with the now legendary Goldschmidt sale of seven impressionist masterpieces in October 1958. The auction – attended by 1,400 people, including Somerset Maugham, Margot Fonteyn and Kirk Douglas, and masterminded by Peter Wilson – lasted just 21 minutes and generated £781,000. It was the highest-grossing fine-art auction in history. Robert Lacey, in his history of Sotheby’s, describes the atmosphere on New Bond Street in the decade which followed the Goldschmidt sale: ‘Beautiful objects fetched beautiful prices. Sellers were happy. Buyers could not wait for the next sale, and breathless newspaper articles extolled the whole process. For Peter Wilson and his bright young men, the auction business seemed the perfect combination of taste, excitement, and money’ (156). Chatwin, the archetypal provincial youngster, was at the very centre of this glamorous and exotic world as Katherine Maclean, Peter Wilson’s personal assistant, attests:

[T]his not so callow youth found himself precipitated into drawing rooms all over Europe and America, meeting the rich and famous, taking them all with a slice of spice, a bit of a joke, and enjoying their manipulations and getting a lot of business. … He’d flown all over the world, he’d been entertained in the best restaurants, he’d been in the best salons and the best drawing rooms, and he was very fêted. (CCMM)

Few would anticipate that such a lifestyle, and such a career, would pall. However, in June of 1966, to the surprise and shock of his colleagues and family, Chatwin announced that he was leaving the firm. In an article written for the New York Times Book Review nearly twenty years later, Chatwin located the impetus for this precipitate departure in an epiphanic realisation which had struck during a trip to the Sudan in early 1965. This journey to Africa had been suggested by his doctor after Chatwin had suffered an anxiety-induced loss of vision,¹ ‘[a]pparently the result of over-doing it in America’ (US 63), he wrote to a friend at the time.² Whilst there, he began to suffer misgivings over his involvement in the art world:

I went to the Sudan. On camel and foot I trekked through the Red Sea hills and found some unrecorded cave paintings. My nomad guide was a hadendoa, one of Kipling’s ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’. He carried a sword, a purse and a pot of scented goat’s grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate; and by the time I returned to England a mood of fierce iconoclasm had set in.

Not that I turned into a picture slasher. But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. (AOR 11–12)

This account of the young auctioneer turning away from craven materialism towards a life as a writer and modern nomad fits appealingly within the grander constructed narrative of Chatwin’s life, and his trip can rightly be viewed as a significant motivator of his emergent interest in the subject of restlessness. However, contemporaneous accounts also testify to the influence of more prosaic factors; in particular, the questionable business dealings of Sotheby’s in the months following Chatwin’s trip to the Sudan.

In the summer of 1965, Chatwin was informed by Sotheby’s that he was to be made a director of the firm. Katherine Maclean, recalls the handling of this promotion: ‘Come the late sixties, Sotheby’s had to restructure its financial basis in some way, and it had done very well over the last ten years, and it was decided to reward about half a dozen of these young men with directorships. They were all told this good news; unfortunately in such a way they all believed themselves to be the sole choice for this great distinction, and so slightly had their noses put out of joint to find that other colleagues were in the same soi-disant distinguished field’ (CCMM). Such were the numbers of new directors that it became standing room only at board meetings from that point on.

Chatwin was aggrieved at the management of this affair, which alone would seem an understandable cause of disillusion. In later life, however, he would privately identify a darker scandal concerning Sotheby’s. Chatwin accused his superiors of implicating him in the fraudulent dispersal of a privately held collection of ethnographic artefacts – the Pitt-Rivers collection: ‘On 27 August 1988, six months before he died, Chatwin focussed his rage against John Hewett, John and Puntzel Hunt in Ireland, and the Sotheby’s chairman, Peter Wilson: Chatwin claimed that he left Sotheby’s because he was being forced to sell the Pitt-Rivers collection “fraudulently” to American and other collectors’ (US 80).³

Such were the contemporaneous events which framed Chatwin’s announcement that he was leaving Sotheby’s. He departed the auction house for a four-year degree course in Archeology at Edinburgh University. In the intervening years since leaving Marlborough, Chatwin had come to regret not taking up his proposed place at Oxford, and his decampment to Edinburgh was intended to rectify this lack of formal eduction. In September of 1966, Chatwin wrote to Michael Cannon: ‘You may not have heard that I have LEFT Sotheby’s to read a degree in archaeology at Edinburgh. Change is the only thing worth living for. Never sit your life out at a desk. Ulcers and heart condition follow’ (US 85).

Chatwin was a committed undergraduate at Edinburgh, engaging with the degree course with enthusiasm, despite occasional bouts of self-doubt. The course was intensive, with Bruce having to write ‘at least one paper a week … He was writing all the time’ (E. Chatwin 2010). However, Chatwin came to find much of the course itself too dry for his taste, characterising it later as ‘a dismal discipline – a story of technical glories interrupted by catastrophe’ (AOR 12).

Nor was any redemption offered by location; both Bruce and Elizabeth found living conditions in Edinburgh – ‘that grim northern city’ (AOR 12) – challenging. In a review of James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Chatwin would later write of the city as a ‘place of absolute contrast and paradox. … The rational squares and terraces of the New Town confront the daunting skyline of the Old. Slums still abut the houses of the rich. … On fine summer days nowhere is lighter and more airy; for most of the year there are icy blasts or a clammy sea fog, the haar of the east coast of Scotland’ (AOR 133).

Despite the challenges of curriculum and location, however, Elizabeth asserts that Chatwin would have finished his degree course, were it not for the restrictions placed upon him by his professor, Stuart Piggott. As with Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s, Bruce had charmed the man in charge, and, as with Wilson, Piggott was unwilling to let his protégé leave, as Elizabeth recalls:

He could have completed and would have been happy to have completed in three years, because they’d lost this very nice professor who did the Dark Ages and never replaced him. So Bruce was going to be stuck doing Roman Britain forever; I mean, he was bored already after two [years]. But Stuart wanted him there. I was on a train with David Talbot Rice⁴ … and he said ‘Why doesn’t Bruce finish at the end of this year?’, and I said ‘He’d love to, but Stuart won’t let him’. (2010)

In November 1968, Elizabeth drove to Edinburgh to help Bruce effect his escape: ‘[H]e just didn’t go back. He didn’t tell anyone that he wasn’t going back. I went up to get him for Thanksgiving and loaded him into the car with some stuff and so on, and then he never went back at all’ (2007).

Later in his career, and more confident in his autodidact identity, Chatwin, eliding practical motivations, framed his departure from Edinburgh in grand terms, as an inspired crisis of confidence similar to that experienced in the Sudanese desert. Alluding to youthful visits to Shakespeare’s tomb at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Chatwin described his epiphany:

[L]ong before I could read, Aunt Gracie had taught me to recite the lines engraved on the tomb-slab:

Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.

… One day, while excavating a Bronze-Age burial, I was about to brush the earth off a skeleton, and the old line came back to haunt me:

And curst be he yt moves my bones.

For the second time I quit. (AOR 7–12)

Chatwin’s tendency to romanticise the manner and motivation behind relatively prosaic life-decisions results partly from his writerly tendency to form narrative from incoherence and ambiguity. However, it can perhaps be argued that Chatwin’s grand moral stance against both archeology and the art world belies the fact that, in reality, the reasons for leaving both situations were more persuasive than compelling. Chatwin could have remained at Sotheby’s; he was young and successful, a director at just 26, despite the compromising manner in which his promotion had been effected. Even the dispersal of the Pitt-Rivers collection, whilst undoubtedly questionable in ethics and motive, was not terribly out of keeping with the general tenor of auction house life. Colleagues such as Marcus Linell and David Nash chose to remain at the firm, despite the compromises, and made a career of Sotheby’s. Equally, many undergraduates have survived dull degree courses and unappealing living conditions whilst at university.

Whatever the practical objections of the time, or the romantic explanations posited later, it seems apparent, viewing Chatwin’s life from the present juncture, that these departures were at least partly the consequence of his ‘inbuilt restlessness’ (Footsteps). His life would be marked by this tendency towards sudden changes of direction: from Sotheby’s to Edinburgh; from Edinburgh to freelancing and the Sunday Times; from the Sunday Times to Patagonia. Chatwin rarely stayed in one place or at one undertaking for very long, suffering persistently from the persuasive voice of conviction which Baudelaire described so effectively: ‘I say, Soul, poor shivering Soul, how would you like to go and live in Lisbon? It must be pretty warm there, and you would soon be as spry as a lizard’ (191). It is perhaps unsurprising that his specific interest in nomads and the solutions that their means of life seemed to offer emerged as this tendency began to influence his life more practically. These early experiences of restless departure crucially influenced the thematic material of Chatwin’s future creative work, inspiring him to seek an explanation for, and justification of, the persistently felt desire for change.

His time at Sotheby’s and Edinburgh had done more than simply encourage his emergent interest in the question of restlessness, however. Both had provided an invaluable practical apprenticeship for a future writer. His time as a cataloguer at Sotheby’s provided particular training in the skill of ascertaining provenance and of paring down description: ‘He wouldn’t have had that discipline without being at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Winding paths
• 2 The great unwriteable
• 3 At the end
• 4 Skin for skin
• 5 Those blue remembered hills
• 6 Transformations
• 7 The Harlequin
• Conclusion: A mythology for every man
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• A Bruce Chatwin bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index