Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989 Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  I - ‘HORREUR DU DOMICILE’

  I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO PATAGONIA - The Making of a Writer

  A PLACE TO HANG YOUR HAT

  A TOWER IN TUSCANY

  GONE TO TIMBUCTOO

  II - STORIES

  MILK

  THE ATTRACTIONS OF FRANCE

  THE ESTATE OF MAXIMILIAN TOD

  BEDOUINS

  III - ‘THE NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE’

  LETTER TO TOM MASCHLER

  THE NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE

  IT’S A NOMAD NOMAD WORLD

  IV - REVIEWS

  ABEL THE NOMAD

  THE ANARCHISTS OF PATAGONIA

  THE ROAD TO THE ISLES

  VARIATIONS ON AN IDÉE FIXE

  V - ART AND THE IMAGE-BREAKER

  AMONG THE RUINS

  THE MORALITY OF THINGS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgements

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  ANATOMY OF RESTLESSNESS

  Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940. He worked at Sotheby’s and then for the Sunday Times (London). His first book, In Patagonia, became an instant classic. It was followed by a series of books notable for their originality and style, including The Songlines and What Am I Doing Here. He was, as Peter Levi said in the Independent, “the best travel writer of his generation, and one of its deepest writers of any kind.”

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Random House 1996

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1997

  10

  Copyright © the Legal Personal Representatives of C. B. Chatwin, 1996 All nights reserved

  Many of the selections in this book have been previously published;

  acknowledgments appear on pages 187-192.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Chatwin, Bruce, 1940-1989.

  Anatomy of restlessness: selected writings, 1969—1989/Bruce Chatwin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50319-5

  I. Title.

  PR6053.H395A6 1996

  823’914—dc20

  96-3003

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  EDITORS’ FOREWORD

  It is commonly supposed that Bruce Chatwin was an ingenuous latecomer to the profession of letters, a misapprehension given credence by that now-famous passage in his lyrical autoportrait ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia’ where we are told that this indefatigable traveller’s literary career began in midstride, almost on a whim, with a telegram announcing his departure for the farthest flung comer of the globe: ‘Have Gone to Patagonia’.

  Such a view overlooks the fact that, from the late 1960s onwards, Chatwin was already fashioning the tools of his future trade in the columns of periodicals as diverse as the Sunday Times magazine, Vogue, History Today, and The New York Review of Books, and that he continued to do so through every twist and turn of his career, from art expert to archaeologist, to journalist and author, right up until his death in 1989.

  These previously neglected or unpublished Chatwin pieces – short stories, travel sketches, essays, articles and criticism—drawn from the pages of reviews, catalogues, literary journals and magazines, and gathered together here for the first time, cover every period and aspect of the writer’s career, and reflect the abiding themes of his work: roots and rootlessness, exile and the exotic, possession and renunciation.

  The present volume is a selection of the best from a wealth of such ‘incidental writing’ and is designed to provide a reader’s companion to Bruce Chatwin, a ‘sourcebook’ of material offering invaluable insight into the author’s life and work.

  With this objective in mind, rather than obey the dictates of chronology, the editors have relied on the inner logic of these texts to guide them in the order of their presentation. Indeed, it is intriguing to see a common thread emerge from such diverse material: a recurring pattern of thought and theme drawing together texts published some twenty years apart. Alongside his more familiar narrative gifts, they show Chatwin to have been a passionate and outspoken reviewer, discerning critic, and audacious essayist, possessed of a restless, inquiring mind.

  The selected texts have accordingly been grouped by theme and presented in five overlapping sections. The first, entitled ‘Horreur du Domicile’, opens an autobiographical perspective on to some of the ‘writer’s chambers’, reflecting at once Chatwin’s keen sense of place and his passion for things remote and exotic. The second section, ‘Stories’, offers the reader a fresh glimpse of Chatwin as a compulsive storyteller, forever treading a thin line between fact and fiction. The third section, ‘The Nomadic Alternative’, returns to a key theme of Chatwin’s work via a synopsis of his first, ‘unpublishable’ book on nomads, in which the author expounds his distinctive vision of History as an ongoing cultural dialectic between civilisation and its natural ‘alternatives’: nomad and settler, city and wilderness, society and tribe. The fourth section, ‘Reviews’, invites the reader to rediscover Bruce Chatwin in the unfamiliar guise of a literary critic, in his role as a forthright, polemical reviewer, and in the fifth and final section, ‘Art and the Image-Breaker’, the author-to-be anticipates a recurrent theme of the novels when he explores the paradoxical nature of artistic creation; its capacity to liberate and emancipate vying with an antagonistic and insidious tendency to obsess and enslave.

  In the same autobiographical essay which described the Patagonian cradling of his literary vocation, Chatwin revealed that his original, extravagant, but ultimately frustrated ambition had been to write ‘a kind of “Anatomy of Restlessness” that would enlarge on Pascal’s dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room’. When it came to deciding on a title for the present volume, this memorable phrase seemed a fitting choice for a selection of texts that so admirably expresses Bruce Chatwin’s enduring fascination with restlessness.

  Jan Borm and Matthew Graves

  Paris, June 1996

  I

  ‘HORREUR DU DOMICILE’

  I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO PATAGONIA

  The Making of a Writer

  Bruce is a dog’s name in England (not so in Australia) and was also the surname of our Scottish cousins. The etymology of ‘Chatwin’ is obscure, but my bassoon-playing Uncle Robin maintained that ‘chette-wynde’ meant ‘winding path’ in Anglo-Saxon. Our side of the family traces its descent from a Birmingham button-maker, yet there is a dynasty of Mormon Chatwins in a remote part of Utah, and recently I heard of a Mr and Mrs Chatwin, trapeze artists.

  By the time my mother married into them, the Chatwins were ‘Birmingham worthies’, that is to say, professional people, architects and lawyers, who did not go in for
trade. There were, however, scattered among my forebears and relatives a number of legendary figures whose histories inflamed my imagination:1. A nebulous French ancestor, M. de la Tournelle, supposed to have been mixed up in the affair of the Queen’s Necklace.

  2. Great-great-grandfather Mathieson, who, at the age of seventy-one, won the tossing of the caber at the Highland Games and died promptly of a stroke.

  3. Great-grandfather Milward – a man obsessed by money, Germany and music. He was a friend of Gounod and Adelina Patti. He also handled the affairs of the ninth Duke of Marlborough and came to New York to negotiate the marriage agreement between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke, who later sacked him for ‘gross incompetence.’ One afternoon, while rummaging through an old tin trunk, I found his court suit and marcasite-handled sword. Dressed as a courtier, sword in hand, I dashed into the drawing room shouting, ‘Look what I’ve found!’ – and was told to ‘take those things off at once!’ Poor Great-grandpapa! His name was taboo. Convicted for fraud in 1902, he was allowed out of prison to die.

  4. Cousin Charley Milward the Sailor, whose ship was wrecked at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan in 1898. I have written his story in In Patagonia. While British Consul in Punta Arenas de Chile, he sent home to my grandmother a fragment of giant sloth’s skin which he had found, perfectly preserved, in a cave. I called it ‘the piece of brontosaurus’ and set it at the centre of my childhood bestiary.

  5. Uncle Geoffrey. Arabist and desert traveller who, like T. E. Lawrence, was given a golden headdress (since sold) by the Emir Feisal. Died poor in Cairo.

  6. Uncle Bickerton. Pick miner and bigamist.

  7. Uncle Humphrey. Sad end in Africa.

  My earliest recollections date from 1942 and are of the sea. I was two years old. We were staying with my grandmother in furnished rooms on the seafront at Filey in Yorkshire. In the house next door lived the Free French, and the men of the Scottish regiment were stationed in dugouts across the street. I watched the convoys of grey ships as they passed to and fro along the horizon. Beyond the sea, I was told, lay Germany. My father was away at sea, fighting the Germans. I would wave at the ships as they vanished behind Flamborough Head, a long wall of cliffs that, if a footnote in the Edition Pléiade is correct, was the starting point for Rimbaud’s prose poem ‘Promontoire’.

  At dusk my grandmother would draw the blackout material across the window, brood over a brown Bakelite radio and listen to the BBC News. One evening, a bass voice announced, ‘We have won a great victory.’ To celebrate the Battle of Alamein my mother and grandmother danced the Highland fling around the room – and I danced with my grandmother’s stockings.

  My grandmother was an Aberdonian, but her nose, her jaw, her burnished skin and jangly gold earrings all gave her the appearance of a gypsy fortune-teller. She was, I should add, obsessed by gypsies. She was a fearless gambler who, for want of other income, made a tidy living on the horses. She used to say that Catholics were heathens, and she had a sharp turn of phrase. One rainy day in 1944 we were sheltering in a phone booth when an ugly old woman pressed her nose to the pane. ‘That woman’, said my grandmother, ‘has the face of a bull’s behind with no tail to hide it.’

  Her husband, Sam Turnell, was a sad-eyed solitary whose only real accomplishment was an impeccable tap dance. After the Battle of Britain he found employment as a salesman of memorial stained-glassed windows. I worshipped him. Towards the end of the war, when we had rented, temporarily, a disused shop in Derbyshire, I acquired from him a love of long walks over the moors.

  Because we had neither home nor money, my mother and I drifted up and down England staying with relations and friends. Home, for me, was a serviceman’s canteen or a station platform piled with kit bags. Once, we visited my father on his minesweeper in Cardiff Harbour. He carried me up to the crow’s nest and let me yell down the intercom to the ward-room. Perhaps, during those heady months before the Normandy landings, I caught a case of what Baudelaire calls ‘La Grande Maladie: horreur du domicile.’ Certainly, when we moved into the grim-gabled house of our own in Birmingham, I grew sick and thin and people wondered if I was going to be tubercular. One morning, when I had measles, my mother rushed upstairs with the newspaper and said, jubilantly, that Japan had surrendered and my father would be coming home. I glanced at the photo of the mushroom cloud and knew something dreadful had happened. The curtains of my bedroom were woven with tongues of orange flame. That night, and for years to come, I dreamed of walking over a charred black landscape with my hair on fire.

  I lost teddy bears without a whimper, yet clung tenaciously to three precious possessions: a wooden camel known as Laura, brought by my father from the Cairo bazaar; a West Indian conch shell called Mona, in whose glorious pink mouth I could hear the wish-wash of the ocean; and a book. The book was The Fisherman’s Saint, an account of Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s mission work on the coast of Labrador. I still have it. On the title page is written: ‘To Bruce on his 3rd Birthday from the postman at Filey. For when he grows up.’ I imagined the book must contain some wonderful secret (which it did not), and it maddened me to have to wait all those years. The usual run of children’s books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, ‘I am a swallow.’ Then I looked up and asked, ‘How do you spell telephone wires?’

  My first job, while staying in Stratford-on-Avon with my greataunts Janie and Gracie, in 1944, was to be the self-appointed guide to Shakespeare’s monument and tomb in the church. The price was threepence ago. Most of my customers were G.I.’s. Not that I knew who Shakespeare was, except that he was somehow associated with the red brick theatre from whose balcony I would chuck old crusts to the swans. Yet, long before I could read, Aunt Gracie had taught me to recite the lines engraved on the tombslab:Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones

  And curst be he yt moves my bones.

  The aunts were spinsters. Janie, the elder and wittier, was an artist. As a young woman she’d lived on Capri and drawn sketches of naked boys. She remembered seeing Maxim Gorki, possibly even Lenin; and in Paris she’d been to a party in the studio of Kees Van Dongen, the Dutch painter. During the Great War she worked, I believe, as a nurse. Perhaps the deaths of so many beautiful youths moved her to paint the canvases of St Sebastian that lay in racks around her studio. She was a tireless reader of modem fiction. Later, she would tell me that American writers wrote better, cleaner English than the English themselves. One day she looked up from her book and said, ‘What a wonderful word “arse” is!’ – and for the first time I heard the name Ernest Hemingway.

  Aunt Gracie was very emotional and very deaf. Her great friend (and my passion!) was the Irish writer Eleanor Doorly, through whom she met members of the Dublin Circle. Her approach to literature was entirely romantic. On summer days we used to sit and read by the Avon. Across the stream was a bank called Wire Brake, which, so she swore, was Shakespeare’s bank whereon the wild thyme blew – though I found only nettles and brambles. We read Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself from an anthology of poetry called The Open Road. We read ‘The Windhover’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and we read from Eleanor Doorly’s book on Marie Curie. The story of Curie’s self-inflicted radium bums affected me greatly. I also wonder if Aunt Gracie was the last Victorian to threaten a child with the spectre of Bonaparte.

  One evening, when I’d misbehaved in the bath, she cried, ‘Stop that, or Boney will get you!’ – and then drew on a piece of paper a dreadful black bicorn hat on legs. Sometime later, in a nightmare, I met the hat outside Hall’s Croft, the home of Shakespeare’s daughter, and it opened like a furry clamshell and swallowed me.

  I remember, too, the aunts having a lively discussion as to whether Measure for Measure was suitable entertainment for a six-year-old. They decided no harm could come of it – and from that matinee on I was hooked. The Stratford theatre kept the back row of stalls unreserved until the day of the performance, and I would cycle through the dawn to make sure of ge
tting a seat. I saw most of the great productions of the late 40s and 50s—with the Oliviers, Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Paul Robeson as Othello – and these constitute for me the Shakespeare of all time. Having lived the plays as a boy, I can now scarcely sit through one without a sensation of loss.

  By 1949 the hard times were over, and one evening my father proudly drove home from work in a new car. Next day he took my brother and me for a spin. On the edge of an escarpment he stopped, pointed to a range of grey hills in the west and then said, ‘Let’s go on into Wales.’ We slept the night in the car, in Radnorshire, to the sound of a mountain stream. At sunrise there was a heavy dew, and the sheep were all around us. I suppose the result of this trip is the novel I’ve recently published, On the Black Hill.

  At boarding school I was an addict of atlases and was always being ostracised for telling tall stories. Every boy had to be a ‘little Conservative’, though I never understood – then as now – the motivations of the English class system. Nor why, on Guy Fawkes Day of 1949, the masters encouraged us to burn on a bonfire an effigy of the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. I was sad for Mr Atlee, and never, even in my capitalist phase, was I able to vote Conservative.

  The Chatwins, coming as they did from the heart of England, were fanatical sailors. The names of their boats were the Aireymouse, the Dozmaree, the Greebe, the Nereid and, finally, the Sunquest, an 18-ton Bermudian sloop built in the 30s to sail around the world. We only sailed as far as Brittany, and once to Spain. I hated the actual sailing, for I was always horribly seasick – and yet I persevered. After reading an account of the effect of the H-bomb on Britain, my ‘life-plan’ was to sail away to a South Sea island and never come back.