In Patagonia Read Free

Darwin’s shocked reaction to the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego. In December 1972 the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray had rekindled Chatwin’s “childhood infatuation”—after visiting Gray in her Paris apartment, he wrote to thank her for “the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years.” Gray, then 93, had on her wall a large map of Patagonia that she had painted in gouache. Chatwin pointed to it: “That’s one of the places I’ve always wanted to go to.” It was Gray’s ambition too. If she were young again she would try to see Cape Horn. “ Allez-y pour moi , go on my behalf.” He later said: “It was almost one of the things that decided me in fact to go.”
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    Chatwin didn’t mind giving the illusion that he had gone to Patagonia for four months and dashed off a classic. But he took with him a body of knowledge that he had cultivated for years. Although In Patagonia would become an overnight success, it had been an arduous apprenticeship. Haunting Chatwin on his journey south was “the rotten experience” of The Nomadic Alternative , the book on which he’d spent several years and which his editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, had pronounced unpublishable after reading 50 pages. (“They were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write.”) This time Chatwin determined to keep silent until he was finished. “The fatal thing is ever to tell anyone about what you’re really writing till it’s done because (a) you don’t do it and (b) you get people vaguely worked up about it and they try to tell you what to do.”
    But what was he writing? The question would vex editors and critics. Just as Patagonia is not a place with an exact border, so Chatwin’s “peculiarly dotty book,” as he called it, would not fall into an easy category. Was it travel writing? Was it historical fiction? Was it reportage? And was it true—and, if not, did it matter?
    In advance of its American publication, Chatwin drafted a letter to his agent, requesting that In Patagonia be taken out of the travel category. He wanted the blurb on the American edition to convey four points, in his opinion the key to understanding the book:
    1. “Patagonia is the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origins. It is therefore a symbol of his restlessness. From its discovery it had the effect on the imagination something like the Moon, but in my opinion more powerful.”
    2. The form described in the Daily Telegraph as “wildly unorthodox” was in fact as old as literature itself: “the hunt for a strange animal in a remote land.”
    3. He preferred to leave the reader with the choice of two journeys: one to Patagonia in 1975, the other “a symbolic voyage which is a meditation on the restlessness and exile.”
    4. “All the stories were chosen with the purpose of illustrating some particular aspect of wandering and/or of exile: i.e., what happens when you get stuck. The whole should be an illustration of the Myth of Cain and Abel.”
    His letter makes clear that Chatwin had come to Argentina with a fixed idea: to retrieve from his abandoned nomad manuscript (“that wretched book,” Elizabeth called it) the idea of the Journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan’s paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earliest stories, he told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni—an “absolute constant, a universal in literature.” He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, he would seek the animal in his grandmother’s cabinet. And if possible find a replacement scrap.
    The spoof was a protective device. It concealed a desire to continue his serious exploration into wandering