Under the Sun Read Free

correspondence reveals much more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books.
    Alone in his letters did he make known that he had been present on a February day near Johannesburg when a cracked fragment of antelope bone was prised from the floor of the Swartkrans cave, soapy-feeling and speckled with dark patches as if burned: evidence, it turned out, of man’s ‘earliest use of fire’. For all his brilliance, Chatwin could be disarmingly modest, hiding his light under the same bushel as his well-concealed darknesses. The Bruce Chatwin who appears in The Songlines , In Patagonia and What Am I Doing Here is his own best, most achieved character: observant, intelligent, sharp-witted, heterosexual, generous, intrepid. This persona was an essential part of the appeal of his writing. ‘In his books you were addressed not merely by a distinctive voice,’ observed Michael Ignatieff, ‘but by the fabulous character he had fashioned for himself.’ The Bruce Chatwin of the letters is less certain of who he is, more vulnerable but more human. Delicate about his health and finances; uneasy about his sexual orientation and his relationship with England; above all, restless almost to the point of neurosis.
    In his passport, Chatwin put ‘farmer’ as his profession, but his life was spent on the hoof, a sizeable proportion of it in the study of nomads. An internal memo circulated at Cape in October 1982 gives a flavour of his travels, their tern-like spread. ‘Publicity have no idea when Bruce Chatwin will be in Australia – neither does his agent! As far as we know he is still in Siberia/Russia.’ He copied into one of his signature Moleskine notebooks this telling line from Montaigne: ‘I ordinarily reply to those who ask me the reason for my travels, that I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am looking for.’ About the motivations for Chatwin’s restlessness, I have not yet found a more convincing explanation than this, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyen Qui Duc. ‘Nomads in the old days travelled around looking for food, for shelter, for water; modern day nomads, we travel around looking for ourselves.’
    Written with the verve and sharpness of expression that first marked him out as an author, Chatwin’s correspondence gives a vivid synopsis of his interests and concerns over forty years. To read his letters and postcards is to be with him on the road: in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Niger, Benin, Mauretania, Tierra del Fuego, Brazil, Nepal, India, Alice Springs, London, New York, Edinburgh, Wotton-Under-Edge, Ipsden – in pursuit of the restless chimera that was Bruce Chatwin, that ‘haunting’ and elusive presence who is at once ‘sparse and solitary and moving’.

    A life revealed through letters is not nowadays so linear as a biography. It zig-zags through time and space rather in the manner of Chatwin’s accounts of his journeys to Patagonia and Australia; it is messy, repetitive, congested, of the moment. Nor, frustratingly, can you rely on it to deliver letters when you want – from periods, and about incidents and people, just when their insight might prove most welcome. But it has this virtue: it is a life told at the time in the subject’s own voice and words. It is the closest we have to his conversation.
    The multifaceted narrator of Chatwin’s books is a person who says remarkably little. He is virtually a mime artist, a character of laconic observations and lapidary asides that camouflage what he is thinking – ‘stepping back to hide himself,’ as his friend Gregor Von Rezzori saw it, ‘in the cultivated impersonality of a newspaper article’. This impression is misleading. In his letters, as in life, Chatwin was no less voluble than was Marcel Marceau when not being silent on stage.
    â€˜I don’t believe in coming clean,’ Chatwin famously told Paul Theroux. In his