Under the Sun Read Free Page A

letters, he cannot avoid it. They are the raw matter of his thoughts, a way of trying them out on the page, the first version. They chart his struggle with who he was and what he wanted to be; art expert, husband, archaeologist, writer – first as an academic theorist, then as an unrepentant storyteller. They are as much a communication with whoever he is writing to as a continuing natter with himself.
    Chatwin’s Gloucestershire neighbour, Jim Lees-Milne, recorded in his diary the local Duke of Beaufort’s opinion that ‘posterity should never judge people by their correspondence, as what they wrote one day was often the opposite of what they thought the next.’ The shifting stream of Chatwin’s mental processes is part of what injects his letters with their vitality. It is not uncommon for him to change his mind from one letter to the next, even between the paragraphs of a single letter. He changes his mind about his house, Australia, Africans, about whether to join his wife in India. ‘He’s thinking on paper and clarifying his mind, like a conversation,’ Elizabeth says. Especially volatile are his travel plans, more uncertain than the on-again-off-again sale of his Maori bedpost that once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt; or the saga of the longawaited cheque from James Ivory to cover the cost of a week’s car hire in France. No sooner does he arrive anywhere than he is shouldering his rucksack, plotting to leave. ‘Everything is always perfect to begin with, but he gets fed up with a place very quickly and in no time at all he’s picking holes.’
    Then, sent as often as not from the next place – a postcard.
    For Paul Theroux, with whom he once gave a talk at the Royal Geographical Society, Chatwin’s postcards have the effect of miniature billboards, being ‘the perfect medium for many boasters, combining vividness, cheapness and an economy of effort’; they allow him to stay in touch without the depth and commitment of letters. But another American writer, David Mason, is less sure that these postcards betray the vice of the self-advertiser. Mason met Chatwin just once, at a bus stop in Greece: ‘His terse correspondence with acquaintances like me was surely the product of a gregarious sensibility. Some writers become self-advertisers out of a grating neediness. What I sensed from Bruce was more akin to uncontainable enthusiasm.’
    This enthusiasm is certainly what appealed to Chatwin’s editor, Susannah Clapp, for whom the idiom of the postcard chimed with his dash and mystery and elipses as a writer. He liked short sentences, short paragraphs; the condensed description of the Sotheby’s cataloguer and postcard sender. ‘Pungent, visually arresting and on the wing,’ Clapp writes, ‘for Bruce Chatwin postcards were the perfect means of communication’ – and allowed him to startle with a bolt from the blue. Arguably his most famous sentence (though the hardcopy has not been traced) was the telegram (it may have been a letter) that he is reputed to have sent to his editor at the Sunday Times magazine, saying GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS (it may have been six). A postcard to his Italian publisher (also missing) contained, apparently, the warning line: ‘Australia is Hell.’
    A phrase that does reoccur is ‘I think of you often.’ One of many to receive it was the Queensland poet Pam Bell, with whom Chatwin stayed on the last leg of his second and final journey to Australia. ‘There was warmth in his postcards,’ she said. ‘You felt he really wanted to bring you up to date. People very often say they thought of you and it’s just a skim, but with Bruce, you did feel that for some minutes he cared about you.’ He posted a card to the classical historian Robin Lane Fox, whose ancestor General Augustus Pitt Pivers had amassed a collection of priceless Benin Bronzes seized by a British