Under the Sun Read Free Page B

raiding party in 1897. ‘Bruce wrote that if I didn’t get in touch he would launch a punitive expedition and come and take my willow-pattern cups away.’

    Chatwin is not everyone’s cup of tea. Under-appreciated for most of his writing life – more or less until the publication of The Songlines (1987) – his reputation after he died ballooned very briefly into a cult-like phenomenon, only to undergo a deflation. The nation’s favourite author, Alan Bennett, was turned into a ‘mean-minded ’ reader by Chatwin’s introduction to Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana . ‘One afternoon,’ Chatwin writes, ‘I took The Road to Oxiana into the mosque [of Shei Luft’ullah in Isfahan] and sat, cross-legged, marvelling both at the tilework and Byron’s description of it.’
    â€˜It’s the “cross-legged” I dislike,’ Bennett wrote, ‘partly because five minutes of it and I’d be crippled. But why tell us?’ Bennett recoiled from what he perceived as Chatwin’s ‘snobbishness’ towards travellers who had come after Byron, ‘the droves of young people who took to the road in the sixties and seventies’. Nor was Bennett engaged by a description of how Wali Jahn helped Chatwin to safety when he got blood-poisoning, which struck him as ‘sheer Buchan’ in ‘the permitted degree of male camaraderie, men caring and crying for each other, both nobly’.
    Barry Humphries was typical of several former friends who pretended they were no longer beguiled, writing in the Spectator in May 2006: ‘Starbucks, incidentally, is on my list of the grossly overrated, along with Bruce Chatwin, Cézanne’s Bathers , French onion soup, Bob Dylan, Niagara Falls, Citizen Kane , the Caribbean, the novels of Patrick O’Brian, Pilates, lobster, The Lord of the Rings , and most sculpture.’ And yet to a generation which has grown up grazing on the Internet, it can seem as though Chatwin, far from being overrated, has slipped back into the obscurity in which he laboured while he wrote and published his first three books. Interviewed in Australia twelve years after his death, I was asked by a puzzled young journalist: ‘Who was Bruce Chatwin?’
    My answer, roughly, was that Chatwin was a precursor of the Internet: a connective super-highway without boundaries, with instant access to different cultures. He was a storyteller of bracing prose, at once glassclear and dense, who offered a brand new way of representing travelling; further, he held out in his six books the possibility of something wonderful and unifying, inundating us with information but also the promise that we will one day get to the root of it. And I quoted his friend Robyn Davidson: ‘He posed questions that we all want answered and perhaps gave the illusion they were answerable.’
    If his questions have not gone away, nor have queries over Chatwin’s reputation. The interrogation mark omitted deliberately from the title of his last book continues to hover over the character of its author, who, on scant evidence, has been accused of making things up, of not telling the truth. He may be guilty of other sins – for example, not telling Anatoly Sawenko that he was modelling the principal character in The Songlines on him, or failing to send him a copy of the published book. And yet Chatwin was not a ‘whopper merchant’. In following his trail, I found errors, but strikingly few examples of mere invention, fewer than in the case of one or two of his disciples; or, say, Norman Lewis, who, imperishable travel-writer though he is, enjoys a reputation as a ‘truth-speaker’ that would have amused him enormously, and probably did.
    â€˜I absolutely deny to the end of my days that Bruce was a fraud, a poseur and a sham,’ says Robin Lane Fox. ‘I don’t think he was any of these things. He had sharp beams of