Anatomy of Restlessness

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

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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

 

 

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These previously neglected or unpublished Chatwin pieces – short stories, travel sketches, essays, articles and criticism—drawn from the pages of reviews, catalogues, literary journals and magazines,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.

 

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:

 

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.