In Patagonia (3 page)

The spoof was a protective device. It concealed a desire to continue his serious exploration into wandering and exile. Only this time, he intended to grapple with his theme not in the abstract terms that had suffocated
The Nomadic Alternative
, but in concrete stories.

“Your fascination is people?” asked Goni.

“Yes, in the end. It took rather a long time to discover that.”

The people Bruce would meet in Patagonia were often rootless storytellers like himself. Fugitives of justice, regime change, or simply “the coop of England.” The whole place was a magnet for those who suffered from a bad case of Baudelaire's Great Malady: Horror of One's Home. Hence the roll call of mad lingerie salesmen, maestros, autodidacts, geniuses, bandits, women with tatters of extraordinary beauty, and exiles like the Arab who “kept a sprig of mint on the bar to remind him of a home he had not seen.”

Exactly as a 34-year-old French lawyer had decreed it
res nullius
—and therefore a perfect place of which to become king—so Patagonia enticed Chatwin as a marvelous and limitless backdrop against which to play out his thesis. A theater for his own restlessness, Patagonia, he would covertly argue, was the source of everyone else's restlessness too.

Under his transforming gaze, a windswept desert of basalt pebbles and
jarilla
bushes unravels into something else. In Chatwin's Patagonia, the uniqueness of the landscape hardly comes into view. His book is largely about interiors that are elsewheres. You won't come across many Patagonian Patagonians in its pages; nor will you discover much about the author, who remains teasingly absent. “How had he travelled from here to there?” Paul Theroux wanted to know. “How had he met this or that person? Life was never so neat as Bruce made out.” Nowhere, for instance, will you find details of Chatwin's arrest by the Chilean military or his seduction of the young pianist “Anselmo”—i.e., the meat and drink of travel writers like Theroux. But you will find the Patagonian origin of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Darwin's theory of evolution, Shakespeare's Caliban, Dante's Hell, Conan Doyle's Lost World, Swift's Brobdignagians, Poe's
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
. Even the Patagonian origin of Man himself.

 

On January 21, marooned in the small village of Baja Caracolles, Chatwin wrote to his wife. He was stranded in the middle of nowhere, but he had arrived.

There is no better precis of the manuscript which he delivered to his agent in August 1976. In his four months there he had discovered Patagonia as a subject and himself as a writer.

 

“The book is extraordinary, and like nothing else—a law unto itself,” his agent wrote in a cover note to Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Maschler had no inkling that this was anything other than the nomad book. “And then I read this thing.” He describes the experience as “one of the ten most exciting events” in his publishing career: “to read this book which I have commissioned which bears no relation to what I had commissioned.”

In England, the book sold 6,000 copies and won instant praise, Graham Greene writing to say that
In Patagonia
was “one of my favourite travel books.” But its publication in America one month after winning the Hawthornden Prize eclipsed even Maschler's expectations. Chatwin's editor at Summit Press, Jim Silberman, had bought American rights for $5,000 after reading Paul Theroux's enthusiastic review in
The Times
. “It had been offered and no one had bought it. I went to a sales meeting and afterwards the head of the parent company came up and said: ‘You know there's one book on your list that's not going to sell.' I said, ‘I know which book and you're wrong.'”

One after another the critics stood up.

“Reviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out,” Chatwin wrote to Elizabeth. “Doesn't mean to say they won't come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as
Gulliver's Travels
,
Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant
, Kipling's
Letters of Travel
etc. People lose all sense of proportion.” There was even a
Rolling Stone
cartoon showing the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat. “The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor (
Boston Globe
): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his madeleine'—ENFIN somebody's got the point.”

Few showed greater enthusiasm than the French writer, and Patagonian Consul in France, Jean Raspail. He wrote “in a state of emotion” after finishing the book, bringing news of one more award. “The Patagonian consulate which represents in France the government of HM Orélie Antoine I, King of Patagonia and Araucania in 1863, has decided to award you the first great prize of Patagonian literature.”

Chatwin's first book is a literary equivalent of his grandmother's cabinet, its 93 chapters a catalog for a collection of stories gathered with a singular eye. For all his insistence that he followed a traditional form, most readers disagreed. Among booksellers it inaugurated a new category: “the new nonfiction.”

Its influences are nevertheless easy to discern. Another provisional title, “Journey to Patagonia,” acknowledges the importance of Osip Mandelstam (“one of my gods”) whose elliptical
Journey to Armenia
Chatwin had read aloud to a startled
Sunday Times
art department.

On April 14, 1979, Mandelstam's translator, Clarence Brown, wrote to ask “with a certain trepidation” whether Chatwin was aware “that the spirit of OM seems to peep out from behind this or that phrase or stroke of portraiture or landscape.” Chatwin replied by return: “Of course
Journey to Armenia
was the biggest single ingredient—more so even than met the eye. Perhaps too much so—‘skull-white cabbages etc' ... But one bit of plagiarism was quite unintentional (though indicative of the degree to which I had steeped myself in the
Journey
). Not until after I had passed the final proofs did I realise I had lifted ‘the accordion of his forehead' straight. I rang up the copy editor in a panic. She said it was too late and, besides, all writers were cribbers.”

Chatwin admitted to cribbing from other Russians. Brown's translation of
The Noise of Time
had led him to “discover” writers like Isaac Babel (“Soon afterwards I started to write”). He had “immersed” himself at the time of writing in the literature of Turgenev and Chekhov: the way Anglo-Argentines clung to their estates in order to enjoy a life in town was exactly the story of
The Cherry Orchard
.

Then there were the Americans: Edmund Wilson's travel journals,
Black Brown Red and Olive
, Gaylord Simpson's
Attending Marvels,
and, of course, Hemingway's short stories. Along with
Journey to Armenia,
Chatwin had carried
In Our Time
in his rucksack.

 

Less obvious was the influence of the French photographer Cartier-Bresson, and it was in photographic terms that Chatwin preferred to describe his odyssey to his friend Colin Thubron. “I was determined to see myself as a sort of literary Cartier-Bresson going SNAP, like that. It was supposed to be a take each time.” Stay longer and the picture would fog.

His quick snapshots—both dense and clear—had the effect of reducing his subjects to the essentials of a black-and-white portrait. “It's like looking at your passport photograph,” said David Bridges, who in the book is called Bill Phillips. “It's not flattering, but it's the truth.” Speaking of the effect
In Patagonia
had had in Patagonia, Bridges observed: “If you haven't ruffled any feathers, you certainly haven't written anything worth writing.” Bridges knew what he was talking about: his father, Lucas Bridges, was author of the first classic on Tierra del Fuego,
Uttermost Part of the Earth
. He said: “I've never known an author yet who's left a happy stream behind him. Some get on their high horse and what they get on their horse about is as ridiculous as a fish on a roof. They have illusions about themselves that a photographer hasn't.”

Down south, Chatwin certainly ruffled feathers by stripping these illusions. In the Welsh community of Gaiman, few guessed what he was up to. When they read about themselves in his book, it was as though they had been blasted by the Patagonian wind. These were private and religious farmers whose ancestors had come to Patagonia expressly to get away from the kind of Englishman represented by a young man with a socking great forehead and blue staring eyes who bowled into their village wearing green Bermuda shorts and announced himself in a ringing public-school accent as Bruce Chatwin. They were unused to scrutiny and they resented his treatment of them. Not telling them that the camera was rolling, he caught them unawares and condensed their lives into a few vivid details. In the process, some felt, he had made off with their intimate moments and preserved them behind the glass of his prose for strangers to look at. They had not had an easy life in the desert. Chatwin had described their difficulties with a twentiethcentury eye, passing swiftly through their lives and refusing to dwell. He had snatched the intimacy Borges writes of: “That kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow.” Not only that, but turned them into stories as tall as the original population, the enormous-footed Patagons: legendary Indians 11 feet high who swallowed rats without skinning them and took pleasure in the yard-long breasts of their women.