BRUCE CHATWIN (1940 - 1989)
SEQUELS TO A PATAGONIAN JOURNAL.
By Buck, Daniel.
BRUCE CHATWIN'S LEGENDARY ACCOUNT
OF HIS JOURNEY THROUGH THIS REGION STILL INTRIGUES LOCALS AND VOYAGES ALIKE
WHEN HE FIRST LAID' EYES on Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia in 1996, Adrian
Gimenez Hutton had been visiting southern Argentina for more than two decades.
"I was very impressed with Chatwin's narrative style, with his way of mixing
fact and fiction, little personal anecdotes within larger histories," says
Gimenez, a Buenos Aires travel writer. A friend surprised him by saying
that the work was completely fictional, implying that Chatwin had never
set foot in Patagonia. Gimenez thought that
was impossible, that the book must reflect actual experiences. But
prompted by his friend's declaration, he decided to go see for himself.
On and off over the next couple of years, Gimenez jeeped around Patagonia,
tracing Chatwin's footsteps, visiting towns and estancias where he had
been, and interviewing the people he had interviewed. Gimenez's narrative-as
he put
it, "the journal of his journal"-aptly titled La Patagonia de Chatwin,
was published in Argentina in 1998. Chatwin had ventured to this remote
zone of Argentina and Chile's southern latitudes because of the skin of
a giant sloth, a mylodon, found in a cave
on the Last Hope Sound by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward,
a merchant-ship captain who had settled in Punta Arenas after a shipwreck.
Milward had mailed a scrap of the skin back to the family in England, and
although it was later lost, Chatwin's sight of it-"black and leathery,
with strands of coarse, reddish hair"-in a cabinet in his grandmother's
dining room had lodged in his mind. At least, that's how he recounted it
in the opening page of his first book. Elsewhere he added that he had gone
to Patagonia to free himself from the strictures of life in London and
to realize an unfulfilled desire to be a writer. Above all, he wanted to
explore not a place but an idea: nomadism.
Born in England in 1940, Chatwin studied architecture and made a stab
at acting. At age eighteen he joined Sotheby's auction house in London
where he had a meteoric career, rising from porter to director in a few
years. He left Sotheby's to study archaeology but soon signed on with the
London Sunday Times magazine. Before he died in 1989 at age forty-eight
of AIDS,
Chatwin had gone on to write three novels and The Songlines (1987),
in which he returned to the theme of wandering, recounting his excursion
to the real and dream worlds of peripatetic Australian aborigines. (Two
collections of his essays and one book of his photographs have been published
posthumously.) During his entire life he traveled incessantly-to the obvious
countries, like Italy and the United States, and the not so obvious,
like Afghanistan and Benin. Chatwin was a compulsive mover.
Susannah Clapp, who edited In Patagonia, writes that nomadism was "the biggest of Bruce Chatwin's big themes." His friend Salman Rushdie says that Chatwin's desire to write the book on nomadism was "the burden he'[d] been carrying all his writing life." Chatwin posited that nomadism has been in our DNA from the very beginning, that we are instinctively restless. At one point he declared, "All our activities are linked to the idea of journeys." (Lest anyone miss the point, he entitled the essay "It's a Nomad Nomad Nomad NOMAD World.") He also suggested that nomads survive because they have an "irreverent and timeless vitality." This idle fixe suffuses In Patagonia, the spiritual warm-up to The Songlines. In Patagonia portrays individuals at the edge of the earth. (The original title was At the End: A Journey to Patagonia.) "Once you get to Argentina," he said, "you're pretty well there, aren't you." But it was the people, not the landscape, who beckoned Chatwin. His Patagonia was not the wild, distant land of icy mountains and wind-scoured steppes populated by graceful guanacos and cute penguins that adorn Sierra Club calendars. It was the last stop of the roamers, the final destination of ancient indigenes migrating south from the Northern Hemisphere and of a latter-day diaspora-Spanish anarchists, Welsh devotees, Boer refugees, and American bandits-who arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from around the globe.
Chatwin underscored the nationality of the people he met. Whether he
named them or not (in a few cases he gave them aliases), he pegged their
ethnicity-Yugoslav, Galician, Russian, Scot, Canary Islander-to remind
readers of the urge to move, an urge that fevers mankind. Whether Chatwin's
readers picked up on his fascination with nomadism or not, they did notice
his writing. They couldn't help it: This was not your ordinary travel book.
Spanish Nobel Laureate Camilo Jose Cela coined the
word vagabundaje, for the picaresque travel book, though for Cela the
traveler is front and center, whereas Chatwin evaporates. In Patagonia,
an almost plotless, loose skein of ninety-seven numbered sketches or episodes,
displays elements of the picaresque novel. (There is no table of contents
or index, though an appendix lists a couple of dozen sources for aspects
of
Patagonian history touched on in the book.) Chatwin did not recommend
hotels with fluffy pillows, pass on the names of favorite restaurants,
or suggest scenic routes. What he did was to sketch portraits, and like
all artists, he subtracted and added. The pictures he created are vivid.
Recalling his visit to Sonny Urquhart's farm near Bahia Blanca, for example,
Chatwin wrote:
"The Scot called the dogs off and led the way down a narrow green corridor
into a tall, darker green room lit by a single bulb. Round the fire were
some Victorian easy chairs with flat wooden armrests. Damp whisky glasses
had bitten rings into the French polish. High on the walls were prints
of willowy gentlemen and ladies in crinolines.
"Sonny Urquhart was a hard stringy man with blond hair swept back and
parted in the center. He had moles on his face and a big Adam's apple.
The back of his neck was criss-crossed with lines from working hatless
in the sun. His eyes were watery blue, and rather bloodshot." Ernest Hemingway
was one of Chatwin's favorite writers. Like him, he had a knack for capturing
snapshots, lean and quick, of places he had seen: "Las Pampas was twenty
miles on from Rio Pico, the last settlement before
the frontier. To the north towered El Cono, an extinct volcano of bone-white
screes and brighter snows. In the valley the river ran fast and green over
white stones. Each log cabin had a potato patch, barricaded from cattle
by stakes and thorns."
Chatwin dubbed his book "cubist." He traveled and observed, making
sardonic, witty, and occasionally moralizing comments as he went. He narrated,
but he was not necessarily telling the literal truth in every instance;
he was creating his own Patagonian journal, written as if he had seen it
all.
The eighteenth-century post-road inspector Concolorcorvo wrote in El
Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers Between Buenos Aires and
Lima, that if "the words traveler and liar are synonymous, then the reading
of fables should be preferred to that of history." His point was that much
history is based on the accounts of travelers. "Granted, then, the uncertain
nature of history," he continued, "I say again that the reading and
study of fables ought to be preferable inasmuch as, being the offspring
of free and unfettered imagination, they offer more inspiration and pleasure."
A traveler and a fabulist, Chatwin might have agreed. Responding to
a query about his book, he said, "As you can read into the text of In Patagonia:
this was not serious history!" When an interviewer asked where "the division
between fiction and nonfiction" lay in his work, he replied, "I don't think
there is one. There definitely should be, but I don't know where it is.
I've
always written very close to the line. I've tried applying fiction
techniques to actual bits of travel. I once made the experiment of counting
up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia. It wasn't, in fact, too
bad; there weren't too many." One critic called him "the best travel writer
of his generation," but Chatwin perversely denied that In Patagonia was
a travel book, although
that's where bookshops invariably shelve it. "It always irritated me,"
he complained, "to be called a travel writer." His obituary in the New
Fork Times identified him as "one of his generation's ranking travel writers,"
adding that he was also "an elegant literary craftsman and storyteller."
He was all three.
Whatever the validity of his nomadic theory (many of the people he met found themselves in Patagonia as a result not of their DNA but of wars, economic travails, and religious upheavals in their homelands), Chatwin's In Patagonia impelled many a traveler to venture into deepest Argentina and Chile.
But, when In Patagonia, first published in England in 1977, made its way to Argentina and Chile it met a chilly reception that had nothing to do with the climate, but everything to do with its author's penchant for mixing literary fancy with historical facts: He highlighted the strange and the unconventional-sometimes inventing the strange and the unconventional, and describing a few locals in less than handsome terms. In a few cases, he gave his subjects thinly veiled pseudonyms.
Patagonian ire was still in evidence when English journalist John Pilkington came calling some fifteen years after Chatwin. The descendent of one English estancia owner, whom Chatwin had implied had participated in the hunting of Indians in 1900, reported having considered suing the writer. The hunting of Indians by estancieros, of course, was not unheard of, so Chatwin might have been close to the mark.
In her 1997 memoir, With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer, Clapp explains that Chatwin's sketches are idiosyncratic short stories: "Nobody reading In Patagonia could mistake it for an attempt to give a comprehensive or balanced view of its characters: it is a series of quick-fire, impressionistic pen-portraits written by someone who is clearly drawn to the unexpected, the self-contradictory, the sharp edged-and who likes to turn a tale in a small space."
In a 1980 interview, Chatwin told Argentine journalist Uki Goni that
his "temperament" was towards "being entertained and seeing an opportunity
when you met one of these characters and pursue it. The whole of this journey
was like a sort of pursuit, not only for this ridiculous piece of skin
... but as it developed it became chasing one stow, or one set of characters,
after
another."
By the time Gimenez got on the trail, some of the characters Chatwin
had sketched had died. Among those still living, some had strong opinions
about In Patagonia, even if they'd never read it. But Gimenez sensed a
mellowing on the subject of Chatwin's sparky imagination because, the gospel
truth or not, it was generating tourism. He was not such a blackguard after
all. In
any event, Gimenez found that though Chatwin's poetic license-takings
had attained almost legendary proportions, they were not as frequent as
was believed. (As Chatwin himself put it, "there weren't too many.") Gimenez
believes "what harmed the most was not what was written but how it was
written ... a description of a person in one or two paragraphs-as occurs
in the majority of cases-is always partial, and then it would be very
difficult for someone to conform to what was written about them."
Whatever the Patagonians may think, Chatwin's book is the most widely
read work about South America's bright-skied south. Judged on its own terms-that
is, as a collage of personal, highly charged, and sometimes invented impressions
of the people and places of the zone-it is a literary triumph. And it has
won a permanent audience, remaining in print almost a quarter century after
its first appearance. Dusty sun-burned backpackers troop to Patagonia like
breviary-toting pilgrims, clutching Chatwin's now classic nontravel book.
If Chatwin's Patagonia is not precisely there, that's beside the point
.
Further reading: Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977), Anatomy of Restlessness
(1996), and What Am I Doing Here? (1989); Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux,
Patagonia Revisited (1986); Adrian Gimenez Hutton, La Patagonia de Chatwin
(1998); John Pilkington, An Englishman in Patagonia (1991); Roberto Hosne,
Barridos por el viento: Historias de la Patagonia desconocida (1997); Susannah
Clapp, With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer (1997); and Nicholas Shakespeare,
Bruce Chatwin (1999).
Americas (English Edition), Vol.52, No.2
COPYRIGHT 2000 Organization of American States.
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