‘What’s that?’
‘A piece of brontosaurus.’
... Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin.
The scrap of “brontosaurus” was in fact cut from the hide of a mylodon, or Giant Sloth, and Chatwin’s parents had thrown it out when they moved to Stratford in 1961, but he had never lost sight of its provenance. The safest place in the event of nuclear war, the place where he planned to escape from his Shropshire boarding school, Patagonia was the habitat of several tribes Chatwin had studied at Edinburgh. Among the few lectures to stir his blood were those of Charles Thomas on the Welsh in Chubut and on Charles Darwin’s shocked reaction to the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego. In December 1972 the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray had rekindled Chatwin’s “childhood infatuation”—after visiting Gray in her Paris apartment, he wrote to thank her for “the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon I have spent in years.” Gray, then 93, had on her wall a large map of Patagonia that she had painted in gouache. Chatwin pointed to it: “That’s one of the places I’ve always wanted to go to.” It was Gray’s ambition too. If she were young again she would try to see Cape Horn. “Allez-y pour moi, go on my behalf.” He later said: “It was almost one of the things that decided me in fact to go.”
Chatwin didn’t mind giving the illusion that he had gone to Patagonia for four months and dashed off a classic. But he took with him a body of knowledge that he had cultivated for years. Although In Patagonia would become an overnight success, it had been an arduous apprenticeship. Haunting Chatwin on his journey south was “the rotten experience” of The Nomadic Alternative , the book on which he’d spent several years and which his editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, had pronounced unpublishable after reading 50 pages. (“They were terrible. They were completely sterile. They were a chore to read and I imagine a chore to write.”) This time Chatwin determined to keep silent until he was finished. “The fatal thing is ever to tell anyone about what you’re really writing till it’s done because (a) you don’t do it and (b) you get people vaguely worked up about it and they try to tell you what to do.”
But what was he writing? The question would vex editors and critics. Just as Patagonia is not a place with an exact border, so Chatwin’s “peculiarly dotty book,” as he called it, would not fall into an easy category. Was it travel writing? Was it historical fiction? Was it reportage? And was it true—and, if not, did it matter?
In advance of its American publication, Chatwin drafted a letter to his agent, requesting that In Patagonia be taken out of the travel category. He wanted the blurb on the American edition to convey four points, in his opinion the key to understanding the book:1. “Patagonia is the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origins. It is therefore a symbol of his restlessness. From its discovery it had the effect on the imagination something like the Moon, but in my opinion more powerful.”
2. The form described in the Daily Telegraph as “wildly unorthodox” was in fact as old as literature itself: “the hunt for a strange animal in a remote land.”
3. He preferred to leave the reader with the choice of two journeys: one to Patagonia in 1975, the other “a symbolic voyage which is a meditation on the restlessness and exile.”
4. “All the stories were chosen with the purpose of illustrating some particular aspect of wandering and/or of exile: i.e., what happens when you get stuck. The whole should be an illustration of the Myth of Cain and Abel.”
His letter makes clear that Chatwin had come to Argentina with a fixed idea: to retrieve from his abandoned nomad manuscript (“that wretched book,” Elizabeth called it) the idea of the Journey as Metaphor, in particular Lord Raglan’s paradigm of the young hero who sets off on a voyage and does battle with a monster. Such journeys are the meat and drink of our earliest stories, he told the Argentinian journalist Uki Goni—an “absolute constant, a universal in literature.” He wanted to write a spoof of this form. Where Jason had sought the Golden Fleece, he would seek the animal in his grandmother’s cabinet. And if possible find a replacement scrap.
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.
Dearest E
I have begun letters I don’t know how many times and then abandoned them. Now I am stuck, for 3 days at least, because the justice of the peace, to whom I confided some of my things, has run off with the key.
Writing this in the archetypal Patagonian scene, a boliche or roadman’s hotel at a cross-roads of insignificant importance with roads leading all directions apparently to nowhere. A long mint green bar with blue green walls and a picture of a glacier, the view from the window a line of lombardy poplars tilted about 20° from the wind and beyond the rolling grey pampas (the grass is bleached yellow but it has black roots, like a dyed blonde) with clouds rushing across it and a howling wind.
On no previous journey am I conscious of having done more. Patagonia is as I expected but more so, inspiring violent outbursts of love and hate. Physically it is magnificent, a series of graded steps or barrancas which are the cliff lines of prehistoric seas and unusually full of fossilised oyster shells 10” diam. In the east you suddenly confront the great wall of the cordillera with bright turquoise lakes (some are milky white and others a pale jade green) with unbelievable colours to the rocks (in the pre-cordillera). Sometimes it seems that the Almighty has been playing at making Neapolitan ice-cream. Imagine climbing (as I did) a cliff face 2000 feet high alternatively striped vanilla, strawberry and pistachio in bands of 100 feet or more. Imagine an upland lake where the rock face on one side is bright purple, the other bright green, with cracked orange mud and a white rim. You have to be a geologist to appreciate it. Then I know of no place that you are aware of prehistoric animals. They sometimes s
eem more alive than the living. Everybody talks of pleisiosaurus, or ichtyosaurus. I met an old gentleman who was born in Lithuania who found a dinosaur the other day and didn’t think much of it. He thought much more of the fact he had a pilot’s license, at the age of 85 being probably the oldest solo flyer in the world. When he was younger he tried to be a bird man.
I have been caught in the lost beast fervour and 2 days ago scaled an appalling cliff to the bed of an ancient lake ... and there discovered to my inexpressible delight a collection of fragments of the carapace of the glyptodon. The glyptodon has if anything replaced the mylodon in my affections—there are about 6 whole ones in the Museum La Plata—an enormous armadillo up to 9-10 feet long, each scale of its armour looking like a Japanese chrysanthemum. The entertaining fact about my discovery, and one that no archaeologist will believe, is that in the middle of one scatter of bones were 2 obsidian knives quite definitely man-made. Now Man is often thought to have done away with the Glyptodon, but there is no evidence of his having done so.
Not an Indian in sight. Sometimes you see a hawkish profile that seems to be a Tehuelche i.e. old Patagonian, but the colonisers did a very thorough job, and this gives the whole land its haunted quality.
Animal life is not extraordinary, except for the guanaco which I love. The young are called chulengos and have the finest fur, a sort of mangy brown and white. There is a very rare deer called a Huemeul and the Puma (which is commoner than you would think but difficult to see). Otherwise pinchi the small armadillo, hares everywhere, and a most beguiling skunk, very small, black with white stripes; far from spraying me one came and took a crust from my hand.
Birds are wonderful. Condors in the cordillera, a black and white vulture, a beautiful grey harrier (also amazingly tame), and the black necked swan which has my prize for the best bird in the world. On the mud flats are flamingoes—these are a kind of orange colour—the Patagonian goose inappropriately called an abutarda, and every kind of duck.
You would think from the fact that the landscape is so uniform and the occupation (sheep-farming) also, that the people would be correspondingly dull. But I have sung “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in Welsh in a remote chapel on Christmas Day, have eaten lemon curd tartlets with an old Scot (who has never been to Scotland) but has made his own bagpipes and wears the kilt to dinner. I have stayed with a Swiss ex-diva who married a Swedish trucker who lives in the remotest of all Patagonian valleys, decorating her house with murals of the lake of Geneva. I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy and other members of the Black Jack Gang, I have drunk to the memory of Ludwig of Bavaria with a German whose house and style of life belongs rather to the world of the Brothers Grimm. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs. I have seen Charlie Milward’s estancia and lodged with the peons drinking mate till 3am. (Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). I have visited a poet-hermit who lived according to Thoreau and the Georgics. I have listened to the wild outpourings of the Patagonian archaeologist, who claims the existence of a. the Patagonian unicorn b. a protohominid in Tierra del Fuego (Fuego pithicus patensis) 80 cm high.
There is a fantastic amount of stuff for a book—from the Anarchist (Yes, Bakunin inspired) Rebellion of 1920, to the hunting of the Black Jack Gang, Cassidy etc., the temporary kingdom of Patagonia, the lost city of the Caesars, the travels of Musters, the hunting of Indians etc. Everything I need.”
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 f
og.
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.