Prodigal Nomad

By Pico Iyer

Bruce Chatwin always seemed almost too good to be true: an "alarmingly handsome" golden boy who became a director of Sotheby's at 25, quit to go to Patagonia and came back with what the blurbists now call "the most influential travel book in the English language." In his address book Jackie Onassis sat next to an oryx herder, and in his prose he'd characteristically present himself talking to a priest while the man "knifed out the eye of a young guanaco."

In the wake of his almost insolent success--first-time author at 38 and icon of literary chic by 41--it has proved as easy to demystify him as it was to crown him. "Only the bizarre or trifling really appeals to him," a school report had complained, and Chatwin habitually acted as if there was nothing wrong with the truth that a little storytelling couldn't fix. When he lost his notes in Africa, he reported that a family of monkeys had stolen them while he'd looked on, transfixed. When he contracted AIDS, he told even his closest friends that he had an "extremely rare" fungus of the bone marrow, known to be transmitted only from China or from the corpse of a killer whale. Six months before his death, at 48, even his brother didn't know that he was mostly homosexual. He was "out to seduce everybody," as a close friend remarked, and he didn't like to fail.

Not the least of the triumphs of Nicholas Shakespeare's unimprovable (and unstoppably readable) Bruce Chatwin (Doubleday; 618 pages; $35) is that it looks unflinchingly at the vanities, lies and manipulations of a "heroically selfish" man and yet somehow makes him plausibly sympathetic. To understand is to forgive, they say in France, and by poring through the unpublished notebooks of both Chatwin and his friends, by talking to seemingly everyone who knew him and by training his novelist's urbanity on all this, Shakespeare shows how the dandified collector of odd treasures could honestly mooch off duchesses while maintaining that one should live like a Mauritanian nomad.

Chatwin's addiction to embellishment was especially strange because the facts around him were extravagant enough: born into a family of colorful semi-scoundrels, Chatwin had an ear for the obscure and an eye for the rare and the fake that were the envy of the art world. Yet swanning around New York City in dinner jacket, jeans and high-heeled yellow boots, he made people doubt what they should have believed and believe what they should have doubted.

Because Chatwin knew everyone, and because most of them are still alive, Bruce Chatwin becomes at times a group portrait of an entire world--sophisticated, cutting and articulate--that cannot stop talking, fascinated, about the Cubist harlequin who ran on self-delight. "He was constantly gyrating on his own axis," his patient and devoted wife Elizabeth said, "to cause a sensation, to find a sensation." Another friend noted, "I have seldom met a human being who exudes so much sex appeal with so comparatively little niceness."

Shakespeare takes this all in with a shadow's unobtrusiveness, never putting himself forward except to throw in a perfect quote from Henry David Thoreau or Blaise Cendrars. More even than his encompassing research, it is his undeluded sympathy that persuades us. Chatwin "needed someone both to run away from and to come back to," Shakespeare writes, with typical shrewdness, "and he found in Elizabeth that person." In the woman who was forced to work as a cashier in a Toad Hall garden center while her now famous husband gallivanted around the world collecting lovers, the author finds a hero more enduring than her lacquered Mercutio.

It is a measure of Chatwin's flamboyance that, scarcely 11 years after his death, he has already inspired two indelible biographies. Susannah Clapp's With Chatwin, of two years ago, was as sleek and elliptical and unorthodox as its subject, and gave us the man as he looked from across an editor's desk. Shakespeare, a stylish novelist with a gift for exotic locales (in the Acknowledgments he cites sources in 22 countries, from Benin to Nepal), provides every other face. The figure who emerges was a deeply solitary soul, hiding behind his exaggerated performances but genuinely driven by a vision, and elusive, perhaps, even to himself. The hope now rises that the legend can rest in peace.