Thursday, June 4, 2009

Bruce Chatwin’s Excellent Adventure






Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977), one of the benchmarks of "creative non-fiction," considered by some to be the best travel book ever written, is one of the greatest adventure stories I have ever read.



And it's the only great adventure story which would never make a movie.



The premise is high-concept enough. Chatwin remembers from childhood a long-lost piece of skin from a mylodon (giant sloth) sent to his grandmother by her uncle Charley Milward, a seaman who settled in Patagonia, the southernmost tip of South America. One day, Chatwin decides to trek his way through Argentina and Chile to find Milward's home and, hopefully, another bit of mylodon skin. Along the way he finds Butch Cassidy's log cabin, the prisons and graveyards of revolutionaries, the most spectacular rivers and mountains and glaciers known to man, and in the end, well…



But this is not a movie. For one thing, Chatwin's quest is NOT IMPORTANT. He didn't even like to think of In Patagonia as a travel book, calling it instead a long meditation on nomadism and Cain and Abel, a story of wanderers looking for a home. More time is spent documenting the lives of the people he meets, almost none of them native South Americans, mostly Scottish farmers with a few cranky Boers and faded Swedish sopranos and promiscuous English female birdwatchers and very laid-back American hippies for good measure.



There is no narrative. Chatwin's inspirations were Osip Mandelstam's elliptical Journey to Armenia and the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The 97 chapters in less than 200 pages are quick, spur-of-the-moment impressions and character sketches, with even a beaten-down bartender who gives Chatwin directions getting a full paragraph. Right before the climax, he breaks off for twelve chapters about Milward, some taken verbatim from his own unpublished memoirs. All of this is for the reader's benefit. I don't know, as Paul Theroux complained (and he LOVED the book), how exactly Chatwin got from one place to another most of the time, but I think I know now what it's like to walk down a lonely road in the middle of Argentina for two days with no sign of human life, only the occasional sheep and a wind so powerful you hear anything and everything in its roar. I think I know why a quiet, strong man can commit suicide fifty years after one momentous event in his life. I think I know what pushes people to try to live a life of extremities in a world dominated by the ordinary. I think I know a little more about human vanity and cruelty and self-destruction…and goodness and spirit. All through honest, direct writing.



Chatwin is not your ideal protagonist. He is nearly invisible in the book. He leaves out the loquacious, persuasive, ex-Sotheby's director side of himself which charmed everyone he met…then riled up people who couldn't stand reading about themselves in a way which hit close to home. And as his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare (also author of The Dancer Upstairs) points out, he leaves out being arrested by the Chilean police in the Pinochet regime. And, when he talks about his encounter with a young piano prodigy named Anselmo, that there was some seduction involved. (Though Chatwin was married, he kept his active homosexuality discreet.) He even once told his agent that he was surprised just how few lies he actually told in the manuscript…his later, equally glorious The Songlines, about his travels in the Australian Outback, would be attacked for untruthfulness, which does NOT take away from its pleasures.



In Patagonia is not your typical excellent adventure. What it is, is Great Literature. I could spend a year analyzing the structure and the recurring themes…there are recurring hints of trying to find a last bastion of sanity in a world being pushed over the edge by ideology, and a deeply sexual undercurrent runs through so many stories (both gay and straight). And the writing itself…I do not have my copy on me right now, so I cannot directly quote Chatwin's poetic sentences, the way he transitions from one paragraph or story to another, but I do remember how he describes hearing of nuclear weapons at school and at "cobalt bomb" only being able to think about his grandmother's cobalt-colored paintings of beautiful boys and beautiful saints…of how a young man whose greatest passion is his truck fails to repair it, the lesson being, "never kick the woman you love"…of how Chatwin finds a colony of penguins, "apart from an albatross, the one bird I'd never want to kill," mixing with eleven thousand nuns on an island named after virgins, the "black and white, black and white, black and white." (You don't kill a penguin because an English captain in the 18th century had his men club 2,00 penguins to death for food as they crossed the Atlantic…the penguins carried worms which ate everything from the wood of the boats to live human flesh.)



Bruce Chatwin wrote novels, articles, and photo books, as well as those two masterpieces, before dying of AIDS at age 48. He at times claimed he had gotten the virus from a gang rape in Dahomey…or from Robert Mapplethorpe's lover. He once told Jorge Luis Borges that he would rather have a volume of his short stories on a trip than a toothbrush, to which the ancient Argentine responded, "how unhygienic."



I wish he had told more stories, true or false.

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