I was born in the early eighties, so by the time I started reading critically, Bruce Chatwin had become received wisdom. His writing was established. I was surprised to hear what he seemed to have meant to his contemporaries:
“No writer has meant as much to my generation. . . In Margaret Thatcher’s ropy aviary of provincial jays, squabbling finches and ‘worthy’ sparrows, Bruce Chatwin has been our bird of paradise, solitary and unpredictable in his apparitions, grand and electric in his markings.”
So says Andrew Harvey in his 1987 New York Times review of The Songlines. I hadn’t realized that Chatwin had been so dazzlingly new. A post on the NY Times Review of Books blog from July 2012 has Rory Stuart saying much the same thing; that Chatwin made English travel writing cool for his generation, that he freed them in important ways. He goes on to then say how inspired he was by The Songlines as a young man – so inspired that he took to a walking journey of his own after reading the book in the late 1980’s; 18 months by foot across Asia. He was shocked to find walking was not transcendent, a promise he had taken from Chatwin’s suggestion that we as a species are born to migrate:
“I experienced not an unfurling discovery, but harsh disconnected fragments: the chafe of the pack, a pain in the knee; I worried about the next meal, or the route. It was often repetitive, boring, and frustrating, and difficult to grasp what people were saying, even when I knew the words.”
His surprise was my second surprise. It’s not fair to criticize the fantasies of other people’s youth (my own, far more stupid, far less constructive adventures will hopefully all one day be available in print), but that he should have been so shocked to discover that traveling all day by foot is not romantic, but painful and dirty, and in some small way hold it against Chatwin’s text, does amaze. Both men give the impression of having had fairy dust blown into their eyes by Chatwin’s writing. I wonder, though, how much of this fantasy was there in the text, and how much they brought with them in the form of fawning adoration for Chatwin the writer. I take this as a cautionary tale both as a reader and as a writer. Not because I worry that some day I’ll write so brilliantly that young Englishmen will need to plug their ears with wax before reading my books to keep from jumping out of windows, but because I don’t think either reaction was part of Chatwin’s project with this (or probably any) book.
Chatwin fictionalized parts of The Songlines. From what I could uncover, he perpetrated two fictions: he collapsed two different visits to Australia separated by more than a year into a single, fictional visit, and he masked two real people (Toly Sawenko and Salman Rushdie) behind a fictional biography, a philosophical bush-whacker named Arkady. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the perils of this fictionalization in regards to dialogue – the temptation to put words in the mouths of a fictional person, or dress up the words of the actual person the character is based on, must be too great to resist. I barely resisted doing this as a journalist. What I hadn’t thought about was how intoxicating this could be for the reader; to believe that such a trip could happen and had happened, that such conversations could be and were had, that there was ever a man as erudite as the in-text persona of Bruce Chatwin.
On top of these fictions, there is also the meta-fiction of the fragmented journal entries; Stewart describes it this way: “Everything, from Aboriginal myths to childhood memories and adult encounters, is fixed, placed, and overdetermined.” I think it’s easier to just say that, with careful cherry-picking, a grand narrative can be read across any selection of history or literature. In a way, the journal excerpts are Chatwin’s own songline through history, his search for the first ancestor. This is how I read them; like a prose poem, or a lyrical assemblage essay. I read them as artifice, as construction, and I suppose that’s what everyone means by calling this book postmodern. As I read, I decided the best comparison for the book I could draw was to poetry, not fiction, and certainly not travel writing or literary journalism. This was not a critical reaction, it simply seemed the most reasonable. But, from these reviewers, I’m beginning to get a sense of the danger of such an approach to nonfiction.
As with poetry, Chatwin writes with pin-prick precision. Again as with poetry, this renders all of the research invisible; the research is folded into the text and not, as is so often the convention in nonfiction, brought up as the voice of ‘research’. Here’s an example:
“The butcher birds were silent. Sweat poured over my eyelids so that everything seemed blurred and out of scale. I heard the clatter of loose stones along the bank, and looked up to see a monster approaching.
It was the giant lace-monitor, the lord of the mountain, Perenty himself (253).”
I can see why young writers would go mad (indeed, I was humbled by passages like these). You can’t even tell he did the research; he just knows exactly what he is looking at, or seems to. Where some writers might be tempted to give more information from their research – a dramatic tidbit about butcher birds, for instance – Chatwin holds back. Like a poet, he lets the specific word carry all the weight without nonfictional exposition. I imagine him taking his notes there in the sand: “birds: motley grey wings, white breasts. They went silent in the trees. Then the lizard came down the slope. Large, a diamond-shaped snout. Could it be the perenty?” Chatwin possesses a vast vocabulary of the physical world; he knows an escarpment, a scree, can tell a bank from a slope. But I am certain he supplements these with research, and after reading The Songlines, I am convinced it’s a combination of on the spot note-taking and detailed enquiry later.
It’s the trick of his writing that readers as lulled into a belief that all of this knowledge just hovers around his head. I applaud the poem-like sparseness, the refusal to allow the extra research to creep in to the text. He does, however, also construct his narrative in an intentionally misleading way. He recalls, for example, a visit to naturalist Konrad Lorenz. On his way in, he has a brief exchange with Lorenz’s wife, who is busy gardening. Chatwin writes it thusly: “We made polite conversation about the difficulty of propagating violets,” (121). I can hear the dew-eyed readers now: ‘He can even speak to flower cultivation! Is there anything this man does not know?!?’ Chatwin’s oblique phrasing and lofty diction invites this interpretation, to be sure. Like a name-dropper at a party, he obfuscates the actual situation by leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. But such an exchange could easily have been completely one-sided; Mrs. Lorenz could have gone on about the difficulties she was having, gently prodded forward by Chatwin’s polite (and journalistically-honed) questions and responses. That seems the most likely scenario, and it’s a situation interviewers often find themselves in. Whether or not Chatwin the man can speak intelligently about growing violets isn’t really the issue, though. What’s important is that Chatwin rendered it in a way that invites a certain reading; that of two knowing minds meeting to discourse on an esoteric topic (Chatwin’s pet vanity, one gets the sense). This is obviously no accident. Though Chatwin was often right (as a poet is right) to hide the source of his knowledge and to phrase painstaking research instead as the clear-eyed seeing of the moment, he was just as often dishonest in this second way.
It is a fine line to walk, perhaps the best lesson a writer can take from this book. Chatwin writes with perfect confidence. His descriptions are direct and unambiguous. He is not afraid to describe a character’s face as “fantastically ugly,” or call the man on the next barstool a “truckie” on sight alone. This gives his prose energy. If, like Stewart says in his review, Chatwin “does not have the anxieties of an anthropologist,” it is because he is not afraid to call a spade a spade, or to hold back the confession that he only learned this in hindsight. But this confidence is also the source of the book’s failing. It makes too perfect the fantasy.
This would be fine, except it is not fantasy; at least, the project of the book is not to slip so completely into the fantastic, and Chatwin is still bound by the autobiographic pact with his reader to “tell the truth”. The Songlines ends the only way it could: abruptly. The two halves, his journal entries and his superficial experiences with Aboriginal peoples, are all he has to work with. He plays loose with facts and forms, but is still constrained by his actual experiences – the conversations he had, the research that trails behind him like footprints. I think he would have been better served going the whole way. He should have fictionalized a narrator. His project was always liminal, on the edge of what human memory and scientific enquiry can positively say. By fixing it to a “real” point, that is the autobiographic author, he was left with an irreconcilable conflict. The problem wasn’t Arkady; it was Bruce. You could not both explore the edges of human experience and be the travel writer dropped into Australia; at least Chatwin couldn’t. We are left to wonder why he held so tightly to his writer persona while everything else slipped away.
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Bibliography:
Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Picador, 1988.
Harvey, Andrew. “Footprints of the Ancestors.” The New York Times. August 2, 1987: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/19/specials/chatwin-songlines.html
Stewart, Rory. “Walking with Chatwin.” The New York Times Review of Books, NYRblog. June 25, 2012: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/25/walking-with-bruce-chatwin/
Sebastian Bitticks - Writing 