Profile of Bruce Chatwin on Famous Like Me

Bruce Charles Chatwin (May 13, 1940 - January 18, 1989) was a British novelist and travel writer.

Chatwin was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire. He spent his early childhood living in West Heath in Birmingham (then in Warwickshire), where his father had a Law practice. He was educated at Marlborough College, in Wiltshire.

In 1958, Chatwin joined the London art auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's impressionism expert. He later became a director of the company. However, he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. An ophthalmologist assured him that nothing was seriously wrong, but suggested that he might stop looking so closely at painting and turn his attention to "horizons"; Chatwin, needing little excuse, headed for to the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest instead to archaeology, quitting his post at Sotheby's in June 1966.

Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology in October of the same year. However, despite winning the Wardrop Prize for the best first year's work, he found the rigour of academic archaeology tiresome, and spent only two years in the city, leaving without taking a degree.

In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills and he traveled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as Andre Malraux, in France, and Nadezhda Mandelshtam, in the Soviet Union.

Chatwin interviewed the ninety-three-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of Patagonia which she had painted. "I've always wanted to go there," Bruce told her. "So have I," she replied. "Go there for me." He set out almost immediately for South America and when he got there severed himself from the newspaper with a telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia".

He spent six months there, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977), which established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region came forward to contradict the events that were depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters that Chatwin reported as true, were alleged to be just fiction.

Later works included a study of the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, for which he traveled to Ouidah, an old slave town in Africa and then to Bahia in Brazil, where the slaves were sold. For The Songlines, Chatwin went to Australia to develop the thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. In What Am I Doing Here?, (1989), he wrote about his friend for over 20 years, Howard Hodgkin. Utz, his last book, was a fictional take on the obsession which leads people to collect. Set in Prague, it is the story of a man obsessed with porcelain. He is a collector who views his life through the lens of beautiful objects. The story is believed to be based on fact and in 2004 a woman, the housekeeper in Chatwin's story, came forward with the story that the Meissen figures, featured in the book, had not been destroyed, but in fact kept by her and saved.

Chatwin is much admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been strongly criticized for his fictionalized anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognized themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Many of the Aborigines he described in Songlines felt betrayed by Chatwin and pointed out that he did not spend much time with them. Hodgkin also claimed the book Chatwin wrote about him was inaccurate.

Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin at age twenty-five married Elizabeth Chanler whom he knew at Sotheby's. He was bisexual throughout his entire married life, a circumstance that Elizabeth knew and accepted. They had no children, and after fifteen years of marriage, she asked for a separation and sold their farmhouse in Gloucestershire. However, towards the end of his life they reconciled.

Throughout his life, Chatwin was, as well as a respected writer and journalist, also a well-known socialite. His circle of friends extended far and wide and he was reknowned for accepting hospitality and patronage from a powerful set of friends and allies. Penelope Betjeman - wife of the poet laureate John Betjeman - showed him the border country of Wales, and thereby helped to contribute to the gestation of the book that would become On the Black Hill. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat. Later, he visited Patrick Leigh-Fermor, in his house near Kardamyli, in the Peloponnese.

In the late 1980s, Chatwin developed AIDS. He was one of the first high-profile sufferers of the disease in Britain and although he hid the illness - passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat - it was a poorly-kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and deteroriating rapidly Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house that belonged to the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.

A memorial was held in the Russian Orthodox Church in West London on the same day that a fatwa was announced on Salman Rushdie, a guest in the crowd. Paul Theroux, Chatwin's one-time friend and fellow-writer, wrote about this event in an issue of Granta, condemning Chatwin, also, for failing to acknowledge that the disease he was dying of, was AIDS.

His ashes were scattered by a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese near to the home of his one-time mentor, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.

List of works

• In Patagonia 1977
• The Viceroy of Ouidah 1980
• On The Black Hill 1982
• The Songlines 1987
• Utz 1988
• What Am I Doing Here? 1989
• Photographs and Notebooks 1993
• Anatomy of Restlessness 1997
• Winding Paths 1998

Books on Bruce Chatwin

• Susannah Clapp, With Chatwin, Portrait of a Writer ISBN 0099733714
• Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin, Vintage (2000) ISBN 1860465447

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