Richard Davenport-Hines
Roving Correspondent
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Selected and Edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare (Jonathan Cape 526pp £25)
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In 1963 Bruce Chatwin wrote to his mother from Herat in Afghanistan. 'The men storm about with artificial ferocity, flashing dark and disdainful glances. In fact their eyes are made up, but then the outward appearance is all important. Turbans are often yards of ice-pink silk.' Behind a street of small booths there stood a caravanserai with a hoard of American women's wear suspended and billowing out from every arch:
From Maine to Texas, from Chicago to Hollywood, the wardrobes of thousands of American ladies over forty are hanging into the breeze. Gowns that could have been worn by Mary Pickford, shiny black velvet with no back, or by Clara Bow, red lace and bead fringes, Jean Harlow, flamingo pink crepe off the shoulder with sequin butterflies on the hips, Shirley Temple, bows and pink lace, the folk-weave skirts they square-danced in, the crinolines they waltzed in, fiery sheaths they tangoed in, utility frocks they won the War in, the New Look, the A line, the H line, the X line, all are there, just waiting for some Afghan lady to descend from her mud-built mountain village and choose the dress of her dreams to be closely concealed under her yashmak.
Six years later Chatwin was in Kabul, dining with a Wellington College housemaster and his ex-pupils who were sponsored by the Anti-Slavery Society. 'No spectacle ... was more bizarre than one puffy public school master followed by three of the most exquisitely dressed and pretty and flirtatious boys, one with boots and marginally more masculine than the other two with handbags,' he told the film director James Ivory. Equipped with 'button-microphones and miniature cameras, and tins of corned beef and ... packet soups', they were investigating the supposed exchange by Chinese military officers of trafficked Czech and Hungarian women for Afghan opium, and discovering slaves where none existed.
These quotations show the best in Chatwin's character, novels and travel writings: his love of the outlandish, relish for absurd incongruity, pictorial intensity, omnium-gatherum zest, avidity for sensation - as well as his eye for artefacts, nose for duplicity and scorn for pomposity. The sequined, flamingo-pink dress concealed beneath the yashmak, the tough guys in make-up, the queens eating corned beef - all these are part of Chatwin's characteristic vision. So, too, is his excitement at hidden microphones and miniature cameras, for this is the intense, surreptitious man who once stood watching the photographer Russell Dexter screwing Rudolf Nureyev as he leant out of a London window.
These letters, selected by Chatwin's widow and his biographer, vary between the hasty, the artless and the eloquent. Their setting is equally varied: Patagonia, the Australian outback, Mayfair, Norway, Patmos, Dahomey (later Benin), Saratoga Springs. Together they give a vivid sense of a novelist with a small, exotic and distinctively crafted output, who was also an art appraiser at Sotheby's and a feature writer for The Sunday Times during its pre-Murdoch swansong. They also give tantalising glimpses of his wife Elizabeth, a Gloucestershire shepherdess, Himalaya trekker, daughter of the most WASPish of American admirals - a woman, it seems, of saintly forbearance and ironic temper. This volume will not placate the puritans, inverted snobs and agitprop gays who for twenty years have sniped at Chatwin's aesthetics, smart friends and denial of his HIV status; but it will make a feast for those who enjoy his novels or are intrigued by his milieu.
Chatwin was born in 1940, and had that sense of entitlement that characterised the baby boomers of the generation that followed him. 'The idea of a job horrifies me,' he wrote in 1972. 'One's independence is so fragile a thing and I hardly think the money matters.' When in 1982 he bought his own London base, a one-room attic in Eaton Place costing £31,000, he gave 'an enormous cheque' to the minimalist architect John Pawson - he was Pawson's first private client - and carte crème (for he insisted on off-white walls) to do up the flat. All through his life rich friends loaned him exotic hideaways in which to secrete himself and work: a clapboard cabin in an Oregon forest, a folly in the Atlas mountains, a summerhouse in the grounds of a Spanish convent, an Albany cubbyhole on Piccadilly, a seventeenth-century merchant's house built on coral on an island off the Kenyan coast, a lakeside Rajput fort in Jodhpur. This is the sort of luck that pound-a-line reviewers begrudge.
Chatwin was that familiar English middle-class phenomenon, the social climber with a taste for lowlife. In his letters one encounters art dealers with princely manners but whorish ethics, a Duchess of Westminster, a Qantas air steward, a stag-hunting Tory grandee, a Brazilian barman, and a tough, moustachioed French ex-legionnaire who bores artesian wells in Niger, always accompanied in his Land Rover by eight spindly Hausa catamites ('when I need a white one, he says, there's always the Peace Corps'). Chatwin skewers his contemporaries with mots justes: Bamber Gascoigne is 'rather silly', Salman Rushdie 'thoughtlessly cruel', George Steiner 'inclined to exaggerate', and Peter Levi 'a publicity seeker'. If Gerald Brenan, Werner Herzog and Wilfred Thesiger were among those irritated by his monomaniacal loquacity, Robin Lane Fox and Susan Sontag are a sample of those whose admiration remained unstinted. There are many delights here, including the reading list he recommended to a young writer in 1978: 'go on a course of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Maupassant, Flaubert (especially Un Coeur Simple), Isaac Bunin (whom I'll get for you), Turgenev, and among the Americans early Sherwood Anderson, early Hemingway, and Carson McCullers, especially The Ballad of the Sad Café.'
It is ten years since the publication of Nicholas Shakespeare's captivating official biography, which looked too intimidatingly detailed for some readers. Under the Sun is a scaled-down version which no one will find daunting. It is a compelling character portrait of a dazzling beauty with a polymorphous sexuality - 'he's out to seduce everybody, it doesn't matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea-cosy,' said Miranda Rothschild - who was also an egotistical dandy, a slyly boastful fabulist, the generator of romantic myths, resilient, manipulative, and single-minded in his dedication to his craft. It also provides a subtle history of underworlds, privileges, demimondes and lost places - sexual, cultural and geographic. Chatwin has been compared to Robert Byron, whose Road to Oxiana was cherished by him; to Lord Byron, whose sexual and wander lusts he shared; and even, spitefully, to Evelyn Waugh's screamer Anthony Blanche. Reading these letters, I was reminded repeatedly of another tortured fanatic in denial about his sexuality, a generator of myths about himself and a traveller in wild places with a death wish that resounded round the world: 'China' Gordon, the Victorian hero who threw away his life at Khartoum.
Richard Davenport-Hines's most recent book is 'Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough' (2008).