Barely a Book Club #4: Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia
There’s a startling moment very early in Werner Herzog’s Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin where the director’s camera captures a stark image of a shipwreck somewhere on the coast of Tierra del Fuego. The film cuts to another image of the the same ship, identically framed, but in black and white, this one taken four decades earlier by Chatwin himself.
Almost nothing has changed; everything has changed. Chatwin died of AIDS-related complications in 1989, and the film is Herzog’s attempt to retrace some of Chatwin’s journeys. And that is what we also will do, in our own particular way, in this phase of Barely a Book Club.
Our next selection is 1977’s In Patagonia.
Who was Bruce Chatwin?
“He collected people just as he collected objects—and ideas and words,” says art historian Hugh Honour in Nicholas Shakespeare’s 1999 eponymous biography. “He was fascinated by the idea of the Schatzkammer, those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collections of natural and artificial curiosities and his own ‘collection’, which mostly remained in his head, rather resembled them. His mind was filled with an extraordinary jumble of the abstruse, the exotic, the savage and the sophisticated.”
And Susan Sontag: “He was amazing to look at. There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthral. Your stomach just drops to your knees, your heart skips a beat, you're not prepared for it. I saw it in Jack Kennedy. And Bruce had it. It isn't just beauty, it's a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.”
And Salman Rushdie: “He was one of the two funniest people I've known1. He was so colossally funny you'd be on the floor with pain. When his stories hit their stroke, they could simply destroy you.”
Later in Herzog’s documentary, Nicholas Shakespeare proposes a motto for the writer. Holding up the last remaining object from a Victorian-style cabinet of curiosities that had fascinated Chatwin as a child, a porcelain figure of a pot-bellied Victorian gentleman, he reads aloud the inscription, “I am starting for a long journey.”
Chatwin’s journeys were extensive, but his career was short; short and incandescent. In Patagonia, his first book, was published in 1977 to wide acclaim. He would live only 12 more years, and publish only five more books. Each was a product of restless searching, travelling, story-collecting. I was first introduced to his work by my friend Adam Leith Gollner, who gifted me with a copy of Utz, a story of a Czechoslovakian porcelain collector consumed by his obsessions. (Another, The Viceroy of Ouidah, would be adapted by Herzog into Cobra Verde.)
Chatwin was close friends with Herzog, and they shared a particular sensibility and approach to what some people would call “the truth.” Herzog is fond of deploring “the truth of accountants” in interviews; that is to say, a strict adherence to verifiable events. Chatwin himself would be the the subject of much criticism after his death for the same. It should be said that this general reaction was also coloured by the posthumous revelation of his bisexuality and that he had died from AIDS, a fact he had concealed while he was alive. This attitude now seems to me as much more shameful than Chatwin’s own reticence.
In Nomad, Chatwin biographer Shakespeare says something like, “people said Chatwin told half-truths, but he really told the truth and a half.” (I think you could describe our previous selection Hav in similar terms.) In Patagonia should be read with this in mind, as much an exploration of Chatwin’s “inner landscapes” as the land he traversed in the mid-1970s.
(Well, maybe not as much—much of what he wrote would be more or less verified by Shakespeare. But allow for a little bit of imaginative work in the retelling.)
Chatwin was in his late 30s when he decamped for Argentina, having had a previous, successful career at Sotheby’s auction house—where he presumably honed his storytelling skills in presenting artifacts to prospective bidders. By the 1970s, though, he had switched to journalism, and the legend has it he sent, out of the blue, a telegram to the Sunday Times that read merely, “GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS.” (According to Shakespeare’s biography, it was actually a slightly more verbose letter, but the telegram made a better story, so that was the one Chatwin would tell in later years.)
Why Patagonia? I’ll let Chatwin explain his own reasons in the book; they involve a “brontosaurus skin” in his grandmother’s possession that fascinated him since childhood. Despite being an avowed lover of all things Argentine, I was actually not very familiar with the region before I started reading the book.
What I found—and continue to find—in the book was a wild region, seemingly barren in landscape but populated with outcasts, dreamers, anachronisms. Welsh-speaking farmers, pretender kings, anarchists, the real-life Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the many indigenous tribes that still populate the huge area. No brontosaurus, but something almost as huge and and interesting. Chatwin takes us on a journey through a landscape that is as much imaginary as real, a perfect analog his writing.
Told in 93 concise, snappy chapters, it is proving a joy to read, and I want to leave most of its pleasures for you to discover. Take your time; let’s reconvene in August to discuss. I may send out some Chatwin-related material in the meantime. As always, please try and source the book from an independent bookseller, local if you can!
Architect John Pawson:
The writer Bruce Chatwin was an early client and the modest apartment of 45 square metres in Eaton Place whose layout he commissioned is referred to in his essay, ‘A place to hang your hat’. Chatwin’s father had been in the Royal Navy and his brief was for the apartment to be as simple and spare as a ship’s cabin, because that was how he wanted to live.
Special thanks to Zev Moses for the recommendation. If you like what you read here, please tell a friend or subscribe below. Barely a Book Club is a spinoff of , which you can also subscribe to separately if you please.
1 Who is the other?? Please send any clues my way.