Barely a Book Club #6: Goodbye Patagonia
This is the third, and final, installment of our book club’s series on Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. You can read the first post here.
In 2019, Rough Guide writer Stephen Keeling revisited some of the locations Bruce Chatwin had so memorably written about some forty years earlier.
What Keeling discovered were places changed in major, but predictable ways, now moulded to the familiar shapes of international leisure travel.
Chatwin finds Ushuaia, the world’s most southernmost city, especially dispiriting, full of “blue-faced inhabitants [who] glared at strangers unkindly”. Today this town is perhaps the most transformed of any he visited, a booming tourist depot serving European and American cruises and adventure travellers by the Airbus load – the main drag heaves with shops, Irish pubs, cool cafés and North Face outlets. English is spoken everywhere.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about Jan Morris’s Hav of the Myrmidons, reconfigured by vague political upheavals but with the same, grimly cheerful result visible decades after her first “visit.”
Chatwin’s Patagonia is a kind of real-life Hav; an obscure, almost forgotten region where various stub-ends of European culture have been left to smoulder: Welsh sheep farmers, Jewish revolutionaries, endangered languages, dispossessed nobility and/or pretenders to various thrones.
Like when I re-read Hav, I found myself jotting down the names of people and places I’d never heard of before, personalities sometimes wildly famous in their day, now forgotten to most. Henri Grien, aka Louis de Rougemont, explorer, bestselling author and eventually unmasked fabulist who eventually toured music halls as “The Greatest Liar on Earth.” José Ruiz y Blasco, failed artist and eventually, father of Pablo Picasso. General Juan Manuel de Rosas, proto-Fascist governor of Argentina, still an icon to the country’s far-right.
So many of the individual stories, the brief portraits of characters who are seen once and never again, will stay with me for a long time. I loved the miniature travelogue of one Miss Starling, an English woman obsessed with flowering shrubs:
She had seen the African veld aflame with flowers; and the lilies and madrone forests of Oregon; the pine woods of British Columbia; and the miraculous unhybridized flora of Western Australia, cut off by desert and sea. The Australians had such funny names for their plants: Kangaroo Paw, Dinosaur Plant, Gerardtown Wax Plant and Billy Black Boy.
She had seen the cherries and Zen gardens of Kyoto and the autumn colour in Hokkaido. She loved Japan and the Japanese. She stayed in youth hostels that were lovely and clean. In one hostel she had a boyfriend young enough to be her son. She gave him extra English lessons, and, besides, the young liked older people in Japan.
But it is a realer place than Hav, and a crueller one.
Chatwin views it all from a distance; the writing has a nearly-affected neutrality, but I feel like he is taking a moral position in what precisely he chooses to write about. I may be projecting my own values here, but there is a toxic, colonial racism that pervades the book, both past and present, that I can’t help but believe he is attempting to underline. The coolness of the prose is, I think, entirely intentional.
For example:
The room was bare and scrubbed clean. On the walls were pictures of Hitler and General Rosas pasted up long ago and browned over with smoke resin. The old man sat me in his canvas chair and blearily answered yes and no to questions.
Later, at another ranch:
After the ceremony the older generation relaxed in the winter-garden, attended by a maid in black and white, who served scones and pale tea. The conversation turned to Indians. The ‘Englishman’ of the family said: ‘All this business of Indian killing is being a bit overstretched. You see, these Indians were a pretty low sort of Indian. I mean they weren't like the Aztecs or the Incas. No civilization or anything. On the whole they were a pretty poor lot.’
or
The Onas’1 sheep rustling threatened the companies’ dividends (in Buenos Aires the explorer Julius Popper spoke of their ‘alarming Communist tendencies’) and the accepted solution was to round them up and civilize them in the Mission- where they died of infected clothing and the despair of captivity. But Alexander McLennan despised slow torture: it offended his sporting instincts. […] He was not among the farmers who offered £1 sterling for every Indian ear: he preferred to do the killing himself. He hated to see any animal in pain.
If you read those passages and don’t believe Chatwin is taking a stance here, I think you should read them again.
As we wrap up the second chapter of this book club, I’d like to know your own experiences reading In Patagonia. For me it was a book I read in fits and starts; the episodic nature, and its coolly alienated nature kept me from ever getting into a real sense of flow. But I do think some books are meant to be read this way, picked at from time to time instead of devoured or binged or whichever gluttonous synonym you prefer. I really did love it, and I hope some of you did, too, or at least appreciated it.
I will announce our next selection soon. Thanks for joining me on this series of journeys.
1 A nomadic indigenous people, also known as the Selk’nam, local to Tierra del Fuego, now considered extinct. The sheep they “rustled” came from herds they had hunted for centuries before the arrival of Europeans.