Bruce Chatwin (88 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
When
The Songlines
was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, Bruce issued a statement: “The journey it describes is an invented journey, it is not a travel book in the generally accepted sense. To avoid any possible confusion, I must ask to withdraw it from the shortlist.” Tom Maschler, writing to Gillon Aitken, Bruce’s new agent, was glad of the attention: “Not many authors write books which are candidates simultaneously for non-fiction and fiction awards!”
The Songlines
was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award, Bruce issued a statement: “The journey it describes is an invented journey, it is not a travel book in the generally accepted sense. To avoid any possible confusion, I must ask to withdraw it from the shortlist.” Tom Maschler, writing to Gillon Aitken, Bruce’s new agent, was glad of the attention: “Not many authors write books which are candidates simultaneously for non-fiction and fiction awards!”
The Songlines
transformed him, as John Ryle wrote, “from a cult writer to a bestseller”. Most newspapers singled the book out, illustrating their review with the photograph of a younger, healthy-looking Bruce. Reports of a mysterious Chinese fungal infection gave him allure. While losing none of his back-packer appeal, he strode into the realm of literary respectability.
transformed him, as John Ryle wrote, “from a cult writer to a bestseller”. Most newspapers singled the book out, illustrating their review with the photograph of a younger, healthy-looking Bruce. Reports of a mysterious Chinese fungal infection gave him allure. While losing none of his back-packer appeal, he strode into the realm of literary respectability.
If his publishers had fretted over the genre, critics and readers welcomed a misfit who dodged the usual categories. His harlequin tricks annoyed some, who complained that he had set up an intellectual apparatus he could not support, and had failed to give the Aborigines their due voice. Many more cheered the violation of a conventional novel structure and the sheer scale of his ambition. The Australian author Shirley Hazzard wrote to him: “Reading your
Songlines
again, I thought it one of those works destined to alter the plane of thought from which an important theme has long been surveyed and discussed. Things can never again be quite the same as they were ante-B.C.”
Songlines
again, I thought it one of those works destined to alter the plane of thought from which an important theme has long been surveyed and discussed. Things can never again be quite the same as they were ante-B.C.”
Bruce’s ebullience, his obsessional vitality, his very intense intellectual involvement combine in
The Songlines
to produce, in Colin Thubron’s words, “his most considerable book, and the one most central to his personality and interests”. It may not succeed on its original terms, but what it does achieve, as fiction, is to allow the world into the songlines. “I can’t say I believe the songlines
literally
,” says Thubron. “Maybe any third-year anthropology student could shoot it to bits, but what’s wonderful is the passion with which Bruce approaches it, his love of it, the way he writes it, the imagery, so that it involves you while you are in it, you inhabit it.”
The Songlines
to produce, in Colin Thubron’s words, “his most considerable book, and the one most central to his personality and interests”. It may not succeed on its original terms, but what it does achieve, as fiction, is to allow the world into the songlines. “I can’t say I believe the songlines
literally
,” says Thubron. “Maybe any third-year anthropology student could shoot it to bits, but what’s wonderful is the passion with which Bruce approaches it, his love of it, the way he writes it, the imagery, so that it involves you while you are in it, you inhabit it.”
Thomas Keneally had watched Bruce and Rushdie check out of their hotel in Adelaide to go to Alice Springs. “I thought at the time this dotty Brit is going to go crazy out there and this Indian prince is going to be a bit more ambiguous about it.” Keneally judges
The Songlines
to be “a cosmic book”, although he found an overripe sentimentality in Arkady’s marriage to Marian. (As did several others, Keneally shrank from the figure of Marian striding around the outback in soaked rags.) “Australians were raised to think that at the heart of Australia there was a dead heart. Australia is not European-sensibility friendly and it took a mad desert freak like Chatwin, a sort of literary T. E. Lawrence, to go to places like that. To realise that far from Australia having a dead heart, there was a map, there had always been a map. It’s a dangerous thing to say, but I think he did Aboriginal Australia a service. If there were ten books I had to set every Ozzie to read not for the sake of nationalism but for the sake of coming to terms with who we are on earth,
The Songlines
would be one of them.” Keneally responded to Bruce’s hopefulness. “The evidence in the cave meant we had not crushed each other’s skulls at every conceivable opportunity over food, women, whatever, but we were in fact the ones who were preyed upon by a sabre-tooth tiger. I don’t know how scientifically reliable it was, but I was willing to take it as a hopeful fable for human kind, a fortifying myth.”
The Songlines
to be “a cosmic book”, although he found an overripe sentimentality in Arkady’s marriage to Marian. (As did several others, Keneally shrank from the figure of Marian striding around the outback in soaked rags.) “Australians were raised to think that at the heart of Australia there was a dead heart. Australia is not European-sensibility friendly and it took a mad desert freak like Chatwin, a sort of literary T. E. Lawrence, to go to places like that. To realise that far from Australia having a dead heart, there was a map, there had always been a map. It’s a dangerous thing to say, but I think he did Aboriginal Australia a service. If there were ten books I had to set every Ozzie to read not for the sake of nationalism but for the sake of coming to terms with who we are on earth,
The Songlines
would be one of them.” Keneally responded to Bruce’s hopefulness. “The evidence in the cave meant we had not crushed each other’s skulls at every conceivable opportunity over food, women, whatever, but we were in fact the ones who were preyed upon by a sabre-tooth tiger. I don’t know how scientifically reliable it was, but I was willing to take it as a hopeful fable for human kind, a fortifying myth.”
The hybrid form was welcomed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “To my mind it’s at the interstices of genres where the most interesting things happen,” he says. “Chatwin’s transgression is much more important than any avant-garde fumbling. He has elements of pretension, but these also have to do with freeing himself from very rigorous ideas of literature in England, where the mere fact that you write a book about a collector in Prague sounds pretentious. In psychological terms, Chatwin suffers from
Beziehungswahn
– a delirium of establishing connections. In
In Patagonia
somehow everything connects in a seemingly mad way, but in
The Songlines
, he took on more than he could integrate. In this escape from English culture, he had perhaps a penchant for rather obscure thinkers. I remember once we talked about Spengler. That is something which here in Germany one would consider not merely old hat, but lacking in any rigour, an intellectual indecency. He had a weak spot for such people. That in
The Songlines
disturbed me a little, but it was perhaps his overreaction to insularity. Once he had decided he wouldn’t be restricted by the English, he became rather defenceless. He gave up his philosophy, which is empiricist, but he didn’t have antibodies. Hence the freshness of Spengler. For him, Spengler wasn’t stale at all.”
Beziehungswahn
– a delirium of establishing connections. In
In Patagonia
somehow everything connects in a seemingly mad way, but in
The Songlines
, he took on more than he could integrate. In this escape from English culture, he had perhaps a penchant for rather obscure thinkers. I remember once we talked about Spengler. That is something which here in Germany one would consider not merely old hat, but lacking in any rigour, an intellectual indecency. He had a weak spot for such people. That in
The Songlines
disturbed me a little, but it was perhaps his overreaction to insularity. Once he had decided he wouldn’t be restricted by the English, he became rather defenceless. He gave up his philosophy, which is empiricist, but he didn’t have antibodies. Hence the freshness of Spengler. For him, Spengler wasn’t stale at all.”
Robert Hughes, who himself challenged the academic establishment with his own magisterial picture of early colonial Australia in
The Fatal Shore
, applauded Bruce’s transgression. “I don’t think it matters in the least, as long as you grant that some of it is made up. Passages in
The Songlines
are extraordinarily beautiful. Bruce caught Australian generosity – ‘Have a steak and stay forever’ – with perfect truth. Turgenev couldn’t have done it.”
The Fatal Shore
, applauded Bruce’s transgression. “I don’t think it matters in the least, as long as you grant that some of it is made up. Passages in
The Songlines
are extraordinarily beautiful. Bruce caught Australian generosity – ‘Have a steak and stay forever’ – with perfect truth. Turgenev couldn’t have done it.”
In Australia, the book represented for many critics “the rapacity of Empire”. Christopher Pearson judged that Bruce did for the Aborigines what Robert Hughes had done for the convicts.
“The Songlines
is a work of arcadian sentimentality, a tremendous misuse of poetic licence,” and he quoted Stewart Harris: “If there is one person more damaging to the position of the Aboriginal Australian than the racist, it is the person who idealises them and romanticises them.” Ruth Brown bridled at Bruce’s colonial attitude and political naïveté. “Chatwin may have helped to put Aborigines on the map in Britain, but it is a map superficially exquisite and tasteful like a Mont Blanc pen, and as unrelated to everyday life.” Nor was Patrick White impressed. “One wonders where truth ends and fiction begins,” he wrote to Maschler. “I happen to know he was driven round the outback by Nin Dutton who turns into a tough guy of Cossack descent in the book. Some of the questions from other writers are interesting. Much of it is plain boring.”
“The Songlines
is a work of arcadian sentimentality, a tremendous misuse of poetic licence,” and he quoted Stewart Harris: “If there is one person more damaging to the position of the Aboriginal Australian than the racist, it is the person who idealises them and romanticises them.” Ruth Brown bridled at Bruce’s colonial attitude and political naïveté. “Chatwin may have helped to put Aborigines on the map in Britain, but it is a map superficially exquisite and tasteful like a Mont Blanc pen, and as unrelated to everyday life.” Nor was Patrick White impressed. “One wonders where truth ends and fiction begins,” he wrote to Maschler. “I happen to know he was driven round the outback by Nin Dutton who turns into a tough guy of Cossack descent in the book. Some of the questions from other writers are interesting. Much of it is plain boring.”
In Alice Springs, Bruce’s inability to penetrate Aboriginal culture disappointed those who had helped him, that is to say those who were most profoundly involved. “I got into trouble for telling everyone to tell him everything because he’ll write a beautiful book,” says Robyn Davidson. She resented the way he paid back those with whom he had had run-ins, such as Phillip Toyne and Daphne Williams. It was the first and only time she had seen a spiteful side to Bruce. “Maybe he wrote that out of the fact he was just scratching the surface and he
was
excluded. He found it very difficult as an idea that there were some things you couldn’t know. He felt that information should be free, that knowledge is out there for everybody. That’s not so. In Aborigine society, information is a currency.”
was
excluded. He found it very difficult as an idea that there were some things you couldn’t know. He felt that information should be free, that knowledge is out there for everybody. That’s not so. In Aborigine society, information is a currency.”
Toyne says, “Many people who had nothing to do with Chatwin thought
The Songlines
was a great book, but it doesn’t go far enough to take on the true liberation of fictional writing. I think he has made a global reputation for himself literally by standing on the heads, shoulders, fingers and hands of people.”
The Songlines
was a great book, but it doesn’t go far enough to take on the true liberation of fictional writing. I think he has made a global reputation for himself literally by standing on the heads, shoulders, fingers and hands of people.”
The most obvious example is Toly Sawenko. “I was completely floored by
The Songlines.
I had no inkling before during or after that Bruce had chosen to write a book about his adventures in Alice Springs. I had one postcard from Paris of a Picasso. After the book came out I never heard from him again. He didn’t send a copy.”
The Songlines.
I had no inkling before during or after that Bruce had chosen to write a book about his adventures in Alice Springs. I had one postcard from Paris of a Picasso. After the book came out I never heard from him again. He didn’t send a copy.”
Since 1987, Sawenko has had to endure a stream of back-packers knocking at his door. The appeal of Bruce’s mystical endeavour was not limited to middle-class white Australians for whom the book provided a window into Aboriginal culture. The back-packers arrive from all over the world. “Their attitude is: ‘Here’s a character a bit like me, more knowledgeable but with enough physical description to hang a mind adventure on. Let’s take a metaphysical journey’.” And so they want to meet Arkady. “What was only a three-day journey has become an unauthorised biography. Bruce doesn’t do anything to make the reader think this is a created character. He says of the narrator, this is Bruce who grew up in Sheffield. He’s just paying lip-service to the notion of fiction because the characters are so recognisable. It’s an occupational hazard for all fiction that writers are going to be basing their characters on real people. My question is: what kind of relationship should writers have with real people?”
Not only for himself does Sawenko regret that Bruce was not open about his intentions. By basing his text so largely on Strehlow, Bruce risked committing, in Aborigine eyes, the same transgressions. “Bruce hadn’t sorted the protocols through. He hadn’t sat down with any Aborigine. He gets his information second-hand and repeats it.” Sawenko believes that Bruce missed a tremendous opportunity by not posing his conceptual questions directly to the people he was writing about. “Aboriginal people are capable of dealing with the world in a philosophical way. The problem is, he just wasn’t there long enough, he didn’t get involved at any depth. That was anathema to Bruce. He came with an interesting set of questions and I admire him for posing the challenge to himself, but he didn’t really carry it off, and how could he? There was never any way he was going to get it right considering the whirlwind time and baggage he brought with him. He would have needed to get to know some Aboriginal people, which he just didn’t do. He uses me as a convenient artifice, but it’s still a white man speculating over how interesting Aboriginal culture is.”
Petronella, too, felt Bruce’s understanding could have been richer, more careful, given what he was capable of. “He has wonderful moments where he captures certain facets of people’s characters, but he doesn’t grant the Aborigines any voice at all. He reproduces the white-fella-as-boss colonial relation. The fallacy that they are going off into the netherlands because of an urge to walk is based on a misunderstanding that people wander aimlessly. But the people’s knowledge of the country is
precise.
They have a terrain which they regard as home. Bruce regarded their land as a kind of non-home. He didn’t deal with nomadism as a true concept. He’s dealing with the flight of prophets into the desert for visions and how this reflects on him.”
precise.
They have a terrain which they regard as home. Bruce regarded their land as a kind of non-home. He didn’t deal with nomadism as a true concept. He’s dealing with the flight of prophets into the desert for visions and how this reflects on him.”
Bruce’s failure to reach the source results in what Jenny Green calls “an interesting absence of song”. This absence, says Davidson, is the key. “One of the things he doesn’t describe is the journey of a dreaming, because it’s the one thing he couldn’t see. He wanted it to be what he had read in Strehlow, but when he went there, it wasn’t, and he had to make it up.”
When pressed to describe the central image of his book, Bruce said: “It’s a low, rather beautiful ‘aaaahh’.”
While Bruce’s political naïveté exposed him to attacks from those working closely with the Aboriginals, even critics like Toyne had to concede that his popularising of the songlines introduced many white middle-class Australians to the culture of the country they lived in. Murray Bail admits, “A lot of people hadn’t heard of the songlines – including myself.”
For Mario Vargas Llosa, a novelist Bruce openly admired, it did not matter whether the songlines were strictly accurate or a charming literary fraud. “Because to pass off fiction as reality, or to inject fiction into reality, is one of the most demanding and imperishable of human enterprises – and the dearest ambition of any storyteller.” Reading
The Songlines
on a visit to Australia in the belief that it was an anthropological work, Vargas Llosa was reminded of Borges.
The Songlines
on a visit to Australia in the belief that it was an anthropological work, Vargas Llosa was reminded of Borges.
In England, the book enjoyed a swift popular success. Cape had paid an advance of £20,000 and initially printed 10,000 copies. Hardback sales eventually reached 20,779. In July, it became number one on the
Sunday Times
best-seller list and was among the titles chosen for the Queen’s summer reading.
Sunday Times
best-seller list and was among the titles chosen for the Queen’s summer reading.
Ostensibly, Bruce had completed his opus and unloaded what Rushdie called “the burden he’s been carrying all his writer’s life”, but he had trouble relinquishing it fully and even tinkered with the text in foreign editions, in the French edition omitting the marriage between Arkady and Marian. His dissatisfaction stemmed from his sense that the book had gone to press before it was ready. “There are masses of details I’d like to have checked, but
physically
could not,” he wrote to Nin Dutton. He had written the last third of the book, he impressed on Welch, “in semi-hallucination”. Handwritten messages in signed copies of the book conveyed a sense that he had needed more time, had not reached the heights he had aimed at. To Hugh Honour: “Remember – this is only the first draft!” To Harry Marshall: “a sequence of non-sequiturs”. There was an awareness that his illness, even as it had sapped his physical strength, had imposed the necessary deadline. “All in all
The Songlines
is a pretty odd production,” he wrote to Charles and Brenda Tomlinson. “The fact that I wrote the last chapter just before what was all but the last gasp gives it a very rough quality – to say the least! But I have an idea that what’s written is written, with all the glaring defects: and if I’d tried to deliver everything I had in mind, the result might be even more incoherent than it is.”
physically
could not,” he wrote to Nin Dutton. He had written the last third of the book, he impressed on Welch, “in semi-hallucination”. Handwritten messages in signed copies of the book conveyed a sense that he had needed more time, had not reached the heights he had aimed at. To Hugh Honour: “Remember – this is only the first draft!” To Harry Marshall: “a sequence of non-sequiturs”. There was an awareness that his illness, even as it had sapped his physical strength, had imposed the necessary deadline. “All in all
The Songlines
is a pretty odd production,” he wrote to Charles and Brenda Tomlinson. “The fact that I wrote the last chapter just before what was all but the last gasp gives it a very rough quality – to say the least! But I have an idea that what’s written is written, with all the glaring defects: and if I’d tried to deliver everything I had in mind, the result might be even more incoherent than it is.”
Maschler, then in the throes of selling Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus and The Bodley Head to Random House, did not share Bruce’s anxiety. This was the book he had envisaged in 1968. “You called what I have ‘a draft’,” he wrote on first receiving the manuscript. “If that is what it is, then it’s the most perfect draft I’ve ever read as a publisher.”
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