Television
Bruce Chatwin spent his short writing career wriggling free from what he called the noose of travel writing. Yet he was excited by its pressure. A journey, he knew, was a tight metaphor for a long life's trek from birth, through middle age, to death - although Chatwin, who died from Aids at the age of 48, skipped his own final section. Nicholas Shakespeare's In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (BBC2, Easter Sunday and Monday) turned the proposition around. Chatwin's literary pilgrimages became the slides illustrating an enthralling lantern lecture on his life.
Chatwin recorded so many media appearances that he practically spoke the lecture himself. Part one opened with him telling a cruelly observed, death-mocking anecdote from The Songlines about a Doncaster woman explaining how she had emigrated to Sydney to be with her sons, only for all of them to die. As he read this passage, photographs of Chatwin floated in front of us, from jeunesse doree to skeletal dying man. "Ooh, but it is a lovely day," the Yorkshire woman finished, which was how Chatwin's story ended, too, with the camera following his brother and his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor to the Greek hillside on which his widow had, first, scattered his ashes and then had a picnic.
Shakespeare insisted any travel writer changes the landscape he passes through, and his director, Paul Yule, proved the point by re-colouring the Patagonian mountain grass behind him a shade of blue. We soon discovered it was not merely landscapes that Chatwin re-tinted but people. The aboriginal expert Bill Phillips turned out to be called David Bridges; the schoolmaster's wife in In Patagonia was married to a professor; The Songlines' "Arkady Volchok" re-emerged into the light as Toly Sawenko. I bristled at each of these rechristenings, for my slavish journalist's training had it that exaggeration improves a story only by dishonouring it first.
We expect, however, travellers' tales to grow during the long passage home - even when, as in the case of the film's visit to King Behanzin of Benin, who assured us he "no longer practise[s] human sacrifice in public", there was little need. What was more worrying was to discover that Chatwin's motives could be petty. Daphne Hobbs held up a picture of her father-in-law Ernest, vilified by Chatwin as an Indian-killer, and said this was an "absolute fabrication". Phillip Toyne, an arrogant and possessive politician in The Songlines, said he had tried to prevent Chatwin from crashing a private barbecue and concluded that Chatwin "used his novels and characters to pay back people he didn't like".
If you were not charmed by Chatwin, whose TV chat show appearances now look camp and public school, he could clearly be extremely irritating, not least because of his insistence that his wanderings proved his authenticity. His brother Hugh recalled Bruce insisting he was "Abel" - "shepherd, free spirit, the keeper of the high ground and birdsong. Who are you?" By default, Hugh, the chartered surveyor, became Cain, from "the verbal roots, to accumulate or acquire". Yet Chatwin made his own nests, was married to an intelligent and devoted wife and accumulated not only a box of rare possessions but an address book of famous friends. Rather, it was his persistent globe-trotting that allowed him to be different things to different men - and men, in the bathhouses of New York and Sydney, they were.
His friend Francis Wyndham insisted: "All fiction lies to tell the truth." But how can we tell? By claiming he was dying from a rare fungal infection, or that his Aids was the result of a gang rape by African soldiers (a private fantasy of his), he was lying, it turned out, from a motive no more base but certainly no higher than to keep the truth of his sexuality from his parents. This was a tragedy for Chatwin's credibility as a storyteller. By lying about being bisexual, he offended an age that uses sexual candour as a touchstone for sincerity. So when, in part two, a palaeoanthropologist recounted the extraordinary coincidence of finding on an afternoon's dig with him a charred bone that put man's discovery of fire back by two million years, I wondered if Bruce hadn't planted it there.
The programmes succeeded on every level, as a travel documentary, a biography and, let it be said, as an advertisement for Shakespeare's new biography (the cover photograph of which ended both parts). Having the budget to compare a traveller's "exotic gaze" with the reality of those he gazed upon is a gift, but Shakespeare and Yule in this case returned it with interest. Their wryly affectionate film refused to exoticise the gazer.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
