With Chatwin
Portrait of a Writer
-
- £3.99
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
Few writers have had as many distinct lives as Bruce Chatwin and few have been as compelling in person as in print. Chatwin was a traveller, an aesthete and an anthropologist. In his twenties he was a star at Sotheby's; in his thirties he was a star at The Sunday Times. A solitary man and a socialite; he was always exotic. He became famous as the person who reinvented travel-writing and when he died in 1989, aged 48, he had published six strikingly varied books.
Susannah Clapp's book is not a biography, but collects her own memories of Chatwin and those of his friends, acquaintances and colleagues, with the aim of producing a chronology of the author's life and, more important, of illuminating particular fields of interest. This is not merely a celebratory volume, but a investigatory one, illustrated with photographs of and by Bruce Chatwin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bruce Chatwin's abbreviated life--he died of AIDS at 47 in 1989--was a performance, his six books of travel writing and fiction included, according to Clapp. Her graceful and affectionate memoir, based on her experience with him as a friend and his British editor, is an informal biography, cutting through his extravagant reinventions of himself. His travel writings about exotic places suggest the adaptable loner, but Clapp reveals that the bisexual Chatwin often included a companion, seldom his devoted wife of 20 years. A compulsive nomad and compulsive talker, he worked out his blend of "fact, fantasy and folklore" in conversations with friends. His impressionistic In Patagonia brought him recognition; his bestselling The Songlines was published when he was already dying. A director of Sotheby's while in his 20s, he charmed clients into buying and selling not only because of his instincts for what was original and exquisite but also because, one critic gibed, he "keeps so many elderly millionaires on heat." Abandoning art because of eye trouble, Chatwin began a career in travel journalism for the Sunday newspaper glossies, then moved into books about isolated places but always returned from his trips to write in the posh pads of the beautiful and wealthy he knew through his genius for friendship, Clapp notes. While the name- and address-dropping begins to pall, the ever young writer who saw himself as a new Robert Louis Stevenson seems likely from this account to be remembered more as a stylist in both life and art.
