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Review by Charles Flowers
Often, biographers either come to despise their subjects or become so besotted that they eventually sound like them. Susannah Clapp, meticulous editor of much of the prodigal prose of the late Bruce Chatwin, leaps happily into the latter category.
In "With Chatwin" she not only reflects her friend's prose style and fey humor; she also eccentrically breaks her story into a collage of themes. Though roughly following chronological sequence, this technique, like Chatwin's in "In Patagonia" or "The Viceroy of Ouidah," has a double effect: it focuses on dramatic highlights undimmed by dull connective material, it includes colorful characters and anecdotes that are interesting in themselves but not vitally relevant to Chatwin's life and writing and personality.
Unfortunately, Chatwin's techniques do not always work as well on Chatwin in this memoir as they did on the geography of Tierra del Fuego or the history of West African slave trading in his own books. At his best, this highly original, often self-indulgent writer could bring unfamiliar landscapes alive, set an obscure human being before us in the flesh, or tease the intellect with off-center insights. In short, he could take us where we had never been in more ways than one.
"With Chatwin," on the other hand, is not likely to attract very many readers who are not already acquainted with either the literary or the tabloid Chatwin.
Works by Bruce ChatwinAnatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989Far Journeys: Photographs and Notebooks In Patagonia Lady: Lisa Lyon Nowhere is a Place: Travels in Patagonia On the Black Hill Patagonia Revisited The Songlines The Viceroy of Ouidah Utz What Am I Doing Here? |
The former, as his astonishing novel "On the Black Hill" suggested, may have been well on his way to finding his voice as a major British novelist when he succumbed to AIDS at age 48 some eight years ago. Always gifted with a sharp eye for the world of objects, he began revealing a profound sense of the hidden, painful interiors of human beings.
But the tabloid Chatwin, a figure Clapp charitably calls "orchidaceous," was evidently a posturing, overbearing, ingeniously rude if not cruel state-of-the-art esthete of well-nigh symphonic sexuality. Most American readers know such characters only from mannered English fiction and will need guidance, not supplied here, to understanding why they are ever invited back to dinner. In Chatwin's case, one explanation was what a friend called "his abnormal good looks." Many followers of the well-populated Chatwin cult will scrutinize "With Chatwin" for the truth about his carefully camouflaged private life. On this score, Clapp slyly provides subtle but adequate data.
She may well offer too much explanation of the writing obstacles, places of composition, and research for Chatwin's books. In this area, too, "With Chatwin" will find warmest reception among readers who already know and admire his achievements. Ironically, his best-selling "The Songlines" was probably his weakest book and not the best introduction to a wider audience.
Susannah Clapp's "With Chatwin," more of a bedazzled personal remembrance than a comprehensive literary biography, is most effective in celebrating the man as artist rather than in making him attractive or understandable as a human being, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, was named Best Columnist by the New York Press Association for his arts and theater criticism.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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