Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

I finally finished Bruce Chatwin’s biography today. Published in 1999, written by Nicholas Shakespeare, it’s a mighty 600 plus page tome that examines every aspect of Chatwin's many-faceted, and carefully pigeon-holed life - the art, the travel, the bi-sexuality, the collecting, the obsession with nomads, the views on anthropology, the obsession with famous people, the inability to shut up - and takes a long, cool look at the damage he inflicted on many people he came across, not least the people who loved him best.

His mother, Margheurita, said she wanted to die before it came out. Which she did.

However, this is not to say he wasn't loved. It is, on the whole, a very positive portrait of a very complex person. His American wife of twenty three years, Elizabeth, was instrumental in ensuring it was undertaken.

Yes, his wife of twenty three years.

I thought I knew a lot about Chatwin. I knew he went to Marlborough. I knew he had had many many affairs with other men, and that he had broken the young Jasper Conran’s heart. I knew about Sotheby's, and his leaving a glittering career there to study archaeology in Edinburgh, and his travels all over Africa, South America, Asia and other places. I knew that his early writing was mired in how difficult he found it to write a book about nomads, and that after many other books, The Nomad Alternative eventually became The Songlines. I knew he died of AIDS back when it was still whispered about.

But I never knew he was married.

And so young.

After the first couple of years where she supported him in university, he mostly lived away from Elizabeth, whom he had settled into a country living style existence in rural England. She seemed to have had a stoic outlook on the marriage. She put up with all his behaviours; sorted out his finances, kept his possessions and tended to the boring mundane parts of his life, while he pretended to be a nomad, or a monkish writer living without possessions in London, or a international jetsetter.

When he became famous he treated her even worse than before, being rude to her which he hadn't before, not hiding his liaisons, interrupting the rhythms of her life on her own, and she eventually had enough, booted him out of their English home and sold it.

When he got sick a couple of years later in the early eighties, he very handily fell back in love with her and she nursed him lovingly to the end of his life, the last bit of which was spent, ironically, in Shirley Conran's house in the south of France.

I dunno, maybe that’s what Elizabeth wanted to believe. Maybe that’s what Nicholas Shakespeare believed. Maybe they concocted it together.

He sounded like a horrendous little shit to me. Spoiled, pretentious, selfish, egotistical. All the attributes we associate with greatness nowadays, without any question as to whether they should be acceptable in anyone, even great people.

I’d have hated him.

Thank goodness I never met him, so I can admire his writing for what it is.

In an interesting aside, the book also confirms what a number of other books have hinted/ tried to get across: Paul Theroux is an obnoxious git. Salman Rushdie seems nice, although there's a bit of kerfuffle when he splits up with a woman Bruce introduced him to in Australia.

There's a great anecdote in the book about Chatwin's funeral, held in a Greek Orthodox church on the day Rushdie's fatwah was announced. Theroux leans over to Rushdie half way through the ceremony and says I suppose we'll all be back here next week for you.

Maybe we’re all too nice to be great writers?!

Or too scared to be obnoxious enough to be great.