Plato believed a beautiful face reflected a beautiful soul; Shakespeare, in the opening speech of Richard III , equated physical deformity with evil. Tolstoy, thinking of his own thick lips and broad nose, wrote in Childhood that “nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man’s course as his personal appearance.” The stunning photograph of Bruce Chatwin on the jacket of this biography suggests that Tolstoy was right. In our time, at least, physical appearance influences literary reputation.

Bruce Chatwin (1940–89) was a travel writer and novelist, a charmer and monstrous egoist. Boyish, blond, bronzed by the sun, his cold, piercing blue eyes looked (as an Arab woman said of T. E. Lawrence) “like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull.” Like Lawrence, Chatwin had an elusive quicksilver personality, precocious learning, and a professional passion for archaeology. Both men, drawn to the tents of desert nomads, were physically and spiritually displaced persons who loved the intoxication of travel and made arduous journeys to exotic lands, often on camel or on foot. They disliked possessions but collected ancient artefacts, and liked to live ascetically in spartan surroundings. Chatwin visited Lawrence’s house, Clouds Hill, and his tiny London flat looked much the same, with polished wooden floors, a built-in bunk bed, and meager furnishings.

Both men were mythomaniacs with a genius for self-promotion; they had powerful wills and liked to test themselves in acts of physical defiance. Both had troubled sexual identities (Lawrence a repressed homosexual, Chatwin a married one), and were masochistic, guilt-ridden, and death-driven. Chatwin even claimed that, like Lawrence, he’d been raped and enjoyed it. A friend of Chatwin’s observed  

When he gave in to his homosexuality, he was disgusted with himself, which explained the rest of his life, which was a flight from reality —going to Edinburgh, going to Patagonia, always to be fleeing. He became like Orestes after the murder of Aegisthus, pursued by furies.

But while Lawrence helped settle the political boundaries of the Middle East after World War I and wrote one of the greatest books about the war, Chatwin lapsed into hedonism and self-indulgence.

The novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has written a first-rate biography of this mesmerizing character. He’s intelligent, artful, and inventive, with a keen eye for the incisive comment and illuminating anecdote, and the same wit and panache as Chatwin. Speaking of Chatwin’s in-laws, for example, Shakespeare writes that “the legendary Chanler wealth, like the legendary Chanler Falls, had long since dried up.” Shakespeare has done a thorough job of research (following Chatwin’s tracks through Nepal, Patagonia, Benin, and the Australian desert), and he maintains a crisp narrative pace, deftly sorting out the facts from the myths. He’s especially good on Chatwin’s years at Sotheby’s, the progression of his mysterious disease, and his cultural legacy; and he gives a vivid account of Robert Mapplethorpe’s circle in New York, which captivated Chatwin:

Muscular men jangled about in chains wearing nothing but leather jockstraps, caps and masks; or laid back in slings, waiting to be fist-fucked, their legs up, taking poppers, eyes rolled back, moaning. And everywhere huge pots of Crisco lard.

Most importantly, Shakespeare is selective. He does not simply cover all the events of Chatwin’s life, but shows what they mean.

There are, however, a few flaws and a number of errors in this excellent book, which has no maps, bibliography, or analytical index on Chatwin. (The index is a mess; an author should do his own). Shakespeare gives too much information about Chatwin’s ancestors (the subject should always be born in the first five pages) and not enough background on important friends. He should have noted that Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth, was related to James Laughlin, who founded New Directions with his steel fortune; that Penelope Betjeman was the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode; that Peter Levi, the Jesuit priest, later married Cyril Connolly’s widow; that Peter Schlesinger was David Hockney’s lover; that Diana Petre was J. R. Ackerley’s half-sister. Shakespeare twice mentions that Chatwin’s friend Raulin Guild died early, but doesn’t give the cause of his death. Shakespeare also falls into a common trap by relying on family legend. Citing Harper’s Bazaar as his source, he says that Henry James called Elizabeth’s grandmother his “friend” and “the only truly cultured woman in America.” But there’s no mention of Daisy Terry in the four volumes of James’s letters or in the five volumes of Leon Edel’s biography.

Chatwin’s great-grandfather was a notorious swindler, sentenced to six years in prison; his uncle was murdered by his cook in West Africa. The son of a Birmingham solicitor and wartime naval officer, Chatwin was undistinguished, almost anonymous, at prep school and at Marlborough. Instead of going to university, he got a job at Sotheby’s, where he showed no promise of literary talent. He lacked background and training in art, but “had the right manner, a mixture of bluff, a good eye, and an ability to deal with the rich.” Speaking of his beloved Inca hanging of blue and yellow parrot feathers, he wrote that the Peruvians had discovered long before Rothko that “blocks of pure colour floating one above the other produced a mood of anxious calm.” He became the darling of the chairman, Peter Wilson (who was, apparently, in love with him), had a spectacular career and became a director at the astonishing age of twenty-five.

Chatwin loathed the ignorant but arrogant staff who claimed an expertise they didn’t have, hated having to suck up to the acquisitive but philistine rich, and was repelled by the blatant dishonesty of the prestigious firm. I worked at Christie’s in London in the following decade. I, too, was appalled by the double-dealing of the outside “advisers” who used confidential information when bidding against bona fide buyers and by the brazen scams of colleagues. Disgusted with himself but drawn into the circle of corruption, Chatwin boasted that when a François II cabinet came up for sale, he “removed the pillars, bought it at the sale, and put the pillars back on afterwards.” When Chatwin’s “good eye” went blind in a kind of somatic rebellion against his disagreeable duties, he took a long leave of absence in the Sudan~dash\opthalmic capital of the world. When he discovered that he’d been made a titular rather than fully empowered director, he felt betrayed by Wilson. In 1966, after eight years with Sotheby’s, he amazed everyone by suddenly resigning.

He then studied archaeology at Edinburgh University, where Stuart Piggott (whose wife had run off with T. E. Lawrence’s brother) considered him a brilliant student. Chatwin’s arrogance on a Welsh dig annoyed a tough workman, who retaliated by pounding his head on a wheelbarrow and turning a portable toilet upside down—with Chatwin trapped inside. In November of his second year he decided he wasn’t cut out to be a dry-as-dust academic, and threw up another promising career. Fascinated by nomads—by their urge to wander rather than sit still, their capacity to survive as empires came crashing down— Chatwin planned an ambitious book about them. After several years of library and field work, the book turned out to be plodding, leaden and quite hopeless. He couldn’t even understand his own argument and threw away the manuscript, which was rescued by his mother. Seventeen years later the material miraculously resurfaced in his fourth book, The Songlines (1987), which argued that Australian aborigines had “a continuous song disgorged while walking through a landscape whose creation it describes.” Though his theory was false, his knowledge second-hand and superficial, Songlines hit a primitivistic nerve, became his most popular book, and transformed him from a cult writer into a bestseller.

In 1965, while still at Sotheby’s, Chatwin had married a Radcliffe-educated American colleague, Elizabeth Chanler. Descended from John Jacob Astor, she had a rich mother but a personal income of only $8000 a year. Self-effacing, infinitely tolerant, though often wounded by his behavior, this heroic patient Griselda was the perfect companion for the madly selfish author. As he traveled the world and had many homosexual affairs, she looked after the animals on their cold comfort farm and was even reduced to waiting on customers in a garden shop for £45 a week. Never threatened by his male lovers, she was always ready to drop everything and rush to meet him in remote locales. Chatwin crawled back to Elizabeth when he was mortally ill and could no longer take care of himself.

Though sensuously beautiful, Chatwin lacked warmth and liked the idea of sex better than sex itself. His lovers spoke “of his frigidity, his emotional unwillingness, his lack of connection.” A woman who’d seduced him said they’d had sex with “great speed and savagery, as if he wanted it to be over quickly. ‘It didn’t leave any taste at all, and I was surprised. I was lacerated as if by a Bengal tiger.’” Like the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby, “careless people … who smashed up things and creatures” and left behind a trail of misery, “when Bruce danced on to the next he had the ability to leave [his lovers] feeling empty and bereft in a way I doubt they ever recovered from.”

The first indications that he was HIV positive—high fever, night sweats, and bleeding—appeared in 1983, and he put Elizabeth at great risk until his disease was definitely diagnosed in 1986. He thought he’d contracted it in Australia or from Mapplethorpe’s lover in New York. He always denied, even to close family and friends, that he had the HIV virus, and claimed that a Chinese rat was the source of his disease. He never wrote about his ghastly experience with AIDS, a disease which, ironically enough, originated with nomadic tribes in Africa. After his death, he was criticized by gay activists for not using his personal example to make the public more sympathetic to the plight of his fellow sufferers. (E. M. Forster had also been criticized for putting private above public life and remaining in the closet.) When suffering from toxic brain syndrome, Chatwin would spend £25,000 on art in a single afternoon and became, like his fictional Utz, a possessor possessed.

Describing Chatwin’s sexual aura, Susan Sontag became schoolgirlish and almost orgasmic: “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall. Your stomach just drops to your knees, your heart skips a beat.” But those never seduced by his fatal charm can now see the radical flaws in his mind and character. He was full of mad unrealized projects, a promiscuous seeker of instant knowledge, a creator of crackbrained theories and an intellectual thief. When Paul Theroux urged him to “come clean” in his self-aggrandizing and notoriously unreliable travel books, Chatwin replied: “I don’t believe in coming clean!”

For all his wide-ranging journeys, Chatwin was a compass without a needle, more a domestic cuckoo than a restless nomad. An Indian friend said that “travelling with Bruce was like travelling with your 88-year-old maiden aunt. No piece of luggage was ever good enough. The weather was never right. It was too hot, too cold, too damp.” In India he travelled like Garbo, with a colossal amount of baggage that included “the typewriter, the card index, the champagne, the muesli, the pills, the hats, the boots, the grey suits, the pyjamas.”

Though charming, Chatwin was childishly conceited and never stopped talking about himself. He exploited and sponged on his friends, treating them like servants as he abused their hospitality. He would burst into the bathroom while his hostess was in the tub, drop his trousers “and plop. I’ve never met anyone who’s done that, ever.” Even his stool, he felt, was worthy of notice.

Chatwin’s editors—Tom Maschler at Cape, Elisabeth Sifton at Viking—helped him pull his books together. His first and best book, In Patagonia (1977), was an instant success. When his first novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), failed, Maschler marketed his next book as if the previous one had never existed, and On the Black Hill (1982) won the Whitbread prize for the best first novel of the year. By 1998, nine years after his death, his books had been translated into twenty-seven languages and sold more than a million paperback copies in Britain. Chatwin’s dazzling beauty undoubtedly enhanced his career. His bizarre life is more interesting than his work, and his work most fascinating when it reflects his life.

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