Bruce Chatwin (making of a writer)
“In the summer holidays I travelled east, as far as Afghanistan, and wondered if I was capable of writing an article on Islamic architecture. But something was wrong. I began to feel that things, however beautiful, can also be malign. The atmosphere of the Art World reminded me of the morgue...
After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning halfblind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons? Africa, perhaps?
I went to the Sudan. On camel and foot I trekked through the Red Sea hills and found some unrecorded cave paintings. My nomad guide was a hadendoa, one of Kipling's 'fuzzy-wuzzies'. He carried a sword, a purse and a pot of scented goat's grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate; and by the time I returned to England a mood of fierce iconoclasm had set in. Not that I turned into a picture siasher. But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. I quit my job and enrolled as a first-year student of archaeology at Edinburgh University. My studies in that grim northern city were not a success (...) For the second time I quit.
Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, ail the great teachers - Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.
The book grew and grew; and as it grew it became less and less intelligible to its author. It even contained a diatribe against the act of writing itself Finally, when the manuscript was typed, it was so obviously unpublishable that, for the third time, I gave up.
Penniless, depressed, a total failure at the age of thirty-three, I had a phone call from Francis Wyndham of the Sunday Times magazine, a man of outstanding literary judgement, whom I hardly knew. Would I, lie asked, like a small job as an adviser on the arts? 'Yes,' I said. We soon forgot about the arts, and under Francis's guidance I took on every kind of article. I wrote about Algerian migrant workers, the couturier Madeleine Vionnet and the Great Wall of China. I interviewed André Malraux on what General de Gaulle thought of England; and in Moscow I visited Nadezhda Mandelstam (...) Each time I came back with a story, Francis Wyndlham encouraged, criticised, edited and managed to convince me that I should, after all, try my hand at another book. His greatest gift was permission to continue. One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the arcliitect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache. 'I've always wanted to go there,' I said. 'So have I,' she added. 'Go there for me.' I went. I cabled the Sunday Times: 'Have Gone to Patagonia'. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia and Hemingway's In Our Time. Six months later I came at. this time, did get published. thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. Eileen Gray's map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.
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