Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) was the supremely gifted British
journalist, traveler, and writer who spent his all-too brief life reinventing himself.
The son of a lawyer who was happier at sea, Chatwin was a
socialite, an art dealer at
Sothebys, a
photographer, an
archeologist, an impeccable journalist, an indefatigable
traveler, and an absolutely original thinker whose monumental travel books and novels,
In Patagonia,
The Viceroy Of Ouidah,
On the Black Hill,
The Songlines, and
Utz are stunning in their insight and sensitivity. As his friend
Salman Rushdie put it: "he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across."
For all of this however, Bruce Chatwin remained an
enigma to friends and the public alike until the day he died, January 18th, 1989, of
AIDS. Blessed with
preternatural good looks, and happily married to the long-suffering but absolutely supportive American
heiress, Elizabeth Chanler, Chatwin was also an active
homosexual who could be counted upon to be the life of any party--from the
Riviera to Rio, from Soho to San Francisco. Everybody loved Bruce. But nobody, it seems, really knew Bruce.
British novelist
Nicholas Shakespeare has written the definitive Chatwin
biography,
Bruce Chatwin (Doubleday, 2000, ISBN 0-385-49829-2), which is a wonder in its own right, balancing the complexity and the nobility of Chatwin's life and work with an artist's loving temperament.
Shakespeare's
epigraph for his biography, taken from
Jorge Luis Borges, sets the tone for all that follows:
As you are not unaware, I am much travelled. This fact allows me to corroborate the assertion that a voyage is always more or less illusory, that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything is one and the same, etcetera, but also, paradoxically enough, to assert that there is no foundation for despairing of finding surprises and something new: in truth, the world is inexhaustible.
Biographies:
The Johnny Appleseed of LSD
Etta Baker
Lucky Baldwin
P.T. Barnum
Blind Blake
Peter Bogdanovich
Anita Borg
Lord Buckley
Bud and Travis
Camaron de la Isla
Butch Cassidy
Bruce Chatwin
Dickey Chapelle
Bikram Choudhury
Cyril Connolly
Gordon Cooper
Amanda Davis
David Dellinger
Wild Bill Donovan
Charles Durning
Gloria Emerson
Mimi Farina
Richard Farina
John Gardner
Sidney Gottlieb, the real-life "Q"
Alfred Hubbard
Lucia Joyce
Hamid Karzai
king of the queens
Thomas Knowlton
Parisoula Lampsos
Paco de Lucia
Malinche
the Real McCoy
Robert K. Merton
J. Fred Muggs
David Myers
Sven Nykvist
Patrick O'Brian
Harvey Penick
Sabicas
Bernardino de Sahagun
W.G. Sebald
Nicholas Shakespeare
Rudolf Steiner
A. J. Weberman