Writings about place are almost always about the writer: The most rigorous are a series of self-exposures, revelations of their chroniclers’ prejudices and ignorances. This isn’t untrue, but it is also incidental to the works’ resonance and beauty. His critics called them self-absorbed confabulations, fiction presented as fact. This sense of certainty, the feeling the reader has that a place is being used as a mirror to reflect the author’s own image, is also what made Chatwin’s travelogues so controversial. Chatwin was powerfully attracted to nomadism, and you might view his collective writings as a struggle to discard this idea of home as a kind of heaven, and to replace it with the radical notion that the person who found himself adrift, in perpetual motion, might already be at home - that movement itself might be the ideal human state. Home, therefore, is anywhere, and yet nowhere as well. Home is not a beloved memory or something to yearn for and fetishize, but merely a matter of circumstance: a piece of land (sometimes large, but usually small) on which one eats and sleeps, sometimes for a lifetime, and sometimes for a day. We think of travelers as people who have no attachment to things, but true travelers are people who really have no attachment to place.
This kind of writer is certain that his identity has resulted not from where he was raised, but in spite of it. Writers who deliberately seek out the company of those foreign to them need to be armed with an unshakable sense of self-possession and a certain sense of arrogance you need to be able to walk into a place (be it a city or a souk or a tundra) without wondering whether who you are is actually where you’re from, because you already know that where you’re from doesn’t matter. (Part of the enjoyment of inhabiting Chatwin’s inimitably vivid travelogues ‘‘ In Patagonia’’ and ‘‘ The Songlines’’ - the latter of which is a balletically discursive study of Aboriginal Australia - is imagining their author moving through those baked and lonely landscapes, a slim white flame licking his way across such scarily empty territory.)Ĭhatwin also possessed another quality that all great travelers have: the ability to remain completely who he was even as he proved himself ceaselessly malleable. He was not forgettable in appearance, either, in his particularly English brand of soft blond beauty, the kind destined to quickly spoil in the equatorial sun, the kind in which one could see the remnants of a too-pretty boy wearing short pants and round-toed black shoes that gleamed like beetles. Before embarking on his new life, he had been a student in archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and, before that, an expert in antiquities and Impressionist art at Sotheby’s in London. Though Chatwin may not have been forgettable, he was adaptable. One’s goal as a traveler is to be forgettable, to leave no footsteps in the sand. This ability to shape-shift, to adapt oneself to one’s context instead of imposing oneself upon it, is a necessary skill the gift of self-erasure ensures one will see and hear things one ought not to. Great travelers are recessive personalities the best are unmemorable. And it wasn’t only that you could (and, indeed, would) travel as Ibn Battuta had, but, crucially, you could travel where Ibn Battuta had, as well: Sanaa and Baghdad and Damascus, all of which are now treacherous or off-limits, cities in countries forced by war or disaster or bad governance to deny their cultures’ extravagant senses of hospitality.Ĭhatwin was 32 when he began this, the latest of his reinventions - from an Englishman of England to an Englishman of elsewhere - and for the rest of his life, he would remain (more or less) in that elsewhere. Depending on where he ventured, he had significantly fewer guarantees of safety, and equally thrillingly, only limited ways of communicating with those he knew and had left behind. A traveler, back then, was far less likely to find in the foreign traces of the familiar. This was not so long ago, and yet the world back then was still so unmapped: A traveler could and did wander through it like Pausanias, like Ibn Battuta, like the explorers who wrote the first drafts of the romance of movement, of the twinned danger and delight of finding oneself in a place where one was at the mercy of unfriendly but intriguing strangers. In 1972, Bruce Chatwin left England and began to travel.
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