Horizon

Bruce Chatwin

He seemed to come from nowhere and then leave just as quickly, that boyish-looking charmer of a writer who would have turned 65 today. You don’t hear about him anymore, but gosh, when I think of writers I really fell for at some time or another, Bruce Chatwin is on the short list. His biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, had this to say about him back in 2000.

Telling stories was how Bruce Chatwin gave of himself. Whatever else can be said of him, in this respect he was a giver. “Having him around was having extra oxygen in the air,” says the writer Sybille Bedford. Francis Wyndham, who in 1972 recruited him to the Sunday Times of London, says, “He made you participate in what, in that moment, did not seem to be a fantasy. One was included in it, even though he did all the talking. But he made me feel he was talking because of me, which explained the sense of exhilaration. That was part of his charm: He made me feel pleased with myself.”

Bruce’s storytelling engaged all his faculties: his youthful looks, his savage mimicry, his peacock voice — both invigorating and crushing at the same time, and “always on the edge of mirth.” The performance was physical. As he watched his audience come forward on their chairs, affirming him, he grew and so did his stories. “He went straight into a performance,” says his friend Jonathan Hope. “He’d sit bolt upright, ramrod back, his eyes popping, and roar off in fourth gear on his idée fixe of that week or hour.” He reminded Hope of Danny Kaye, a Chatwin favorite, who was able to convince an audience entirely by phonetics that he was speaking in Hungarian. Hope could seldom follow Chatwin’s stories to their conclusion. “But he would conjure up incredible images. Evening in the Atlas Mountains, the sky an exquisite cerulean blue, the stars coming out one by one and the wonderful sang de boeuf of the North African desert.”