Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English writer whose brief, brilliant career produced some of the most beautiful and formally adventurous prose of the late twentieth century. His six books — published across just twelve years — resist categorisation: they are travel books that read like novels, novels that read like ethnographies, and essays that read like philosophical investigations. In Patagonia (1977) reinvented travel writing. The Songlines (1987) used Aboriginal Australian songlines as the foundation for an argument about human nomadism. Utz (1988) — a novella about a Meissen porcelain collector in Communist Prague — was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989 at forty-eight, a death he concealed from all but his closest friends, and his posthumous reputation has only grown.

Life and Career

Chatwin was born in Sheffield and grew up in Birmingham. His childhood was peripatetic — his father was in the Navy — and the habit of restlessness became the defining feature of both his life and his art. At eighteen he joined Sotheby’s, the auction house, where he rose rapidly to become one of the youngest directors in the firm’s history, specializing in Impressionist painting and antiquities. But at twenty-six, he developed a psychosomatic blindness that he attributed to staring at objects too closely, and he left Sotheby’s to study archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

He never completed the degree. Instead, he became a journalist for the Sunday Times Magazine and began traveling obsessively — to Afghanistan, West Africa, Patagonia, Australia, Central Europe. His journalism was distinctive: beautifully written, deeply personal, and more interested in ideas than events.

In Patagonia (1977) — his first book — was published to immediate acclaim. Structured as a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative, the book follows Chatwin to the southern tip of South America in search of a piece of brontosaurus skin that his grandmother kept in a cabinet (it turned out to be a piece of mylodon, a giant ground sloth). The search is the pretext; the real subject is Patagonia itself — its landscapes, its eccentric inhabitants (Welsh settlers, Butch Cassidy’s widow, anarchist utopians), and its quality of being the end of the world. The book’s innovation was formal: it demonstrated that travel writing could be constructed like a modernist novel — fragmentary, allusive, driven by juxtaposition rather than chronology.

The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) — about Francisco Félix de Souza, a Brazilian slave trader who became the most powerful man in the West African kingdom of Dahomey — was his first novel, though it reads like a hallucination of history. On the Black Hill (1982) — about twin brothers who spend their entire lives on a Welsh border farm — was his most conventional and compassionate novel, praised for its deep understanding of rural life and the passage of time.

The Songlines (1987) was his most ambitious and controversial book. It began as an investigation of Aboriginal Australian songlines — the invisible pathways across the continent along which Aboriginal people navigate by singing the landscape into existence — and became an argument about the biological basis of human nomadism. Chatwin braided his Australian travels with a “notebook” section containing quotations, anecdotes, and reflections on the nomadic impulse from sources ranging from Pascal to the Saharan Tuareg. The book was criticised by anthropologists for its romanticisation of Aboriginal culture and by literary critics for its structural looseness, but its central idea — that human beings are evolved to walk, and that the sedentary life is a form of pathology — is one of the most provocative in modern travel writing.

Utz (1988) — a novella about Kaspar Utz, a collector of Meissen porcelain in Communist Czechoslovakia who must navigate between his passion for his collection and the Communist state’s claim on it — was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is Chatwin’s most perfect work: a meditation on collecting, possession, and the relationship between beauty and freedom, compressed into 150 pages of lapidary prose.

What Am I Doing Here (1989), published posthumously, collected his essays, profiles, and travel pieces.

Themes and Style

Chatwin’s central obsession was nomadism — the human compulsion to move, to walk, to resist the tyranny of property and settlement. He believed that human beings were biologically adapted to a nomadic life and that the invention of agriculture and private property was a catastrophe from which civilisation has never recovered. This argument — romantic, provocative, historically dubious — gives his work its animating energy.

His prose is among the most beautiful in English since Nabokov: precise, sensuous, rhythmically controlled, and capable of compressing enormous amounts of information and observation into single sentences. He writes about objects — a piece of porcelain, a fossiled skin, a Aboriginal painting — with the trained eye of the former art expert.

Critical Standing

Chatwin is one of the most influential travel writers of the twentieth century and a major prose stylist. In Patagonia remains the model for a generation of literary travel writing. The early death, the concealed AIDS diagnosis, and the mystery of his personal life have added a romantic mythology to his literary reputation.

Key Works

• In Patagonia (1977)
• On the Black Hill (1982)
• The Songlines (1987)
• Utz (1988)

Collecting Chatwin

In Patagonia (1977, Jonathan Cape, London) — fine first editions in the dust jacket bring $300–$800. The Songlines (1987, Cape) brings $50–$150. Utz (1988, Cape) brings $40–$100. Chatwin’s early death makes signed copies scarcer than they would otherwise be; inscribed copies bring substantial premiums.