What do you want to know?? I'll have a thunk and see what i can come up with - too late now, my brain's going dead and I have someone waiting ....

Thank you Alexander for creating this topic.*beaming smile* Bruce Chatwin, as a writer has long intrigued me. My introduction to his work came through taking The Songlines out of our local library many years ago. From the first I was gripped by the heady combination of anthropology,, history, and just �people talk�. The concept of a travel novel with real people in it gripped me. There is almost an element of voyeurism in eavesdropping on his conversations with the people he met. I felt like a little person lodged in his rucksack peeping over his shoulder, and overhearing his conversations with people. Style wise his prose is direct and non-flowery. There is almost a tautness about it. Yet there is also a mental freedom to meander and just �be� which is very restful. He uses some interesting devices to good effect. For example in the gentle, almost aimless meander of The Songlines, there is a whole chapter of journal notes which explore the concept of nomadism from the countries he visited all over the world. This device succeeds in placing what by then had becom a rather myopic look at aboriginal thought within the greater world context of nomadism, creating a change in the length of focus. It takes literary courage to break the narrative flow and introduce unrelated journal entries, but like most of what Chatwin has done, it works. Yet overall, there is little personal reflection but a mass of descriptive narrative, and at the end one still feels that the man himself has been obscured. We are seeing through his eyes, but not his mind. I have taken time to find out more about the man himself because this intrigued me, and I�ll write about that later.

Principal Works In Patagonia, London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. The Viceroy of Ouidah, London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. On the Black Hill, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Patagonia Revisited (by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux), Salisbury, Michael Russell, 1985. The Songlines, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Utz, London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. What Am I Doing Here, London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. Nowhere is a Place: Travels in Patagonia [US edition of Patagonia Revisited with photos by Jeff Gnass and new introduction by Paul Theroux.], San Francisco: Yolla Bolly Press/Sierra Club Books, 1992. Photographs and Notebooks, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. Far Journeys: Photographs and Notebooks [US edition of Photographs and Notebooks], New York: Viking, 1993. Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969 - 1989, London: Jonathan Cape, 1996. Catalogs, anthologies, smaller works, etc. Animal Style (Art From East to West) (Bruce Chatwin with Emma Bunker and Ann Farkas), New York: The Asia Society, Inc., 1970. "The Guggenheim Family" in Great American Families, New York: Times Books, 1978. Diary selections in Cobra Verde: Filmbuch, Schaffhausen, Edition Stemmle, 1987. John Pawson (by Bruce Chatwin and others, translated from Spanish by E. Bonet), Spain: Gustavo Gili, 1992. The Morality of Things - A Talk by Bruce Chatwin, Francestown, New Hampshire: Typographeum, 1993. The Attractions of France, London: Colophon Press, 1993. Prague, edited by John and Kirsten Miller, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994. Articles, stories, introductions, etc. "The Bust of Sekhmet", in Ivory Hammer 4: The Year at Sotheby's & Parke-Bernet 1965-66, London: Longman, 1966. "Museums", in Robert Allen & Quentin Guirdham (eds.), The London Spy - a discreet guide to the city's pleasures, London: Blond, 1971. "The Estate of Maximilian Tod", in Emma Tennant (ed.), Saturday Night Reader, London: W. H. Allen, 1979. "Foreword", in Lorenzo Ricciardi, The Voyage of the Mir-el-lah, London, Pan Books, 1980. "Introduction", in Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana, London, Pan Books, 1981. "Howard Hodgkin", in Michael Compton, Howard Hodgkin's Indian Leaves, London: Tate Gallery catalogue, 1982. "Body and Eyes", in Robert Mapplethorpe, Lady: Lisa Lyon, New York: Viking Press, 1983. "Introduction", in Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, London: Redstone Press, 1989. "Introduction", in Sybil Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio, London: Folio Society, 1990. Work appearing in periodicals "Gone to Timbuctoo", in Vogue, July 1970. "It's a Nomad Nomad Nomad NOMAD world", in Vogue, December 1970. "The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions", in History Today, May 22, 1972. "Surviving in Style", in the Sunday Times magazine, March 4, 1973. "Moscow's Unofficial Art", in the Sunday Times magazine, May 6, 1973. "One Million Years of Art" (Bruce Chatwin, ed.), in the Sunday Times magazine, June 24 to August 26, 1973. "Postscript to a Thousand Pictures", in the Sunday Times magazine, August 26, 1973. "Heavenly Horses", in the Sunday Times magazine, September 9, 1973. "Fatal Journey to Marseilles - North Africans in France", in the Sunday Times magazine, January 6, 1974. "The Oracle", in the Sunday Times magazine, March 17, 1974. "The Witness", in the Sunday Times magazine, June 9, 1974. "The Road to the Isles". in the Times Literary Supplement, no. 3790, October 25, 1974. "Man the Aggressor", in the Sunday Times magazine, December 1, 1974. "The Riddle of the Pampa", in the Sunday Times magazine, October 26, 1975. "The Guggenheim Saga", in the Sunday Times magazine, November 23, 1975. "The Anarchists of Patagonia", in The Times Literary Supplement, no. 3903, December 31, 1976. "Milk", in London Magazine, August-September, 1977. "Until My Blood is Pure", in Bananas, no. 9, Winter, 1977. "Perils of the Israeli Settlement", in the Spectator, April 8, 1978. "Western Approaches", in the Radio Times, June 22, 1978. "A Memory of Nadezhda Mandelstam" and "An Introduction to Journey to Armenia", in Bananas, no. 11, Summer, 1978. "The Quest for the Wolf Children", in the Sunday Times magazine, July 30, 1978. "On the Road with Mrs. Gandhi", in the Sunday Times magazine, August 27, 1978. "Bedouins", in London Magazine, November, 1978. "The Estate of Maximilian Tod", in Triquarterly no 46, Fall, 1979. "Abel the Nomad", in the New York Review of Books, 22 November, 1979. "Variations on an Id�e Fixe", in the New York Review of Books, November 22, 1979. "An Aesthete at War", in the New York Review of Books, March 5, 1981. "Von Rezzori", in Vogue, May, 1981. "Donald Evans", in the New York Review of Books, May 14, 1981. "On the Black Hill", in Harpers & Queen, October, 1982. "A Visit to Wiesenthal", in the Observer magazine, November 7, 1982. "On Yeti Tracks", in Esquire, 1983. "Explorations of the Heart", in Vogue, January 1983. "Body Building Beautiful - Lisa Lyons and Robert Mapplethorpe", in the Sunday Times magazine, April 17, 1983. "I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia - The Making of a Writer", in the New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1983. "A Coup", in Granta no. 10: Travel Writing, Cambridge: Granta Publications, Ltd., 1984. "Self-Love Among the Ruins", in Vanity Fair, April, 1984. "A Place to Hang Your Hat", in House & Garden, June, 1984. "Great Rivers of the World: the Volga", in the Observer magazine, June, 1984. "Les Apocalypses", in Lettres Internationale, winter, 84/85. "Where a Wayfarer Halts her Journey: A Welcoming Home for Sally, Duchess of Westminster", in Architectural Digest, June, 1985. "In China, Rock's Kingdom", in the New York Times magazine, March 16, 1986. "A Tower in Tuscany", in House and Garden, January, 1987. "Dreamtime", in Granta no. 21: The Story-Teller, Cambridge, Granta Publications, Ltd., Spring, 1987. "The Lizard Man", in the New York Review of Books, August 13, 1987. "In Natasha's Trunk", in the New York Review of Books, September 24, 1987. "The Albatross" and "Chiloe", in Granta no. 24, 1988. "When the Revolution Came Home", in House & Garden, January, 1988. "On Location. Gone to Ghana: the Making of Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde", in Interview, March, 1988. "Excerpts from The Songlines", in Aperture no. 11, Spring, 1988. "The Seventh Day - a story by Bruce Chatwin", in London Review of Books, June 2, 1988. "The Songlines Quartet", in the New York Review of Books, January 19, 1989. "Songs of a Friend for Life", in The Times, January 20, 1989. "The Bey", "Mrs. Mandelstam", "Konstantin Melnikov: Architect", in Granta no. 26: Travel, Cambridge: Granta Publications Ltd., Spring, 1989. "The Duke of M____", "My Modi", "The Bey", in the Daily Telegraph (weekend section), May 6, 1989. "Your Father's Eyes Are Blue Again", in the Observer, May 7, 1989. "Brief Interludes", in Vogue, August, 1989. "On George Ortiz", in the New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989. "The Road to Ouidah", in Granta no. 44: The Last Place on Earth, Summer, 1993. Interviews "Bruce Chatwin: from Patagonia to the slave trade" (with Mary Blume), in the International Herald Tribune, 1980. "In search of the giant sloth and other stories" (with Maureen Cleave), in the Observer magazine, October 31, 1982. "An Interview with Bruce Chatwin" (with Michael Ignatieff), in Granta no. 21: The Story-teller, Cambridge, Granta Publications, Ltd., Spring, 1987. "Heard Between the Songlines" (with Michael Davie), in the Observer, June 21, 1987. "Songs of the Earth" (with Lucy Hughes-Hallett), in the London Evening Standard, June 24, 1987. "Born Under a Wandering Star" (with Colin Thubron), in the Daily Telegraph (weekend section), June 27, 1987. "Bruce Chatwin" (with Michael Field), in Publisher's Weekly, August 7, 1987. "Vagabundear por la memoria: Entrevista con Bruce Chatwin" (with Christian Kupchik), in Quimera: Revista de Literatura 83, 1988. Filmography Film Adapations On the Black Hill, direction and script by Andrew Grieve, British Film Institute/Film Four International, 1987. Cobra Verde (adapted from The Viceroy of Ouidah), direction and script by Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1990. Utz, directed by George Sluizer, scripted by Hugh Whitemore, Viva Pictures, Ltd., 1992. Documentaries Nach Patagonien (Zu Bruce Chatwins Reise in ein fernes Land), directed by Jan Sch�tte), Novoskop Film Jan Sch�tte, ZDF, 1991. Songlines: sur les traces de Bruce Chatwin en Australie, directed by Barbara Dickenberger), Arte, 1993. Works wholly or partly about Bruce Chatwin Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King - Journeys to Afghanistan, London: Collins, 1972. David C. Estes, "Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia: Traveling in Textualized Terrain." in New Orleans Review 18.2, 1991. Nicholas Murray, Bruce Chatwin, Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1993. Paul Theroux, "Chatwin Revisited", in Granta no. 44: The Last Place on Earth, Summer, 1993. Claudine Verley (ed.), B. Chatwin, Poitiers: les Cahiers forell, no. 4, November 1994. Alessandro Grassi and Neri Torrigiani (eds.), Bruce Chatwin: Searching for the Miraculous, Turin: Gruppo GFT, 1995. Richard Utz, "Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines" and "Bruce Chatwin: Utz", in Walter Jens (ed.), Kindler's Neues Literatur Lexikon, Nachtragsband, Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1997. Patrick Meanor, Bruce Chatwin (Twayne's English Author Series, No. 542), Twayne, 1997. http://www.mindspring.com/~canner/chatbibl.htm

this dude's been busy, eh? may have to check out some of his stuff....

Me too, but my books are backed up and are circling the bed like a rampart. Better spend more time off-line so I can read...*sigh*

Sounds like a Bruce Chatwin anthology might be just the thing to take when planning to get stranded on a deserted island. *wink*

I would think so...

The Making of a Writer; I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia By BRUCE CHATWIN Bruce is a dog's name in England (not so in Australia) and was also the surname of our Scottish cousins. The etymology of ''Chatwin'' is obscure; but my bassoon-playing Uncle Robin maintained that ''chettewynde'' meant ''winding path'' in Anglo-Saxon. Our side of the family traces its descent from a Birmingham button maker, yet there is a dynasty of Mormon Chatwins in a remote part of Utah, and recently I heard of a Mr. and Mrs. Chatwin, trapeze artists. By the time my mother married into them, the Chatwins were ''Birmingham worthies,'' that is to say, professional people, architects and lawyers, who did not go in for trade. There were, however, scattered among my forebears and relatives, a number of legendary figures whose histories inflamed my imagination: 1. A nebulous French ancestor, M. de la Tournelle, supposed to have been mixed up in the affair of the Queen's Necklace. 2. Great-great-grandfather Mathieson, who, at the age of 71, won the tossing of the caber at the Highland Games and died promptly of a stroke. 3. Great-grandfather Milward - a man obsessed by money, Germany and music. He was the friend of Gounod and Adelina Patti. He also handled the affairs of the ninth Duke of Marlborough and came to New York to negotiate the marriage agreement between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the duke, who later sacked him for ''grose incompitance.'' One afternoon, while rummaging through an old tin trunk, I found his court suit and marcasite-handled sword. Dressed as a courtier, sword in hand, I dashed into the drawing room shouting, ''Look what I've found!'' - and was told to ''take those things off at once!'' Poor Great-grandpapa! His name was taboo. Convicted for fraud in 1902, he was allowed out of prison to die. 4. Cousin Charley Milward the Sailor, whose ship was wrecked at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan in 1898. I have written his story in ''In Patagonia.'' While British Consul in Punta Arenas de Chile, he sent home to my grandmother a fragment of giant sloth's skin which he had found, perfectly preserved, in a cave. I called it ''the piece of brontosaurus'' and set it at the center of my childhood bestiary. 5. Uncle Geoffrey. Arabist and desert traveler who, like T.E. Lawrence, was given a golden headdress (since sold) by the Emir Feisal. Died poor in Cairo. 6. Uncle Bickerton. Pick miner and bigamist. 7. Uncle Humphrey. Sad end in Africa. My earliest recollections date from 1942 and are of the sea. I was 2 years old. We were staying with my grandmother in furnished rooms on the seafront at Filey in Yorkshire. In the house next door lived the Free French, and the men of a Scottish regiment were stationed in dugouts across the street. I watched the convoys of gray ships as they passed to and fro along the horizon. Beyond the sea, I was told, lay Germany. My father was away at sea, fighting the Germans. I would wave at the ships as they vanished behind Flamborough Head, a long wall of cliffs that, if a footnote in the Edition Pleiade is correct, was the starting point for Rimbaud's prose poem ''Promontoire.'' At dusk my grandmother would draw the blackout material over the window, brood over a brown bakelite radio and listen to the BBC News. One evening, a bass voice announced, ''We have won a great victory.'' To celebrate the Battle of Alamein my mother and grandmother danced the Highland fling around the room - and I danced with my grandmother's stockings. My grandmother was an aberdonian; but her nose, her jaw, her burnished skin and jangly gold earrings, all gave her the appearance of a gypsy fortuneteller. She was, I should add, obsessed by gypsies. She was a fearless gambler, who, for want of other income, made a tidy living on the horses. She used to say that Catholics were heathens, and she had a sharp turn of phrase. One rainy day in 1944 we were sheltering in a phone booth when an ugly old woman pressed her nose to the pane. ''That woman,'' said my grandmother, ''has the face of a bull's behind with no tail to hide it.'' Her husband, Sam Turnell, was a sad-eyed solitary whose only real accomplishment was an impeccable tap dance. After the Battle of Britain he found employment as a salesman of memorial stained-glass windows. I worshiped him. Toward the end of the war, when we had rented, temporarily, a disused shop in Derbyshire, I acquired from him a love of long walks over the moors. Because we had neither home nor money, my mother and I drifted up and down England, staying with relations and friends. Home, for me, was a serviceman's canteen or a station platform piled with kit bags. Once, we visited my father on his minesweeper in Cardiff Harbor. He carried me up to the crow's nest and let me yell down the intercom to the ward-room. Perhaps, during those heady months before the Normandy landings, I caught a case of what Baudelaire calls ''La Grande Maladie: horreur du domicile.'' Certainly, when we moved into the grim-gabled house of our own in Birmingham, I grew sick and thin, and people wondered if I was going to be tubercular. One morning, when I had measles, my mother rushed upstairs with the newspaper and said, jubilantly, that Japan had surrendered and my father would be coming home. I glanced at the photo of the mushroom cloud and knew something dreadful had happened. The curtains of my bedroom were woven with tongues of orange flame. That night, and for years to come, I dreamed of walking over a charred black landscape with my hair on fire. I lost teddy bears without a whimper, yet clung tenaciously to three precious possessions: a wooden camel known as Laura, brought by my father from the Cairo bazaar; a West Indian conch shell called Mona, in whose glorious pink mouth I could hear the wish-wash of the ocean; and a book. The book was ''The Fisherman's Saint,'' an account of Sir Wilfred Grenfell's mission work on the coast of Labrador. I still have it. On the title page is written: ''To Bruce on his 3rd Birthday from the postman at Filey. For when he grows up.'' I imagined the book must contain some wonderful secret (which it did not), and it maddened me to have to wait all those years. The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at 6 I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, ''I am a swallow.'' Then I looked up and asked, ''How do you spell telegraph wires?'' MY first job, while staying in Stratford-on-Avon with my greataunts, Janie and Gracie, in 1944, was to be the self-appointed guide to Shakespeare's monument and tomb in the church. The price was threepence a go. Most of my customers were G.I.'s. Not that I knew who Shakespeare was, except that he was somehow associated with the red brick theater from whose balcony I would chuck old crusts to the swans. Yet, long before I could read, Aunt Gracie had taught me to recite the lines engraved on the tomb-slab: Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones. The aunts were spinsters. Janie, the elder and wittier, was an artist. As a young woman she'd lived on Capri and drawn sketches of naked boys. She remembered seeing Maxim Gorki, possibly even Lenin; and in Paris she'd been to a party in the studio of Kees Van Dongen, the Dutch painter. During the Great War she worked, I believe, as a nurse. Perhaps the deaths of so many beautiful youths moved her to paint the canvases of St. Sebastian that lay in racks around her studio? She was a tireless reader of modern fiction. Later, she would tell me that American writers wrote better, cleaner English than the English themselves. One day she looked up from her book and said, ''What a wonderful word 'arse' is!'' -and for the first time I heard the name Ernest Hemingway. Aunt Gracie was very emotional and very deaf. Her great friend (and my passion!) was the Irish writer Eleanor Doorly, through whom she met members of the Dublin Circle. Her approach to literature was entirely romantic. On summer days we used to sit and read by the Avon. Across the stream was a bank called Wier Brake, which, so she swore, was Shakespeare's bank whereon the wild thyme blew - though I found only nettles and brambles. We read Whitman's ''Song of Myself'' from an anthology of poetry called ''The Open Road.'' We read ''The Windhover'' of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and we read from Eleanor Doorly's book on Marie Curie. The story of Curie's self-inflicted radium burns affected me greatly. I also wonder if Aunt Gracie was the last Victorian to threaten a child with the specter of Bonaparte. One evening, when I'd misbehaved in the bath, she cried, ''Stop that, or Boney will get you!'' - and then drew on a piece of paper a dreadful black bicorn hat on legs. Sometime later, in a nightmare, I met the hat outside Hall's Croft, the home of Shakespeare's daughter, and it opened like a furry clamshell and swallowed me. I remember, too, the aunts having a lively discussion as to whether ''Measure for Measure'' was suitable entertainment for a 6-year-old. They decided no harm could come of it - and from that matinee on I was hooked. The Stratford theater kept the back row of stalls unreserved until the day of the performance, and I would cycle through the dawn to make sure of getting a seat. I saw most of the great productions of the late 40's and 50's - with the Oliviers, Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Paul Robeson as Othello - and these constitute for me the Shakespeare of all time. Having lived the plays as a boy, I can now scarcely sit through one without a sensation of loss. BY 1949 the hard times were over, and one evening my father proudly drove home from work in a new car. Next day he took my brother and me for a spin. On the edge of an escarpment he stopped, pointed to a range of gray hills in the west and then said, ''Let's go on into Wales.'' We slept the night in the car, in Radnorshire, to the sound of a mountain stream. At sunrise there was a heavy dew, and the sheep were all around us. I suppose the result of this trip is the novel I've recently published, ''On the Black Hill.'' At boarding school I was an addict of atlases and was always being ostracized for telling tall stories. Every boy had to be a ''little Conservative,'' though I never understood -then as now - the motivations of the English class system. Nor why, on Guy Fawkes Day of 1949, the masters encouraged us to burn on a bonfire an effigy of the Labor Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. I was sad for Mr. Attlee, and never, even in my capitalist phase, was I able to vote Conservative. The Chatwins, coming as they did from the heart of England, were fanatical sailors. The names of their boats were the Aireymouse, the Dozmaree, the Greebe, the Nereid and, finally, the Sunquest, an 18-ton Bermudian sloop built in the 30's to sail around the world. We only sailed as far as Brittany, and once to Spain. I hated the actual sailing, for I was always horribly seasick - and yet I persevered. After reading an account of the effect of the H-Bomb on Britain, my ''life-plan'' was to sail away to a South Sea island and never come back. The first grown-up book I read from cover to cover was Capt. Joshua Slocum's ''Sailing Alone Around the World.'' This was followed by John C. Voss's ''The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss,'' by Melville's ''Omoo'' and ''Typee,'' then Richard Henry Dana and Jack London. Perhaps from these writers I got a taste for Yankee plain style? I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical. One summer when I was 13 I went alone to Sweden to talk English to a boy of my age whose family lived in a lovely 18th-century house by a lake. The boy and I had nothing in common. But his Uncle Percival was a delightful old gentleman, always dressed in a white smock and sun hat, with whom I would walk through the birch forest, gather mushrooms or row to an island to see the nesting ospreys. He lived in a log cabin lit by crystal chandeliers. He had traveled in Czarist Russia. He made me read Chekhov in Constance Garnett's translation, also Duff Cooper's biography of Talleyrand. THE great English novelists were left unread, but were heard, very much heard - ''Oliver Twist,'' ''Wuthering Heights,'' ''Pride and Prejudice'' - on gramophone records, in plummy English voices, as I lay in the Birmingham eye hospital with partial paralysis of the optic nerve - a psychosomatic condition probably brought on by Marlborough College, where I was considered to be a dimwit and dreamer. I tried to learn Latin and Greek and was bottom of every class. There was, however, an excellent school library, and I seem in retrospect to have come away quite well read. I loved everything French - painting, furniture, poetry, history, food - and, of course, I was haunted by the career of Paul Gauguin. For my 17th birthday the owner of the town bookshop gave me a copy of Edith Sitwell's anthology, ''Planet and Glow-worm,'' a collection of texts for insomniacs, to which I can trace a number of literary fixtures -Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud, Li Po and other Chinese ''wanderers,'' Blake and Mad Kit Smart, the encapsulated biographies of John Aubrey and the 17th-century prose music of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the idea of becoming a writer never entered my head. For a time I went along with the suggestion that I follow the family tradition and train as an architect; but, because I was innumerate, my chances of passing the exams were remote. My parents gently squashed my ambition to go on the stage. Finally, in December 1958, since my talents were so obviously ''visual,'' I started work as a porter at Messrs. Sotheby and Co., Fine Art Auctioneers, of Bond Street, at wages of 6 a week. I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculpture. I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered. Before long, I was an instant expert, flying here and there to pronounce, with unbelieveable arrogance, on the value or authenticity of works of art. I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake. We sold the collection of Somerset Maugham, who, at dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, told a story about a temple boy, himself, and a baby elephant. On Park Avenue, a woman slammed the door in my face, shouting, ''I'm not showing my Renoir to a 16-yearold kid.'' The high points of my fine-arts career were: 1. A conversation with Andre Breton about the fruit machines in Reno. 2. The discovery of a wonderful Tahiti Gauguin in a crumbling Scottish castle. 3. An afternoon with Georges Braque, who, in a white leather jacket, a white tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird. In the summer holidays I traveled 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. ''All those lovely things passing through your hands,'' they'd say - and I'd look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth. Or people would compliment me on my ''eye,'' and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out. After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half-blind. 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? The chairman of Sotheby's said: ''I'm sure there is something wrong with Bruce's eyes, but I can't think why he has to go to Africa.'' 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 slasher. But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. I quit my job and enrolled as a first-year student of archeology at Edinburgh University. MY studies in that grim northern city were not a success. I enjoyed a year of Sanskrit. By contrast, archeology seemed a dismal discipline - a story of technical glories interrupted by catastrophe, whereas the great figures of history were invisible. In the Cairo Museum you could find statues of pharaohs by the million. But where was the face of Moses? One day, while excavating a Bronze Age burial, I was about to brush the earth off a skeleton, and the old line came back to haunt me:'And curst be he yt moves my bones.'' 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 reestablish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers - Christ, 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 33, I had a phone call from Francis Wyndham of The Sunday Times of London's magazine, a man of outstanding literary judgment, whom I hardly knew. . Would I, he 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 Andre Malraux on what General de Gaulle thought of England; and in Moscow I visited Nadezhda Mandelstam. She lay on her bed, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, gritting a song of triumph between her blackened teeth. Her work was done. She had published, abroad it was true, but her words would one day come home. She looked at the thrillers I'd been told to take her and sneered: ''Romans policiers! Next time, bring me real trash!'' But when she saw the pots of orange marmalade, her mouth cracked into a smile: ''Marmalade, my dear, it is my childhood!'' Each time I came back with a story, Francis Wyndham encouraged, criticized, 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 70's, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of 93 thought nothing of a 14-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 of London: ''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 back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published. While stringing its sentences together, I thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. I am older and a bit stiffer, and I am thinking of settling down. Eileen Gray's map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/19/specials/chatwin-writer.html

If his books are half as interesting as his bio above he is a splendid read, indeed! Thanks, Maggie.

He actually inspires me to keep a travel journal in Africa - maybe, someday .....

Thesis first! I have the first installment which I should read instead of posting here...*sigh*

From Maggie: Portrait of Bruce Chatwin

Sorta looks smouldering doesn't he. Anyway it goes with the article he wrote.

It is always nice to have a face to go with the people in whom we are interested.

Mmm I like this one! prefer dark hair normally though

UmmHmm

Definitely UmmHmm. He was quite a ladies man apparently. I'd have been in the queue.

And, I right behind you (or beside you - your choice!)

Weeell the tales I've heard of him!!!!

*whispering* tell me here and no one else shall ever know...*grin* From whence have you been banned? Or is it an 'in-house' ban ?!