Grove Koger
As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with Bruce Chatwin’s widely acclaimed first book, which describes a journey to southern Argentina and Chile.
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Chatwin, Bruce: In Patagonia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977)
Bruce Chatwin grew up coveting a thick, leathery piece of skin his grandmother kept in a curio cabinet. It was, he was assured, a piece of brontosaurus hide discovered in Patagonia by her cousin. Chatwin later learned that it actually had been recovered from the mummified remains of a giant sloth, although it did indeed hail from Patagonia, a region whose “absolute remoteness” thereafter haunted his imagination. Chatwin (seen below in a portrait by David Ford) was further inspired in his teenage years by reading Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, and although he would work for several years at the famous auction house of Sotheby and Co., he ultimately turned to traveling and writing.
The Patagonia that Chatwin discovered when he finally visited it for six months in the mid-1970s turned out to be a limbo of the displaced, historical and contemporary. These include madmen, outlaws such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a forlorn colony of Welsh settlers, a would-be king in search of a kingdom, a Russian doctor convinced that “the future of civilization is in the hands of the Slavs,” and a distant relative who had lost his ship on the rocks near remote Desolation Island.
The account Chatwin wrote of Patagonia is an idiosyncratic work of ninety-seven short, often very short chapters presented in staccato fashion. Many are stories in abbreviated form, the tales of the exiles and fellow wanderers Chatwin met along the way. Others deal with that distant relative, whose discovery of the skin perhaps instigated the entire quixotic affair. Chatwin has been accused by the Patagonians whose land he crisscrossed of “getting it wrong,” and the reader certainly senses that Chatwin has sought out the bizarre. He admitted to fellow writer Paul Theroux that he “embroidered” and invented. He himself called his work a “Quest or Wonder Voyage. It is about wandering and exile, and its structure is as old as literature itself: the narrator travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, as he goes along, describes his encounters with other people whose stories delay him en route.“
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The striking cover of the Summit edition that you see at the top of today’s post is the work of Fred Marcellino. Unfortunately, the creator of the map (which I’ve reproduced from the book) isn’t identified.
Similar works by Chatwin include Patagonia Revisited (1986, with Paul Theroux; also published as Nowhere Is a Place: Travels in Patagonia); The Songlines (1987); What Am I Doing Here (1989); Far Journeys: Photographs and Notebooks (1993); and Winding Paths: Photographs (1999). And for information about Chatwin himself, see Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (Twayne, 1997; Cape, 1997); Patrick Meanor, Bruce Chatwin (Twayne, 1997); Nicholas Murray, Bruce Chatwin (Seren, 1993); and Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin (Harvill in association with Jonathan Cape, 1999).
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