Nicholas Shakespeare: Bruce Chatwin (Groot Brittannië, 1999): 550 blz: Uitgeverij the Harvill Press
Bruce Chatwin was een Engelse schrijver van reisverhalen, wiens werk in de jaren 80 en 90 vrij populair was. Ik heb geen idee of hij nog steeds gelezen wordt.
Chatwin was geboren in 1940 in een klein dorpje vlakbij Sheffield. In 1958 kwam hij te werken bij het veilinghuis Sotheby's in Londen. Daar ontwikkelde hij zijn befaamde oog voor kunst en leerde hij om wat hij gezien had beknopt en nauwkeurig te beschrijven. In 1965 trouwde hij de Amerikaanse Elizabeth Chanler die hij bij Sotheby's had leren kennen. Hij stopte met zijn werk bij Sotheby's en heeft daarna 3 jaar als verslaggever bij The Sunday Times gewerkt.
In 1979 publiceerde Chatwin zijn eerste boek "In Patagonië". Chatwin was biseksueel en oefende een zeer grote aantrekkingskracht uit op zowel mannen als vrouwen. Hij stierf in 1989 aan de gevolgen van Aids.
De biografie van Nicholas Shakespeare is prachtig geschreven en zeer onderhoudend. Ik had deze biografie al in 2002 gelezen en ook de biografie van Susannah Clapp die lang niet zo interessant is.
Shakespeare besteedt veel aandacht aan de eerste 18 jaren van het leven van Chatwin, maar liefst 80 bladzijden. De eerste 285 bladzijden van het boek (tot het moment waarop Chatwin naar Patagonië vertrekt) vind ik tamelijk briljant. De tweede helft van zijn boek met uitgebreide beschrijvingen van hoe de boeken van Chatwin ontvangen werden en over het verloop van zijn ziekte vind ik beduidend minder interessant.
Al met al vind ik "Chatwin" één van de meest onderhoudende biografieën die ik ooit heb gelezen. In tegenstelling tot de biografieën van Charles Darwin en Gregor Mendel die ik een tijdje terug heb besproken, is dit niet een biografie die voor een groot publiek geschikt is. Je moet wel erg geïnteresseerd zijn in het leven en werk van Chatwin om deze biografie te willen lezen.
Citaten:
- Chatwin was a storyteller first, but not until the last third of his life did he write the stories down. "I've always loved telling stories," he told Thubron. "It's telling stories for what it's worth. Everyone says: "Are you writing a novel?" No, I'm writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. ... "
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For Bruce, the lockable cabinet in West Heath Road was a sustaining
metaphor and it informed both the content of his work (faraway places,
one-offs, marvels, fakes, the Beast) and its style (patchwork, vitreous,
selfcontained). The shelves and drawers were a repository for
collecting, movement and story. Bruce's life would enact all three.
- I have never felt any real attachment to a home and fail to produce the normal emotive respond when the word is mentioned - except when travelling ...
- Never more than a average pupil at Innisfree, he was by his own account only interested in journeys and maps. "I was a tremendous fabulist." In one story he had "absolutely nothing" to do with England. "I startled the class by pointing dramatically at the White Sea on the classroom atlas, and held their attention with a confident revelation. My parents were not my parents at all. I was a Russian orphan. I described in graphic detail my escape across the frontier to safety. Dead of winter, sledges, panting huskies and black pine trees. Guns of the soldiers blazed on the frozen river. Blood in the snow. I was the only survivor. So brave. One little girl sobbed and burst into tears. The headmistress suggested to my mother I might see a psychiatrist."
- "There is no doubt in my mind," says David Nash, who worked alongside Bruce in the Impressionist department, "that Sotheby's was the main stimulus of Bruce's life, whether he likes to admit it or not." He learned how to look at an object and to describe it compactly.
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Bruce had to produce a succint description of the object's history,
weight and size as to maximize its value. By the process of cataloguing
thousands of objects and dipping into arcane reference books, he learned
how to transfer graphic ideas into words.
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In the tearoom at Sotheby's, there was a phrase, "doing a Bruce". It
meant wrapping up something in a bit of myth and making a story out of
it.
- Bruce's unstinting confidence more than compensated for his lack of training, experience and expertise. David Nash accompanied Bruce to the Parsee dealer Heeramanek in New York, then contemplating a sale of Buddhist and Hindu sculptures. "Bruce was enormously impressive at discussing in learned terms thirteenth-century Vijayanagara culture. I'd never heard of it. I thought: "My God, this man knows everything." Only later, I realised he'd read it up the night before."
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Alongside the absolute confindence of the cataloguer, he brought to his
journalism the knowledge of what to leave out. He was able to suggest,
to supply just enough data but no more. He knew the magic of a name and
of the specific detail that gives authenticity and conviction. "An
observed detail has a resonance - a branching truth - that no
generalisation can match," wrote John Updike.
- Bruce sought the same reverberating image. He wrote quick snapshots of ordinary people among whom he passed a very short time ...
- "Bruce always went straight to the fountain-head," says Paddy Leigh Fermor. "He found the best authority he could and asked hundreds of questions and then he would come back the second best informed man on that particular subject in the world possibly."
- Just as he preferred to think of Eaton Place as empty, so Bruce liked to think of himself as someone who travelled light, with only a brown leather rucksack. ...
But travelling with Bruce in India, says Bail, was "like travelling with Garbo". Bruce's luggage included 40 kilos excess bagage in books. There was also the typewriter, the card index, the champagne, the muesli, the pills, the hats, the boots, the grey suits, the pyjamas. "His amount of luggage was really colossal," says Bail. "We needed a driver."
