Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
Nomad
By John Ryle
With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer
by Susannah Clapp
Knopf, 241 pp., $23.00
Anatomy of Restlessness
by Bruce Chatwin
Penguin, 205 pp., $12.95 (paper)
'If Bruce Chatwin had been portly, myopic and mouse-haired,' writes Susannah Clapp, 'his life and reputation would have been quite different.' Chatwin's death might have been different too. When he died in January 1989, his fatal illness, not yet acknowledged to be AIDS, was still a matter of speculation; his memorial service, at London's Greek Orthodox cathedral, compounded the mystery: the proceedings were conducted in a language none of his friends could understand, under the aegis of a faith few of them knew he had espoused. There was no encomium at St. Sophia, no valedictory address—no account of Chatwin's childhood, of his early career in the art world, of his reinvention of himself as a writer, of his marriage, his illness, or his death. There was no evocation of his flirtatious charm, his inexhaustible conversation, or his literary originality, the gifts that had brought hundreds of mourners together under the bare brick dome of the cathedral, in an atmosphere thick with incense and liturgical Greek. Those gathered there could note only, with bemusement, that the combination of austerity and exoticism was in keeping with Chatwin's own taste in such things.
Review, 3054 words
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