The Tao of Travel

CHATWIN WAS DELIBERATELY enigmatic, but a relentless explainer in the excitable way of a self-taught and widely read person, fond of theorizing. His work has this same excitable, distracted quality, with flashes of true brilliance in description. He was greatly influenced by Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, and this admiration shows in his own work, in his idealizing oddity of description and a love of the grotesque or unexpected. His self-assurance showed, as Augustus Hare said of Mrs. Grote in his autobiography, as the stating of every belief "with the manner and tone of one laying down the laws of Athens."

Chatwin was just as unambiguous in his belief in the value of walking. Walking defined him. And he felt that walking defined the human race—the best of it. His earliest work was on nomads; he lived his life on the move. Chatwin scoffed at the term "travel writer" and even "travel book." He claimed that much of what he wrote, sold as "travel," was fiction. "The Songlines is a novel," he said, though most readers regard it as Bruce's own adventures in the Australian outback. Some of In Patagonia was made up or fudged. He was contradictory, intense, unreliable, elusive, a compulsive exaggerator, almost a Munchhausen, and also secretive. "Hate confessional mode" he wrote in one of his notebooks.

Chatwin could seem at times frivolous, or so intense and demanding as to be exhausting. But without question he was an imaginative writer and one of the great walkers in travel literature.

This is not plain in the text of In Patagonia, where a typical sentence is "I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn"—a trek of two hundred miles, but he doesn't say how he got there. Or "I crossed over into Fireland" or "I passed through three boring towns" or "I went to the southernmost town in the world." He is an insubstantial presence in his books ("I am not interested in the traveler"), but in his letters home he was explicit. "Dying of tiredness. Have just walked 150 odd miles," he wrote to his wife.

The walker sees things clearly: the sun on the walker's head, the wind in the walker's face, the country under the walker's feet: "I walked out of town to the petrified forest," he wrote in The Songlines. "Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paralyzed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The tongue was missing. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill."

If The Songlines

is a novel, as Chatwin said, it is a very patchy piece of fiction. I think he meant that he invented much of it, and this may be true; but making things up in a travel book is not the same as writing a novel. The Songlines is a book arguing the case for nomadism: "The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu."

This, on Chatwin's part, is bad history. The historian Fernand Braudel, in his study of global shifts in culture, The Structure of Everyday Life, writes that nomads were "horse- and camel-men" who "represented speed and surprise at a period when everything moved slowly." Chatwin seems not to have known this. Later in The Songlines, he asserts, "Natural Selection has designed us—from the structure of our brain cells to the structure of our big toe—for a career of seasonal journeys

on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert."

Chatwin spent some weeks in an SUV in Australia, visiting Aboriginals. But what one remembers of these visits, and the stops in the outback, are the many instances of racism and mindless abuse from Australian whites (he was traveling in the mid-1980s). When he is on foot his prose is sharper:

I walked over a plateau of sandhills and crumbly red rock, broken by gulches which were difficult to cross. The bushes had been burnt for game-drives, and bright green shoots were sprouting from the stumps. [Then I climbed the plateau to find] Old Alex, naked, his spears along the ground and his velvet coat wrapped in a bundle. I nodded and he nodded.

"Hello," I said. "What brings you here?"

He smiled, bashful at his nakedness, and barely opening his lips, said, "Footwalking all the time all over the world."

—The Songlines

Werner Herzog: Walking on Foot Is a Virtue