The proposer told how he was fascinated by Chatwin in the 1980s, when he was a cult writer – central in the new ‘travel writing’ – but also a cult personality, with all that means for better or worse. He was good-looking, unpredictable, brilliant, always on the move, bisexual, and HIV positive – which led to an early death. He became famous for his ‘moleskin’ notebooks, specially made and still sold by Moleskine as Bruce Chatwin notebooks – some of these published in a beautiful 1993 volume Photographs and Notebooks. He was a nomad and an aesthete.
Inevitably, he went through a period of neglect. Having won several literary prizes, the proposer wondered whether he had he been overrated, but thought all his books were still in print.
He had a particular reason for choosing this book, about a region of the Welsh border he knew very well, spending time there every year in the areas of Herefordshire, Radnorshire, the Black Mountains and the Wye Valley. (Chatwin’s geography is a bit elusive, but you can plot the book fairly exactly – e.g. Rhulen is Hay on Wye). Like his father’s background – he and his two brothers were born on a hill farm on the border first decade of 20th century.
Chatwin was born 1940, and in his childhood he was constantly on the move (mainly Midlands, Birmingham, English not Welsh). He went to an English public school (Marlborough), his father got him a job at Sotheby’s, where he did very well, but feeling burnt out, left to enrol in archaeology at Edinburgh University 1966, leaving without a degree. He then lived as a writer, employed at the Sunday Times 1972-5, but spending much time on exotic travel – Asia, Africa, South America, Australia. His first book (possibly the best?) is In Patagonia (1977). He went on to write other novels, making a big hit with The Song Lines (about the Australian outback). Living quite a bit in New York and famously bisexual, he had many affairs with men, became HIV positive, died young.
Chatwin didn’t like being pigeon-holed as travel writer – he preferred ‘story-teller’. On the Black Hill, set in a limited space, stands apart from his otherwise exotic work. Note though that this is ‘border land’ – on the edge. Perhaps Chatwin is attempting to explore the opposite of his usual theme, life in one place as against nomadism. It is interesting to see how Lewis wants to travel and is trapped by the ‘cramped and frugal’ rural life with the home-loving Benjamin (yet both of them are carried up in the plane at the end).
Some points:
a. Welshness – much of the sympathy in the novel goes to the Welsh side, to the ordinary people of the farms (cf. fairly hostile image of the Bickertons). Chatwin is entirely English, not Welsh, though he spent a lot of time in this border country, both in childhood and when writing the novel. However, there are quite a few incomers – it is not a closed world – e.g Theo the Tent, a sort of wild man who links up with Meg the Rock as forces of nature against the world of the small town. So perhaps Welsh wildness is set against English stuffiness? The Welsh went to Patagonia after all.
b. There is continuity and change in image of this border Everything seems to stay the same, yet the twins’ lives carry you from an ancient to a modern world. It is interesting in this to compare this with the much more elegaic Sunset Song, and the destruction of the old world.
c. There are powerful emotions, violence in the family and between families (The Vision and The Rock), and Mary’s love/hate for Amos. In some ways this paradise is a hell to live in. At the centre of all this the twins; the theme of twins clearly interests Chatwin. For identical twins, they are very different – maybe this refers to two potentialities of the bisexual author.
d. Above all, there is the extraordinary manner of writing – very deliberate brevity, short sentences, short paragraphs, packed with physical detail, places and people – highly coloured, often grotesque. Compare Chatwin’s very beautiful semi-abstract photos of Africa, Asia etc. A gallery of memorable images.
e. There is a striking resemblance to the style of one of Chatwin’s masters, Flaubert – who oscillated between exotic writings and highly polished evocations of ordinary life in Normandy, Madame Bovary of course, but also the short story ‘A Simple Heart’, about the life of servant girl.
What do you think? What’s the effect of this highly worked, deliberate writing?
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