What Am I Doing Here

365 Pages·1989·14.92 MB·English

by  Bruce Chatwin

'His last book, a "personal selection" of essays, portraits, medit­
ations, travel writing and other unclassifiable Chatwinian forms of
prose, was put together during his final, terrible year of wasting
away . . . one of its chief delights is that it contains so many of its
author's best anecdotes, his choicest performances'
Salman Rushdie, Observer
'It is a personal collection of travel pieces, profiles, stories and essays,
and as one reads it one cannot forget it was compiled by a uniquely
gifted writer in the face of death, urgently pinning down ex­
periences important to him. All that might suggest a scrapbook, but
as a legendary traveller and observer of people Chatwin had more to
put into his than most'
Mail on Sunday
'Each of his books, in its distinctness from the others, mirrored his
evident fear of being categorised by critics or publishers, and this
sense of wanting to surprise went hand in hand with the power to
create a collusion with the individual reader, as though you and he
alone knew where the work's real thrust lay'
Jonathan Keates, The Independent
'Bruce Chatwin's posthumously published volume of articles and
stories is both a marvellous introduction to his work and a memorial
to a great writer ... It is a remarkable collection, and a fitting
postscript to a distinguished career'
Today
'All the writing in this volume demonstrates Bruce Chatwin's
loathing of the humdrum, the dreary, the predictable. What at­
tracted him was the unusual, the weird and wonderful. Wherever he
was, he would respond to odd news items he read, like the day he
was in Benares and read that a wolf-child had been found near
Sultanpur. Most people would think how interesting and turn the
page but not Chatwin. He caught a train at once and within twenty
four hours was travelling on by rickshaw to where the boy was. The
journalist in him (strongly present) knew a good story when it heard
one'
Margaret Forster, The Guardian
'Bruce Chatwin's originality as a writer is that he uses accepted
means, sharpened and pared down admittedly, to express unlikely
material. If there was a barrier or inhibition, he just crashed it as he
would in life; the resources of language had to take the strain he put
on them without distortion. That is Tolstoy's formula, and almost
every great writer's. It is like the best letter-writing only more art­
ful, and as with the best letter writers there was a competence,
almost a smoothness about Bruce'
Peter Levi, The Spectator
'When I read The Songlines I felt that his most engrossing character
was himself, and that the unknown land which most fascinated him
remained, as it had been since childhood, his own imagination. That
is true in this book too. There are a dozen autobiographical articles —
about his father, about undergoing tests in hospital and his feelings
about death, about his visit to the location where Herzog was film­
ing The Viceroy of Ouidah. Pieces like these show us that human
existence — at least as Chatwin sees it — is gloriously open-ended,
unpredictable and exotic. The more he assures us that he is telling
the truth, the more wonders we can expect'
Kenneth McLeish, The Sunday Times
'He was a great traveller and a fine stylist, a good companion, an
original nomad, and clearly a nice man. His work will last*
Philip Howard, The Times
'What Am I Doing Here (the question Rimbaud asked in Ethiopia),
because it is more ragged than anything else he wrote, tells us more
about him — his interests and friends, if not his passions. He writes of
his father, of his friend, the distinguished painter Howard Hodgkin,
and his tête-à-têtes with André Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstam
. . . Ideally he gets a really bizarre bee in his bonnet, such as the
rumour of a "wolf-boy" in India, or a Chinese fengshui geomancer
in Hong Kong, or the idea of looking for a Yeti, and he sets off and
deals with it. At its most successful his travel is a search for an
unholy grail - something freakish, plainly an excuse — and off he
goes, and the piece is a winner. More than half of those in this book
are winners, and the others can be classified as Anecdotes, Frag
ments, Assignments, and Bits of Odd Lore. This latter category is a
Chatwin speciality'
Paul Theroux, The Telegraph
'"My whole life," said Chatwin in 1983, "has been a search for the
miraculous." There have been few writers better qualified to seek it,
or better able to distinguish the fake from the genuine article'
Punch
'These essays cover the whole of his short writing life and they get
better and better. The many little pieces he composed in the last year
of his life are the best of all . . . Chatwin's travels had left him with
both rich eyes and rich hands and he had only begun to dispense the
results to his readers'
Sean French, New Statesman & Society
'The effect ought to be disjointed; yet the recurrent theme of
Chatwin's own insatiable wanderlust ultimately knits this unlikely
assortment of people and places into an absorbing whole'
Daily Mail
BRUCE CHATWIN was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending
Marlborough School he began work as a porter at Sotheby's. Eight years
later, by then one of Sotheby's youngest directors, he abandoned his job to
pursue his passion for world travel. From 1972 to 1975 he worked for the
Sunday Times, then announced his next departure in a telegram: 'Gone to
Patagonia for six months.' This trip inspired the first of Bruce Chatwin's
books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize arid the E. M.
Forster award and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been
made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (redded Cobra Verde), direc­
ted by Werner Herzog, and the British Film Institute's On The Black Hill.
The Songlines went straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and
stayed in the top ten for nine months. His most recent novel, Utz, was
shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. He died in January 1989.
Also by Bruce Chatwin in Picador:
On The Black Hill
The Songlines
Utz
In Patagonia
The Viceroy of Ouidah
BRUCE CHATWIN
W H AT AM I
DOING HERE
published by Pan Books
In association with Jonathan Cape
First published 1989 by Jonathan Cape Ltd
This Picador edition published 1990
by Pan Books Ltd,
Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG
In association with Jonathan CaDe Ltd
9 8 7 6 5 4 3
© The Legal Personal Representatives of
C. B. Chatwin 1989
ISBN o 330 31310 X
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior
consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
Introduction. xi
1 WRITTEN FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Assunta — A Story 3
Assunta 2 — A Story 5
Your Father's Eyes Are Blue Again 9
2 STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
A Coup — A Story 15
The Lyman Family — A Story 36
Until My Blood Is Pure — A Story 42
The Chinese Geomancer 49
3 FRIENDS
George Ortiz 59
Kevin Volans 63
Howard Hodgkin 70
At Dinner with Diana Vreeland 79
4 ENCOUNTERS
Nadezhda Mandelstam: A Visit 83
Madeleine Vionnet 86
Maria Reiche: The Riddle of the Pampa 94
Konstantin Melnikov: Architect 105
André Malraux 114
Werner Herzog in Ghana 136