Here it is a weakness: The value in a collection of letters must lie in bringing us closer to the writer. Veils, however ornamented, grow tedious in any extended show. Paradoxically, though, the need for somewhere else to be his true home and someone else his true identity are what gives Chatwin’s gifts their distinctive character.
He was a vast explorer in a contracted world of package tours and identical airports. He went to places still remote and calling for strenuous, even dangerous effort. In “In Patagonia’’ and “The Songlines’’ (sometimes criticized for using myth to enhance their real encounters), and in a collection of shorter pieces that may be his best work, his precarious journeys sought out inhabitants who defied the odds by flaunting a style, an extremity, a passion, an art, out of all reason and seasons. Tweaking them, no doubt, he found anachronisms and free spirits who could tell us the world is still mysterious, unafraid, unbounded.
Chatwin’s zigzag life did indeed feed into his work. Apart from the writing, which he labored on in unflagging torment, he lived a pattern of starting out with a hilarious conviction worthy of Mr. Toad and then, Toad-like, walking away to some new revelation. This was true of much of his career: a meteoric rise as arts expert with Sotheby’s and sudden departure; studying archeology in Edinburgh and quitting after two years; triumphing as interviewer and writer of portraits for Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine and renouncing such journalistic endeavors. It was true of his continual discovery of ideal places to live and work — an Indian palace, an Oregon cabin, a posh London garret, a Provence chateau — and his quick disillusion with them. It was true of many though not all of his attachments.
“He would wear out people in certain places and then have to move on. Everything was absolute paradise etc. for about a month and then things were not quite what he wanted them to be.’’ Thus one of many chilly footnotes by his widow, Elizabeth, a co-editor of the letters.
