Some thoughts on Bruce Chatwin’s fabrications, from Crabwalk
At Crabwalk yesterday, Josh Benton had an interesting entry about travel-writer/novelist Bruce Chatwin.
“Chatwin occasionally made things up,” Benton writes. “Parts of his books were fabricated. At times he tried the old dodge that a certain amount of fabrication was, well, expected by readers. Some of his books he labeled fiction in hidden places, but the fact they were all about this fellow named Bruce who was talking to real people in real places made it clear he had no intention of tearing down the fourth wall.
“Chatwin was writing books, not works of journalism. For better or worse, people have grown more used to fibbing in books than in newspapers and magazines. (Does anyone really think David Sedaris’ stories are all literally true? Come on.) But the basic lie of it all remains — people like Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski told falsehoods much larger than anything Jayson Blair did. And they’re globally acclaimed. (It also helps that they had roughly 1,000 times the talent Blair did.)
“I don’t have any wise summary points here — just that people have different expectations of objectivity from different sources, and that some people manage to work outside those expectations. A lot of the time, they produce brilliant work — Chatwin and Kapuscinski alike. But it’s unfortunate that every time a journalist writes something of great value, it seems to be tainted, either with perspective or with fabrication. Maybe our expectations are off. Or maybe the writers’ expectations are. [David Cay] Johnston wants the imprimatur of The New York Times on his stories, but isn’t willing to play by the down-the-middle rules most newspapers enforce. Chatwin wants the bracing power of non-fiction but doesn’t want to play by the rules of Always Telling The Truth.
“(A quote about Chatwin’s most famous book, The Songlines, about nomadic Aboriginal Australians: “In Songlines, Chatwin takes leave of the facts about the people he met and the places he went. Had Songlines been fiction this would have been forgivable; but Chatwin refused to have his theory regarding the nomadic nature of man reduced to fiction. [Biographer Nicholas] Shakespeare took the time to interview the many people Chatwin spoke with while researching The Songlines. It is very clear they felt completely betrayed by Chatwin. More damningly, they point out Chatwin did not, in fact, spend much time with actual Aboriginals.”)”
February 2nd, 2005 at 1:35 am
And your thoughts on this?
February 2nd, 2005 at 3:16 am
Shakespeare’s biography is Chatwin is excellent and discusses this issue at length. I highly recommend it. It illuminates his writing and life.
February 16th, 2005 at 8:48 am
Sorry to be slow on the reply here, but as for my thoughts on Chatwin and his writing, I thought of the following passage, which I recently read in a foreword that Bob Shacochis wrote to C. Peter Ripley’s Conversations With Cuba:
“Objectivity, for someone trying to understand the most complicated and difficult things about the world — politics and power, the human heart, betrayal, sacrifice — is a false or at least an inadequate science. In its stead, fair-mindedness and open-mindedness expressed in the envelope of the writer’s own value system, are the best we can hope for — are what we should hope for. A writer shapes what we know as much as any other player invested in a story — policy analyst or historian, spin doctor or diplomat, leader or peasant exile or anyone else, and to report from a vacuum of self becomes a political, and perhaps ethical, sleight of hand. * To have a direct, unobstructed view of the person writing, to have access to his or her inner thoughts and moral universe, is a vital component of our ability to judge a work clearly, judiciously, responsibly. Correspondents as separated in place and time and sensibility as Mark Twain and Martha Gellhorn knew this instinctively: that they were not some sort of truth machines — not neutral transmitters — that what they saw and heard and, just as significantly, what they felt and believed, mattered. That they had a point of view, and it was as much a part of the story being told and interpreted as anything else. Rather than diminish credibility, point of view places the writer’s integrity on the line and diminishes the fiction — the self-righteous bluff — that objectivity invites onto the page.”
So, with Shacochis, I think that injecting the personal into a travel story is not just acceptable, but more honest than presumed objectivity.
Making up people and situations to flesh out the story, on the other hand doesn’t really jibe with the parameters of nonfiction. Though I’ve read many critics who don’t mind Chatwin’s semi-fictional style — claiming it still captures the “truth” of the place…
February 18th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
I certainly don’t have any problems with injecting the personal into a travel story. (Although I’d argue that it’s become too much of a fetish in recent years. Finding a travel book that isn’t pitched as “Follow Jane’s adventures as she crosses the Hindu Kush, having just broken up with her long-term boyfriend” is harder than ever.)
The irony here, of course, is that Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” kills off almost all of that personal detail, prefering a more restrained and abstract voice.
Anyway, my problem isn’t with authorial perspective — it’s with authors making things up. If lies can do such a good job at capturing the “truth” of a place, imagine how good of a job actual honest facts could do! Whenever I see a critic say something silly like that, mentally substitute “what I imagine the ‘truth’ of the place might be, sitting here in the comfort of my study” for “truth.”
February 18th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Making up facts is acceptable if the writer acknowledges that he is doing that, that he is not wrting non-fiction. But
to pass off invented meetings, conversations, and events as fact is deceptive and a cheat.
It’s a cheat because because we seek different things from journalism and non-fiction than we do from
fiction. Non-fiction claims our attention first on the premise that it is factual, not made up. If it fails in that premise – no matter how much its claim to a greater truth –
it’s unworthy.
I remember this issue rising years ago when the Canadian writer Farley Mowatt attempted to pass off as true accounts of wolves that were at least partially made up. Many people rushed to his defense, but I felt he was a fraud. I’ve occasionally read make-believe about animals (Black Beauty and Old Yeller come to mind) but that is different from reading make believe presented as if it were true. Mowat’s stories were of no interest if they weren’t factual.
June 21st, 2006 at 6:17 am
i found shakeseare’s biography of chatwin quite terrible. he trolls inexhaustibly for facts but misses the essence of the man
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Well, it’s fiction, not a memoir. Since when did fiction have to accord with the facts?
May 10th, 2009 at 7:00 am
I’m currently reading “Songlines,” which I believe spurred my late father to retire from teaching in New England at 60 and go opal mining in the region Chatwin is discussing. At first Chatwin’s name-dropping put me off, and I found his narrative strange: the narrative voice is fearless male heterosexual, discussing prostitutes’ comeons, the alluring nature of a white woman, and his presence in dangerous bars; he speaks of Aboriginals with authority, or at least uses others to speak in that voice. And yet, by the end of the book, you realize he has spent little unmediated time with Aboriginals, and little with them even in the presence of white Australians. Discovering that he was a relatively closeted gay man explained the easy disappearance from the narrative of [clearly fictionalized] sexual interest in the opening of the book, and his putdowns of the Western world are at odds with the ubiquitous name-dropping of so many cultural figures (for example, there is a completely pointless anecdote about Malraux, so the reader says to herself, Aha! He knew Malraux!). Nevertheless, I find his theories on aggression and wandering, and his notes on aggression and wandering from other sources, to be truly original and thought provoking. Researching him today and learning of his tendency to fabricate, I am not so surprised. But for some reason, I don’t hold it against him. He is trying to live/lie up to a Heminqwayesque wandering machismo, sans the obvious bluster, that so many find appealing. He is an archetype of High Civilization gone Native. The book gets stranger and stranger, and reminds me that our own brains tend to supply story lines from even inadequate clues, and that writers can get away with murder as long as they have the ability to tell a compelling anecdote. For that is what “Songlines” is, one compelling anecdote after another, tied only by its writer’s fascination with his subject, love of his own brain and revealing what a fascinating life he (appears to have) led. He doth protest too much on that score, but I find myself touched by Bruce. For some reason, his lies, at least in this book, seem beside the point, because he clearly did not spend deep time with the Aboriginals and thus can have nothing all that deep or true to say about them. But he has traveled a lot, and met interesting people, and links some ideas in an original way. This evening, that seems enough, though I can sense how others, especially his subjects, might feel betrayed.