With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer

Bruce Chatwin's abbreviated life--he died of AIDS at 47 in 1989--was a performance, his six books of travel writing and fiction included, according to Clapp. Her graceful and affectionate memoir, based on her experience with him as a friend and his British editor, is an informal biography, cutting through his extravagant reinventions of himself. His travel writings about exotic places suggest the adaptable loner, but Clapp reveals that the bisexual Chatwin often included a companion, seldom his devoted wife of 20 years. A compulsive nomad and compulsive talker, he worked out his blend of ""fact, fantasy and folklore"" in conversations with friends. His impressionistic In Patagonia brought him recognition; his bestselling The Songlines was published when he was already dying. A director of Sotheby's while in his 20s, he charmed clients into buying and selling not only because of his instincts for what was original and exquisite but also because, one critic gibed, he ""keeps so many elderly millionaires on heat."" Abandoning art because of eye trouble, Chatwin began a career in travel journalism for the Sunday newspaper glossies, then moved into books about isolated places but always returned from his trips to write in the posh pads of the beautiful and wealthy he knew through his genius for friendship, Clapp notes. While the name- and address-dropping begins to pall, the ever young writer who saw himself as a new Robert Louis Stevenson seems likely from this account to be remembered more as a stylist in both life and art. (Aug.)