In Patagonia Read Online Free Page A

up the copy editor in a panic. She said it was too late and, besides, all writers were cribbers.”
    Chatwin admitted to cribbing from other Russians. Brown’s translation of The Noise of Time had led him to “discover” writers like Isaac Babel (“Soon afterwards I started to write”). He had “immersed” himself at the time of writing in the literature of Turgenev and Chekhov: the way Anglo-Argentines clung to their estates in order to enjoy a life in town was exactly the story of The Cherry Orchard .
    Then there were the Americans: Edmund Wilson’s travel journals, Black Brown Red and Olive , Gaylord Simpson’s Attending Marvels, and, of course, Hemingway’s short stories. Along with Journey to Armenia, Chatwin had carried In Our Time in his rucksack.
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    Less obvious was the influence of the French photographer Cartier-Bresson, and it was in photographic terms that Chatwin preferred to describe his odyssey to his friend Colin Thubron. “I was determined to see myself as a sort of literary Cartier-Bresson going SNAP, like that. It was supposed to be a take each time.” Stay longer and the picture would fog.
    His quick snapshots—both dense and clear—had the effect of reducing his subjects to the essentials of a black-and-white portrait. “It’s like looking at your passport photograph,” said David Bridges, who in the book is called Bill Phillips. “It’s not flattering, but it’s the truth.” Speaking of the effect In Patagonia had had in Patagonia, Bridges observed: “If you haven’t ruffled any feathers, you certainly haven’t written anything worth writing.” Bridges knew what he was talking about: his father, Lucas Bridges, was author of the first classic on Tierra del Fuego, Uttermost Part of the Earth . He said: “I’ve never known an author yet who’s left a happy stream behind him. Some get on their high horse and what they get on their horse about is as ridiculous as a fish on a roof. They have illusions about themselves that a photographer hasn’t.”
    Down south, Chatwin certainly ruffled feathers by stripping these illusions. In the Welsh community of Gaiman, few guessed what he was up to. When they read about themselves in his book, it was as though they had been blasted by the Patagonian wind. These were private and religious farmers whose ancestors had come to Patagonia expressly to get away from the kind of Englishman represented by a young man with a socking great forehead and blue staring eyes who bowled into their village wearing green Bermuda shorts and announced himself in a ringing public-school accent as Bruce Chatwin. They were unused to scrutiny and they resented his treatment of them. Not telling them that the camera was rolling, he caught them unawares and condensed their lives into a few vivid details. In the process, some felt, he had made off with their intimate moments and preserved them behind the glass of his prose for strangers to look at. They had not had an easy life in the desert. Chatwin had described their difficulties with a twentiethcentury eye, passing swiftly through their lives and refusing to dwell. He had snatched the intimacy Borges writes of: “That kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow.” Not only that, but turned them into stories as tall as the original population, the enormous-footed Patagons: legendary Indians 11 feet high who swallowed rats without skinning them and took pleasure in the yard-long breasts of their women.
    The person most upset was the daughter of the former British Consul, Tom Jones, who whenever Chatwin’s name came up in the press, would fire off salvos to the letters page, listing complaints about his “disgraceful” book. Daphne Hobbs did not possess a copy of In Patagonia . “I would not sully my shelves.” But her sense that Chatwin had twisted the truth to make it more readable would strike