Under the Sun Read Online Free

knowledge and a range of fragmented, intimately observed allusions that he could piece together in the most extraordinary original whole, beyond the frontiers of normal publication. There was no object I could allude to that he didn’t know – a Spartan bronze, the Vix Crater in Burgundy, a silver plate on a Greek Bactrian elephant and a drawing of a similar object known in the Channel Islands in the nineteenth-century and since lost. He would have a wild card on the uses of it, and off we’d be on a vast horizon expanding all the way from Russia to Siberia – a phenomenal imaginative display, entirely spontaneous, but based on genuine knowledge. It wasn’t fraudulent balls. He understood . I learned so much from Bruce. Boy, he knew.’
    For Elisabeth Sifton, Chatwin’s American editor: ‘Bruce was an artist not a liar.’ Paradoxically, he did not have a fictional gift. He had the imagination to tell stories, to connect them, to enlarge, colour and improve them, but not to invent. Whether this reflects the terror of the autodidact, Chatwin more than most writers felt compelled to meet the people he wrote about, go to the places, read the books – where possible in the original language. ‘His art of arranging, composing and enspiriting the material was, though, more like a novelist’s than a journalist ’s,’ says Sifton.
    Perhaps the way to understand his stories is to treat them as Graham Speake advises us to view the stories of monks on Mount Athos, the place which in important respects marked the end of Chatwin’s quest – i.e. as ‘embroideries of a fundamental truth’. At his worst, he can irritate like any writer can; he can be cold, peremptory, relentlessly exotic. At his best, though, he is less economical with the truth than spendthrift. He tells not a half-truth but a truth and a half.
    Nowhere does Chatwin arouse more suspicion than in the manner he is perceived to have dealt with his final illness: he died of Aids, but denied in public that he had it. His denial bred a sense that if he lied about his life, he must have lied about his work. Some readers have taken this as a cue to pass judgement on his books – or else not to bother with them. It deserves repeating that Chatwin’s medical reports confirm that he said nothing he was not given leave to believe by his doctors at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. At the time he fell ill – the mid-1980s – all sufferers of Aids had HIV, but it was not known for certain whether every person infected with HIV automatically contracted Aids. The disease, which had appeared in New York in 1981, was relatively new to England and still ‘mysterious and shameful’ in the words of the gay writer Edmund White, one of a number of men who had sex with Chatwin.
    Whatever Chatwin’s private fears during this period of profound public anxiety, he clung to the shred of hope offered by the presence of a then-rare fungus that he might not, after all, necessarily develop Aids (the fungus is now known to be an Aids-defining illness). It is unfair to judge him for any pronouncements that he made once his brain had been poisoned. By the time his HIV had developed into full-blown Aids, he was much like his description of Rimbaud, who died in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, ‘mumbling in his delirium a stream of poetic images which his sister Isabelle, though she had paper and pencil to hand, did not think to write down’.
    Typical of Chatwin’s Protean nature was that after he died friends should disagree about him almost to the extent of his readers and critics. In Australia, Murray Bail, one of his closest correspondents, reacted to news of his death with a single paragraph, a notebook entry Chatwinesque in its deadpan concision. ‘18.1.89 All head and bulging blue eyes. No sense of humour, yet could recognise and tell well a story – always based on a person, an