The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin, 1987
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142422571
Summary
For its 25th anniversary, a new edition of Bruce Chatwin's classic work with a new introduction by Rory Stewart
Part adventure, part novel of ideas, part spiritual autobiography, The Songlines is one of Bruce Chatwin's most famous books. Set in the desolate lands of the Australian Outback, it tells the story of Chatwin's search for the source and meaning of the ancient "dreaming tracks" of the Aborigines—the labyrinth of invisible pathways by which their ancestors "sang" the world into existence.
This singular book, which was a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 1987, engages all of Chatwin's lifelong passions, including his obsession with travel, his interest in the nomadic way of life, and his hunger to understand man's origins and nature. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1940
• Where—Sheffield, England, UK
• Death—January 18, 1989
• Where—Nice, France
• Education—Marlborough College; University
of Edinburgh (no degree)
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer. Married and bisexual, he was one of the first prominent men in Britain known to have contracted HIV and died of AIDS, although he hid the facts of his illness.
Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940 in the Shearwood Road nursing home in Sheffield, England, and his first home was his grandparents' house in Dronfield, near Sheffield. His mother, Margharita (nee Turnell), had moved back to her parents' home when Chatwin's father, Charles Chatwin, went away to serve with the Royal Naval Reserve. They had been living at Barnt Green, Worcestershire.
Chatwin spent his early childhood living with his parents in West Heath in Birmingham (then in Warwickshire), where his father had a law practice. He was educated at Marlborough College, in Wiltshire.
Art and archaeology
After leaving Marlborough in 1958, Chatwin reluctantly moved to London to work as a porter in the Works of Art department at the auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's expert on Impressionist art. He later became a director of the company.
In late 1964 he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. He consulted eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper, who diagnosed a latent squint and recommended that Chatwin take a six-month break from his work at Sotheby's. Trevor-Roper had been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, and suggested Chatwin visit east Africa. In February 1965, Chatwin left for the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest to archaeology. He resigned from his Sotheby's post in the early summer of 1966.
Chatwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study archaeology in October, 1966. Despite winning the Wardrop Prize for the best first year's work, he found the rigour of academic archaeology tiresome. He spent only two years there and left without taking a degree.
Travel and writing
In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills. Chatwin travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing such diverse people as Andre Malraux in France, and the author Nadezhda Mandelstam in the Soviet Union.
In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia, which she had painted. "I've always wanted to go there," Bruce told her. "So have I," she replied, "go there for me." Two years later in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived, he left the newspaper with a telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia." He spent six months in the area, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977). This work established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region contradicted the account of events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were alleged to have been fictionalized.
Later works included a novel based on the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in Benin, West Africa. For The Songlines (1987), a work combining fiction and non-fiction, Chatwin went to Australia. He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in The Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans.
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, his novel On the Black Hill (1982) was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders. It focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz (1988), was a novel about the obsession that leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain. Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death in 1989, including a transcontinental epic, provisionally titled Lydia Livingstone.
Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been criticised for his fictionalised anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognised themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Chatwin was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations. As his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare argues: "He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half."
Personal life
Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin married Elizabeth Chanler (a descendant of John Jacob Astor) in 1965. He had met Chanler at Sotheby's, where she worked as a secretary. Chatwin was bisexual throughout his married life, a circumstance his wife knew and accepted. They had no children. After fifteen years of marriage, she asked for a separation and sold their farmhouse at Ozleworth in Gloucestershire. Toward the end of his life, they reconciled. According to Chatwin's biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, the Chatwins' marriage seems to have been celibate. He describes Chatwin as homosexual rather than bisexual.
Chatwin was known as a socialite in addition to being a recognised travel author. His circle of friends extended far and wide. He was renowned for accepting hospitality and patronage from a powerful set of friends and allies. Penelope Betjeman—wife of the poet laureate John Betjeman—showed him the border country of Wales. She helped in the gestation of the book that would become On the Black Hill. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat.
He extensively used moleskines, a particular style of notebooks manufactured in France. When production stopped in 1986, he bought up the entire supply at his stationery store.
German filmmaker Werner Herzog relates a story about meeting Chatwin in Australia while Herzog was working on his 1984 film, Where the Green Ants Dream. Finding out that Chatwin was in Australia researching a book (The Songlines), Herzog sought him out. Herzog states that Chatwin professed his admiration for him, and when they met was carrying one of Herzog's books, On Walking In Ice. The two hit it off immediately, united by a shared love of adventure and telling tall tales. Herzog states that he and Chatwin talked almost nonstop over two days, telling each other stories. He said that Chatwin "told about three times as many as me." Herzog also claims that when Chatwin was near death, he gave Herzog his leather rucksack and said, "You're the one who has to wear it now, you're the one who's walking."
In 1987, Herzog made Cobra Verde, a film based on Chatwin's 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, depicting the life of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a fictional Brazilian slave trader working in West Africa. Locations for the film included Brazil, Colombia and Ghana.
Death
Illness and death
Around 1980, Chatwin contracted HIV. Chatwin told different stories about how he contracted the virus, such as that he was gang-raped in Dahomey, and that he believed he caught the disease from Sam Wagstaff, the patron and lover of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He was one of the first high-profile people in Britain to have the disease. Although he hid the illness—passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat, a typically exotic cover story—it was a poorly kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and suffered increasing bouts of psychosis. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house belonging to Shirley Conran, the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.
A memorial service was held in the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia in West London. It happened to be the same day that a fatwa was announced on Salman Rushdie, a close friend of Chatwin's who attended the service. Paul Theroux, a one-time friend who also attended the service, later commented on it and Chatwin in a piece for Granta. The novelist Martin Amis described the memorial service in the essay "Salman Rushdie," included in his anthology Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.
Chatwin's ashes were scattered near a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese. This was close to the home of one of his mentors, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A blend of travelogue, memoir, history, philosophy, science, meditation, and commonplace book...Chatwin's astonishing style captures the metamorphoses of his own "'Walkabout".... He takes the travel genre beyond exoticism and the simple picturesque into the metaphysical.
Boston Globe
No ordinary book ever issues from Bruce Chatwin. Each bears the imprint of a dazzingly original mind.
Newsday
The riches of The Songlines are varied and artfully stashed. Chatwin's physical journey over Australia's parched hide corresponds to his intellectual excursions, which are full of surprising turns.
Time
In his new book, Chatwin (In Patagonia, etc.) explores the area around Alice Springs, in central Australia, where he ponders the source and meaning of nomadism, the origins of human violence and the emergence of mankind amid arid conditions. Searching for "Songlines" the invisible pathways along which aboriginal Australians travel to perform their central cultural activities, Chatwin is accompanied by Arkady Volchok, a native Australian and tireless bushwalker who is helping the aboriginals protect their sacred sites through the provisions of the Land Rights Act. Chatwin's description of his adventures in the bush forms the most entertaining part of the book, but he also includes long quotations from other writers, anthropologists, biologists, even poets. These secondary materials provide a resonant backdrop for the author's reflections on the distinctions between settled people and wanderers, between human aggression and pacifism.
Publishers Weekly
For Australian aborigines, "songlines" are the string of sites of significant cultural events, such as marriage, song, trades, dances, a hunt, etc., in an individual's and group's history. They are the invisible means by which a man indicates and keeps track of his territory. British author Chatwin (In Patagonia) organizes his book around the Australian aboriginal's notion of songlines, although the writing is more often than not on the periphery of this theme. Interspersed with the explanation of songlines are a narrative of a mild adventure, sometimes with novelistic dialogue, and jottings from Chatwin's notebooks (making up a considerable portion of the book), which include his own musings and observations, proverbs, and quotes from famous people, most of which concern travel and wandering and theory about instinct, myth, etc. A curious work. —Roger W. Fromm, Bloomsburg Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Songlines:
1. Would you describe Chatwin's book as a travelogue...or something else?
2. What do you think of Bruce Chatwin; how would describe his personality and character traits? Would you yourself have found him a good companion?
3. Chatwin contemplates on the human race, reflecting on where we came from and where we're headed. Can you summarize his thinking? What are your thoughts?
4. What are "songlines" and how do they function in the aboriginal culture? How does Chatwin broaden the concept of songlines as a metaphor for all of us?
5. Chatwin believes that humans are not an aggressive species—we are programmed not to fight for power (as others have proposed), but rather to defend the tribe. What do you think? Is his view realistic...or overly sanguine? Do his ideas have validity—are they based on empirical evidence and research...or the result of philosophical and spiritual thinking? Is one approach more or less valid than the other?
6. What have you learned about Aborigines from reading Chatwin's book? How does Chatwin present the Aboriginal culture and people? Do his views confirm—or are they at odds with—any previous understanding you may have had?
7. When Chatwin was traveling and writing his book, he was aware that he was dying of AIDS. How would this knowledge have affected the way Chatwin both experienced his travels and wrote about them in this book? How does this knowledge color your own reading of The Songlines?
8. Chatwin is a disciple of Heraclitus. Talk about the ancient philosopher's view of life and change. How does Chatwin see the Aborigines as the exemplar of Heraclitus's philosophy?
9. What do you think Chatwin means in the final pages of his book where he writes:
[T]he mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a "right death." He who has arrived "goes back." In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for "going back" or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your "conception site," to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become—or re-become—the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus's mysterious dictum, "Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other's life."
What other passages in The Songlines struck you as interesting ... controversial ... tiresome ... preposterous ... or insightful, even profound?
10. What parts of The Songlines did you enjoy most—the travelogue portions and descriptions of the Australian outback...or the philosophical, metaphysical reflections? Did you, in fact, enjoy the book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)