With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer by Clapp, Susannah - 1997

Jonathan Cape, 1997. Hardcover. Very Good. With Chatwin is a charming exploration of the life of beloved writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin--both high-brow and low-, both collector and nomad--was a man of contradictions. His writing "hovered teasingly between fact and fict ion," and he was fascinated by paradoxical subjects: a private art collecti on in a Communist country; a publicity-loving woman who lives alone in the desert. For Chatwin, being on the road was an obsession. He "was an inventi ve and adventurous traveller," an itinerant who got writer's block at home and who believed that people are happiest when on the move. "Travel does no t merely broaden the mind," he once said. "It makes the mind.