What Am I Doing Here / Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin was a British travel writer and novelist who died of AIDS in 1989. This is his last book; it collects a range of shorter pieces, including stories, travel accounts, and essays. I've had the book since it was first published but never before found the time to read it.

Like Death in Venice, What Am I Doing Here did not turn out to be the book that I expected it to be. I took the title to be a question and assumed that Chatwin would answer it in the book. It's a question that I've thought about a lot over the years as I have tried to figure out my relationship to my native country and what to expect from my travels, and I was hoping Chatwin would help me think about it. But Chatwin's title doesn't actually have a question mark and he seems to be an engaged traveler, one who doesn't question why he is where he is.

I enjoyed the book anyway, mainly because I discovered that Chatwin is a well-informed writer who provides great context for almost everything he writes about. His knowledge of art leads him to people and topics I knew little about, such as the art scene in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. For me the highlights were his accounts of:

• The mistreatment of Algerians in Marseilles in the early 1970s. 
• Werner Herzog filming Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah in Ghana in the mid 1970s.
• Covering Indira Ghandi when she was staging her return to power in the late 1970s.
• A boat trip down the Volga River with a bunch of German tourists in the early 1980s.

On the other hand, China seems a bit beyond Chatwin's grasp. His essay on Han dynasty conflicts with the northern nomads is not very original, and his account of a visit to Lijiang in the early 1980s focuses on Joseph F. Rock, the western scientist who lived there in the early 20th century, rather than on the culture that so intrigued Rock.

So what do these pieces tell us about Chatwin's relationship to travel? First, he never expresses the ambivalence about being an outsider that I inferred from the title of the book. He takes his work seriously; in addition to his extensive background research, he pays careful attention to his physical surroundings and seems to engage well with the local people he encounters. Only occasionally did I have the feeling that he went somewhere just to be there, as in trip to Nepal.

And what does the book reveal about Chatwin's homosexuality? Pretty much nothing. He regularly notes young men he encounters along the way, but the reader can only wonder at whether anything more happened between them. Twice he refers to his wife, Elizabeth, whose existence was a surprise to me; he reveals no more of his feelings for her than he does of his feelings for the young men.

The book ends with a very short homage to Noel Coward, with whom Chatwin had lunch shortly before Coward's death in 1973. Chatwin doesn't name Coward directly, refering to him only as "The Master." With such treatment Chatwin, in his last bit of writing, confines himself to a particular, limited time and place, mid-20th century Great Britain, the only place time and place where the reader would understand that Noel Coward would be "The Master." This is an odd ending for a writer who is known for traveling widely and reading history deeply. In the end, he claims a home for himself, which means I'm unlikely to find my answer to the question "What am I doing here?" in Chatwin's work.

Chatwin, Bruce, What Am I Doing Here.  New York: Viking, 1989.