Nicholas Shakespeare's Reading List

"Byron was Chatwin’s first conscious model. Like Chatwin, he was educated at Marlborough, he was gay, and he was an aesthete who privileged art over people. It was in Byron’s footsteps that Chatwin travelled first to Persia and Afghanistan, the countries that inspired The Road to Oxiana . The book is a candid account of a journey made in 1933 in search of Seljuk tombs – tall, cylindrical mausolea whose existence was known to Byron only through some “inadequate photographs”. Chatwin put Byron’s descriptions of Islamic architecture “at least in the front rank as Ruskin” and raised the book “to the status of ‘sacred text’, and thus beyond criticism … it was my Bible.” Byron’s previous book, The Station , was about his visit to Mount Athos, where Chatwin would discover God at end of his life, and convert to Orthodoxy."

"It is easily forgotten how much of a writer’s life like Chatwin’s is spent not on the hoof, but on your backside alone in a library. And no writer embodied libraries more than the immobile, blind Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges. Invited to appear on a chat show in 1983 with “the Magus of Buenos Aires”, Chatwin extolled: “You can’t go anywhere without packing a Borges, it’s like packing your toothbrush.” Borges murmured in response: “How unhygienic.” Chatwin responded to the compression of Borges’ prose, his range of exotic references, his unfashionable mentors (Chesterton, Kipling), and his notion of a cabbalistic answer as a key to unlock the universe. He even wrote a short story in imitation of Borges, and during his final illness he had this vision: “I saw green-capped schoolboys leaving school, an infinite library of books which turned into a library of primroses and a troupe of glass horses which galloped off in a shatter. It was like something from Borges’ El Aleph .”"

"All Chatwin’s hallmarks are to be found in the prose of this Russian poet, “the most important writer to be snuffed out by Stalin.” The journey to somewhere remote. The style – dense, yet glass-like. The brevity. Chatwin steeped himself in the Journey to Armenia and would read it aloud to the Sunday Times art department when he worked there, calling Mandlestam “the shaman and seer of his time” and “one of my gods.”"

"This anthology, arranged as a common-place book, was recommended to Bruce at his public school by an old lady in Marlborough’s White Horse Bookshop. It excited in him the fragmentary approach of the scrap-merchant, and he would base The Songlines on its structure, reworking his fictionalised journey in Australia into a collage of quotation and diary. Another influence was Cyril Connolly’s anthology-cum-journal The Unquiet Grave , which Chatwin described as “a book I return to again, so brilliant yet so terribly indicative of the pitfalls of English literary life.” He was particularly taken by Connolly’s cautionary advice to aspiring writers, “that the true function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence … All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing of films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment.”"

"Writing about Kafka, Borges observed that “each writer creates his precursors”. Of all those liberated by Chatwin’s trampling of fence-posts, and empowered by his example of zig-zagging through time and space, none stands higher than WG Sebald, whose last piece of writing before his own untimely death was actually about Chatwin. One can recognise Sebald’s idiosyncrasies in Chatwin’s earlier work, and yet, to paraphrase Borges: “if Chatwin had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.” He died young, but not as young as most people think. At 48, he had outlived many of his influences: Robert Louis Stevenson , TE Lawrence, Anton Chekhov , Robert Byron, Arthur Rimbaud. He died of AIDS – one of the first well-known figures in England to do so – 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. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter 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 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, 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.” Like Hemingway , another of his influences, Bruce Chatwin has spawned a lot of imitators, but like Hemingway he’s a one-off."