Backlisted - Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

This episode is about Utz, Bruce Chatwin's final novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. John and Andy are joined by writer and journalist Jonathan Wilson and Unbound's editor-at-large Rachael Kerr, who worked for Chatwin's publisher Jonathan Cape and knew him well. Other books discussed include Valerie Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'48 - Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli, 10'55 - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, 20'05 - Utz by Bruce Chatwin* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. I did know of Jonathan's work before he came on the podcast because he and I share a football team. Well, I presume we share a football team. Yeah, I'm a Sondland fan very much so. I know this is not a great start for you, Andy.

I know talking about football is not something you understand. I'm going to be issuing an apology on behalf of that listed in a minute, but do carry on, gentlemen. Well, I believe that it's possible to write deeply intelligent stuff about sport, and Jonathan does that. What I haven't seen is the Netflix series, Sudden Until I Die, which everybody in my family tells me I have to watch and that it's marvellous and heartwarming and brilliantly done.

Yeah, it really is. It's made with a lot of love for the city and i think a sense if you haven't grown up in the city maybe you don't realize that because sondland was such a big and important shipbuilding port and those shipyards have gone yeah the sense of loss that still hangs over the place you don't even i mean i was born in 1976 There's no shipyards there to speak of when I was growing up. And yet the sense of something missing, the sense of the town is not as important as it used to be, hangs over it. It hangs over the football as well.

And so that sense of nostalgia for a past you never were really aware of, I think characterises everything. I'd love going back there, even though it does have exactly that feeling. It's one of the rare places in the UK where it really is, it's such a cliche to say it's a religion, but they're still getting 35,000 plus fans for what is essentially now they're playing in the third division. Rach, has John ever taken you to a Sunderland game?

I have never been to a Sunderland game. You've never expressed an interest? No, it's true. That glorious prospect is always there. The stadium of light is still there Rachel. Anyway it's a rather odd way to start off a discussion on the writer that we're going to be discussing today but he did box at school Bruce Chatwin. And captained the school rugby team. I didn't know. Despite claiming to have hated games at school he was. I think we all hated games at school didn't team? I didn't know that. Despite claiming to have hated games at school, he was. I think we all hated games at school, didn't we?

I mean, didn't we? Yeah, I did. Yeah, absolutely. Jonathan disproves my long-held theory that it was impossible for a man to like both football and Bruce Chaplin. So we'll grill him on that in a minute. I bet that Venn diagram is forming even as we speak across the country. Well, hang on.

People will let me know, John, don't worry. I think we should start. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you join us in the mysterious middle European city of Prague in 1974 as we sit in a musty apartment, sparsely furnished except for the row upon row of mirrored shelves each one crammed with antique porcelain. I'm John Mitchinson the publisher of Unbound the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and joining us today are Jonathan Wilson, a sports writer and author of 11 books.

Yes. Hello. 11. 11 books. Come on. Including Inverting the Pyramid, a History of Football Tactics that was named Football Book of the Year in 2009. His most recent book is The Barcelona Legacy. I'm going to try and pronounce these listeners.

Guardiola, Morinho, and the Fight for Football's Soul, published by Blink in 2018 and which is appearing in paperback in April. Jonathan is also the editor of The Blizzard, a quarterly journal of football writing. Also joining us today, just weeks after she was last here. After the Lawrence shootout. Listeners demanded it it so here she is she's back is rachel kerr a publisher and editor who has worked for jonathan cape picador harville

and unbound rachel previously appeared on our episode about haunts of the black mass sir by charles charles sprawson and a few weeks ago on the DH Lawrence episode about the rainbow. And, Rachel, do you notice anything different about me since we recorded that DH Lawrence episode? You look considerably more slender, Andy. Why, how nice of you to say. There's a stone less of me than there was when we recorded that DH Lawrence episode. No, I'm more irritable.

Have you noticed? No, not much. I'm more irritable because I'm not eating enough food. You look good on it, though, love. Oh, bless you. Rachel is also married to John Mitchinson, for her sins. And why she's back with us so soon will shortly be revealed. So the book that Jonathan and Rachel are here to talk about is Utz,

the last novel and penultimate book by Bruce Chatwin, first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape. And I think one of the things that we should say immediately is how bizarre it is for those of us of a certain age to remember how famous and popular and best-selling and critically revered Bruce Chatwin was in the 1980s and how now we can sit around a table 30 years later. And I think we'll all agree that Chatwin is probably not nearly as widely read as he was,

and he feels to me like he's fallen very much out of fashion. Though that might change. There is a documentary coming later this year by his friend Werner Herzog about Chapwin. So there may be a resurgence. I don't know. We've all got lots to say. I know we have.

So let's get on with it. John, I'm going to ask you this, Tyson. What have you been reading this week? I have been reading a very short, very powerful book by the Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli called Tell Me How It Ends, an essay in 40 questions. She is a novelist who kind of came to prominence in 2012 with a book called Faces in the Crowd, a book about an unhappily unmarried mother of two children whose life is kind of falling apart. But the thing in the book is sort of experimental. She's trying to impose narrative order on her life

and she's got lots of reviews. She's become very quickly one of the poster girls for the kind of best writing coming out of Central Latin America. This is very different. She narrates in Tell Me How It Ends how she's applying for a green card to live and work in the US. It should be said that this book's written in English. I, as you know, am trying to read more books in translation

and I read Faces in the Crowd, but I also read this and I was so impressed by this short book about child migrants crossing from Mexico into the US. It's just remarkable numbers of children, unaccompanied children, finding themselves, turning up at the border. And they all have to go through this quite sinister, well, you've all been to America, where you have to do that slightly comic,

you know, moral turpitude. Have you ever been a communist? You know, those are those questions that you, and you think when you say no to all of them, unless you're my mother. Have you been on a farm? Oh, yes. But this, the actual detention center when you're trying to uh you're trying to cross the border there are 40

questions so the book is structured around each of these 40 questions and the the stories that the children that she gets the children to tell her that they tell her why do you want to come to america it's written before trump but the looming horror is there. And it's as equally critical about what, in the age of the Mexican premier, is doing to create the crisis as well. So it's not just that America is in the wrong. For the kind of reportage Kapuscinski-like, weirdly reminded me of that kind of writing that you found

in the Glory Days of Gran kind of that kind of writing that you found in in the grant the glory days of grantor of the night of the 1980s is this book john is this like pitched as journalism i think it's not really journalism not to be disrespectful to journalism what she's trying to do i mean there's a narrative which is her you know her movement to America, but she's a novelist, so what she's doing is trying to imaginatively reconstruct the narratives of these children. I mean, she makes political points. It's not a tub-thumping polemic. It's just quietly devastating in the stories that she tells.

Just the moral obscenity, just thinking of Herzog again, you know, Herzog goes on record all the time as saying it's the extremities of the human condition that produces truth this is definitely one of those liminal points where everything is breaking down and of course you know it's it is this mythological notion that the way you respond to that is to build a wall it's like troy it's anyway it's just a little bit from towards the end of the book where she's just reflecting on it. I've had to ask so many children, why did you come? Sometimes I ask myself the same question. I don't have an answer yet. Before coming to the United States, I knew what

others know, that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, that on the other side, a possible life was waiting. I understood sometime after that that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from, the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter, a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you're here, you're ready to give everything or almost everything to stay and play a part in the greater theatre of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means. To stay is the founding myth of this society. To stay in the States, you will unlearn the universal metric system

so you can buy a pound and a half of cooked ham, except that 32 degrees and not zero is where the line falls that divides cold from freezing. You might even begin to celebrate the pilgrims who removed the alien Indians and the veterans who maybe killed other aliens and the day of a president who will eventually declare a war on all the other so-called aliens. No matter the cost, no matter the cost of the rent and milk and cigarettes, the humiliations, the daily battles, you will give everything. You will convince yourself that it is only a matter

of time before you can be yourself again in America, despite the added layers of its otherness already so well adhered to your skin. But perhaps you will never want to be your former self again. There are too many things that ground you to this new life. Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive. And that is kind of towards the end of the book. Who's it published by? Fourth Estate. It was published last year.

I kind of was vaguely aware of it, but she's a really interesting writer and just sort of strangely felt in the key of Chatwin. Very good. Andy. Yeah. Speaking of in the key of Chatwin, what have you been reading? Okay. Andy yeah speaking of in the key of Chatwin what have you been reading okay so I've actually cheated this week because it's I haven't read this book this week I read it a few weeks ago and then when I insisted John that you invite Rachel back to talk about Oots by Bruce Chatwin that was a

a dodge because actually what I wanted to do is get Rachel in because I know this is one of her favorite books of all time it's by Grand Central Station I sat down and wept by Elizabeth Smart or as I like to think of it by by Grand Central Station I sat down and wept I sat down and wept by Andy Miller it is one of the worst books I have ever read, and that is not an exaggeration. It is terrible. It is both unenjoyable and appallingly written. But nobody wants to hear me wang on about that because that is not what That Listed is about. And so, listeners, what I've done is I've got Rachel Kerr in

specifically to account for herself and Elizabeth Smart. That's really mean. It's not meant to be mean. I genuinely don't want to sit here slagging a book off. And I'm genuinely, what you said, because we had a chat about it, and you said this was such an important book for me. What did I miss? I think you're not a 19-year-old girl, Andy.

That's clearly. I tried so hard. I mean, I was 19 19-year-old girl, Andy. That's clearly... I tried so hard. I mean, I was 19 when I first read this book and it completely blew me away. It's one of those books that sort of enters your soul and you sort of... It's a novel in prose poetry about the affair between Elizabeth Smart

and the poet George Barker. And she fell in love with him through the page by reading his poetry in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road. She's Canadian, he's British. He went over to America, they got together, they got arrested from trying to cross state lines because they were not married. And she was carted away and that's all in the book.

And so it's sort of that amazing sort of all for love type thing is the scene where she gets arrested is one of those scenes that will stay with you forever because she's being put into a car with a policeman and driven away from her lover. And she intersperses the poetic description of that with lines from the Song of Solomon. So it's sort of like the enormous and the really mundane all together. And that's what she does all the way through.

That's what I loved about it. It's one of those books that sort of, it just completely at the time was exactly what I loved. The writer it reminded me of, and this is a serious point, I think I've probably said something about this writer on backlisted before it really reminded me bizarrely of hp lovecraft the horror writer no i'll tell you why hp lovecraft couldn't write he could not string together a pleasing sentence in the bourgeois way as a result of which the stories his writing is able to take you to places that other better writers cannot because he accesses ways of seeing and ways of thinking that a more orthodox educated trained mind would not be able to get to. And I felt with Elizabeth Smart that there were real challenges

to my aesthetic sense. Yeah. But at the same time, I wouldn't, why I wanted you to tell people about it was I feel not, I feel it's inappropriate for me to judge the artistic intent harshly. I would not doubt the sincerity of what she was trying to do. I would just question her ability to do it, right? But other people read the book and don't feel that way at all.

It certainly seems to provoke a very strong reaction in people. It does. I think there is art in that. I mean, to me, it's very clever. It's very beautiful. There are passages that just, you know, and what I love, I mean, for instance, on this edition that you've got here, there's that quote from Angela Carter, which says,

it's like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning, a masterpiece. Now, Angela Carter. Angela Carter said she wouldn't have wept. She said, by Grand Central Station, I'd have cut off his balls. She was talking about Virago, the setting up of Virago. And she said, you know, we need this because I don't want any daughter of mine to have to write a book like that. What you have to remember is this book was written in 1945.

Can you read us the beginning of it? No, you're laughing. I'm not putting you on the spot. No, but no one wants to hear me read it, right? I think we can all agree on that. I think we can all concur on that, the committee. I would like her to have a fair hearing. I don't want to make fun.

Okay. I'm standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire. Apprehension and the summer afternoon keep drying my lips, prepared at ten-minute intervals all through the five-hour wait. But then it is her eyes that come forward

out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster. Her Madonna eyes, soft as the newly born, trusting as the untempted. And for a moment at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. Her eyes shower me with their innocence and surprise. Was it for her, after all? For her whom I had never expected nor imagined

that there would have been compounded such ruses of coincidence. I get what you're saying, Eddie. Yeah, yeah, go on. Behind her, he for whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets in the bags and shuffles up to the event, which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds you see what i see i'm really glad we did this because a if you recorded the audio book i would happily listen to it right but also i'm serious

how we approach the book is really important you approach that in good faith and your good faith it communicates itself when you're reading it. It sounded great. If I read that, I'd be bringing all my kind of... Remember that time you read... You had that bad reaction to Elizabeth Bowen that time. I did have that bad reaction to Elizabeth Bowen.

And I read that awful paragraph. Yeah, yeah. How can you not love that? He shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds. Yes, but equally, Rachel, vulgar disembarkers is horrible, right? I know, but, you know, she's looking at a bus of fat people getting, you know. Anyway, so that's what.

It's fine. That's what I was. It is slightly not to want to rehearse. I don't think we're going to have that problem with Chatwin, but it is slightly the high style that you've disliked in Lawrence and that a lot of people who love Blake's lyrics find it almost impossible to read his longer poems because it's just, you know, what are we now?

It's just like, I don't know who this character Thoth and, you know, Barlam and I just, it's too confusing. And I was thinking about the Lawrence episode. I've been thinking about it a lot since. And it was that thing that T.S. Eliot wrote a very unpleasant book that's out of print called After Strange Gods in which he disembowels Lawrence. But also Blake, he accuses Blake of not having had a sufficiently classical

education and you know you admire his verse like you admire homemade furniture which is just such me yeah exactly their relationship through the whole thing is such a push me pull you sort of I'd have to tell a small a very short little anecdote one of the first literary parties ever went to at Jonathan Cape, the novelist Lisa Santobanda Turan arrived with her then-husband, George Macbeth, who I heard George Macbeth and I thought, that's the bastard that was really mean to Elizabeth Smart. It's only halfway through the evening that I realised,

no, no, no, no, wrong poet, wrong George. It was George Barker, not George Macbeth. So you were throwing him evil. I was literally like, hmm. Hey, so Jonathan, wrong George. It was George Barker, not George Macbeth. So you were throwing him evils. I was literally like, hmm. Hey, so Jonathan, have you ever read by Grand Central Station? I have not. I recommend it. It's very good. Well, I'm impressed that you got to the end of it, Andy,

as you always do. One of the rules, one of the backlisted rules. How can we, with a clear conscience, presume to pass judgment on these things if we don't even do them the justice of finishing them. It's not difficult. Do you remember the massive problems we had trying to read Joseph Heller's Something Happened?

We were weeping. He was what was his name, Bob Slocum, with such an unpleasant consciousness to be inside. But if you don't read that book to the end, literally you miss the thing that happens. What happens happens really, really, really right at the end of the book. Something does happen and it does change the way literally you miss the thing that happens what happens happens really really really right at the end of the book something does happen and it does change the way you think about the book now it's commercials anyway chatwin we should start right come on

by bruce chatwin bruce chatwin was so famous and the facts of his life were at one point so well known. But I think perhaps they aren't now. So we will talk a bit about Chatwin himself as we go along. But Utz was Chatwin's final novel, as John says. So I woke up on Christmas morning. I was really excited. I was thinking, I wonder what Father Christmas has brought me. And then my phone buzzed.

And it was a DM from Jonathan saying, where were you? I was at home in Sunderland, doesn't my mam say? It's like at 7.30 on Christmas morning saying, can I come on to Batlisted to talk about Utz by Bruce Chatwood? I never met you or spoken to you before. We'd never met or spoken before. I so admired the, no pun intended chutzpah of that of that gesture can i can i just explain why that happened yeah right so my mom's not very well

she's in her home i was up at my mom's house christmas day was going to be me getting a taxi to the home running back after the 30 minutes or 40 minutes or however long i could bear being in the home. And I wasn't sleeping particularly well. I'd woken up at four in the morning. I'd done some of the work I needed to do. And I had to do my tactics review of the year for the Guardian, which is something I've been desperately putting off. And I had a list of things that, you know, things to do with the bank and, you know, a list of things I had to do. And one of the things in the sort of nice column was maybe push myself forward and see if i could talk about us and so i've been up from four i didn't really seem that early when i think it was actually 755 when i dm'd i just thought it

was a magnificent gesture and a moment to choose and i think i came at you very quickly and went yes this would be great in like five minutes there you go you see it's literally the best thing that happens listeners listeners don't do that to me that's not the way to get on it but then what happened the other thing amazing thing that happened is after rachel had come on and uh been here for the rainbow by dh sauron's john you i just i said to her what you know we'd enjoyed we'd because we both i think as often with with with Backlisted you feel you've done a reasonable job but there's so much that you didn't get to say and I and I said what would you pick I mean you know given that the rainbow sort of was we it was Catherine's choice

and it was something that I'd wanted to do because I hadn't reread it and wanted to reread it and it was also you know the whole baiting, knowing that he loathed Lawrence. And I wanted to see if we could turn him even slightly, which we did a bit. So I said, what would you choose? Have you had a blank slate? And quick as a, she said, Utz by Bruce Chatwin. And I said, that's incredible, really.

And it made me think, because what I would say about Utz is I read it as in the height of my Chatwin mania I mean I was I there was no writer I loved more in 1988 than Bruce Chatwin I was obsessed with him a whole generation I think of male not just male but a lot of younger right people who were aspiring to write Chatwin was in this impossible, glamorous, brilliant, interesting figure. And Utz came out, and I can remember being a tiny bit disappointed by it at the time it came out because I was sort of reeling

from all the intellectual kind of stimulation of the song lines. And then this perfectly formed fable arrives. It's too weird a coincidence to have two people coming up. And Rachel, you were working at Jonathan Cape when Utz was published, right? Yeah, I was there when the songlines was published as well. So Bruce used to come into the office. There was always a moment of giggly excitement if Bruce came into the office. I want to ask Rachel about Bruce a bit more in a minute.

But Jonathan, when did you first read Utz? The honest truth is I can't remember. But I will tell you a long and rambling Chapwinian tale to try and explain that. So the first Chapwin I read was in 2007. And I was in Argentina. I was researching Invoking the Pyramid. And so I read In Patagonia. And I wouldn't say I was disappointed in it, but it wasn't really what I was researching Invoking the Pyramid. And so I read In Patagonia. And I wouldn't say I was disappointed in it,

but it wasn't really what I was looking for. What I wanted was something that was going to give me cheap and easy insights into the Argentinian soul. And I wasn't even in Patagonia, I was in Buenos Aires. So I sort of put it to one side. But while I was in Argentina, I met a woman. We ended up being together for three and a half years. In Christmas 2009, she came over to Sondland for Christmas.

We'd wrap things together nicely, Sondland Christmas. He does. And one of the things we did, we went up to Crasford, notumberland coast, we meet the Kippers, walked along the cliff to Dunstanbury, and it was really cold. So I thought, where can I go that's warm and not too far away? So we went to Annick on the way back to Barter Books,

the enormous second-hand bookshop in the old station. My favourite bookshop in the universe. Fantastic place. And I was about to go to Angola to cover the African Cup of Nations. It's a football tournament. I'm practically drooling with incomprehension and I picked up a copy of Another Day of Life, the Kapuscinski book about Angola

and I happened to see in Barter Books the biography of Kapuscinski I get that, it's nice and cheap and then next to it there's a biography of Chatwin Nicholas Shakespeare, which is a brilliant biography I think and I picked that up as well. Went off to Angola.

Been a terrorist attack on the Togo team. I was the only British print journalist out there. I was completely at my depth dealing with stuff that wasn't men kicking a ball around, but actually people shooting each other. Luanda was hideous. I spent three days at the airport trying to get up to Cabinda where the terrorist attack had happened. But the domestic terminal in Luanda is pretty basic.

So it's a very chat-winning scene of packing cases and chickens pecking about the floor. Not that I knew it was chat-winning at this stage. I then went, not being able to get to Cabinda, so I went down the coast to Benguela, which is seven hours south of Luanda. It's a lovely, really nice town. Lots of old Portuguese colonial architecture.

And I was in a lovely guest house there. But the electricity and the Wi-Fi kept going off. So every time I was unable to work, I'd go out into the courtyard and there was two mango trees. You'd sit under the mango trees for shade. And there was a Swiss journalist there. And I wouldn't mention this

if it isn't the kind of detail Chatwin would ram down your throat. Oh, indeed. So there was this Swiss journalist there who I'd met in Ghana two years earlier. And he was a really funny bloke, but a very bitter, cynical man. And his previous job before becoming a football journalist, he'd been a clown in a circus.

And his circus... This is very checking in. This is very good. Go on. His circus had toured West Africa, and one night while they were performing in Nigeria, he'd seen a beautiful woman in the front row, in the audience, and he'd contrived a way to go over and get her number, and they ended up getting married.

And after he married her, he quit clowning and became a football journalist fantastic but when when he when he wasn't about i would read and so i found myself having gone through another day of life and the kapuscinski biography which had led me to you know the questions we talked about earlier about you know when you are writing that sort of reportage to what extent is your duty to factual truth or to expressing an emotional truth? And then I read the Chapman biography in perhaps most serendipitous circumstances you can conceivably do so. I was reading it in the absence of a former Swiss clown

sitting on a mango tree in a courtyard in Angola. And there was this whole series of kind of little connections i mean he talks when he was researching by suave weeder he was in brazil and he went to see the sociologist jibberdo freya and i i'd read a lot of freya when i was doing it so there's a whole series of of little kind of connections um and i thought yeah i want to read more with this guy this sounds this sounds like the kind of person I want to be. I don't think I really do. But initially it seemed that way.

And so through 2010, I think I'd already read his last book, which is The Collection of Journals, and I then read the other four in order. And I can't say I liked them much, but there was enough to keep me reading until I got to Utz, which I thought was just absolutely sensational. Rachel, I'm going to ask you about Chatwin. John is a few, not many listeners, just a few years older than me,

but I think one of the significant differences in our ages is that he had the 80s Chatwin mania. I reacted against the 80s Chatwin mania i reacted against the 80s chatwin mania yeah that i was sufficiently young that i looked at and thought this is what all these people like i don't want anything to do with it and i had reacted i mean we know that chatwin was a scrupulous curator of his own myth especially around his books and i i i say that because that's a big part of his own myth, especially around his books. And I say that because that's a big part of his publishing. You know, it's photographs taken by Lord Snowden.

So I come into reading Chatwin for this podcast. I read the Viceroy of Ouida. I don't really like it. I read the songlines, although the weirdest thing happened. Yes. But anyway, we might talk about it later. I read the songlines, although the weirdest thing happened. Yes. It's very strange. But anyway, we might talk about it later. I read the songlines.

I found that very frustrating, but I had little flashes of enjoyment while simultaneously thinking this was a number one bestseller for six weeks. It's surely one of the strangest books ever to have done that. Anyway, now I get to Utz. I absolutely love Utz I read it and then I read it again because I couldn't believe how good it was and the things that were good about it were things that he had not bothered to do in the previous books that I read that the discipline the structural

discipline of it apart from anything else, and the way the prose is shaped is totally different to what he does in the song lines. So suddenly the whole subject of Chatwin and my respect for him as a writer, as a persona we might come back to, but as a writer went up stratospherically. And this book, Utz, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, wasn't it? So you didn't work on this book, Rach, did you?

No, I didn't do the publishing. That was done by my friend and colleague, Polly Sampson. By the time this was published, he wasn't well. He was always a very glamorous presence, a person that everybody wanted to see. It was exciting when he came into the office. It's a story which I is stuck in my memory and I'm not even sure if I've imagined this or whether this actually

happened because having I was absolutely convinced that this was true I remember Bruce coming into the office with a little package and saying guess what I've got in here and we were like well what have you got Bruce he said it's a signed, signed first edition of Madame Bovary. He was like, Rachel, get on the phone, ring Julian now, tell him that I've got this. Which is very, very Bruce. What happens with Chatwin is he is, as you say, he is literary hot stuff, gold, everybody.

He reinvents travel writing within Patagonia. And travel in the 80s travel was massive yeah but chatwin writes in patagonia and it's a completely unclassifiable book that is not like anything else that's going on it's you know you've got through you had at the same time paddy lee fermor writing but chatwin writes this book of fragments. It immediately gets mythologized. How the hell did he meet all these people? There's a famous bit which is used against Chatwin. I have sung Hark the Herald Angels Sing in Welch. I've dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs. And on

it goes. The book was kind of, it was either tremendously pretentious or tremendously brilliant, or perhaps both. And that, so he writes that, and then he writes Viceroy of Ouida, which is short but gets amazing reviews. Well, we've got a clip here of Chatwin, which seems appropriate. One of the things I like about Bruce Chapman is he's very much one of those people who appears to have a strong personal moral code, but never lets you know what it is. Right. And one of the things that he didn't like being called a travel writer. No, he hated it.

Right, he hated it. No, he hated that. Absolutely. So here is Chapman talking about travel writing. The great point about travel is that you are outside the systems of class and caste and everyone will talk, basically, because you're defenceless when you're travelling. And that's the way you find stories. And if you're interested in stories, I'm much more interested in stories and storytelling than I am in travelling. But stories come to you more easily when you are travelling.

They do, they happen. A story will suddenly develop in front of your eyes and then you pursue it. I think that, for me, is the key to understanding Chatwin in terms of his oft-remarked-upon relationship to truth. He famously has this jovial argument with Paul Theroux where Paul Theroux says to him, well, you should come clean.

And Chatwin says, I don't believe in coming clean. And that, it's the story that matters. You know, as long as the story is true enough. What, Jonathan, putting you on the spot, is the story of Utz? What's the story of it? In terms of the basic plot? Yeah. Utz is a collector of porcelain in Prague. He's protected this incredible collection of specifically Meissen porcelain

through the war. This is one of the things I think that is brilliant about the book, that you're never quite certain how much you should believe in the writer. There's a whole bit about the moustache. As unreliable narratorsators go this is one of the greats because it's not flagged up at all the mustache is the one little nudge he's you know he talks about his mustache and he did he have a mustache and then by the end he definitely has a mustache but there's bits in the middle where you're not sure if he has a mustache so the mustache is a little little signal of don't necessarily believe all of this so there's a line about him saving jews during the war by essentially doing deals with with his porcelain then there's another line where he says

you know wars and revolutions they're great for collectors gives you so many opportunities so there's a whole series of little uh inconsistencies like that but anyway he you know he has has this this collection of porcelain and it is the thing he cares about more than anything else he has the chance to escape czechoslovakia you know the very repressive communist czechoslovakia every year he goes on holiday to vichy every year he thinks about staying in france and every year he ends up going back to his collection, which I think from Chapman's point of view, Chapman's all his theories about how the nomadic condition is the natural condition of humanity.

This is pretty core to him that possessions actually end up imprisoning you. And yet they're also a form of escape from the communist state. Rach, you've got a first edition of Utz right there. What is the jacket blurb there? It says, harbouring his private collection of mice and porcelains, Caspar Utz found a refuge from the horrors of the 20th century. Compared with the exquisite reality of his figurines, rescued and safe in the illusionist city of Prague,

the Gestapo and the secret police were to Utz as creatures of tinsel. It was the colourful harlequin, the trickster, with whom nondescript Utz most identified. Utz too was adept at wriggling into positions of advantage, at outwitting authorities, and the love of his own Columbine was nearer at hand than he knew. Being one quarter Jewish, he nursed a qualm that art collecting was a kind of idolatry, a blasphemy, and that somehow this very danger was what made Jews so good at it. From his flat and sanctuary of old European images, Utz could see the tomb of Rabbi Leuev, legendary creator of the golem, standing as mute, warning to him.

By modelling and remodelling the figure of Utz, as each new detail about his life is unearthed, Bruce Chatwin offers an insight into the fictional process itself. The artistry, as always, is made to look simple, yet Chatwin's work stands out among contemporary writing as something valuable and rare. Who wrote that? Do you know? Do you know who wrote it?

Yes, I do know who wrote it. Do we allow to say? Yeah, yeah. It was a copywriter, Maggie Traugott. But really who wrote it was Bruce Chatwin. Yeah. Because there's a famous note. I think you've got it as well. Yeah, he was furious with the initial blurb. And this was a letter he wrote to...

And Maggie Traggart was sort of slightly his hero worship priest. Oh, yeah, she loved him. She was a wonderful woman. We're talking about the days in publishing where there was somebody whose job it was to write blurbs. I mean, we don't have that sort of luxury anymore. Her job was to... She was a reader and blurb writer, copywriter.

That was her job. Susanna Clapp, who was Chatwin's editor and edited, marks sort of somewhat acidly that only women did those jobs because they were the only ones who could afford the ludicrously, ridiculously low pay that they came with. So, yeah, this is from a letter after he's got the blurb. He's clearly furious about it. He says, there's no idea of the illusionist city of Prague.

There's no idea of the private world of utzer's little figures figures or figurines can't be writing anyway figures or figurines is a strategy for blocking out the horrors of the 20th century that the porcelains were real the horror is so much flimflam no indication of a technique which allows the reader an insight into fictional process and how a storyteller sets about it one of the principal themes of the book is that old Europe survives. Martyr, who's Utz's maid who he ends up marrying, if we can keep that spoiler. Well, I like you. Martyr epitomises the fact that the techniques

of political indoctrination fail and are bound to fail. No idea that Utz identifies himself as Harlequin, the trickster, and runs his own private commedia, outwitting everyone until finally he finds his Columbina. No idea of a Jewish element, Ut is a quarter Jewish, of a somewhat subversive notion that the collecting of images, i.e. art collecting, is inimical to Jehovah, which is why Jews have always been so good at it.

Art collecting equals idol worship, equals blasphemy against the created world of God. Well, as Eric Morecambe once said, he won't sell many ice creams going at that speed. Now, when this book was shortlisted for the Book of Prize in 1988, Private Eye did what it always does, which is it wrote its own blurb, which I'm now going to read out. Because you've heard Jonathan's excellent description. Rachel has read you the blurb. This is what Private Eye said. i think this still stands up the novel tootsie fruitsie by bruce hatpin rye evocative sensitive account of a viennese ice cream collector who fills his cavernous flat in marxist prague with hundreds of different flavored ice creams one day he wakes up

and finds that they have all melted as the daily telegraph commented tootsie frutzie is a wry evocative novella in which ice cream collecting is used as a paradigm for man's insatiable urge to externalize the transient check win is of course best known for his award-winning cult novel, Tramlines, which shows how the ancient Incas invented trams. An insatiable nomad, he lives in Notting Hill like everybody else. I mean, I think that's still pretty good. Whoever wrote that 30 years ago, that's pretty funny.

But the interesting thing to remind listeners who haven't read this book is that it is 150 pages long of big print. It contains all the things that are on that blurb and all the things that Chatwin said were missing from the blurb. It's so full of ideas and resonances and references. He called it a fairy tale with some savage digs at the art business. It does have that sort of fabulous sort of structure, doesn't it? You meet him first in the 60s.

He's researching Rudolf, the great porcelain collector, Rudolf II. This is all based on truth. There was a collector whose name forgets me, Juste, I think. He goes back after the book starts with his funeral. It kind of has this Russian doll structure. Each bit of the narrative, each time you go back to the narrative, new details are added.

Through the narrative, it completely transforms from a rather pasty faced mean-spirited collector into variously a great lover and then a kind of a romantic, a married man. I mean, it's... I have to say, having gone back to this and I've looked at it,

I haven't re-read in its entirety the songlines and the other book that I loved, which is On The Black Hill, I kind of feel this might be its best book. What was it that made you love it? What was it that made you fall in love with it, Jonathan? Because I know very clearly what made me fall in love with it. I just want to hear from you. Maybe it's easy to say why it resonated in a way his other work didn't,

or his other fictional work, and I guess there's a question of what of his other work is fictional. But Songlines I had a huge problem with, and it is this issue of truth, and maybe this is because I'm coming out from a journalistic background, that I just, it's a cheap get-out to have a character called Bruce Chatwin who you can subsequently claim is not you. And this book, which has all the hallmarks of a travel book,

of a book of ideas, to exonerate yourself from a commitment to truth by saying, no, it's a novel. I'm not really sure that's good enough. They asked Tom Mash to the publisher of Cape, is The Songlines a novel? Because Bruce ever strikes me. He got shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award and he said we must withdraw.

And Mash just said, I think it is a novel because Bruce persuaded me. But if, on the other hand, Bruce had persuaded me it was a travel book, I'd be telling you it was a travel book. We've mentioned Susanna Clapp earlier. Yeah. Susanna Clapp edited books and edited several books. In Patagonia. She edited all of them, I mean. Not all of them. Not all of them. She books. In Patagonia. She edited all of them, I mean.

Not all of them. Not all of them. She did it in Patagonia. Yeah. And Chatwin had worked for Sotheby's in the 1960s. And this is Susanna Clap talking about what Sotheby's gave him as a writer. He was extraordinarily wonderful-looking, blonde hair, blue eyes, piercing blue eyes,

very animated manner. His talk was very fluent, and he was one of those rare writers who can talk as expressively as they wrote, and indeed in the same way. And part of his charm was the way in which he rehearsed his stories, continually honing down and always able to put a verb in the right place to colour his talk so expressively. All these things drew people to him. I mean, it's not simply that his books are full of visual description, although that is a large part of it.

And his first book in Patagonia is absolutely packed full of very, very precise adjectives. I mean, it is painterly in that sense. I mean, I once counted the number of descriptive colour adjectives on a page and they were absolutely enormous. It goes beyond that, I think. He was inquisitive visually in a way that very few people are. He was always noticing the bizarre, the odd, the anomalous. It went absolutely throughout his writing. And I think that Sotheby's was very important in teaching him,

in developing what was already there, in developing a very precise way of looking at things, at examining things. Chatwin was famous for having the eye, right? He was very good, when he worked for Sotheby's, at spotting the value of things, what a fake what wasn't a fake and another great writer and traveler is the poet Rambo right so he's a very big reader of Rambo and Rambo's famous dictum that I the word I in writing I is another you know is another, yeah. You know, and it seems to me

Chatwin actually is one of the writers who really takes that to its logical and then perhaps unacceptable extreme. I, Bruce Chatwin, is another. Yes, but that's okay because what's he doing? He's not a journalist. He is a storyteller.

That's what he would say, I think. What matters is the story. Yeah, and yet if the form in which you are writing or the form in which you appear to be writing is one essentially based on facts, I'm not sure that's enough. And that's why Utz, I think, appealed because that question's taken out of the equation. Okay, it's based on people who existed 20, 25 years earlier,

but it's not so obviously, I know he changed the names in Songlines, but it's not as obviously based on contemporary people. And then, you know, to fully, I sort of answered the question, why did I fall for it by slagging off the previous book? So the whole question was taken away. But also, it's the combination of precision and composition and there's so many ideas that are there that are just sort of glided over

all that stuff on the blurb we talked about a whole series of you know of the beginnings of themes we've barely mentioned rabbi lurth and the idea of porcelain as a golem. And that's obviously, when he's talking about Prague as being this mysterious city, that's very key. Also porcelain as the product of the actual scientific process of alchemy. Yeah. That's a very interesting. Yeah, Berkshire was literally locked in a basement

by Adolphus the Strong until he solved the problems of alchemy and he came up with porcelain instead, which is pretty good. Rach, could you read us a section? Well, there's several bits that I love, but what I love about that whole Gollum thing is that it completely runs throughout the whole book. I remember this really kind of... All Gollum legends derived from an ancient Jewish belief

that any righteous man could create the world by repeating in an order prescribed by the Kabbalah the letters of the secret name of God. Golem meant unformed or uncreated in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been Golem, an inert mass of clay so vast as to cover the ends of the earth that is until yahweh shrank him to human scale and breathed into him into his mouth the power of speech and that that's what a sudden whoa you know you're really something because what the other

thing that made me fall in love with it okay this is the very opening of the novel. An hour before dawn on March 7th, 1974, Caspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke in his apartment at No. 5, Scirocco Street, overlooking the old Jewish cemetery in Prague. Three days later, at 7.45am, his friend, Dr Vaclav Ullich, was standing outside the church of St Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations

he had hoped to afford at the florist. Yes, yes, yes, that's right. Seven of the ten pink. Oh, my God. I can quote that from when I first read it. That's stuck in my mind. Also, that is very similar in the way it uses specifics of time and place

with then the smallest incidental detail. That is remarkably similar to the opening of The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. It was an absurd shortlist that year, wasn't it? Well, I want to do a little exercise now where, Alana, you can join us in this because we're going for a clean sweep. I'm going to read out the six shortlisted novels of the 1988 Booker Prize,

and I'm going to see if we as a group have read all of them. I think there's a good chance that we have, right? So, Utz. Yes. Yes. The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald. Not yet. I have, so I've got them covered.

Okay. The winner, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. You have, Alana. Okay, so that's a strong showing. Nice Work by David Lodge. Yes. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Yes.

So that just leaves Marina Warner's The Lost Father. No. No. No. No, I haven't read that. I hope she's not listening. Well, she might be because she figured in the great interview with Rebecca West last week, it's a hell of a short list.

I think that is a hell of a short list. Do you know who the jury was that year? Rose Tremaine. Blake Morrison, Philip French, Sebastian Fawkes, Chairman Michael Foote. Wow. I mean, wow. Michael Foote, yes, Michael Foote. Red Uts.

And found it pleasing. Chatwin famously didn't go to the dinner. Did he not? Was he too ill? Well, he was too ill. He wanted to go, but then he was sort of told it was more or less not going his way. He was really ill by that stage. The little bit you read about the golem, what's satisfying about it,

and why I liked, I mean, as as i say i'm speaking a little bit as a fan boy because the time the song lines just seem to me to be so interesting it's a book about nomadism that the core of chatwin's life is the tension between wanting to travel and wanting to stay at home elizabeth his wife famously stays at home and, you know, has sheep and dogs and lives a rural life. Well, she travels quite a bit, doesn't she? She does. She takes trips to India. But she's kind of, she's, I mean, there is a sort of martyr,

the martyr, the character in the book who's kind of an earth sprite is what he talks about, Elizabeth. So there's all that tension. And the songlines is a kind of on one level an ungenerous level an undigested attempt to write the great book about where human beings came from the battle with the beast you know the the the hunter gatherers much like we were talking last week last podcast about dogger land you know he he's trying to ask big questions it's it's bits of it are travelogue bits of it are his notebooks and at the time it just seemed to me like an incredibly i mean very brave very unoriginal

and and kind of brilliant original yeah not unoriginal very original very very original and and and it got amazing i remember got an amazing review by John Bailey calling it a masterpiece in the LRB, and it got the kind of coverage that got it to number one. Still, as you say, a very remarkable feat for a book that's so odd. Anyway, the point is that what he does in Utz is he takes all those undigested ideas and puts them into characters, puts them into narrative, puts them into a story.

Is that what you felt? Yeah, I think it's a much lighter, much more readable book for all the depth of the ideas. I mean, it's funny. I mean, the opening, which you read, it goes on into the whole joke about the janitor playing the organ. Yeah. And it's funny in a way, I don't think any of his other his other i mean maybe some of the journalism is quite funny when they're sitting in

a they're sitting in a in a restaurant having lunch and the the menu is badly translated so carp comes out as crap which is you know leads to much actual jokes and chat with actual jokes and chat when there's obviously there's a there's a photograph hanging on the wall a photo of comrade novotny. How a man with so disagreeable a mouth would consent to being photographed at all? Which is very, that's very chatty. I think the thing I found overwhelmingly affecting about Utz is it seemed to me that it's an unverifiable love story.

And it's not the love story that's interesting. It's the unverifiable part of it. And that seemed to me a really profound comment on writing. How do we account for things which we can't account for? What does fiction do to fill in the gaps where we can't know the gaps yeah and one of the things that he does in it which is totally fascinating to me is whoever the narrator is of us gradually lets go of the need to verify the story. That, for me, on the second reading, is one of the brilliances of it.

And by the end has completely just snapped the rope and off it goes. Saying, I presented you at the start of this book with facts and I end it wholly in the realm of fiction. And it's up to you to find where the wardrobe door is in this novel. Where do I pass from fact to myth? And i i is another it's chatwin as well it's the idea of chatwin passing from real life to created life even in his own lifetime he'd done it this character of bruce chatwin the narrator of the song lines the novel the song lines, the novel, the song lines, not the travel book, the song lines, this character of Bruce Chatwin. I would say, Jonathan, I find it's totally fascinating. On the one hand, yes, you could see that as a get out.

Right. It's not me. On the other hand, you could see it as something totally freeing to leap across barriers and make connections and pull in the things that he does in Utz, if all he was interested in was a dogged presentation of the facts, he wouldn't be able to present to you that list of all the things that got left out of the blurb. I agree with you. For me, of the books of his that i've read as a novel this is the one that really embraces fiction in a way that's the vice of weaver and the song lines don't now i haven't read on the black hill i know you're a big fan aren't you i i am yeah i mean i am and oddly enough it's the one of the very few books i gave to my son and grandfather who didn't

he didn't read a lot of fiction but i knew he would love that book and he indeed he read it very very carefully from beginning to end and said it was the best novel he'd ever read, which is why I have perhaps an over-sentimental attachment to it. But going back to it, it still stands up. I think it's really important to say that Chatwin had this amazing reputation almost as soon as he's dead, a very bizarre kind of Greek Orthodox ceremony. Famously, that was the day that the fatwa was announced.

It was no readings. It was just a lot of Orthodox monks chanting. The only word that anybody understood at any point in the service was the word Bruce. Very chatwin. Anyway, almost immediately his critical reputation starts to become sort of reassessed, you know, people, Alan Bennett. As recently as 2010, Blake Morrison's able to start a review

of the letters with, does anyone read Bruce Chatwin these days? And there has been a kind of, I think there's been a massive swing in the opposite direction, which interests me. He hated literary London and he hated the whole, but he was also, you know, he was called Lord Chatwin at school we've heard his you know he was product of Marlborough I'm fascinated by that the the person who he most resembles in his in his writing that I can think of is is Zabalt Zabalt's very last essay he talks about Chatwin and says Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma one and never

knows how to classify his books and then gives a wonderful account of what those books are you know anthropological and mythological studies in the tradition of Livy Strauss adventure stories looking back to our early childhood reading collections of facts dream books regional novels examples of lush exoticism puritanical penance sweeping baroque vision self-denial and personal confession they're all these things together you sort of feel feel that zabalt is there for the long haul not sure whether chatwin is anymore i used to it would have been a ridiculous thing to say in 1988 89 that chatwin wouldn't last but i wonder i i read a bit you know you asked me what did i read

this week and we were talking about elizabeth. One of the books I actually read this week, I'd be fascinated to know if anyone here has read it, is V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival. Years ago. Right. Now, that is a fascinating book to compare to both Seybelt and Chamwin. You know, it presents itself as a novel. I would be astonished if there's anything fictional in it apart from a few names changed.

And it is a meditation on, guess what, history, truth, landscape. From a writer you would not necessarily expect to approach those subjects. I found it totally hypnotic, absolutely hypnotic book, The Enigma of Arrival. Yeah. Well, I would like to say thank you to uh jonathan for suggesting we do chat win on christmas morning thank you very much it did turn out to be a good christmas present and rachel for coming back so soon i found this one of the

most liberating backlisted that we've ever done because it was one of those times that what I thought I knew about an author was only I was half right but the the half in which I was wrong was the liberating half yeah and to have the pleasure of discovering a writer all of whose work I particularly like but one of whose books I felt wow I haven't read anything with I've had such a strong intellectual and emotional reaction to for a long time. I'm fascinated to hear you say it because that's almost exactly my feeling. I went back to reading Patagonia when I was in Patagonia. It was, again, this great serendipitous moment that I'd been out on a boat

to look at a penguin colony and we were getting tea and cake having got off the boat. And I suddenly realised this was Halberton, the farm that he talks about in Patagonia. It's sort of this weird sense of, hang on, why is this familiar? Oh. I've been here before. Yeah.

Yeah. Which tells you how good the descriptive work is. It felt as if I'd been there before. It was Utz who first convinced me that history is always our guide for the future and always full of capricious surprises. The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, brilliant, brilliant.

Okay, well, it's time for this band of nomads to return to camp. Huge thanks to Jonathan and Rachel, to Alana Chance, our cool and collected guest producer, and to Unbound, the underwriter for all our literary divagations. You can download all 86 of our shows, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading and even buy tasteful merchandise by visiting our website at batlisted.fm and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and via Boundless.

Before you do that, and assuming this podcast has met with your exacting standards, why not leave us a review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcast joy. Farewell, fare forward, fellow travellers. Yay! Oh, come on! Really, really good, guys. That was brilliant, Jonathan. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts,

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