Kevin Volans : Some Japanese influences on style and structure in Bruce Chatwin’s Writing

SOME JAPANESE INFLUENCES ON STYLEAND STRUCTURE IN BRUCE CHATWIN’S WRITING

This paper was presented at a conference on Bruce Chatwin at Oxford University, July 2008

I must begin by saying that I have written this handfulof personal observations as a musician and as a friend of the author – in otherwords, as an amateur. So I must beg your indulgence. I have not read any ofthe critical work on Bruce’s oeuvre, so what I have to say may well beredundant, off the point and worse still, self-evident.

And I hope I will also be forgiven for beginning on adidactic note.

When starting a course in composition I always tried toexplain to my students what I considered to be the difference between merely writing music and compositionitself. I define composition as an attempt to re-define reality in music, and Isuppose by extension, re-define life. This means that the act of compositionmust involve going beyond what one already knows into uncharted territory. Andgoing beyond what one knows means going beyond craftsmanship, because bydefinition craftsmanship employs a set of actions with a known outcome.

Composing is more like dancing in the dark - dancing, thatis, not stumbling! The only thing to guide you is your artistry - a combinationof training and intuition - and your personal pleasure.

And it goes without saying, that this transcends ‘personality’.Personality is formed and assessed socially and is habitual – dancing in the dark, unseeing and unseen,is strictly private and anti-social. Beethoven the personality mayhave driven Beethoven the artist, but it was the intellect, the intelligence and the imaginationof the artist that created the realms of his music. To me,Beethoven the music goes far beyond the tormented soulof its author.

I say all of this because with Bruce Chatwin it is easyto be sideswiped by the glamour of the personality and the life of the author.Indeed, I think that at times the artist and the persona in Bruce were at oddswith each other.

Bruce’s love of the exotic and his fascination with otherpeople’s stories certainly influenced his choice of subjects. But in his lifehe was always an Englishman abroad – certain of himself, his home base and sureof being able to return there. On the other hand, I think in his work hewas more experimental and took fargreater risks than he did in life. The work often wanders into unchartedterritory without an idea of how it would return.

It was the compositional structure of the books thatfirst attracted me to Bruce’s work. In terms of formal experimentation, withinthe same literary world he had, for me, only one contemporary rival: J.M.Coetzee.

Bruce often referred to Flaubert’s Madame Bovery ashis ideal. But there was another book which had I think a more profoundinfluence on his work: The Narrow Road to the Deep North byMatsuo Basho (b. 1644). Moreprecisely, it is the Penguin Classics Edition, translated and with a lengthyintroduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa, which appeared in 1965 (and which is stillcurrently available). The book also contains Basho’s The Records of aWeather-Exposed Skeleton, A Visit to the Kashima Shrine, The Records of Travel-worn Satchel and A Visit toSarashina Village. All of these, including the introductory essay,find resonance in Bruce’s work.

To begin with, style:

Bruce’s writing has often been called ‘lapidary’, ‘pareddown’, ‘polished’. But this begs the question, in what way?

He himself often talked of ‘pure description’. By this Ithink he meant an account of things in which the author attempts to hold hisown opinion or perception back as far as possible – a kind of objectivity.

Basho (quoted by Yuasa) wrote:

“Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, orto the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you mustleave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourselfon the object and do not learn.”

This approach has several consequences. It means thewriter seldom uses metaphor, which by its very nature reveals the hand of thewriter. So if there is a metaphor, it is indirect. For example, let’s look atBasho’s most famous haiku:

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond,

A frog jumped into water –

A deep resonance;

The poemappears to do nothing more than state the facts. No comment.

But thereis the word ‘ancient’.

All pondsin the wild are likely to be ancient. However, the only way we would know that a pond is ancient is if itwere man-made: ‘ancient’, therefore it must be in a palace or temple ground,where a pond would survive for centuries – in a very controlled environment –into which the frog has introduced an element of chaos. The pond is certainly a metaphor for the observer’s mind. But this is notstated.

Similarly Bruce tended to understate – tell us somethingwithout saying it. He often used a reference to an object or a colour to evokea mood. It’s almost impossible to find a page in all the later novels without areference to colour, or something redolent of colour - blood, wine, coal.[Well, I exaggerate a little.]

A random example: on the first page of Utz wehave pink, grey and giltwood; on the second there’s white, red, red, red, shinylaurel, brown and many-coloured.

The pink refers to carnations and the grey to a man’shair, the gilt is on the organ, but these colours are also those of a cold latewinter’s dawn, when these events are taking place. Similarly, the red and whiterefer to flowers, the brown to a handbag, but they serve to reinforce theBolshevick/military intrusion of the second page.

Another example: in On the Road with Mrs. G,Bruce frequently records what Mrs. Ghandi was wearing, but I can’t help feelingthis documentation is ficticious – the attire being switched around or inventedto suit the tone of the next scene. Whatever the case, the reference to colourspeaks volumes: a green and white striped sari when dealing crisply with atricky situation, a floral one to meet and tame the gentlemen of the press.When dealing with hostile crowds,“Mrs. Ghandi arrived in vermillion” would beclassic Chatwin. Although on this occasion he allowed himself a metaphor: “Mrs.G., in vengeful vermilion, glared at the crowd.” When he used metaphor, it wasstartling.

In place of metaphor Chatwin tends to use a structurealso found in haiku or its older form waka - an AB form in which the first part setsup an expectation, and the second part provides a resolution (which is oftenunexpected). The resonance created between the first and the second partssubstitutes for metaphor. The choice of materialgives an indication of the author’s intention. This is the basis of thestructure of Japanese linked poetry which was developed from the 8th centuryonwards. According to Yuasa, ‘…each poem takes up the suggestion of the lastpoem and yet opens up a new world of its own, so that the reader is carriedthough the whole series as through the exquisitely arranged rooms of abuilding.’ I think this is what Bruce aspired to in his moreambitious moments.

An AB structure runs throughout Bruce’s late work inparticular – the form is so common as to almost be a personal cliché - and isused both on a small and a large scale.

In some case the setup and resolution is little more thana joke, in others, the he embarks on short passages of poetry, in others still,there is a mere suggestion of poetry.

Some short examples skimmed hastily from various books:

A: “Mrs. Gandhi wore a green and white striped sari. Andsat down to a breakfast

B: that never came.” [What Am I Doing Here]

A: “They set down the coffin with a show of reverence.

B: Then, attracted by the smell of hot bread from abakery along the street, they strolled off to get breakfast…” [Utz]

A: “Olwen had kicked. The hoof caught him under the chin,

B: and the sparrows went on chattering.” [On the BlackHill]

In Utz we have near-haikus:

“To relieve the pressure of her bunions /

the sides of her shoes were slit open.” (19 syllables).

The opening of The Viceroy of Ouidah isalmost entirely constructed of contrasting AB paragraphs:

A: Thefamily of Francisco Manuel da Silva had assembled at Ouidah to honour hismemory with a Requiem Mass and dinner. It was the usual suffocating afternoonin March.

B: Hehad been dead a hundred and seventeen years.

A: TheMass was said in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a stuccoedmonument to the more severe side of French Catholicism

B: thatglared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees ofthe Python Fetish.

and so on.

There are also passages that are clearly incipient poetry(with a heavy dose of assonance and alliteration, for which Bruce had aweakness):

Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky

[ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ]

6 feet

The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse.

[ ˘ ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ]

6 feet

Bananaleaves hung in limp ribbons

[ ˘ - ˘ - - ˘ - - ˘ ]

5 feet

There wasno wind.

[ ˘ - ˘ - ]

2 feet

37 syllables in all.[Waka had 31]

For me it’s difficult not to read ‘beat’ for ‘heat’ and ‘rhythms’for ‘ribbons’: The…din of crickets made the beat seem worse.Banana leaves hung in limp rhythms.

With regard to the AB structure, the movement of thefirst 2 lines contrasts with its absence in the second.

I am not suggesting that these books be regarded aspoetry, and I certainly don’t wish to make a direct comparison with Basho. Bythe time Basho was perfecting the art of linked verse, it had been refined overa period of some 800 years. For example, according to Yuasa, Basho judged thelink between 2 poems in terms of a number of difficult to define qualities: thearoma (nioi), echo (hibiki), countenance(omokage), colour (utsuri) and rank (kurai) ofthe preceding poem.

Bruce would never have claimed to be working on thislevel of refinement. He was more likely to have echoed Basho’s comments on hisown writing: “…I must admit that my records are little more than the babble ofthe intoxicated and the rambling talk of the dreaming. And therefore my readersare requested to take them as such” [The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel]

But I am sure Bruce’s love of Basho suggested a number ofpossibilities to him. And we do know that not a single word Bruce wrote wasplaced carelessly. I was with him, for example, when he agonised for a full tenminutes over whether to use the word “when” in place of “whenever” in the thirddraft of one of the short stories.

By formalising the material into tight miniaturestructures, Bruce was able to include a wide range of images, allowing hissomewhat baroque imagination to range freely.

It seems that the more one simplifies, reduces andabstracts an idea, the more it lends itself to a larger and broaderinterpretation. For example, Japanese stone gardens – or Zen gardens, as theyare often called. The isolated rocks surrounded by raked stone suggest not justan extensive landscape, but islands - small worlds - in a vast sea. In otherwords, the absence of plants – except for lichens and miniature trees on therocks – permits an interpretation of the garden that is far larger and moresweeping in scale than the grandest of Capability Brown’s creations. The sameidea is found, of course, in haiku.

With regard to the large-scale use of linked ABstructures, a case could be made that Bruce sometimes attempted to create akind of extended prose waka- at least in the short stories. Thetechnique of linking ideas in an AB format enabled him to expand the structure.The relationship between A and B usually involves a re-interpretation of anaspect of A in the B section:

For example, the linked stories Assunta1 and Assunta2 (not his best, in my opinion):

In both stories, the common thread is Bruce in a hospitalbed with fever, possibly malaria, and Assunta is the Italian cleaning lady whotells him stories. There is another common thread, which is diagnosis ormis-diagnosis.

In Assunta 1 the set-up is the storyAssunta tells of her neighbour’s pregnant python.

In Assunta 2 the link is the story of her own pregnancy, but with anunpleasant echo of the first - in that she was expected to give birth to a babywhich, like the python, lacked arms and legs. Happily it was a mis-diagnosis.

But in Assunta 2, the malariaprovides Bruce with a subsiduary AB structure, enabling him to tell a story ofthe Pan-African Ladies’ Congress in Accra, where he may have contracted thedisease. He sets up a kind of reflection between the French-speaking ladiesfrom Guinea, who needed help ordering food, and Assunta, who overcomes allbarriers to communication. For good measure Bruce throws in an aside about theProfessor attending him: He is a world authority on snake-bites.

In Your Father’s Eyes are Blue Again thestructure is

A: his mother had a cataract operation and could oncemore see his father’s blue eyes clearly;

B: his father had found his grandfather’s yacht, the Aireymouse,after a long search, and was going to help restore her. His father’s eyes weremetaphorically blue again.

The link between the two is a box of old photographswhich didn’t contain a picture of the Aireymouse, but did haveone of his father that his mother had kept next to her bed.

There is an AB sub-plot in the story of Bruce’s firstmemory of his father, with a ride on the handlebars of his bicycle – for thethree-year-old, this must have been akin to sailing in a yacht - and thetradewind passage his brother arranged for his father on an elaborate modernyacht, that was not a success.

I can’t help but feel the perfection of his father’s eyesin part A is reflected in the perfection of the lines of the yacht in part B.

In the scant 3 pages of this story, Bruce manages to puttogether a miniature Paradise Regained: the story ofhis mother’s love for his father, his father’s love for his ‘lost lover’, theyacht (I mean no disrespect here), the tenderness of the relationship betweenthe boys and their father, a good deal of family history, a reference toRimbaud and, conveyed by the colour blue, a sense of the beauty of sailing.

This concision is surpassed in the one and a half pagesof The Fly, where the ‘right kind’ of collector, Bertie Landsbergin part A is vividly contrasted with Mr. and Mrs. W. of part B. The pages arepositively crammed with detail. The link between the two is a clever sidestep:Bertie tells a story about his wife, Bruce’s wife tells a story about the W__s.Bruce claimed both stories influenced their decision to marry.

The same linking structures are found in nearly all thelater short stories.

When it comes to the larger scale of the novels, wealmost find a macro-structure of links. I don’t want to stretch a point here,but I think it’s fun speculating:

In Patagonia is about a (presumably real)Bruce travelling through a vast country, collecting stories.

The Viceroy of Ouidah is about aman who travelled from one continent to another to make a fortune, and spentthe rest of his life trying to escape the oppressive regime he had landed inand return home. He failed. But in the meantime he ‘collected’ a dynasty, avast family. The book begins with his memorial service attended by dozens ofhis family.

Utz is about a man who had afortune and escaped the regime with his large porcelain collection. He thenreturns, smuggling his collection back to his claustophobic apartment inPrague. He dies without issue and the collection disappears. Researching thestory is a fictional ‘I’ who resembles Bruce. The book begins with his funeralattended by two people.

The Songlines is about apeople who collect nothing material at all and who travel freely, covering vastdistances through the countryside. They have strong kinship ties and a huge collectionof stories and songs. Travelling to learn about them is a semi-fictional Bruceand his friend Arkady.

On the Black Hill is abouttwins who travel nowhere at all– they barely stray from the bed they are bornin. They collect very little. They have no immediate family.

The books all cross-reference each other in a complex setof pairs, like an internal scheme of rhyming couplets.

In this respect, and in the fictionalised self, I find anecho in J. M. Coetzee. For example his first novel, Dusklands, iswritten in two parts which mirror each other: the oppressive boss of theprotagonist in part one (who is partially responsible for his breakdown) iscalled Coetzee; the protagonist in part 2 is an explorer called JacobusCoetzee. In Disgrace, the protagonist is the middle agedprofessor of English in the University of Cape Town, in this respect almostidentical with Coetzee himself. The fictional Elizabeth Costello delivers lectures that Coetzeepublished as himself, and she re-appears as a character in another book.

AndCoetzee used some other slightly experimental forms. For example, In theHeart of the Countryis written as a set of consecutively numbered paragraphs. (Numbering was veryfashionable in the ‘70’s).

For me Bruce’s novel with the most interesting structureis The Songlines. In form it’s almost an exact parallel of Basho’sA Visit to Sarashina Village: first a prose narrative which givesway to a set of linked verse. Basho, in the company of a pupil, sets off to seeMount Obasute under a full moon. The piece becomes a meditation on the meaningof travel, and journeying as a metaphor for transience of life itself. Thelinked poems at the end are by Basho and his disciple Etsujin.

A Visit to Kashima Shrine has the samestructure. Here Basho is accompanied by a masterless youth and a wanderingpriest. They proceed without hiring a horse because ‘we wanted to try thestrength of our slender legs’. The journey is to see the shrine by full moon,but the clouds thwart them.

The linked poems at the end were written by severalpeople, including Basho under an earlier pen-name.

Despite the brevity of each piece, there is attention todetail – the ‘somewhat uncouth gold-lacquer work’ cups they drink from, themoonlight touching a corner of his room.

In The Songlines Bruce travelswith a companion, Arkady. [I have often wondered about the choice of thischaracter’s name. Is it chosen because of its connection to Arcady spelt with ac – the 16th century word for an ideal rustic paradise?]

The book is, of course, primarily a mediation on walking,travelling and its meaning.

And the notebooks at the end have links: Petrarch talksof sleeping in a different bed each night. This links to Rimbaud ( asking whatam I doing here) – to a sleepless night in an hotel in Brazil – to the names of2 hotels in Cameroon, the Windsor and the anti-Windsor – which provide a link athe British ambassador in Kabul, whose contradictory initiative andinsensitivity to local culture leads to a Moorish proverb on the value of men –which prompts a story of a little man who prospects for jewellery in sewers inMiami: “’It is not, I can assure you, sir’ he said, ‘ an unrewardingoccupation.’” And so on.

And of course, many of the notes are quotations fromother people’s writings.

Finally, a brief word about fact and fiction:

Basho’s travel sketches are combinations of prosenarrative, and static verse. They are not guide books – and in some cases thenarrative of the journey is distorted for poetic reasons. In The Narrow Roadto the Deep North Basho describes places he visited in the ‘wrong’order to create a symmetry of names and moods.

Bruce always combined fact and fiction.

In Utz, for example, he felt that bychanging the description of Utz himself: now he has a moustache, now he doesn’t;he would sufficiently undermine the veracity of the story to bring intoquestion the existence of the collection and the self-proclaimed baroness atthe end of the book.

By starting his career with In PatagoniaChatwin ran into a problem: all the arts are now run by their arch enemy:Business – in this case the Book Industry. And industries love labels. Workmust be classified into genres. Is it fact or fiction? Is it a novel or is it atravel book?

I recall one of the judges of the Booker prize beingalmost more annoyed at the brevity of Utz than anythingelse. The book didn’t fit into his classification of a novel, and therefore hefelt it didn’t belong in the competition! (Imagine Capability Brown’s apoplexyat the sight of a stone garden).

Perhaps because of their age and established position inJapanese literature, there is no classification problem with Basho’s writings.And they are so beautifully named: Travel Sketches.

A travel book is supposed to deal with a factual past. Anovel deals with a fictional present, even when written in the past tense. InBasho there is a separation of the two – the prose is in the past tense, thepoetry captures the present.

I think Bruce, in his short novels, almost stripped ofthe Here and Now of dialogue, devoid of the usual plumping up ofcinematographic detail of popular fiction,was aiming at the altogether moretimeless genre of the chronicle. There are scenes,events, special moments in time that are brought back to life and replayed asin a novel, but many more that are merely suggested.

In What am I Doing Here Bruce tells Noel Coward advised him: “Neverlet anything artistic stand in your way.”

By this I’m sure he meant Art as opposed toEntertainment. Bruce says he followed his advice, but this is more of a stancethan a fact. His work is full of artifice. Bruce’staste in art was unusual – he gravitated towards the artifactrather than the conventional artwork of high art. He was interested in pieces thatwere repositories of stories, rather than those which aimed at transcendence,the hallmark of western art. (It is not for nothing that Utz is about acollector of narrative porcelain, rather than paintings).

Interestingly enough, artifacts tend to be highlyformalised. Often they are completely abstract.The handling of the material isthe root of a narrative. The relationship between the artist and the work, thecare and precision of the craftsmanship (or lack of it) tell us more of thevalue of the work to the artist and his society than its subject matter or thematerial itself; be it an Inuit whalebone toggle, a Neolithic flint arrowhead,an Aztec feather cape, an Aleutian islands hat, a Hawaiian bark-cloth sheet, amodern fibreglass sculpture or a Mogul miniature.

The first weekend I met Bruce, he produced a 13th CenturyJapanese red lacquer box, one of his most prized possessions. It was slim,perfectly circular, tending to matt and fading slightly irregularly. Itsuggested a rising moon.

The form could not be simpler or more perfectly executed,and it had a patina brimming with suggestion of another world and another age.

“This is me,” he said, “this is what I am about.”