The Sacred Art of Walking: Bruce Chatwin's Legacy Explored through Herzog’s Film Nomad – Part 1 of 2

Werner Herzog, left, and Bruce Chatwin, c. 1983. MUSIC BOX FILMS

A recent brilliant documentary film celebrating the life of Bruce Chatwin by Werner Herzog offers us the opportunity to re-evaluate the legacy of the acclaimed British writer.

“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” – Werner Herzog

The British writer Bruce Chatwin died of AIDS at the age of 49 on January 18, 1989. His passing precipitated a widespread and almost unprecedented outpouring of grief for a contemporary literary novelist. As one friend put it, “You would suppose Lord Byron had died.” Although he started writing relatively late in life (in his 30s) and only published six books in his lifetime, Chatwin’s death struck a deep nerve throughout the literary world. Without a doubt, his was one of the most extraordinary literary lives in recent decades. Escaping a successful career as the director of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Antiquities Department, Chatwin studied briefly at Edinburgh University, worked a few years as a journalist at the Sunday Times Magazine, before sending a tersely-worded telegram to the magazine – “GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS” – and disappearing. Three years later, in 1978, he published his first book In Patagonia to universal critical acclaim. And thus, was born the Chatwin myth.

In the three decades that have passed since Chatwin’s death, his mythic reputation as a restless, cosmopolitan, dazzlingly attractive, erudite, and glamorous yet enigmatic writer of exotic tales has continued to soar. I’ve been fascinated and somewhat puzzled in equal measure by the adulation that’s been heaped on Bruce Chatwin over the years ever since I first picked up a copy of In Patagonia. I can’t deny that I enjoyed that book’s impressionistic collage of narrative fragments of journalistic description, historical cameos, anthropological speculation, folklore, and bizarre fact, and the clever way it blended non-fictional elements of travel writing with fiction. It left me with the impression that the region was more a realm of fantasy than a real geographical region in South America.


I went on to read all six of the books that Chatwin published in his lifetime – The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. Each book was radically different from the previous one, each presented Chatwin’s mastery of a different genre, and each took us to a very different place, exposing us to new experiences. I was dazzled and beguiled. There can be no denying his writing talent, yet I remain a little bit sceptical of the wildly enthusiastic claims made on Chatwin’s behalf. I still find it doubtful whether his two travel books (In Patagonia and The Songlines), three short novels (The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, and Utz), as well as the disparate newspaper articles he published quite justify his ranking alongside Gustave Flaubert or Ernest Hemingway.

That’s why when I came across – Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin – a 2019 documentary film made by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, my interest was immediately piqued. I had a vague recollection of Herzog’s involvement with a film project based on one of Chatwin’s books. But the key selling point for me was what I knew of Herzog and his filmmaking. His films such as The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God were all set in strange and unique environments and all seemed to deal with brooding, obsessive, intense protagonists, on the verge of some sort of psychological or spiritual crisis. But in addition, each of his idiosyncratic films seems to be a departure from the one which preceded it. And so, his interest in a writer like Chatwin made perfect sense to me. They seemed, on the surface at least, to share some similarities – both in their aesthetic temperaments and in their interests.

It was only after a few minutes into this deeply personal film that I realised the extent of Herzog’s relationship with Bruce Chatwin. They were, in fact, very good friends. I had not been aware of this fact. But even more surprising for me was the German filmmaker’s willingness to open up his interior world to reveal the depth of his kinship with the English writer. They even shared some of the same obsessions. I’m no expert on Herzog’s filmography, yet I can say with confidence that this is probably one of the most personal of any of his films.

By the end of the film, I recognised that this encounter with Herzog’s recent film offered me an excellent opportunity to examine the legacy of Bruce Chatwin. Because Herzog shares many of the Englishman’s preoccupations, including a fascination with nomadism and travel, his documentary offers a unique window onto Chatwin’s literary themes of the quest, exile, displacement, modern anxiety, death, and cultural entropy. Both are contemporary storytellers with a poetic grasp of the numinous intensity of physical reality and a propensity to balance their narrative art forms on the knife edge of fact and fiction. When we watch Herzog in interview or read his famous Minnesota Declaration, it’s hard for us not to be reminded of Bruce Chatwin and the way he repeatedly flouts the empirical basis of non-fiction prose with his constant impulse towards fabulation. As Herzog states in his Minnesota Declaration, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.”

But I recognised another opportunity opened by Herzog’s documentary: as a modern filmmaker with a single-mindedly uncompromising attitude towards artistic truth and integrity, he offers us the possibility to closely examine the relevance of Chatwin's writing in today's literary and cultural climate. Over the years, I’ve found myself questioning whether the British writer’s approach to storytelling – his intense exoticizing of the non-Western cultures he explores, his unapologetic mixing of fact and fiction (often in a way that has an impact on the living subjects of his books), and his relentless self-mythologising – would still be embraced in the current literary scene, in which sanctimony and a kind of command system of socially reforming narrative seems to prevail. Would Bruce Chatwin’s brand of storytelling withstand scrutiny from a contemporary social justice perspective? Could he still get away with it if he lived today?

I think Werner Herzog’s documentary film offers us a chance to answer these sorts of questions and, at the same time, to explore this wonderful document of the friendship between a filmmaker from Germany and a writer from England as an artistic artefact on its own terms. But I want to do justice to both Herzog and Chatwin. This article will not be a rush job, in which I try to cram as much of my observations into a standard 800-word Substack article. Instead, this article will be presented in two parts. In this, the first part, I will lay the groundwork of the artistic friendship between these two singular men, outlining the basic structure of the film and how it attempts to address the concerns in the Chatwin books that it considers. In part two, two weeks from now, I will explore the idea that lies at the heart of Herzog’s film and of Chatwin’s literary oeuvre – nomadism, the art of walking – and why both men saw it as a sacramental activity.

The film Nomad follows Herzog on a series of encounters in different parts of the world that were inspired by Chatwin’s travels. The film’s eight chapters focus on the themes that were fundamental to Chatwin’s writing:

Chapter 1 – The Skin of the Brontosaurus
Chapter 2 – Landscapes of the Soul
Chapter 3 – Songs and Songlines
Chapter 4 – The Nomadic Alternative
Chapter 5 – Journey to the End of the World
Chapter 6 – Chatwin’s Rucksack
Chapter 7 – Cobra Verde
Chapter 8 – The Book Is Closed

The film opens with the sound of Chatwin’s voice – sounding to my ears similar in timbre to that of Sir Laurence Olivier – recorded in 1983, reading the opening page of In Patagonia:

“In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.

‘What’s that?’
‘A piece of brontosaurus.’”

Young Chatwin is of course unable to realise that this is a mistake. He’s told that his distant sailor cousin had sent the skin back from South America, and the boy’s imagination is aroused with fanciful images of monsters and a Land of Fire "at the end of the world". The account that follows of the adult Chatwin's journey to the South American hinterland is presented as an erratic mock quest for the origins of this skin.

Herzog’s camera, meanwhile, unfolds a wide, bare landscape of farmland in Patagonia and cars and trucks passing by on a highway. The statue of a brontosaurus towers over the landscape. Then the camera pans over an ice-covered glacier and a long, deep inlet of icy sea, winding its way between some snow-capped mountains. We’re in Patagonia still, but moving further south, in the direction of Cape Horn. We come upon the skeletal wooden frame of a shipwreck at Punta Arenas on the southern tip of South America, exactly as depicted in a photo in Chatwin’s book.

Herzog explains, in narration, the kinship he felt with Chatwin:


“He would craft mythical tales into voyages of the mind. In this respect, we found out we were kindred spirits. He as a writer, I as a filmmaker. In this film, I will follow a similar erratic quest for wild characters, strange dreamers, and big ideas about the nature of human existence. These were the themes Chatwin was obsessed with.”

At several points in their lives, the two men’s lives had intersected, and there were landscapes that they’d explored independently and unaware of each other, sometimes with years in between. The shipwreck in Punta Arenas was one such point. Yet rather than being biographical or tracing out all the travel book’s wild stories, Herzog’s film follows just a few of them that echo his own interests.

The writer’s journeys were mapped out in his childhood as he gazed at the objects in his grandmother’s living-room cabinet. Chatwin’s biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, explains that each object held a story for Bruce and was an emblem of the place he would want one day to visit. This notion is developed most fully in the film’s second chapter, “Landscapes of the Soul,” where Herzog takes viewers on a tour of the landscapes of Chatwin’s youth in Avesbury, Wiltshire and the Welsh border country near Llanthony Priory in Monmouthshire.

To Herzog, the critics who blamed Chatwin for making things up were wrong: “They were wrong because… sure he would take facts, but he would modify them in such a way that they would resemble more truth than reality.”

Or as Shakespeare puts it, “Bruce didn’t tell half-truth; he told the truth and a half. He embellished what was there to make it even truer.”

One aspect of Chatwin’s work that Herzog chooses not to address in his film but which might have yielded some helpful insights was the writer’s highly refined aesthetic sensibility. It’s a unique quality that the writer Susannah Clapp convincingly captures in her 1998 memoir With Chatwin. She suggests that Chatwin's time at Sotheby's was the watershed period of his life.

His work in the Antiquities Department, she argues, aroused the deepest response in him: it confirmed his appetite for the rare, the overlooked, and the unadorned object. We can perhaps trace the precision of Chatwin’s descriptions, his manner of itemising the details of people and landscape, back to the habits of close attention, the chronicling of a mass of physical details, and searching for the historical provenance of artefacts. Working at Sotheby's taught him to be alert to the wonder in what he saw, to be aware that all things, just like people, have their own story.

But the habits of the arts appraiser and cataloguer also - perhaps most radically - affected the way that Chatwin saw himself, or at least they enhanced a self-conscious tendency that he already had. Because if we can recognise that working in Antiquities fostered a tendency to regard people and their lives aesthetically, then we might also see how it encouraged Chatwin to look for the artistic shaping of his own nature and personal destiny.

Chatwin’s narrator in In Patagonia is an aesthete-traveller who on his journey records encounters with Welsh and other European immigrants, the histories of Patagonian anarchists and American outlaws, and a host of other meetings with strange texts and exotic misfits. The encounters are recorded as crisp and discrete episodes with a minimum of narrative links. In Buenos Aires, his first South American port-of-call, the aesthete-traveller looks in the telephone directory and pronounces: "The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory".

He then proceeds to select "at random" five names - "Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D.Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild" which tell a "story of exile, disillusion and anxiety behind the curtains".

But each of the names here belongs to an old aristocratic European family, so it is fairly obvious they were not chosen randomly. There’s a conscious metaphoric design to Chatwin’s narrative. It becomes clear that this concern with exile and disillusion is the apriori preoccupation of the aesthete-traveller, particularly when the narrative describes Patagonia as a symbol of final refuge from atomic war:

"I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log figures inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blows up".

Especially noticeable here is the tone of entropic disillusion (an assumption of the developed world's irreversible tendency towards self-destruction). The various misfits the aesthete-traveller meets in his quest are all, in a sense, proxies for Chatwin’s aesthete-traveller's entropic anxieties and preoccupations. Underlying In Patagonia's quest, therefore, is the metaphoric underpinning of exile, cultural loss, and the search for belonging.

This is the metaphoric underpinning that we should keep in mind when we come to the central thematic hub of Herzog’s film, in the chapters titled “Songs and Songlines, “The Nomadic Alternative,” and “Journey to the End of the World.”

I will cover those parts of the documentary in the second part of this article. I’ll be exploring the idea that seems to compel both Werner Herzog and Bruce Chatwin – nomadism, the art of walking – and why both men saw it as an almost sacred human activity.

And I’ll also answer the questions about Chatwin’s literary legacy with which I began this article - whether he’d still be able to get away with his tendency to exoticize the non-Western cultures he explores, his unapologetic mixing of fact and fiction, his relentless self-mythologising, and whether his brand of storytelling could withstand scrutiny from a contemporary social justice perspective.

Thanks for reading. Look out for part two of this article in September.