With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer

An impressionistic study of Bruce Chatwin's life and work by one of his friends. It is not a biography, but a collection of Clapp's own memories of Chatwin and those of his friends and colleagues. Both a solitary and a socialite, he has been described as the person who reinvented travel-writing.

With Chatwin is a charming exploration of the life of beloved writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin--both high-brow and low-, both collector and nomad--was a man of contradictions. His writing "hovered teasingly between fact and fiction," and he was fascinated by paradoxical subjects: a private art collection in a Communist country; a publicity-loving woman who lives alone in the desert. For Chatwin, being on the road was an obsession. He "was an inventive and adventurous traveller," an itinerant who got writer's block at home and who believed that people are happiest when on the move. "Travel does not merely broaden the mind," he once said. "It makes the mind."