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A Bruce Chatwin bibliography

It may seem obvious to the point of banality to observe that Bruce Chatwin was a voracious reader, yet there have been few significant writers of the last century whose breadth and diversity of reference could match Chatwin’s. He was referred to by John Updike as the ‘demon researcher’ (128) for good reason; Elizabeth Chatwin recalls once finding 50 books by his bedside whilst tidying, all of which were being read simultaneously: ‘[H]e could never go past a book store’, she comments. ‘It was just a total fascination’ (2010). His wide-ranging reading habits bred a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge base; Salman Rushdie has referred to him as ‘probably the most knowledgable person amongst my contemporaries that I ever met’ (Footsteps). His references sometimes eluded his friends, however; Redmond O’Hanlon recalled an early morning conversation with Bruce in which Bunin1 was mentioned; after Chatwin had rung off, O’Hanlon began ‘wondering who or what Bunin was: with Bruce you could never be sure. The new Stravinksy from Albania? The nickname of the last slave in Central Mali? A lighthouse-keeper from Patagonia? Scroll 238B from a cave in the Negev? Or just the émigré King of Tomsk who’d dropped in for tea?’ (103). Bruce’s library remains more or less intact at his home in Oxfordshire, though some significant volumes were given away to friends. It is a sizable collection; taking up two long walls of floor-to-ceiling shelving in his study, as well as various bookcases dotted around the house. The most common writers are European, particularly Russian: Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Gogol and, of course, Osip Mandelstam. The French are also well represented, often in the original language (Chatwin had intended to learn Russian in the period of remission ultimately given over to the writing of Utz); the works of Balzac, Proust, Maupassant (whose short stories are particularly well thumbed), Racine and Flaubert are all in evidence. There is relatively little modern fiction on the shelves (though Borges and Italo Calvino are both strong presences), and very little from the United Kingdom – D.H. Lawrence being the obvious exception. There is also a substantial amount of poetry; Ezra Pound’s Cantos appear in various editions, as do the poems of the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy. Also