Plato believed a beautiful face reflected a beautiful soul; Shakespeare,
in the opening speech of Richard III , equated physical deformity with
evil. Tolstoy, thinking of his own thick lips and broad nose, wrote
in Childhood that “nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man’s
course as his personal appearance.” The stunning photograph of Bruce
Chatwin on the jacket of this biography suggests that Tolstoy was
right. In our time, at least, physical appearance influences literary
reputation.

Bruce Chatwin (1940–89) was a travel writer and novelist, a charmer and
monstrous egoist. Boyish, blond, bronzed by the sun, his cold, piercing
blue eyes looked (as an Arab woman said of T. E. Lawrence) “like the sky
shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull.” Like Lawrence,
Chatwin had an elusive quicksilver personality, precocious learning, and
a professional passion for archaeology. Both men, drawn to the tents of
desert nomads, were physically and spiritually displaced persons who
loved the intoxication of travel and made arduous journeys to exotic
lands, often on camel or on foot. They disliked possessions but
collected ancient artefacts, and liked to live ascetically in spartan
surroundings. Chatwin visited Lawrence’s house, Clouds Hill, and his
tiny London flat looked much the same, with polished wooden floors, a
built-in bunk bed, and meager furnishings.

Both men were mythomaniacs with a genius for self-promotion; they had
powerful wills and liked to test themselves in acts of physical
defiance. Both had troubled sexual identities (Lawrence a repressed