BOOKS: PICK OF THE WEEK

Much has been made of Bruce Chatwin's failure to do any washing up in 23 years of marriage, an affectation highlighted in the Bruce Chatwin biography by Nicholas Shakespeare, who will speak about the writer tomorrow at the Brighton Festival.

While there's something you have to admire about shameless manipulation, it's hard to imagine the kind of people who actually let the pipsqueak get away with it, prime among them his wife, Elizabeth.

At 15 minutes a day, though, that's 300 seven-hour days, enough to read a few hundred books, if not, at Chatwin's initially slow-chugging pace, to actually write one.

Maybe Chatwin just didn't stand still long enough to get his hands in hot water. Having once described two kinds of writers - those who move and those who "dig in" - it's easy to see Chatwin was head boy in the former camp, the last in a family line of wanderers, sailors and travellers, each on a perpetual pilgrimage.

His peregrinations took him for six months to Patagonia, from where he alleges he sent his terse "Have gone to Patagonia" resignation "telegram" to The Sunday Times and which produced the background for his first travel book, In Patagonia.

There followed more trips - to Africa, Brazil, India and Australia - and outstanding, finely written books: The Viceroy of Ouidah; the beautiful, claustrophobic Welsh farming saga, On the Black Hill; and The Songlines, his paean to the Aborigines.

But there was also a less-edifying side to his brand of travel writing. "He didn't give a damn whether they [the stories] were true or not, only whether they were good," says Salman Rushdie.

And the self-created myth of the hardy explorer is also blown away by a friend, who describes accompanying Chatwin around India as like "travelling with Garbo", a comment on Chatwin's hypochondria and his boxes of pills - a long way from the stoic lifestyle of the nomads he so admired.

His final journey was in 1989 to a hospital in Nice, where he died at 48 of Aids-related complications. In his five-year deterioration, he had passed it off as, among other ailments, a rare bone-marrow disease he'd picked up in the Far East: "Hazards of travel - rather an alarming one," he claimed in a late-1980s interview.

Nicholas Shakespeare on Bruce Chatwin, Pavilion Theatre, 29 New Road, Brighton (01273 709709) tomorrow, 2.15pm, pounds 5.

`Bruce Chatwin' by Nicholas Shakespeare is published by Harvill Press, pounds 20.

Stuart Price