He is forty-seven years of age, tall and lean, with fierce blue eyes. Thinner than he ought to be: the skin is tightly stretched on his face and his colour is too high – the effects of a recent brush with illness. The shooting jumpers, corduroys and walking shoes mark him down as English country middle class, an identity he has spent a lifetime escaping. He is English in his use of self-deprecation as a strategy of disguise. An indefatigable fabulist and storyteller, he laughs with a high merry cackle. A lapidary talker, an enviably economical writer.

He came to writing after a career at Sotheby’s. Each of his books escapes the last one: In Patagonia, a travel narrative and voyage of self-discovery; The Viceroy of Ouidah, a lushly coloured miniature about a Brazilian slaver in Dahomey; On the Black Hill, his only novel set in Britain, about the lives of two Welsh hill-farmer brothers; and now The Songlines, a novel of a journey in search of the Australian Aborigines’ songlines, and an inquiry into the origins of nomadism, storytelling and the roots of human restlessness.

He has been married to Elizabeth for more than twenty years. There are no children. They live in a raspberry-red clapboard farmhouse, which belongs on a Vermont hillside but is actually on the edge of sloping pastures in the Chilterns near Oxford. His sojourns here are a prelude or epilogue to travel. He is off next week to Ghana: Werner Herzog is shooting Cobra Verde, based on The Viceroy of Ouidah.

After lunch in the white study, with the wooden slat blinds drawn against the fierce bright sun reflecting off the snowy fields, he sits down in a canvas chair in front of the fire, hands together, fingers touching his lips, waiting: wary, amused, elusive.

Michael Ignatieff: Songlines is a bit of everything: autobiography, fiction, anthropology and archaeology. How would you describe it?

Bruce Chatwin: It has to be called a novel because I’ve invented huge chunks of it in order to tell the story that I wanted to tell. But I suppose as a category it’s indefinable.

Ignatieff: I’m puzzled that you chose a fiction form to tell us a lot of interesting theories about nomadic origins, about storytelling, restlessness and so on …

Chatwin: To write it as a fiction gives you a greater flexibility; otherwise, if you were laying down the law on these subjects, and indeed I had a go at laying down the law, I can’t tell you how pretentious you sound. Or else you have to hedge the whole thing around with so many qualifications that it collapses.

Ignatieff: Were there any books that served as models?

Chatwin: I’m interested in an eighteenth-century form, the dialogue novel, I mean particularly Diderot’s Jacques Le Fataliste. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had a way of expressing serious concepts very lightly indeed. That was one of the things I was trying.

Ignatieff: Where in your work is the division between fiction and non-fiction?

Chatwin: I don’t think there is one. There definitely should be, but I don’t know where it is. I’ve always written very close to the line. I’ve tried applying fiction techniques to actual bits of travel. I once made the experiment of counting up the lies in the book I wrote about Patagonia. It wasn’t, in fact, too bad: there weren’t too many. But with Songlines, if I had to tot up the inventions, there would be no question in my mind that the whole thing added up to a fictional work.

Ignatieff: There’s one character in Songlines who isn’t fictional, and that’s Bruce, the narrator. You.

Chatwin: Ah well, I don’t think you can invent yourself – though you have, of course, to keep a firm reign on yourself. All one hopes to be is the first-person narrator who is like a camera shutter, taking flashes on the story as it develops in front of his eyes.

Ignatieff: Songlines originated, didn’t it, in a book you were planning to write about nomads?

Chatwin: I went to the Sahara at the time when I was working in the art world, and completely by chance spent time with a very extreme nomad people called the Beja. They alerted me to certain things which were obviously close to me but which I hadn’t realized before. They started my quest to know the secret of their irreverent and timeless vitality: why was it that nomad peoples have this amazing capacity to continue under the most adverse circumstances, while the empires come crashing down? It seemed to me to be an immensely interesting subject to tackle. But the literature of nomad peoples is very difficult to handle, and the more I delved into it, the less wise I became. So this is why I did a lot of travelling and why I left a conventional job at the age of twenty-six.

Ignatieff: In the nomads you saw a clue to your own restlessness?

Chatwin: I was working at a job which was making me tremendously unhappy –

Ignatieff: – so unhappy that at Sotheby’s you seem to have gone blind.

Chatwin: Yes, one day I came back from America on a pretty nasty flight to stay with a friend in Ireland. I drove from Dublin to Donegal and the next morning I woke up blind. The sight came back in one eye during the day, but when I got to England the eye specialist who looked at me said, ‘You’ve been looking too closely at pictures. Why don’t you swap them for some long horizons?’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘Where would you like to go?’ I said, ‘Africa.’ And so instead of writing a prescription for new spectacles, he wrote a prescription saying that he recommended travel to Africa. The chairman of Sotheby’s said, ‘I’m sure Bruce has got something the matter with his eyes, but I can’t think why he has to go to Africa.’ (Laughter.)

Ignatieff: Let’s come back to restlessness. Why is it the question of questions for you?

Chatwin: Well, obviously we are the most restless species on the planet. And it seems very important to control that restlessness to prevent it getting out of hand in destructive ways. These were ideas which grew on me as I started reading the literature of nomad peoples, but they became an obsession, particularly after I left the art world. It was at the time of the Vietnam War, and I was having to think for the first time. My career was the reverse of most people’s in that I started as a rather unpleasant little capitalist in a big business in which I was extremely successful and smarmy, and suddenly I realized at the age of twenty-five or so that I was hating every minute of it. I had to change. I became quite radical and I intended to write a big radical book, which came to nothing because it was unprintable.

Ignatieff: But in Songlines you’ve kept faith with that earlier project.

Chatwin: Let’s just say I felt that the time had come when if I didn’t write it now, the whole thing would go sour on me.

Ignatieff: In Songlines you’ve put together a narrative of your voyage in search of Aboriginal wisdom in the Australian outback, and interspersed it with some extraordinary passages of theorizing and quotation culled from twenty years of your notebooks. These give the impression of being put down just as you thought of them, but in fact they struck me as the most heavily worked, the most fictional parts of the book.

Chatwin: The juxtapositions are artful – I hope not arty – a collage of disparate things, whether it’s a description of a bus journey in downtown Miami or a quotation from the ancient Greek. I was impressed by that essay of Walter Benjamin in which he says the ideal book would be a book of quotations, and then there’s a wonderful commonplace book by Hofmannsthal, which is a sort of dialogue of quotations and his own thoughts as well, all jammed in. I also had the remains of an essay about nomads, about the metaphysics of walking, and it struck me that the only way to use it was to graft it on to a narrative of a journey to Australia.

Ignatieff: At one level Songlines is a travel book. What does travel mean to you?

Chatwin: The word ‘travel’ is the same as the French travail. It means hard work, penance and finally a journey. There was an idea, particularly in the Middle Ages, that by going on pilgrimage, as Muslim pilgrims do, you were reinstating the original condition of man. The act of walking through a wilderness was thought to bring you back to God. That is something you find in all the religions.

Ignatieff: Do you think of your travelling in terms of pilgrimage?

Chatwin: Pilgrimage is too strong, really. It’s just that I’m a footloose sort of character and can’t do anything else.

Ignatieff: Do you think of yourself as a travel writer?

Chatwin: It always irritated me to be called a travel writer. So I decided to write something about people who never went out. That’s how On the Black Hill came into being.

Ignatieff: But it is true that you yourself can’t write unless you travel.

Chatwin: That’s very true.

Ignatieff: Then the question is why?

Chatwin: I wish I knew. I do find it quite interesting that in one form or another all the great early epics – whether it’s the Odyssey or Beowulf – are traveller’s tales. Why should it be that the metaphor of the voyage is at the heart of all storytelling? It’s not simply that most stories are traveller’s tales, it’s actually the way these epics are patterned into a voyage structure. Lord Raglan, a British folklorist, took the great myths and showed that they have a common paradigm. The story begins with a young man, who is often a foundling, who goes on a journey and finds a population menaced by some kind of monster or wild beast. He saves the population, rescues the damsel in distress and receives a reward, usually of the damsel in marriage, the kingdom and treasure. In his maturity he rules people who are strangers to him, and then in old age the forces of destruction close in, restlessness strikes again, and he departs to do battle with another monster, and then vanishes. I once mapped Che Guevara’s life against this paradigm and it fitted pretty well. (Laughter.) The point is that the classical hero cycle is an idealized programme for the human life cycle. Each stage corresponds to a biological event in human life.

Ignatieff: So let’s get clear about this. You think that most fictions replay archetypal, universal stories.

Chatwin: We’re on tricky ground here.

Ignatieff: That’s the ground that’s interesting.

Chatwin: I do in a way, yes.

Ignatieff: But doesn’t that go against the idea of the modern writer as the inventor, the originator of his stories, the creator of something new?

Chatwin: I’m unimpressed by the idea of the new. Most advances in literature usually strike me as being advances into a cul-de-sac.

Ignatieff: And so a good writer ought to be in touch with the recurring character of certain story forms?

Chatwin: He may be in touch with them although he doesn’t realize it. There’s a strong instinctive bias in human behaviour, a template into which we slot. I don’t believe all behaviour is learned. We’re not a blank slate.

Ignatieff: Instincts pose limits to what you can do with human beings, and that’s a good thing?

Chatwin: Absolutely. The Greeks had the idea that there were limits to the range of human behaviour, and if anyone had the hubris to go beyond those limits, he was struck down by fate. Well, one would agree. In other words an instinctive paradigm does impose limits as to how people can or should behave.

Ignatieff: And you think some storytelling is instinctual?

Chatwin: Again, we’re on tricky ground, but Konrad Lorenz has worked out that an animal experiences certain stages or ‘calls’ in its career. The animal may or may not take up the call, because if the natural target or partner of a particular paradigm of behaviour is not available, then it will get deflected onto a substitute. It struck me that these ‘behavioural chains’ which Lorenz talks about are similar to the structure of myths. If myths have a sort of spontaneous activity in the human psyche, then a section of that myth corresponds to a certain section of the human life cycle. I would say tentatively that there is a connection between instinct and the structure of storytelling.

Ignatieff: Let me see if I understand this. Human beings originate on the desert plains of Africa three million years ago …

Chatwin: Yes …

Ignatieff: …and they gradually acquire a set of instinctual behaviours that enable them to survive on the grasslands and vanquish their predators…

Chatwin: Yes …

Ignatieff: …and as they acquire a set of instinctual nomadic patterns of behaviour they also acquire a meaning system, a set of myths which are imprinted on the brain over millions of years …

Chatwin: Yes …

Ignatieff: … and these are the story patterns that keep recurring even in the modern day.

Chatwin: Absolutely.

Ignatieff: An example of this kind of eternal story would be the young man who leaves home, goes off into the wilderness to find himself. Bruce Chatwin, archetypal hero, goes out into the desert in search of …

Chatwin: You make me sound very pretentious …

Ignatieff: Not at all. I’m just taking seriously the idea that Songlines itself works through a certain mythic story form.

Chatwin: I would hope so.

Ignatieff: In your version of the myth, the callow young man travels into the Australian desert in search of enlightenment and finds Aboriginal peoples engaged in precisely the same quest …

Chatwin: Exactly.

Ignatieff: … finding the knowledge of their ancestors, following a songline in search of their destiny. What are the songlines?

Chatwin: The songlines are a labyrinth of invisible pathways which stretch to every corner of Australia. Aboriginal creation myths tell of the legendary totemic ancestors – part animal, part man – who create themselves and then set out on immense journeys across the continent, singing the name of everything that crosses their path and so singing the world into existence. In fact, there’s hardly a rock or a creek or a stand of eucalyptus that isn’t an ‘event’ on one or other of the songlines. In other words, the whole of Australia can be read as a musical score …

The ancestors, while walking through the land, are thought to have scattered a kind of ‘scent-trail’ of words and musical notes. Each newborn baby inherits a section of the song as his birthright. His stanzas are his inalienable private property and define his territory. But he is entitled to ‘lend’ these stanzas up and down a songline and so acquire rights of passage from his neighbours – so that, in case of catastrophe, he can always expect help and hospitality providing he sticks to the line. At the end of the last century, an English ethnologist, W. E. Roth, was the first to indicate that the so-called Aboriginal ‘walkabout’ was, in fact, part of a gigantic diplomatic and trading system which kept the most far-flung tribes in peaceful contact with each other. What has since emerged is that the trade routes were also songs, and that the principal medium of exchange was song. A songline changes language from one people to the next, but the melody remains constant over colossal distances: so that, in theory at least, a man can sing his way across a landscape without ever having been there.

I felt the songlines were the most fascinating concept I’d ever had to deal with. I still don’t quite know what implications to draw from them. But I do know they make nonsense of the various theories touted around in the name of science: that man is a territorial predator whose impulse is to raid or destroy his neighbour.

Ignatieff: Songlines could be read as a pretty grandiose metaphysics of your own restlessness. It grounds your wanderlust in a big scheme that involves Darwinism, nomads, instincts – but a sceptic would say, ‘Come off it, Bruce, the real story is that you’re an Englishman who wanted to get out of Sotheby’s, who wanted to get out of this bloody little country and see the world.’

Chatwin: That may also be true. Being an Englishman makes me uneasy. I find I can be English and behave like an Englishman only if I’m not here.

Ignatieff: Why is that?

Chatwin: I think the English survive rather well under conditions of exile. And the fact that they tend to disintegrate while they’re at home is not true of all peoples.

Ignatieff: Why do you think that is? The imperial past?

Chatwin: I don’t like the imperial past. When I was at my prep school it was somehow assumed that when you left you would take the Colonial Service exam and suddenly find yourself on a South Sea island pulling down the Union Jack at sunset. That was the image not only I but a lot of people had of themselves.

Ignatieff: But in fact you were on the tail-end of that, when all that old rubbish was over. You’re actually a Vietnam-era traveller – and therefore part not so much of something English, but of something international. Everybody hit the road in the sixties.

Chatwin: That’s what I feel part of.

Ignatieff: But there’s still an English story to your wandering, a story of escaping the suffocation of ‘our island home’.

Chatwin: If you travel, you escape being labelled with class stereotypes. I come from a very middle-class family of lawyers and architects. Travel was an immense relief – it got rid of the pressure from above and from below. If you’re out on the road, people have to take you at face value. You’re the ‘travelling Englishman’. I find that very relaxing. The English class struggle, with all its nit-picking, is alien to me. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that during the war, while my father was away in the navy, I lived in NAAFI canteens and was passed around like a tea urn.

Later, when I went to prep school, I was shocked by the class hatred. I didn’t understand what it was. For example, during the 1949 election, I think it was, on Guy Fawkes Day, we boys were required to make images of Mr and Mrs Attlee and burn them on a bonfire. We were told that Aneurin Bevin was an appalling ogre. It made me really outraged.

Ignatieff: Let’s talk about another kind of politics: the struggle for Aboriginal land rights in Australia. What’s your attitude to that?

Chatwin: Australia is the only great colonial land mass in which the native population did not fight back. They just folded their arms and looked with a reproachful smile at their murderers, and that made the murderers jittery beyond belief.

There is an idea in Australia that the Aboriginals have got the country by the throat. I remember in Sydney talking to somebody who said, ‘I can’t think why you want to go and see the Aboriginals. Here in Sydney we never meet Aboriginals; we don’t see them at parties. I am not conscious of ever having shaken an Aboriginal by the hand. They don’t mean anything to us.’ One watched his knuckles whitening out of sheer rage at something he didn’t know anything about. It was an interesting insight into the immense power these old Aboriginal men have over the country. To be confronted by them is like going to pay a visit to one of the presocratic philosophers. They seem immensely wise, even though they simply rattle out a few sharp words at you. They sit there, legs folded, rather in the position of the Buddha, and you feel this immense intelligence coming out at you in waves.

Ignatieff: But what about the rights and wrongs of their land case?

Chatwin: Obviously, the whole of Australia is Aboriginal land. There’s no end to the claim. You see, a tribal group who might be sitting in western New South Wales would actually know what part of downtown Sydney belonged to their moiety. And white Australians do feel with some justification that once you’ve opened this particular can of worms there’s absolutely no end to it.

Ignatieff: I was struck by the edginess, the bitterness of your relationship with these Aboriginal presocratics.

Chatwin: Yes. There was that rather curious exchange I had with a man who was a defrocked priest, an Aboriginal, who had been to Rome, been blessed by the Pope, and had then returned to his people. I tried to interest him in the themes I was pursuing. Hopeless! Not a glimmer! Then I thought I’d try a different tack. I’d try and interest him in the gypsies, because there are certain ways in which gypsies use the international telephone system in the same way that Aborigines use the songlines. Again, he said, ‘I can’t see what gypsies have to do with it.’ And I said, ‘The gypsies also see the white man as a resource, as “sitting game”, to be preyed upon. In fact the gypsy word for white settlers is “meat”.’ The Aboriginal suddenly turned on me and said, ‘Do you know what we call white men?’ And I said, ‘Meat.’ And he said, ‘Do you know what we call the welfare cheque?’ ‘Also meat.’

Ignatieff: How much closer could you have gotten to them?

Chatwin: I would have chosen to go and live on an Aboriginal settlement. Then I would have had to undergo some kind of ritual initiation. But my stance was to remain an observer, to get as close as I possibly could without going through all that. I just didn’t want to.

Ignatieff: An accusatory voice would say, you’ve managed just enough entanglement with the Third World to get some fiction out of it, but you’ve never actually got involved.

Chatwin: Now you’ve caught me on tricky ground. (Pause.) If I had become involved, I wouldn’t write the books I do.

Ignatieff: But isn’t there a recurring contrast in Songlines between Bruce, the narrator, and characters like Arkady, Marion and Wendy, who make a commitment to Aboriginal reality incomparably deeper than your own?

Chatwin: Incomparably deeper than mine! The point of inventing a character like Arkady is that I was able to take a load off my back as an observer by turning it into dialogue with Arkady. And he is admirably involved. But if I had been involved then I couldn’t have described him and his involvement.

Ignatieff: Now we come to the fine line between the traveller and the tourist.

Chatwin: There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a tourist. A tourist is somebody who happens to be more interested in the rest of the world than he is in his own little puddle.

Ignatieff: And what redeems this particular tourist – Bruce Chatwin – is the writing he brought back?

Chatwin: Well, it either works or it doesn’t.

Ignatieff: Songlines ends with an unforgettable image of three Aboriginal ancients who have followed their songlines to a sacred place where the songline starts. And they’re dying, but in a state of beatific happiness. It struck me that the book ends with an image of a happy death, and that when you wrote that you yourself happened to be near death.

Chatwin: Ah yes. Well, a young German Lutheran missionary took me to see these three old men dying under a tree. And it was obviously the way to end the book; there were no two ways about it. But somehow fiction and real life all came together: the year before I had been to China and picked up a completely unknown disease of the bone marrow; I handed in this book – which is, above all, about walking – and the day after I couldn’t walk across the hotel bedroom. I wrote that last chapter about three old men dying under a gum tree, when I was just about to conk myself. It was done with great speed. Often I have to labour over sentences, but this time I just wrote it straight down on a yellow pad, and that was the end of the book. It did bring home how writing a fiction impinges on your life.

Ignatieff: Bruce, we’re talking in a sunlit room of a farmhouse that looks over a banked meadow in which black sheep are grazing. There’s a crackling fire in the grate, and we’ve just finished a delicious roast of lamb which Elizabeth prepared for us. The whole scene is a picture of home. For a wanderer, are you surprised at where you sit now? Is this home?

Chatwin: (Long pause.) Terrible to say so, but it isn’t. I don’t know why, but it can never be. I couldn’t explain why. It drives Elizabeth insane, but … we have everything here, but I always wish I was somewhere else. It’s a condition that makes one very difficult to live with.

Ignatieff: (Pause.) So Songlines is finished, but in some sense the voyage is not over. You’ll be back on the road again.

Chatwin: Yes, all my plans are geared to the idea of the road. I have an idea that I should try and write a ‘Russian novel’, as seen from the viewpoint of an outsider. So I shall be off again.

Ignatieff: During your convalescence you began a novel about Prague, didn’t you?

Chatwin: It’s a memoir of things that happened to me in Prague in 1967. I met a character who was a great collector of Meissen porcelain. He had shrunk his horizons down to those of his best friends, who were all porcelain figures seven inches high. He lived like a monk. It is, of course, a fantasy of people like myself to want to sit in a cell and never move again. That’s what this man did.

Ignatieff: Final question. Who are your heroes?

Chatwin: The writers I adore are nearly always the Russians. Mandelstam especially; his Journey to Armenia went with me on my journey to Patagonia. As a Jew, he understands restlessness – at one point he speaks about ‘our fantastic homelessness’. His life was a series of the most extraordinary dislocations, which ended up in Siberia. He seems to have postulated, very early in his writing, the fate that would eventually overcome him.

Ignatieff: There’s a quotation from Mandelstam in Songlines.

Chatwin: And how! It’s from his Conversations about Dante. It goes something like:

The question occurs to me – and quite seriously – how many shoe soles … how many sandals Aligheri wore out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy.

The Inferno, and especially the Purgatorio, glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape …

I love it. It’s a key text.

Ignatieff: And talismanic for a book like yours about the relationship between walking and writing.

Chatwin: Absolutely. Mandelstam himself could only compose on the hoof. He had to be walking, when actually writing a poem. He had an idea that the production of words in the larynx was dependent on the action of the feet.

Ignatieff: You believe this …?

Chatwin: Oh yes. Like dogma!

Photograph © Snowdon/Camera Press/Redux