Free Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

the mutant pig of Landser: a portentous creature with eight legs. “He liked the off-beat. He liked the monstrous. He liked things that suggested an inadvertent crack in the seamless world of cause and effect.”
    The phenomenon of the Wunderkammer began in Vienna as a response to the wonder of America. It domesticated our terror of a dangerous new world, the monsters seething on the peripheries of the medieval map. To create a Wunderkammer was to cast the world in your own light. It contained, according to historian Steven Mullaney, “things on holiday, randomly juxtaposed and displaced from any proper context . . . Taken together, they compose a heteroclite order without hierarchy or degree, an order in which kings mingle with clowns.” A defiance of category was crucial.
    These cabinets of curiosities were also mirrors. They reflected the collector’s extraordinariness, his journeys to marvellous places, his encounters with marvellous people, and – important when considering Bruce – they offered up a neat metaphor of a world picture that they replicated in miniature. “If nature speaks through such metaphors,” wrote the seventeenth-century musicographer Emmanuel Tesauro, “then the encyclopaedic collection, which is the sum of all possible metaphors, logically becomes the great metaphor of the world.”
    The collections Bruce most admired were the Pitt-Rivers museums in Oxford and Farnham; the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris, where he proposed to his wife; the Volkerkunde in Vienna. In 1967, like the narrator of his novel Utz, Bruce stopped off in Vienna on his way to Prague: “The Imperial mantle of 1125 !! with gold lions attacking camels on a scarlet ground is the most wonderful thing I ever saw,” Bruce wrote to his wife. “The sword of Charles the Bold has a narwhal tusk sheath and handle, and I must say I am more than resigned to the extravagance of a tusk since seeing the unicorn presented to the Emperor Rudolf, one of the inalienable treasures of the Habsburgs together with a sumptuous Byzantine agate bowl, once considered to be the Holy Grail.”
    Isobel Chatwin’s mahogany wedding gift from Chamberlain, King and Jones was in the solid tradition of these Wunderkammer. With the development of British maritime power and the scientific voyages of Cook, Darwin and Huxley, most middle-class drawing rooms had a flat, glass-topped table which lifted to reveal “conversation pieces” to prove where the traveller had been. Some of the marvels turned out to be fake – the mermaid tail inevitably a piece of dried hake with a monkey sewn on. But many were genuine curios.
    Isobel’s family museum was as formative in its influence on Bruce as the collections of the Habsburg Emperors in Vienna and Prague were on the Meissen collector, Utz. In his last novel Bruce reaches back to his four-year-old self, to the young Utz visiting his grandmother’s castle outside Prague and standing on tiptoe before her vitrine of antique porcelain and saying: “I want him.” The slothskin has been recast as a Meissen harlequin with a leering orange mask. “He had found his vocation: he would devote his life to collecting . . .”
    Werner Muensterberger, a friend of Bruce and the author of a study of the psychology of collecting, suggests that the collector is only too aware of the futility of his compulsion: “a chronic restiveness that can be cured only by more finds or yet another acquisition”. Muensterberger, himself a collector and intimate with the “tyrannising” dedication of his calling, believes the collecting passion is an instrument “to allay a basic need brought on by early traumata”. The infant looks to alternative solutions for dealing “with anticipations of vulnerability”. For the young Bruce, always on the move, the objects in the cabinet became a fixed compass. In desiring to hold on to them, he alleviated, temporarily, his dread of being alone. “Things”, he wrote in his notebook,