The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

by Roland Allen

More associated with notebooks than any other English-language writer, Chatwin used them in the same ways that authors had for centuries. Like Boccaccio, he had kept zibaldoni of his wide-ranging reading, laying down seams of knowledge that could be mined years later. Like Petrarch, he had developed a practice of revision and redrafting that enabled him to hone his work. Like William Worcester, he had connected a landscape’s physical reality with the stories that the locals told of it. Like Defoe, he had used notebook entries to add interest to a first-person narrative. Like Melville and Twain and Leigh Fermor and a host of others, he had used notebooks to capture encounters, record impressions and train himself to pick the right words on the spot. But by giving his notebooks so prominent a role in the finished work he had done something new: he made them totems of the free-spirited creative. Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer, rightly points to his becoming, posthumously, ‘an icon of the back-packer’, ‘the promotable ideal of the literate traveller’, someone who ‘set free other writers and encouraged them not to be tamed by conventional boundaries’. Playing each of these roles, he carries the notebook as an essential prop. And, knowingly or not, when he went to Alice Springs he had followed Francis Bacon’s advice, four centuries old, to the letter: Then he must have such a servant, or tutor, as knoweth the country.... Let him carry with him also, some card or book...