Gavin Maxwell Read online

  DOUGLAS BOTTING

  GAVIN MAXWELL

  A Life

  IN MEMORIAM

  BESSIE DOUGLAS BOTTING (NÉE CRUSE)

  1910–1990

  I am going a long way

  To the island-valley of Avilion;

  Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

  Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns

  And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,

  Where I will heal my grievous wound.

  TENNYSON, Morte d’Arthur

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Plates

  Map: Sandaig

  Preface

  Prologue: Encounter with a Guru

  PART I: THE QUEST FOR AVALON

  1 The House on the Moor

  2 Mowgli with a Gun

  3 Breakdown

  4 The Celtic Fringe

  5 To the Low Arctic

  6 A Call to Small Arms

  7 Harpoon

  8 ‘Muldoan!’

  9 An Artist’s Life

  10 The Man of Light

  11 The House by the Sea

  12 Writing Man

  13 The Sicilians

  14 Into the Great Marshes

  15 Mijbil in Basra

  16 Mijbil in London

  PART II: AVALON FOUND

  17 The Bay of Alders

  18 The Death of Mij

  19 Writer at Work

  20 The Ring and the Book

  21 To the High Atlas

  22 Avalon Besieged

  23 Ring of Bright Water

  24 The Haywire Winter

  PART III: AVALON LOST

  25 End of the Idyll

  26 The Habitat of Marriage

  27 Break-up

  28 Finale

  29 A Chapter of Accidents

  30 A Pattern of Islands

  31 On the Rocks

  32 Bitter Spring

  33 The Curse

  34 The Rearguard Action

  35 Revived Fortunes

  36 Fire and Ice

  37 The White Island

  38 Opting Out

  39 A Bright Bitter Sea

  40 No Coming Back

  41 The Tunnel

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Source Notes

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PLATES

  Unless otherwise indicated, photographs are from Gavin Maxwell Enterprises.

  Gavin Maxwell with his mother, Lady Mary, in 1915

  Gavin aged ten, with jackdaw pets at Elrig

  Aged twelve, the unhappy schoolboy

  The House of Elrig

  Gavin beside his first Bentley and a ‘bag’ from a day’s shooting, Galloway, Christmas 1932

  Gavin’s brothers Eustace and Aymer, 1933

  Gavin on joining SOE, November 1942 (Foreign Office/SOE)

  Gavin on board his lobster-boat, the Gannet, September 1944 (John Winter)

  Making a basking shark fast to the Gannet, summer 1946 (Hamish Pelham-Burn)

  The East Harbour on the Isle of Soay

  Gavin reloading his harpoon gun, summer 1946 (Radio Times/Hulton)

  On the bridge of the Sea Leopard, 1946

  Gavin with a basking shark at the Soay factory, summer 1946 (Radio Times/Hulton)

  The factory ‘boneyard’ on Soay (Radio Times/Hulton)

  Peter Scott. Drawing by Gavin, 1946

  Raef Payne. Drawing by Gavin, 1946

  Tambimuttu. Painting by Gavin, 1949

  Tambimuttu, Kathleen Raine and Gavin at their first meeting, Paultons Square, August 1949 (Jane Williams)

  Gavin racing his Bentley at Silverstone, summer 1949 (Jane Williams)

  Clement Glock working on a set at the Royal Opera House, c. 1949

  The burn and the bay at Sandaig (Douglas Botting)

  Sandaig as it was at the time of Gavin’s first stay in the spring of 1950

  Gavin with a young gull on Gull Island, Sandaig, 1950

  Salvatore Giuliano (Michael Stern)

  Ma’dan boatmen in the Iraq marshes during the explorations of Gavin Maxwell and Wilfred Thesiger, winter 1956

  Wilfred Thesiger in the war canoe in which he and Gavin travelled in the marshes

  Gavin in the marshes with his short-lived first otter, Chahala

  Mijbil asleep in the studio at Avonmore Road

  Mijbil at Monreith, Galloway, summer 1956

  Mij in the Sandaig burn (Phillip Glasier)

  Kathleen Raine with Mij, autumn 1956

  The kitchen-living-room at Sandaig (Terence Spencer)

  Jimmy Watt and greylag geese on the Sandaig Islands

  Edal at the high waterfall at Camusfeàrna, 1960

  Edal emulating a Modigliani nude

  Gavin, summer 1960 (Magda Stirling)

  The house at Sandaig, summer 1961 (Douglas Botting)

  Gavin with Edal, summer 1960

  Gavin at his writing desk, Sandaig, 1963 (Terence Spencer)

  Terry Nutkins with Teko

  Gavin and Teko (Douglas Botting)

  Teko in the surf, Sandaig Bay, 1961 (Douglas Botting)

  Gavin carries a lame sheep down the hill to Sandaig, 1960 (Constance McNab)

  Gavin and the Duke of Edinburgh, Sutherland, autumn 1962 (Phillip Glasier)

  Camusfeàrna under snow, winter 1961–2

  Gavin and Lavinia after their wedding, February 1962 (Solo Syndication)

  Telouet in the Moroccan High Atlas

  Gavin tending an injured climber in the High Atlas (Hamish Brown)

  Monday on the day of her arrival

  Mossy and Monday, Sandaig, February 1962

  Lavinia and Monday

  Gavin and Dirk, the deerhound (Colin Jones)

  Douglas Botting with Edal (Jimmy Watt)

  Free at last. Teko with Andrew Scot, Sandaig, October 1967

  Early on the morning of 21 January 1968, the house at Sandaig still smoulders after the fire that had destroyed it the previous night (Daily Mail)

  Gavin in the long room of the lighthouse cottage on Kyleakin Island (Douglas Botting)

  Richard Frere and Owl

  Lisa van Gruisen and fox cub

  Gavin and Malla, November 1968 (Douglas Botting)

  PREFACE

  THE SEA IN THE LITTLE BAY is still tonight and a full moon casts a wan pallor over the Sound and the hills of Skye. A driftwood fire crackles in the hearth of the croft on the beach, and through the open window I can hear all the sounds and ghosts of the night – the kraak of a solitary heron stalking fish in the moonlight at the edge of the shore, a seal singing softly in the bay, the plaintive, child-like voice rising and falling like a lullaby in the dark.

  It was on just such a night that I first arrived in this tiny paradise in the company of the unusual man who is the protagonist in the saga which follows. There have been many changes – natural, ecological, man-made – during the intervening years. A tall dark conifer forest now covers the once bare hills. The encircling burn, the ring of bright water, runs along a different course, and the dunes and the foreshore follow a different configuration. Sand martins no longer nest in the sandbanks above the burn, and far fewer seabirds congregate on the islands in the bay. The rowan tree – the source of so much myth and conflict in years gone by – finally died this summer, overwhelmed by the Norwegian fir planted beside it. Camusfeàrna itself is now a venue for fans and tourists who find their way through the woods to savour its peace and seek its pervasive magic; they leave votive offerings on the cairn that marks the grave of Edal the otter and
on the great granite block that covers the spot where Gavin Maxwell’s ashes were laid to rest, the same spot where he wrote his classic account of life with otters at Camusfeàrna, Ring of Bright Water.

  There are otters still at Camusfeàrna, descendants of the wild otters that once kept Gavin Maxwell uneasy company at the long-gone house – I saw tell-tale signs of them this afternoon, in the tumble of rocks out at Otter Island. And the place has not lost its ability to surprise and delight. The moment I stepped out of the croft this morning a brilliant rainbow sprang up between the waterfall and the mouth of the burn, and a skein of seven whooper swans in perfect V-formation came honking low beneath the exact centre of the rainbow’s arc – an effect so stunningly theatrical that I thought for a moment Gavin’s spirit had returned to Camusfeàrna especially to lay on a good show for me.

  But the shadow that darkened Gavin Maxwell’s later life reaches even to the present. Plans are afoot to destroy his last retreat on Kyleakin Island, along with the wild otters and eiders that have colonised the place since his death, by laying the controversial Skye Bridge right across the middle of it. Soon the only testimony to this remarkable man’s life will be the memorial rock with its life-size bronze otter overlooking Luce Bay, near Gavin’s birthplace in his beloved Galloway.

  Gavin Maxwell was to otters what Joy Adamson was to lions, Dian Fossey to gorillas, Jane Goodall to chimpanzees and Grey Owl to beavers. Ring of Bright Water was one of the twentieth century’s most popular wildlife books (top of the US bestseller lists for a year, over two million sold worldwide, and still in print), and was habitually bracketed with Thoreau’s Walden, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne and Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. The book gained its author a huge following as a guru of the wilds among a whole generation, especially in Europe and America, where he was ranked with John Burroughs, W.H. Hudson and Gerald Durrell as one of the finest nature writers of the last hundred years. The New York Herald Tribune acclaimed it as ‘one of the outstanding wildlife books of all time’, and The Times described its author as ‘a man of action who writes like a poet’. It was largely thanks to Maxwell and his book that the world began to take notice of the delightful species that was its subject, and to initiate measures to protect it from the depredations that threatened to destroy it. Today the otter is a protected species, and is making a comeback in Britain.

  But never had the simple life been pursued by so complicated a character. Maxwell had come into contact with otters purely by chance, and his many schemes and adventures took him round many other bends in the river – travel, war, shark-hunting, portrait-painting, espionage, poetry and journalism. This is the first full-length biography to tell the whole story of Gavin Maxwell’s extraordinarily picaresque and ultimately tragic life. Though there have been a number of previous attempts, all fell at the first hurdle of the family and the literary estate. My own redeeming virtues seemed to be that I had known Maxwell during the last twelve years of his life – an essential advantage, it was felt, in unravelling the paradoxical and contradictory personality of this highly complex man – and had conducted a long interview with him about his life and work shortly before his death (the starting point of this present biography).

  Among the many complexities in the general mix was the matter of Maxwell’s homosexuality. Readers who view modern biography as a kind of voyeurs’ bazaar may be disappointed that I have felt unable to pursue this aspect to the last drop and tittle of detail. There are various reasons. One is my personal respect for the persons involved (of whom there are relatively few). Another is a stricture laid down by Gavin Maxwell’s literary trustees that the matter should be aired only in a general way, with no reference to specifics. One accidental result of this, perhaps, has been to give Maxwell’s heterosexual involvements a disproportionate emphasis in his life. Though inveterate witch-hunters may ransack these pages for clues to identities, they will be disappointed. Friends of Gavin Maxwell who appear in this book are just that – friends, or colleagues, whether they are accountants, animal keepers, fellow expeditionaries or shark-hunters. Or for that matter biographers.

  I knew Gavin well. I liked him (not everybody did), I enjoyed his company and conversation and judged him to be a truly remarkable man, a troubled spirit and genius manqué, an outstandingly gifted descriptive writer, a latter-day eccentric in the grand manner whose life was spent on a kind of knightly quest to achieve an ideal life and find an ideal Avalon. In a word, I looked on him as a friend I admired, for all his patent flaws.

  This biography could not have been written without the help of a host of people who knew Gavin Maxwell at almost every stage of his life. A full list of acknowledgements is given at the end of the book, but I would like to give special thanks here to the following select little band, who helped me above and beyond the call of duty: Michael Cuddy, Anthony Dickins, Richard Frere (and his book Maxwell’s Ghost), Lavinia Hankinson, Peter Janson-Smith, Constance McNab, Terence Nutkins, Raef Payne, Kathleen Raine (and her reminiscences, poems and book The Lion’s Mouth) and Jimmy Watt. I am grateful to Time-Life Books for permission to make use of my book Wilderness Europe in the writing of passages of Chapter 20 and the Epilogue of this biography; to Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd for permission to quote extracts from God Protect Me from My Friends © 1956, 1972 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, The House of Elrig © 1965 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, and The Ten Pains of Death © 1959 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd; to Penguin Books Ltd for permission to reproduce extracts from Ring of Bright Water (first published by Longman Green, 1960, Penguin Books, 1974) © 1960 Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon at a Venture (first published by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952, Penguin Books, 1984) © 1952 the Estate of Gavin Maxwell, The Rocks Remain (first published by Longman Green, 1963, Penguin Books, 1974) © the Estate of Gavin Maxwell, 1963, and A Reed Shaken by the Wind (first published by Longman Green, 1957, Penguin Books, 1983) © 1957 Gavin Maxwell. I am also grateful to the Authors’ Foundation (Society of Authors) and to Andrew and Margaret Hewson (John Johnson Agency) for their valuable financial support during the extensive period in which this book was written, to Katie Rigge for translations from Italian, to Dominic Cooper for the invaluable interviews he conducted in the West Highlands, to John and Viv Burton for their unstinting encouragement and advice, and to Duff Hart-Davis for his enthusiasm about writing this biography in the first place.

  DOUGLAS BOTTING

  Camusfeàrna

  9 October 1992

  PROLOGUE

  Encounter with a Guru

  A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  The first time I met Gavin Maxwell – poet, painter, shark-hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out – was a shock. ‘Come round for a drink,’ he had said over the phone. ‘Say, about tea time? Take the bus up the King’s Road. Get off just before the World’s End and double back. The square is on your left, between the road and the river. Paultons Square. Number 9.’

  I found the house without difficulty, a tall, narrow-fronted terrace house in a large, tree-filled square on the furthest frontier of fashionable Chelsea. There were two bell pushes by the front door: the lower one was labelled ‘G. Maxwell’, the upper one ‘K. Raine’. I pushed the lower one and waited. Nobody came, and after a minute or two I went back to the pavement and leaned over the railings to try and peer through the front window. Behind the net curtain I could make out nothing but a brightly lit glass fishtank standing waterless and fishless on the windowsill. Inside the tank I could see the outline of what I took to be a large stuffed lizard, a sort of dragon in miniature, about a foot and a half long, with a tawny coloured, scaly skin. As I stared transfixed at this Jurassic apparition I saw that it was not stuffed after all but very much alive, for suddenly a long tongue like a snake’s flickered out of its mouth, snatched at an insect that looked like a grasshopper, then just as suddenly retracted. My attention was instantly distracted from this startling reptile by a
flash of iridescent wings and a frantic fluttering of brilliant electric-blue and green feathers in the upper window pane. Some kind of tropical bird, wings beating furiously like a humming bird, hovered momentarily behind the glass, then swooped away and was lost from view in the darkness of the room’s interior.

  At least the house was inhabited, I decided; no one could stray for long from a menagerie as exotic as this. I went back to the door, rang the upper bell and waited again. After a minute or two the door was pulled fractionally ajar. A keen, wary face appeared cautiously from around the door, eyeing me guardedly with a shy half-smile as I stood there. Gavin Maxwell was forty-three then, in the autumn of 1957, but to me he looked far older, with a face lean and lined and wrinkled as though he had spent a lifetime in the desert. His pale blue eyes stared at me quizzically from under a mop of flaxen hair.

  ‘Gavin Maxwell?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. If I am late. I must have pushed the wrong bell.’

  ‘You’re not late,’ he answered. ‘You’re early.’ He spoke with a carefully modulated deepish tenor voice, enunciating his words positively, even authoritatively.

  ‘I heard the doorbell the first time,’ he went on. ‘I was just checking you out through my binoculars from the other end of the room. Come in and have a whisky. After all, it is tea time.’

  He ushered me in. The sitting room ran the whole width of the house from front to back. It was clearly no ordinary sitting room. It was ornate, baroque, even eccentric. Partly this was due to the creatures that inhabited it – the dozen or so tropical tanager birds that fluttered freely around the furniture, the giant Saharan monitor lizard I had already seen skulking in its glass case by the window. Partly it was the opulence of the furnishings – the antique aquamarine tapestry hanging from one wall, the magnificent ormolu clock, the tall lampstand of clear fluted glass, the gilded mirror and luxurious velvet curtains. Partly also it was the eclectic assortment of weaponry that was dotted about the room – the chrome-nickel whaling harpoons and curved Arab daggers with jewelled hilts that hung from the walls, and the brace of expensive-looking hunting guns that stood in a corner. A portrait in oils of an attractive, long-haired blonde young woman, painted by Maxwell himself, hung above a mantelpiece. With an expression of faint sensual bemusement she stared across the room towards a life-size ancient Roman terracotta phallus on top of the bookcase opposite.