Though Gavin was still receiving his Soay Shark Fisheries salary, he was to all intents and purposes completely broke – ‘not two halfpennies to rub together’ he wrote. Yet he contrived to live in some splendour. ‘This room is rather fine,’ he wrote to Raef Payne, who had been out in the shark-boats several times and was now an undergraduate at Cambridge. ‘I have succumbed to the obvious temptation of making it more so, and have transformed it by my last purchase – some lovely panels of French First Empire damask, which now drape the walls in very pale salmon pink. The room is really lovely now. Rough sketch appended.’
The sketch portrayed all four sides of Gavin’s resplendent castle room in the form of an extended panorama. Gold carved-wood eagles spread their heraldic wings above the doors. Precious china plates and a Wedgwood plaque surrounded by ornamental gilt moulding surmounted a wide recessed bookcase. A marble statue of naked wrestlers, dating from 450 B.C., was proudly displayed beneath one of the new pink damask panels, and a heavy inlaid Florentine table stood before a twelve-foot window, draped with crimson damask curtains, which looked out over the castle grounds towards the distant sea. Dominating the room was a large portrait of a distant ancestor, the fourth Duke of Argyll, which had come up for auction (‘attributed to Gainsborough’) following the death of its owner, Gavin’s aunt by marriage Princess Louise. ‘The picture is not beautiful,’ Gavin reported, ‘but fine in a heavy and competent way – if it’s a copy it’s a damn good one, and if original (which I much doubt) worth a lot. I bought it for £25, and nine magnificent carved wood frames for a total of £6.10. Just about the first good buy I have ever made. The finest of these I have made into a mirror, which is hanging over the fireplace, a really beautiful piece of elaborate carving, circa 1740.’
To anyone not accustomed to the wildly divergent polarities of Gavin’s personality, the transition from rugged deep-sea sharker to urbane interior designer and denizen of a baronial stately home would have seemed improbable. But at Glenapp he was simply returning to the panoply of his high-born background. Here, after the rigours of his sharking years, Gavin lived not only in style, but in comfort. ‘I am looked after by a charming and quite lovely child,’ he wrote to Raef Payne in early June, ‘who looks about fourteen but I believe (incredibly) to be twenty or more. I have started two portraits of her, and for someone more competent than I she would make the most perfect (though perhaps rather childish) model for a madonna. Her reign of a month here has been heaven – she dotes on me and anticipates my every need. Alas, she is supposed to go and be trained to be a doctor or theatre nurse or something soon, and I can think of no remedy but marrying her, which is perhaps a little drastic – though one might fare much worse, I don’t suppose she could!’
Sharking was no more than a casual, distant concern now. Though he sometimes drove up to Mallaig to cast an eye on things, Gavin never went to sea any more, and had virtually no control over sharking operations. At the end of June 1948 he was advised that if he did not resign from the company it would be liquidated and then reformed, in order to remove as shareholders his ten friends who had invested £500 each in the enterprise. They would receive no more than two shillings and fourpence in the pound. This was an option Gavin could not tolerate, and on 12 July he resigned as managing director of the Island of Soay Shark Fisheries. In due course the company was wound up, the factory demolished, the boats and the island sold, and the population evacuated.
‘A remarkable fact stands out from a welter of confusion,’ he wrote to Raef Payne on 26 July:
I HAVE LEFT MY JOB. Provocation to do so became very great indeed, and after chewing it over for forty-eight hours I wrote off. Reactions at present:
1. Fear my resignation will be accepted
2. Fear my resignation will not be accepted
3. Faith in self as great artist
4. Lack of ditto.
See, I will lose
(a) the only fixed income I have
(b) my seaman’s ration book
(c) my typewriter
(d) security from labour direction.
But, I will gain
(a) FREEDOM
(b) (Can’t fill this in)
So what. Anyway, ’tis done. Now I feel I really am a struggling artist.
Gavin was more hurt than his chirpy tone would suggest, for he felt an overwhelming sense of failure. He had personally lost £11,000 (worth more than fifteen times that amount by 1992 values) – ‘all the money I shall ever have, as it was secured by a total advance on my mother’s will’. All he had left was his Bentley, £250 worth of personal possessions, and the unprofitable salmon-fishing rights on Soay. He had also invested the prime of his young manhood in the four years of the venture. Now, a few days short of his thirty-fourth birthday, he found himself stranded, with large debts and no occupation. Circumstances compelled him to earn a living, an activity for which he was almost totally inexperienced and temperamentally unsuited. With the vision of his future in ruins, he was now to perform a somersault in his career and lifestyle as radical as the metamorphosis in his habitat.
At school and university he had displayed a talent for drawing – mostly birds and animals and country scenes. He had acquired some desultory knowledge of painting at the Ruskin School of Art while he was at Oxford, and in 1946 he had taken a little instruction in human portraiture from talented friends like Peter Scott, and had tried his hand at sketching the heads of friends and relatives.
As the shark fishing began to wind down in failure and penury, the idea occurred to Gavin that, with his wide network of well-placed and well-heeled friends and relatives, he might be able to put his talent to good use by setting up as a portrait painter of the rich and famous. At Monreith the idea hardened into a resolve when he met a fifty-one-year-old Australian painter and sculptor by the name of Colin Colahan, who had been commissioned to paint a portrait of his brother, Sir Aymer, for a substantial fee. Colahan painted in the manner of Velázquez, placing the easel next to the sitter, viewing him from the other end of the room, then rushing up to the easel to paint. This method required a large room, which was one reason why Gavin moved into the vast flat at Glenapp Castle. It was here that he set about transforming himself, with all his habitual energy and optimism, from a shark-hunter into a society portrait-painter.
His first subject was his landlady, Lady Inchcape, seated with flowers in her hand and a mirror on the wall reflecting the sea and the gannet island of Ailsa Craig. ‘Although it is not at all a good painting,’ Gavin reported, ‘it is quite like her and is liked by her husband, and I hope to sting him a full hundred guineas for it with luck.’ Other portraits followed in quick succession – portraits of locals and neighbours, old comrades from SOE, and his brother Eustace (‘very bold, modelled, unkind, and generally satisfactory – probably the best painting I have done’).
He did not find it easy. ‘I’m getting better,’ he wrote at this time, ‘but find that I can only paint with confidence and un-niggle when I don’t care a damn what the sitter thinks of it – women especially make me go all KEEP-IT-BEAUTIFULLY-SOFT. But I’m making progress.’ He tended to lose interest once he had done the head, and found it hard to finish a picture. He had difficulty managing backgrounds and making two eyes a real pair, and disliked using mirrors. On the rare occasion he tackled a female nude he found himself unable to resolve the sexual confusion that ensued – a confusion all the more acute in that his body appeared to react in direct disobedience to the messages sent by his mind. ‘I’ve painted another nude,’ he wrote after one such session: ‘Huge woman, great fids of flesh, creases, all tits and buttocks and things. I think she expected me to seduce her (judging mainly by assumed postures). But honestly, how can one view with desire these mountains of flesh, these voluminous folds? Why can’t there be less of them? Promise of pneumatic bliss was never a strong attraction for me, alas. But talk of lighthouses! I had to increase the shadows under the tits second by second. How fortunate that women are otherwise made more
discreetly than men.’
Sometimes he abandoned human beings and indoor work and took to the hills. One day, revisiting Soay, he decided to take advantage of the glorious summer weather to paint some landscapes of Skye. ‘Itching to paint,’ he recorded, ‘Found marvellous scene – unloaded canvas, etc, etc – no easel. Buckets of blood. Walked a mile from road and erected vast and moon-eclipsing cone of peat. First touch of brush – whole thing collapsed. Stuck canvas upright in ground and lay on stomach. After five minutes canvas fell. Started again. Clegs began to bite. Couldn’t get away from canvas to look at it. Began to rain. Upset turpentine. Finally in general struggle walked on canvas. Dangerous smouldering of temper. Ce n’est pas gai.’
Commissions were few in those early days, distractions frequent. Visitors tended to have a deranging effect, but some were more distracting than others. One such was the wife of a Harley Street surgeon who had taken a short let on another flat in the castle with her husband and children.
She is forty, looks and behaves exactly like a tart, has a figure young for her age and a face fifteen years older. Well, I have practically been raped by her – not a nice sensation. The second time I met her she came up to my flat to have a drink, and insisted first on showing me a mole so high up on the inside of the thigh as to leave little to the imagination, and second, having explained to me that her youngest son was born by Caesarean section, tried to show me the scar. Next day she came up here with both sons, and stayed (with both of them) till 4.30 a.m. Despite desperate resistance she practically undressed me, at last said, well anyway kiss me goodnight, after which I spent minutes, but minutes, trying to disengage her tongue from my uvula or epiglottis. Now I daren’t be alone with her for a second.
At the end of September Gavin took three weeks’ holiday away from Glenapp, staying with various friends in the West Highlands in order to stalk deer and walk the hills and breathe deeply of the clear, cool, autumnal West Coast air. The trip was to prove crucial in the future course of his career and reputation.
His first destination was the grand old Highland house of a longstanding friend called Mrs Tew, who lived at Conaglen in the wildly rugged region of Ardgour, Argyll. Conaglen was unbelievably beautiful, and quite unlike anything he had seen in the rest of Scotland. The house was on the sea, and the glen ran up for fourteen miles inland behind it. A small, shallow river ran down the glen over huge grey slabs of stone, in half a dozen places developing into quite considerable falls, with high hills on either side.
My God, the colours! On Thursday I stalked at the head of the glen, and rode the fourteen miles up on a pony. Listen. The river pure cobalt, with raw sienna stones showing under it, and the whitest of white foam at every little waterfall and blue-grey slabs of smooth rock at the sides. The reds and yellows – every one in the Materia Pictoria. The ferns pure chrome yellow coming down to the cobalt water, the bracken an indian red behind it – then the wild cherry trees, turned every colour from chrome yellow to vermilion, and rowans with scarlet berries between them. Every colour was almost literally dazzling, and all in lovely great defined patches and blocks. Behind all this the turning oakwoods and the hills rising bare with deep purple shadows above the trees. Says I to myself, if Sunday is a fine day I’ll spend all of it up here painting like a stoat (or something).
I went on and duly ascended a gigantic mountain – views stupendous, over seventy miles in all directions – and killed two stags and tittupped home again in the twilight.
Next day Gavin set out for the hills again, and after a long walk of sixteen miles and a climb to the top of the highest mountain in Ardgour, returned so impassioned by the beauty and the solitude of the natural world all around him that he was like a man in a mescalin trance. ‘Where vegetation is sparse and the ground covered only by a thin layer of granite chips,’ he wrote,
where you can see the sea nearly a hundred miles away, where everything is blue and yellow and one is incredibly high up, it is like a big dose of benzedrine. The ears stick forward juttily, the nose beaks craggily, the toes spring sorbo-rubberly, sweat dries icily. Where would the drab world be without mountains to stand on top of, without the distant sea to look at, without the crushed and drying myrtle leaves in the pocket? Perhaps you think I exaggerate? I have, I admit, a certain tendency to rhetoric. But what I do feel is this: THE WORLD IS STILL YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL – so young and beautiful I could eat it. My mind is crammed with things I THINK ARE BEAUTIFUL. I’m glad I was born onto this earth and not a Martian or something dim … My day was very wonderful, and I was all alone, and I just wished I could go on looking at everything for ever and ever and never come down to where one can’t see so far or feel so supercharged.
Gavin’s route next took him further north along the West Highland coast, through Glen Shiel and over Mam Ratagan to the sleepy and reclusive village of Glenelg on the Narrows of Skye. A little beyond Glenelg lay Eilanreach – ‘a lovely place, on the sea, approached by eighty miles of barely passable dirt road, amid positively Alpine scenery’. Here Tony Wills, head of the Wills tobacco empire and a friend from Oxford days, kept a Victorian shooting lodge from which the huge estate he had recently acquired in the area was administered. Gavin hoped to collect a commission to paint Wills’ wife and children and to spend a few days stalking deer on the slopes of Beinn Sgritheall, but he was laid low by a virulent cold, contracted no doubt after his drenching in Conaglen, and for most of the time he was confined to the house, fretful and ailing and complaining loudly.
One Sunday morning, as his stay at Eilanreach drew to its sneezy, stuffy end, Gavin casually hinted to his host that he was minded to find another pied-à-terre in the Highlands, now that the sharking venture was over. Tony Wills mentioned that a shepherd’s-cum-lighthouse keeper’s cottage on his estate had recently become vacant, the lighthouse having been converted to automatic operation. ‘It’s right on the sea and there’s no road to it,’ he said. ‘There’s been no one there for a long time, and I’d never get the estate people to live in it now.’ If Gavin did not mind its remoteness and inconvenience, its total lack of all mod cons, he would be happy to rent it to him for a pound a year, on condition that he kept it in repair and did not let it fall into ruins.
Tuesday, 13 October 1948 was to prove a day of destiny in Gavin’s life. Coaxing his Bentley out of Eilanreach, he drove up the single-lane track that led southwards to the road’s end at Arnisdale on Loch Hourn, climbing steadily higher over the steep deer moor, with the sea and the hills of Skye stretched out majestically on his right, till he came to a lonely green house roofed in corrugated iron at a place called Tormor, near a point where a burn starting high on the flanks of Ben Sgriol began its descent towards the sea below. Here he parked his car and followed the course of the burn as it plunged down between the walls of a steep wooded ravine. He could hear the roar of a waterfall tumbling between the rock walls of a narrow chasm, and climbing out of the ravine he reached a small bluff of heather and bracken where a steepening track levelled out before its final drop to the shore.
He paused here and drew a deep breath. A vast and marvellous panorama of sea and mountains stretched away before him. Immediately beneath him lay a small house in a little patch of heaven at the edge of the sea. Filled with an intense, impatient excitement, he half fell, half flew down the track, stony now in its final descent, crossed the swiftly-flowing burn and found himself standing alone, breathless in Avalon. That evening he wrote to Raef Payne:
NEWS – hold your breath! I have rented a cottage – an idyll, something out of a dream!
No road, approachable only by boat, nearest human habitation two miles. Stands on little white shell sand beach, on green turf with river flowing round it, sea within fifty yards of the door. Absolute paradise, everything one could possibly want in a tiny compass. A reef on which the sea breaks, an automatic lighthouse, and six little islands, also with green turf and white sand. Faces across to Skye with hills rising steeply behind it. House in excellent repair, only been em
pty three months. Two biggish rooms downstairs and ditto upstairs. I intend to furnish it and spend a few weeks there every summer, painting the sea and lying in the sun and planting roses and revelling in privacy.
The name of this place was Sandaig, and it was to be Gavin’s true Island Valley of Avalon for most of the rest of his life.
For the moment, though, Sandaig lay in the future. Gavin had begun to perceive that he was getting nowhere closeted alone with an easel in a remote castle in Scotland. He needed more stimulus, a more painterly ambience; he needed, above all, professional instruction if he was to progress at all. On his return from the West Highlands, therefore, he flew to London for a preliminary meeting with Colin Colahan, who enjoyed considerable respect as a teacher, armed with two paintings by which Colahan could judge his potential. Gavin reported to Raef Payne on their meeting: ‘Criticism frank (devastatingly so!) but v.v. encouraging. I felt I had learnt more in one day than in the whole of the past year, and came away alternating between great hope and despair.’
Colahan told Gavin that he had not studied the faces in his pictures as a whole but as the sum of parts, and that he was too obsessed with getting a likeness and searching for details which one wouldn’t normally see. But for all its faults, his work showed competence and power, and Colahan was interested enough to give him further instruction. ‘He then proceeded to paint me, with a running commentary and a huge mirror in which I could see every action. Forty-five minutes’ work – quite brilliant! He is quite the most conceited man I have ever met – but how justifiably and charmingly so.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 16