Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin returned to Glenapp with revived enthusiasm about his artistic future – and some misgivings about his artistic past. Looking over the portraits already in hand he was full of guilt at the fees he was charging for them, and on an impulse he gave them free of charge to their sitters. New commissions began to come in, including one from Bertrand Russell. His career as a portraitist seemed on the verge of a spectacular take-off, and in the middle of November he returned to London to spend a week as a student in Colin Colahan’s studio.

  Following Christmas in the family home at Monreith, Gavin returned to London in January, staying first at the Guards’ Club, off Berkeley Square, then taking a short let on a flat at 3 Ryder Street in St James’s. There was a pressing need to find a more permanent base in London. At times he had been obliged to use his Bentley as a kind of home on wheels. Fortified from the case of whisky on the back seat which was his only visible means of support, he would spend the night sleeping in the car somewhere on the road, or just off it, and drive the following day to his next place of rest.

  The early months in London were fraught and desperate. His financial crisis was acute. He felt lonely and rootless in an alien metropolis, far from his beloved Scotland and its hills and seas and wheeling birds. Even his dog, Jonnie, had to be left behind at Glenapp. ‘Jonnie wagging his tail for me five hundred miles away,’ he pined in a letter at about this time, ‘is 499 miles 1759½ yards too far.’

  Gavin’s growing bemusement with the artistic milieu in London was typified by a visit to the studio of Lady Nicholson, the widow of Sir William:

  It was squalor of a fairly austere kind, and Mrs P. [Mary Phillimore, an Irish friend of Yeats and now a tenant at Monreith] (who had told me to clean my nails before meeting what she described as ‘a real lady’ – god!) was utterly and finally horrified when a somewhat decayed musician with scrubby grey hair, dirty pyjamas and a torn dressing gown suddenly emerged from behind a curtain, shambled across the room, belched, and disappeared. Afterwards she said to me: ‘Gav’n, is there any studio in London that hasn’t a piece of garbage like that lying around?’ I told her that if there was I hadn’t yet seen one.

  Gavin was presented with a totally different face of the art world, however, when he attended a Boat Race party at the riverside home of the artist Julian Trevelyan, in Hammersmith. ‘The party was fun,’ he enthused, ‘hundreds of people but hardly a face that wasn’t striking in some way and hardly a name unfamiliar. What a collection, but Gosh they’re all geniuses, and I do feel flattered when they’re nice to me.’

  But Gavin was becoming disillusioned with the artistic life, and particularly with the depressing realisation that his own endeavours were not progressing as he had hoped. This knowledge spelt the end of the confidence and enthusiasm that had buoyed him along in the early days. In the autumn he cancelled an exhibition of his paintings in Cambridge. ‘I find I can no longer produce even a likeness,’ he wrote, ‘much less a decent painting … My Gawd, I’m a bad painter. I shall never dare to face Colahan again.’ But commissions and sitters continued to turn up, including his old ex-SOE friend, the conductor Edward Renton, the concert pianist Louis Kentner and his wife Griselda, and others.

  The recipient of most of Gavin’s letters was Raef Payne, the English friend of Jackie Shaw Stewart whom Gavin had first met at Morar Lodge. Raef was himself a good enough painter to have thought seriously about pursuing an artistic career, and he shared many of Gavin’s other interests. Gradually Gavin came to realise that this was no ordinary friendship.

  Sexually, as in a number of other ways, Gavin was a late developer. By his own admission his knowledge of sexual matters at school had been zero, and for three years after the onset of puberty he had remained sexually inactive, emerging from this hormonal torpor into a state of adolescent confusion and embarrassment made all the more acute by the difficulties he encountered in working out his real sexual polarity. The course of his sexual evolution in those early years is difficult to chart. It seems his first romantic infatuation was with the aristocratic beauty called Elizabeth he met at Strachur when he was sixteen, but he appears to have had difficulty translating this impulse into an active relationship, still less a steady heterosexual state. A Freudian interpretation would have it that Gavin’s sexual orientation was virtually decided for him by the circumstances of his early childhood – no father, and a suffocatingly adoring mother in whose bed he slept till he was eight years old. By the middle of the war, when he was in his late twenties, it seems Gavin had come to terms with his predominantly homosexual nature, and admitted as much to one of his closest friends in SOE, Matthew Hodgart.

  In those years homosexuality was against the law in Britain, and since Gavin was a shy, fastidious, romantic and guilt-ridden young man, he had suppressed his sexual emotions – he had not, indeed, felt able even to attempt a deep relationship with another human being. Now his intense friendship with Raef became such a dominant element in his life that he could no longer escape or conceal it. When Raef realised the nature of Gavin’s feelings, his response was one of bewilderment and some alarm, though he was sympathetic enough not to reject a friendship which had become such a good one, and which continued to grow through the interests and sense of humour they had in common. Nor was it in any sense an exploitative affair on the part of the older man; while Gavin finally accepted the nature of his own feelings, he was scrupulously careful not to let them put a strain on the relationship. Or so it was at first.

  To Gavin, for whom loneliness was almost a way of life, this friendship was a tremendous source of comfort and strength. But until he came down from Scotland to live in London on a permanent basis early in 1949 the liaison had been of necessity an intermittent, long-distance one, and the longest period the two men had spent in each other’s company was two weeks. It was this, perhaps, that had enabled the relationship to develop so happily, with only occasional meetings, but regular and lively correspondence. When Gavin began to spend more time in London, Raef began to feel oppressed by the demands being made on him. In the spring of 1949 (Raef was now at Cambridge) the matter came to a crisis, and he told Gavin he could cope with it no longer; for both their sakes the relationship must end.

  This was more than Gavin could take. The fracture left him orphaned, so to speak, privately alone and stranded among a multitude of strangers. By the time he found his London pied-à-terre – a studio flat with a gallery and dry rot throughout the woodwork at 8 Avonmore Road, Olympia – Gavin was in the middle of an acute breakdown. A chronic neurotic at the best of times, he finally gave way to the combined weight of the sharking failure, the hand-to-mouth existence of a tyro painter, the financial crisis, the end of the friendship – and just about everything else.

  ‘I appear to be in a somewhat mentally feeble state,’ he wrote during this period, ‘owing to too much hard work, too many bad paintings, bad poems, efforts to organise, dust, dirt, expired ration cards … Oh mists that will not part, oh dove that finds no resting place, oh feet without lendals, pots without croon … With my fal-de-ro and di-de-dum-de, with my bottle of rum my throat speaks every human tongue.’

  Though Gavin did not know it – perhaps never knew it – he was by now almost certainly suffering from ‘bi-polar illness’. Though it seems he only suffered from the affliction in a modified form, its symptoms were sufficiently marked to bewilder and confuse anyone who happened to be in his company at the time of their occurrence. Gavin would experience intensely buoyant periods characterised by boundless creativity, optimism and omniscience, a feeling that all things were possible, a sense of being at one with the cosmos, of containing the whole of the human condition within himself. For days and weeks there would be an endless stream of random but often profound pensées (often embracing concepts as huge as God and the Universe), wisecracking good humour and bubbling enthusiasms. But these would be followed by collapses into utter despair, self-absorption and misdirected paranoia.

  In this dark night of the soul Gav
in’s stream of letters dried up, his work faltered, he began to drink heavily and take sleeping pills. His thoughts even began to dwell on suicide. To help relieve his distress, he sought the advice of a psychiatrist, Dr Ellis Stungo – ‘a wise man and a very understanding one’ – who had a practice in Harley Street. When Gavin said he was feeling suicidal, Dr Stungo told him: ‘The best thing to do if you feel like killing yourself is to go off and do something really dangerous.’ Soon afterwards Gavin rang John Hillaby, who recalled:

  He said he wanted to say goodbye. Why, I asked, was he going abroad? No, he said, his fortune teller had told him he was going to die in a racing crash and as he was racing his Bentley at Brooklands the next day he thought he would like to say goodbye to a few old friends. By this time I had got used to Gavin saying things totally beyond my comprehension, so I said, Oh yes, well, goodbye then. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. But about three weeks later I bumped into him again and I said, I thought you were dead? Oh, he said, I didn’t race, the car developed a fault and wouldn’t go.

  In fact by mid-summer the suicidal mood had passed. Dr Stungo had got in touch with Raef Payne and by dint of wise counselling had brought about a reconciliation between him and Gavin. The friendship was resumed, but on Gavin’s part at a less intense emotional pitch, and in time it settled into a deep and abiding affection that enriched both their lives.

  Gavin began to rebuild his life with the help of his latest enthusiasm, and at the beginning of July he entered his Bentley for the races to be held at Silverstone later that month. ‘My race is only for 3½ and 4¼ Bentleys,’ he reported, ‘and I’m relying on leaving the field at the start and having the corners to myself, as I don’t fancy being one of a huge pack cornering at 90 m.p.h. Up is what the wind will be in any case.’ A phone call from the Silverstone race secretary soon demolished this plan. ‘Not sufficient entries in the 3½–4¼ Bentley class – now I have to race against a mixture of Mercedes, Bugatti, Maserati and Lord knows what. Much more wind-up-putting, and no sure hope of getting away from the pack early on in the race. Buckets of blood.’

  Gavin proved to be a dramatic racing driver, but he was inclined to forget that in order to win you have to finish. On the eve of the race he was awake all night with worry, tossing and turning and chain-smoking through the early hours; and in the morning he consumed half a bottle of Scotch in preparation for the looming ordeal. His huge 3½-litre Rolls Bentley had a fine turn of speed and a light aluminium body by Corsica, but it was no match for the likes of Maserati, and at the start Gavin chose to take the lead, as his best and only hope of winning the race. At the drop of the starter’s flag he roared off down the straight, his goggled, hawk-like face peering intently ahead, gloved hands clutching the wheel tightly as he approached the first, dreaded corner. When he reached it he over-braked, span round in front of the rest of the pack, and was forced to retire when the stewards gave him the black flag.

  This failure did not weaken his determination, but he fared little better in other races. At Goodwood – ‘the course difficult and frightening; no straights, only something like a circle full of outrageous kinks, all banked the wrong way, on which 100 m.p.h. felt like tight-rope walking’ – he nearly came to grief in practice and was forced to retire with fuel starvation in the actual race. ‘I went, and returned, alone and uncheered,’ he recorded. Time trials were more his forte. In the Bentley Drivers’ Club time trials at Silverstone he won two pewter tankards for the standing half-mile (32.89 seconds) and flying quarter-mile (eleven seconds). And at the Firle hill trials he totally forgot his worries in the exhilaration of the occasion.

  I had the Bentley tuned for two days before the event, and when I set off for Eastbourne she was going as never before, and leash of greyhounds slipping thong was what she was like most. I spent the night in a rose-trellised hotel in Lewes, and on to Firle at 8.30 in the morning – a marvellous morning of early sunshine and heavy dew. Chalk downs, blue sky, and big white cumulus; sea, and shipping in the Channel.

  Firle Hill itself turned out to be a lovely place – skirting a big chalk ridge of the downs, and a merry throng of cars of all makes and colours at the foot. There were eighty-six cars competing, including quite a lot of famous ones – three of the official Lagonda racing team, Pitts’ supercharged 4¼ Bentley, Hutton’s Bugatti, and many others familiar by name or sight. From the moment I saw this assembled horde, the hosts of Midian, the Philistines, I didn’t hope to do more than not disgrace myself, and quite expected to be killed and eaten at the end of the day.

  Judge therefore of my amazement and delight to make the (I think) sixth fastest climb of the day, and (I think) fastest time of any unsupercharged car. AND I absolutely squashed Hay’s much vaunted and Rolls-sponsored 4¼ Bentley which had been winning things all over the world this year. And, which made my day, I got a cheer when I drove down the hill again, and some very nice and kind remarks from the commentator. And in the chalk pit I picked up a lot of Salvador-Dali shaped flints coated with chalk, as edible as anything I’ve ever combed from a beach in the past. So altogether it was a good day.

  TEN

  The man of light

  The power that wheels the eagle’s wing

  And darts the silver herring shoal

  Strikes from my rock a mountain spring

  That has no knowledge of its goal

  But only of its will to sing.

  GAVIN MAXWELL, ‘Poem from a Sequence’ (1951)

  Gavin’s venture into motor racing broadly coincided with another point of departure in his life. His Stowe friend Anthony Dickins, by now a gifted pianist and chess player, had come to London to renew old friendships, and Gavin was one friend he sought out. Another was an extraordinary half-genius, half-bohemian called James Meary Tambimuttu – known as Tambi to his friends, and Tuttifrutti to his enemies.

  A descendant of the royal house of Jaffna in Ceylon, Tambimuttu had first come to London in 1938 in pursuit of a beautiful Kandyan dancer called Miriam. When she eluded him, he stayed on, drifting to the area around Fitzroy Square and the Fitzroy Tavern on which he later claimed to have bestowed the name of Fitzrovia – a name which today signifies not so much a place as a legendary era and way of life long gone. Fitzrovia in those days rivalled Chelsea as an artistic and intellectual quarter of London. Its inhabitants included such figures as Dylan Thomas and Augustus John, together with a wild and noisy sub-stratum of drunks, sensualists, bohemians, eccentrics and aspiring literati. Prince among them was Tambi. ‘Tambi’s blue-black hair was bobbed, and curled at the corners,’ recalled Julian Maclaren-Ross in his Memoirs of the Forties; ‘his extraordinary hands, with fingers that bent right back, apparently boneless like a lemur’s, only longer, flickered mesmerically as he talked in rapid tones with an accent that on the wireless sounded Welsh, white teeth and eyeballs flashing meantime in the dusk of his face.’ Almost every night Tambimuttu led an invasion of Fitzrovian pub-crawlers into Soho, where the pubs stayed open half an hour longer. Dan Davin, in his book Closing Time, describes one such invasion: ‘Tambimuttu came and went with his train of girls and poets, a comet rather than a star, black-rimmed fingernails gesturing, a wild, dark and crafty eye.’ It was in an attic room in Fitzrovia, where one of W.H. Auden’s boyfriends was throwing a party, that Anthony Dickins first met Tambimuttu, shortly after his arrival in London, and together they went on to found the influential magazine Poetry London, the first issue of which came out just before the outbreak of the war.

  Whatever else one made of him, there is no doubt that Tambimuttu was a gifted if erratic poetry impresario, with an almost infallible nose for sniffing out poetic talent. The works of many poets of promise and quality first saw the light of day in the pages of his Poetry London; and there were few poets in London who were not known to him. When Anthony Dickins introduced Gavin to him in the summer of 1949, Tambi (who was a year younger than Gavin) at once perceived in him a rare talent of some kind and took him under his wing, encouraging him to write
poems and working out ways of advancing his career as a portrait painter. The thing to do, he told Gavin, was to hold an exhibition of paintings of the rich and famous as a bait for future custom, and he promised to introduce him to potential sitters, among them the poet Kathleen Raine.

  When Tambimuttu brought Gavin to her house at 9 Paultons Square, Chelsea, in August 1949, Kathleen Raine was forty-one years of age – six years older than Gavin. Once described as the most beautiful woman of her generation at Cambridge (where she had read biology), she had been twice married and was now the handsome mother of two young children, a Research Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, an acknowledged authority on William Blake, and the author of three books of intense, rhapsodic, and often mystical and metaphysical poetry, much of it inspired by her sense of the sacred she saw as permeating nature, which had placed her in the front rank of contemporary English poets. There were many things this gifted and unusual woman had in common with Gavin Maxwell – and many things she did not. The extent of the gulf between them she was to explore during their tumultuous and often painful future relationship.

  Kathleen showed very little interest in Gavin at that first meeting, or he in her. She was highly suspicious of any friends Tambi brought round to meet her, for experience had shown they could be princes or beggars, poets or drug addicts. ‘Yet Tambi was right in discerning, in Gavin, a vein of genius,’ she was to write in the third and final volume of her autobiography, The Lion’s Mouth. Tambi bustled the two of them into the garden and photographed them – ‘like a reluctant Adam and Eve’ – under a pear tree. And there the matter might have ended had not Kathleen, as Gavin was about to leave, mentioned that she had just returned from Northumberland, and thus made the fatal connection.