Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  In the end, neither Gavin nor his brother was destined to enjoy Clement’s company for long. Her husband soon left her for another woman, she drifted away, began another affair, became a Roman Catholic, and in her fortieth year died of a sudden brain haemorrhage. Her death was a terrible shock to Gavin. Before she soared out of his orbit, however, she bequeathed him one last favour, and introduced him to a new sitter, a brilliant and attractive young chess genius from the Continent by the name of Tomas, who with his untidy mop of blond hair bore an uncanny resemblance to her. The idea was that Tomas would be the model for the ‘dreamer at the rowan’s foot’ in a picture Gavin would paint for Kathleen to illustrate her poem. In due course Gavin was to become as involved with Tomas as he had been with Clement, thus redoubling Kathleen’s jealous torment.

  Tomas and his family had come to England as refugees some years before the outbreak of the war, and with Gavin’s support he went on to study mathematics at Oxford. His analysis of Gavin’s complex personality in the early 1950s was penetrating and incisive:

  Gavin cut a very romantic, adventurous figure in society, but this was only one side of him, for in reality he was two different people – the respectable public figure (the aristocratic painter, author, ex-Guards officer and member of learned societies) and the less respectable private one (the homosexual, the outlaw, the fearful, repressed, inhibited inner man). So though he was not a schizophrenic he often behaved like one – he separated his personality into two distinct parts and led two compartmentalised lives. Like everybody who has an unresolved emotional problem he was a role player. He always had to express himself as a duality – a personality in conflict in all areas. In front of his friends, for example, he could ham it up histrionically, but he was really a very inhibited person by nature. And though he was genuinely drawn to people from outside his class – I mean to working-class people (because he couldn’t stand middle-class, suburban values) – he was very class-conscious, very aware of his background as an aristocrat, having been brought up embedded in the system, and he was anxious to protect his social reputation among his peers. For example, when he took me to the Guards Club for lunch he was afraid my accent would give my non-aristocratic background away and lead his toppy friends to believe that he was associating with someone from an inferior class. So he told me he would make out I was an Albanian prince and asked me to speak in a foreign accent so as to bolster up the disguise.

  This division of his personality was crippling for him. It meant he could never experience what life was really about, never experience true joy – except perhaps on some of his explorations abroad – because only wholly integrated people can experience that. Gavin was too fearful to live in his essence, so he lived in his ideal; and, like many people in conflict, he lived as he wished to be, and not as he was. He faced life seeking rather than being – for only an integrated person can be – and in this sense he was a genuinely romantic figure, like a knight on a quest. The immense emotional deprivation he suffered as the result of his childhood upbringing and his public-school education meant he had to externalise his life, over-compensate. Every aspect of his outside life was role play (the Major in the Highlands, the Guards officer at the Guards Club) and many of his activities (like his studies of foreign cultures) were over-compensation. And the externalisation of his emotional life led to a mistrust of relationships with adults, so that he only felt safe in the animal world, the natural world, and would be more heartbroken at the death of a favourite animal than of his best friend. His own emotions affected him as a writer, made him less than the great writer he might have been, for there was a mixture of cruelty and sentimentality in him, of repressed violence.

  All this was the product of his sexual dilemma, which was at the heart of his depressive problem. For he was sexually quite confused and inhibited, and far too fastidious to be promiscuous – I mean, he was already past the halfway point in the Biblical span of his life when I met him, yet I was only the second boy friend he had ever known. This was why he was so interested in the study of psychology and why he was so attracted to Freudianism, with its narrow concentration on sexual conflict as the source of psychic breakdown. But his Freudianism was really just a flirtation; he wasn’t committed to it, it gave him no satisfaction, just some sort of explanation for his inexplicable motives, which so perplexed and depressed him. But Gavin should have been a Jungian rather than a Freudian. Jungianism was far more universal and creative, more tuned to a human being’s spiritual needs. Gavin’s search in nature was a genuine search for a spiritual life. To Gavin nature provided a spiritual outlet and held for him a mysticism which some people see as a spiritual need. But he was not a guru himself, he was more passive than active – he thought through nature rather than was a mystic. I remember lots of conversations with Gavin which indicated that he was evolving from Freudianism to a more power-orientated psychology – not Adlerian, more Canettian. Perhaps that was the direction he was going – looking for power in personal relations, power to form and mould young people.

  He tried this with me. I was a complete fantasy of his. He wished to mould me, dog-train me, correct my English and try and improve me socially and culturally; but I recognised that and I wouldn’t have it. As far as I am concerned he could be very pleasant, charming and generous; but was not a wholly integrated human being, and this prevented him from becoming the great man he might have been.

  Before long Gavin’s secret life came to the attention of Kathleen Raine. Her suspicions were first aroused when she visited his studio flat in Avonmore Road one evening and found a pair of woman’s gloves left there the previous evening by another visitor – Clement. Wounded and dismayed, Kathleen fled the premises, then scribbled Gavin a letter – ‘bitter, reproachful, and in places almost venomous – 1000 words long’:

  She is the fury that hell holds no other like, and I don’t think that anything in the world that I could do could make her any happier except to fall in love with her – and as I can’t do that, this terrifying mixture of love and hatred will follow me directly or indirectly for a long time. If I am friendly to her, I am accused of triviality; if I act more warmly than I feel, of insincerity; if I accept her offers of help with my work, of exploitation – there’s nothing I can do or say that can be more than momentarily acceptable. How are we expected to find women other than frightening and bewildering when their emotions are stirred?

  Eventually, in the early spring of 1950, Kathleen was apprised of the whole truth. Gavin reported her reaction:

  Kathleen has been erupting with unprecedented violence, and for forty-eight hours had the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside in a state of near-panic. She rang me up in a terrible state at 8 o’clock on Monday morning to tell me that Sonia Orwell [widow of George Orwell, who had died a few weeks earlier] had spent the previous evening with her and had told her

  (a) the truth about myself and Clement

  (b) my real attitude to herself (Kathleen)

  (c) much else

  – and when asked where all this information came from had replied that Sonia had had lunch with Canetti and that he had told her all this.

  Elias Canetti was a key figure in the world in which Gavin and Kathleen moved at this time. Then in his mid-forties, a Bulgarian Jew thrown out of Austria by the Nazis before the war, Canetti was a formidably talented European intellectual, the author of a classic novel, Auto da Fé, and a philosopher-psychologist whose main preoccupation was the question of power and its manifestation in the crowd (as mass hysteria and crowd solidarity). He was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Kathleen was not alone in considering Canetti to be the most learned and the most intelligent person she had ever met, endowed with the wisdom of Socrates and a mixture of insight and compassion which gave him a genius for understanding human beings and the human condition. Canetti was a guru to many, including Gavin and Kathleen, and they would come to him for advice about all their emotional, psychological and sexual problems, which he w
ould discuss with them with a confidentiality that was absolute.* Both Gavin and Kathleen sought Canetti’s advice in the storm that now raged, as Gavin recorded immediately after:

  I did an hour’s rather frantic telephoning before Kathleen arrived in a terrible state here – she was obviously suicidal and her sanity in real danger, of which Canetti had warned me. I expect you can imagine what the morning was like. It ended, after she had left in the greatest grief and bitterness, by her returning a quarter of an hour later to make a reconciliation of the least desirable and most passionate kind. During the course of the next two days, during which I felt as if I was in the process of being run over by a steam roller, both she and I had long separate talks with Canetti – who, being a wise and discerning man, pointed out that Kathleen’s sanity was more important than my having an easy life, and outlined my most desirable course of action; then, moving us like puppets, did the same for Kathleen. The upshot is as good as can be expected in the midst of these raging passions – a surface reconciliation between her and Clement, and a determination on everyone’s part (for how long, I wonder?) to make everything as easy as possible for everyone else.

  Canetti told me that this is a real near-hallucination with Kathleen, that she is a sort of goddess who must never be opposed or spurned, and that in her mind it is a necessary myth without which she would disintegrate. So she suffers more than the average person of strong emotional nature who loves someone without return – because it is an unthinkable sort of blasphemy that a goddess’s love for a mortal would be unrequited.

  Canetti handled her extraordinarily cleverly, telling her that it would be an indignity for her to love anyone sexually, and that the only possible relationship between the goddess and the mortal was one of calm bounty. This must have appeared to her as a very acceptable way out, because when I took her down to David Jones’s [painter and poet, author of In Parenthesis and Anabasis] studio at Harrow, she explained to me that she had come to realise that the only reason she was in love with me was because it could never be returned, and would therefore always be bound to remain on the astral plane in which she lived.

  Alas, the more I live the more I must reject Jung and accept Freud – all else seems ultimately to lead to the wildest fantasies of self-deception.

  Kathleen was only temporarily placated. There were more storms, recriminations and reconciliations, more fervent pleas, urgent letters and anguished phone calls. ‘When she is not hysterical she is just miserable,’ Gavin noted in the early summer of 1950, ‘and she is never far from tears. How terribly much responsibility is forced into one’s hands, and how unfit the hands are to cope.’ Time and again, both parties resorted to their mutual counsellor, the ever patient, ever thoughtful Elias Canetti. To Kathleen, Canetti spelled out the obvious – that there was another side to Gavin from the one she chose to see. There was, for example, his homosexuality, which she could never bring herself to approve or condone. There was his lack of commitment to the inner ground of imagination, to the life of the spirit – a yawning gulf between them. There was the possibility that Gavin was simply making use of her to further his own ends. There was his streak of cruelty, which co-existed with his kindness and generosity. ‘Poor old Kathleen,’ he once taunted her, reducing her to tears, ‘you look like a fat squaw.’ Once, at Paultons Square, a great spider crawled out from beneath her chair, and Gavin cried out, with a look of dismay on his face, ‘A spider, Kathleen!’ The implication was clear: the spider was the female devourer – and so, for Gavin, was Kathleen. ‘I really do think Gavin was afraid of me,’ she recalled. ‘I couldn’t believe it. At the time it was unimaginable to me that he should fear me. But I was so aware of my own suffering that it never occurred to me that I was making Gavin suffer.’

  Canetti told Kathleen bluntly that Gavin did not love her. More, he did not really like her poetry. These warnings fell on deaf ears. For her, the ‘real’ Gavin remained the ‘man of light’ who could do no evil. With the help of the immortal powers, she told Canetti, she could rescue Gavin from the abyss. To which Canetti replied, with the utmost gravity: ‘For you, Gavin is the abyss.’

  Kathleen the spider: Gavin the abyss. They were an odd, doomed, tragically warring couple. Only once did Kathleen pass a night with Gavin, and even then only in a state of carnal innocence, as she later described it: ‘He had been desperately wretched and asked me if I would stay; on the understanding, of course, that there should be no sexual contact between us. And to that I gladly agreed. Yet to me that act was binding as no marriage had ever bound me … Every night of my life, since then, I have spent alone.’

  * So absolute that he declined to talk to me about Gavin at all, telling me: ‘He spoke to me about himself – I never had any permission from him to pass on what he said.’

  ELEVEN

  The house by the sea

  To be only my original self – to be the thing that is the strongest urge in my depth – that is to lay all that down and laugh at it and walk on a mountain alone – really alone in a wild place. And not want to meet a soul. And that is really true and it is the urge and the flame and it needs no fanning.

  ELIZABETH SMART, Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart (1991)

  Gavin had first come to stay at Sandaig, his lighthouse-keeper’s cottage on the remote and almost inaccessible Highland coast of Wester Ross, one cloudless, bracing day in early April 1949. With a rucksack bouncing and jingling on his back and his springer spaniel, Jonnie, trotting in front of him, he once again picked his way down the course of the burn towards the sea. Even at a distance, he noted, the empty house ‘wore that strange look that comes to dwellings after long neglect … that secretive expression that is in some way akin to a girl’s face during her first pregnancy’. Crossing a wooden bridge over the burn, he passed a small rowan tree on his left, went up to the house and turned the key in the door. ‘There was not a stick of furniture in the house,’ he was to write later; ‘there was no water and no lighting, and the air inside struck chill as a mortuary, but to me it was Xanadu.’ There was more space inside than he remembered, with a parlour and a kitchen-living-room on the ground floor, a scullery at the back, and two bedrooms and a landing upstairs. The entire house was panelled with the dark-varnished pitch-pine typical of Highland houses at the turn of the century.

  Gavin had brought with him no more than the bare essentials for survival on that first visit – a bedding roll, a Primus stove and a little fuel, some candles and tins of food. That night he slept in the empty kitchen with his head cushioned on Jonnie’s fleecy black-and-white flank, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of this unfamiliar place – the soft thump of rabbits’ feet among the dunes at the back, the squeak of hunting bats, the piping of oyster-catchers at the sea’s edge, the muffled roar of the waterfall, ceaselessly tumbling into the pool at the head of the burn’s last encircling run to the sea.

  When he went down to the burn to fetch water next morning, five stags stood and watched him from a primrose bank. In those days, before they were kept out by a forestry fence, these stags spent every winter low down along the Sandaig burn. ‘They were in some way important to me,’ Gavin recalled, ‘as were the big footprints of the wildcats in the soft sand at the burn’s edge, the harsh cry of the ravens, and the round seals’ heads in the bay below the house.’ For these creatures – and the goats and the black-faced sheep and the black Highland cattle that cropped the turf around the house and beyond the burn – were his neighbours. Such was the start of his great adventure – and the laying-claim to his Island Valley of Avalon.

  Gavin’s shark-fishing years had taught him that along the west-facing beaches of the West Highland coast one could find all sorts of objects that could be put to household use, and a large proportion of his early days at Sandaig was spent scouring the sea-wrack for whatever he could find washed up by the sea. Fish-boxes served as seats and tables and storage containers; fish-baskets as repositories for firewood, waste-paper and laundry; barrel tops as ch
opping blocks; rubber hot-water bottles as table mats and – well, hot-water bottles; planks as shelves, whisky bottles as water decanters, glass floats as ornaments, and so on to the limits of ingenuity. When it became clear that the flotsam and jetsam of the sea could not provide all that the house required, Gavin purchased from his old wartime friend, Uilleamena MacRae at Lochailort, a small load of basic items – two small chests, two kitchen tables, a bed, three kitchen chairs, and a threadbare Brussels carpet – ‘really frightful furniture’ – which had to be shipped in by sea at outrageous cost. Finally, in its rudimentary way, the house was habitable, smoke issued from the chimney, meals were eaten at a proper table, Gavin wrote at a proper desk and slept in a proper bed, and Avalon was occupied.

  Life in Avalon was a special kind of existence – but it was never an easy one, nor was it meant to be. The West Highlands are the rainiest part of Britain, and it could, if it chose, rain for weeks on end, a deeply saturating and unremitting downpour; or it could rain violently in spasms, as a long succession of brief south-westerly squalls swept in from the ocean and lashed the house with driving horizontal rain as hard and sharp as tin-tacks. It was always a battle to keep firewood and clothing dry, and if the meths and paraffin ran out it could take up to an hour to coax a kettle to boil on a spluttering wet wood fire.

  Sometimes the practical difficulties of life seemed so great that Gavin would rather creep back to bed than go downstairs and try to solve them. The livestock that grazed haphazardly around the house, for example, proved ever alert to an open door. Sometimes the goats – ‘their cynical, yellow, predatory eyes bright with an ancient, egotistical wisdom’ – would break in to plunder the kitchen and the last of the precious supply of loaves. Once Gavin returned to find a pregnant cow stuck tight halfway up the stairs, unable either to go up or down. It took an hour to heave the creature down and out of the house, even longer to clear up the ‘positively Augean litter of dung’ with which she had plastered the stairs.