Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Before long Gavin had explored every inch of his territory. It was the waterfall rather than the house that was the soul of Sandaig, he decided. ‘If there is anywhere in the world to which some part of me may return when I am dead,’ he was to write, ‘it will be there.’ It was not the highest of the waterfalls that marked the precipitous passage of the burn from the high ground down to the sea, but it was the most magical and mysterious. ‘It emerges frothing from that unseen darkness,’ Gavin wrote, ‘to fall like a tumbling cascade of brilliants into a deep rounded cauldron enclosed by rock walls on three sides, black water in whorled black rock, with the fleecy white spume ringing the blackness of the pool … The sun reaches the waterfall for only a short time in the afternoon; it forms a rainbow over the leaping spray, and at the top of the burn between the boulders it gives to the smooth-flowing water the look of spun green glass.’ Its voice was always with him, day and night. He fell asleep to it, dreamed with it, woke to it. It changed with the season, from the full-throated roar of winter to the hushed crooning of parched high summer. In spring it was alive with birdsong and bedecked with massed clusters of yellow primroses and wild blue hyacinths; in autumn it glowed with the bright red berries of the rowan trees jutting from the cracks and fissures of the rock chasm. It was here that Gavin would sometimes sit, and sometimes write, and very infrequently – for even at the height of summer the waterfall was snow water and its tiny drops scalded the naked skin like ice – bathe.

  If the waterfall was the soul of Sandaig, Gavin felt, it was the encircling burn and the wide-spreading sea that gave it its essential character. The burn was Sandaig’s sole source of fresh water and essential means of survival. The sea was an immense stage where the scene and the dramatis personae changed constantly according to the time of day and the season of the year. From Sandaig one could watch the violent squalls sweep in from the sea and the lurid sunsets burn and die over Skye, and the great sea creatures – whales, porpoises and basking shark – pass up and down the sound on their summer procession.

  So Gavin pitched his camp and planted his flag in his new Highland home. Yet for many years it was to be no more than a part-time paradise, a temporary retreat to which he periodically withdrew for up to three months of the year to live closer to nature or to escape from more urgent preoccupations elsewhere.

  In May 1950 Gavin allowed Kathleen to stay at Sandaig for the first time, while he remained in London; after a few days she was joined by her friend Winifred Nicholson. The place acted like a balm on Kathleen. ‘She’s brimmingly happy,’ Gavin noted with satisfaction, ‘to the point of almost slipping out of this world.’ She planted herbs by the door, tended the rose on the wall, brought home the natural treasures of the place – scallop-shells, mussel-pearls, wood carved by the waves – and sat with her back against the rowan tree that grew by the house, staring up into the boundless blue windy sky. ‘What a miracle,’ she was to write of her thoughts then, ‘what unimaginable blessedness to be here and now at the place on earth I most desire to be; by Gavin’s rowan.’

  Later she wrote: ‘Living in his house, seeing his sky over me, the spaces of his sea, those near hills and far mountains which were the regions of his imagination … I lived like Psyche in the house of love, alone yet not alone. In the pool of his waterfall I bathed, on his beaches I gathered shells and stones written with the strange language of the sea.’ It was as if, in Gavin’s absence, he wished her to experience his world for him, or so she felt. ‘I saw for him, touched and smelled and heard all for him, as if every wheeling bird, every radiance of sun or moon on water, every sound of wind or sea or waterfall I was hearing and seeing and touching and knowing for him; or for both of us, perhaps; for the “one consciousness”. I felt it my task to enrich and transmute for him his world into poetry.’

  This she did. Sandaig was the inspiration of many of her poems – most notably, perhaps, ‘The Marriage of Psyche’ in her collection The Year One. The poem, which was actually written at Sandaig, was in two parts. The first stanza of the second part, ‘The Ring’, contains the phrase with which Gavin Maxwell’s name was to be inextricably associated:

  He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water

  Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,

  He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter

  Broadcast on the swift river …

  The calm that Kathleen brought back to London did not last long. A series of contretemps, each more furious than the last, escalated the conflict in her relationship with Gavin. The most lethal occurred during the winter, when Gavin, Sandaig-bound, gave Kathleen a lift in his Bentley as far as Winifred Nicholson’s house in Cumberland. It was dark and snowing heavily by the time they reached Greta Bridge, and though they were still some way from their destination they decided it would be prudent to spend the night at the local hotel before resuming their journey in the morning. In a letter to a friend Gavin described the catastrophic dinner that ensued:

  Up to date K. and I had been getting on quite nicely with each other; but after dinner she seized the opportunity to show me a brand new diary, the last entry being only twenty-four hours old, consisting of a detailed analysis of my sexual impulses. To do her justice the analyses were mainly admiration, but the fact that she was keeping such a diary after having given her solemn word that she wouldn’t put me in a rage which I found difficult to conceal. Anyway, when I went to bed she came as far as the door of my room imploring me to kiss her goodnight, in plain hearing of two servants, and just wouldn’t go away. All appallingly awkward and embarrassing. Eventually I had to leave my room and only return to it after she’d gone. After that she apparently sat up all night writing a gigantic letter to me which she delivered at breakfast.

  The next morning Kathleen was still terribly upset and distressed. That night she had had a dream about Sandaig. She dreamed that the house and its rowan tree were barred to her by a high wooden palisade, and the beauty of the place was all destroyed. Perhaps the palisade was a symbol for her of the wall built around Eden after the Fall. Certainly a great rift had now opened up between her and the object of her love. For Kathleen her diary was a record of things that were sacred to her, the raw material for poetry; to Gavin it represented a dangerous indiscretion and a betrayal of trust. Some years later, following an even deeper estrangement from Gavin, she hurled all her diaries into the waters of the River Eden, in Cumberland.

  Those drowned diaries had presaged the beginning of the Fall. Nothing could be quite the same again between Gavin and Kathleen. The direction of Gavin’s life was already changing, and he was beginning to move outwards and away from London life and London people.

  After more than three years of wrestling with his painting, he had finally abandoned all hope of achieving any great skill or distinction as a portrait painter, and felt increasingly guilty at charging high fees from the few people who commissioned their portraits from him. During this period his financial predicament had, if anything, grown more acute. ‘I am living from hand to mouth and from day to day,’ he recorded in mid-1950. ‘An hour’s letter writing a day keeps the more pressing creditors quiet.’ Gavin’s disintegration was observed by his friend Stanley Peters, an interior designer: ‘He was drinking heavily – easily a bottle of Scotch a day. When he was sober he could be highly amusing, but when he got drunk he could turn into a savage. And by now he was really living in a shit house – he’d even eat caviar out of a toothpaste-squeezer.’

  To make ends meet Gavin was forced to sell, bit by bit, his books, his clothes, his furniture, even his bed, so that eventually all that was left in his studio flat was a mattress, three hard chairs and some empty bookshelves. Some while later he was even obliged to part with his pride and joy, his magnificent 3½-litre Bentley, buying in its place a modest but curious Hotchkiss – he would never stoop to owning a run-of-the-mill mass-production vehicle – an unusual and unreliable oddity that looked and sometimes behaved like a large green grasshopper. Only
an annual allowance from his brother Aymer kept him functioning – together with a munificent birthday present of a year’s rent on his studio, also from Aymer.

  But money problems, Gavin believed – speaking with a certain loftiness as the brother of a baronet and the grandson of a duke – were not the real problems of life, merely tiresome conundrums. The true threats to happiness and fulfilment lay elsewhere. In his thirty-seventh year, for example, he had no real home – no place to which he could truly give that name, no real mate, no family of his own. The idea of Elrig as his home had faded imperceptibly during the war years, and finally died when his mother left it. ‘It was never the same after we left Elrig – that really was a home and it has always been odd to think of strangers in all the rooms.’ Nor did he belong in any real sense to a community, for he worked and had his being as an aristocrat amongst the bourgeoisie, and felt himself a pariah in conventional society, and at odds with his own aristocratic kith and kin, whose inherited wealth he could not emulate and whose stiff, old-fashioned mores he could not share, mocking them from afar while at the same time half wishing he could be at one with them.

  As for his own immediate family, his relationship with them was a complex and increasingly detached one. He remained fond of his mother and saw her frequently once he (and she) had moved to London; and she continued to darn his socks in her flat in Eaton Place until he was well into his forties. He had little rapport with his unmarried sister, Christian, and seldom saw her even when she moved into a studio not far from his own in London; for him she remained ‘that odd Bolshevik painter’, and he would tease her when she went on protest marches, asking her: ‘Why don’t you go and live in Russia?’ He did not have much in common with his brother Eustace either, a gentleman farmer whose talents diversified in a number of practical directions (he later turned out to be a first-class film cameraman, and invented a successful ‘car-wash’ for double-decker buses), and the only one of the siblings to produce children (a daughter, Diana, and a son, Michael, who was eventually to inherit the family title). But Eustace was straightforward and commonsensical, in a way that neither Gavin nor Aymer could ever be, and Gavin for his part regarded him as a figure of fun and treated him unkindly at times.

  It was with Aymer that Gavin formed the closest family relationship. Throughout his life Gavin continued to view his eldest brother with a volatile mixture of envy and admiration, rivalry and respect. Aymer had inherited the Maxwell baronetcy in 1937 on the death of his aged grandfather, Sir Herbert Maxwell, and used a portion of his inheritance to ‘bank’ Gavin after the failure of the shark-fishing venture. Raef Payne, who knew them both, was a keen observer of the complicated dynamics of the brothers’ relationship:

  They were very close, yet (in adult life at least) often at odds. They shared the jokes and mimicries and the whole mythology of childhood – and of course, as they came to recognise (quite when I wouldn’t know), they shared sexual inclinations and Clement Glock. And they were always trying to emulate and outdo each other. When Aymer did up Monreith grandly, Gavin had to acquire a palatial flat in Glenapp Castle and do it up even more grandly. When Gavin became an ‘artist’ (painter/poet), Aymer became a film script-writer and producer, and shot a feature film called Another Sun on location in Morocco in the early 1950s. Possibly Aymer’s eventual withdrawal to the Greek island of Euboea was his answer to Gavin’s ‘Avalon’ at Sandaig. Gavin used to speak of Aymer with resentment sometimes (Aymer had all the money and Gavin was for a time largely dependent on him, though often grumbling that Aymer was so mean), yet also with affection and regard, and when they were together they were often like children, helpless with giggles.

  Yet, well into adulthood Gavin felt it desperately necessary to live as apart from his family – even from Aymer – as he could, and anyone who lumped him together with his siblings was in for a shock. To a woman friend who once made just such an unforgivable gaffe he sent a scorching reproof:

  You must never say ‘the whole Maxwell clan’. It’s about the most goading thing you can say to me. All my childhood it was ‘Aymer-and-you’, and after I grew up it was ‘You-and-Aymer’ or ‘you Maxwells’. I don’t identify myself with my family, and perhaps least of all with Aymer, and I hate being grouped with him either in approbation or derogation. When you’ve done as much as I have to get free from the bracketing, by leading a quite separate and very different life, it’s more than galling to find it all in vain … An ungracious remark, and one which I hope you will repent.

  As for Aymer, his view of Gavin was in some ways a mirror-image of Gavin’s view of him. Aymer was always deferring to Gavin’s superior gifts. He was a talented, sensitive, creative man in his own right, and even embarked on a literary career himself following his venture into films. He started writing before Gavin, but when he heard that Gavin was writing a book he tore his own up; and when his translation of a Montherlant play was not staged he turned his back on the arts and lived on his investments, a rather sad and disillusioned intellectual manqué who never fulfilled his potential. ‘I envy you very much your literary career,’ he was to write some years later when Gavin was rich and famous, ‘not so much for the fame and laurels but for the fact of having something to do worth doing.’

  Now, immured among the sooty streets of London in the depths of dull despair, human society itself and the mire of human relationships grew intolerable to Gavin, and he dreamed again of his Island Valley of Avalon. ‘Oh take me away, take me away to an island,’ he yearned on one such occasion, ‘I’m sick of this jungle.’ He was a misfit in the metropolis, he realised. He could no longer abide dressing up in a dinner jacket to dine in other people’s houses, and sometimes when he did so he arrived the worse for whisky and sat speechless at table. It was at Monreith in late November 1950 that he saw his predicament with blinding clarity, and realised that perhaps he had driven himself into a cul de sac.

  It is glorious here – frost and bright sunshine and the old disturbing sounds of wildfowl wings in the dusk that make me feel that I have forsworn a whole life that was perhaps the only possible one. I think we should not be taught to see beyond the limited worlds (islands?) into which each of us is born. I think my world was really that of birds and animals, and the realisation that it was a limited world, a stage on the journey, should not have made me want to leave it. I think I only understand people or love them when I see them translated into the terms of an unhappy animal species, with difficulties opposed to all their activities and aspirations. I know I’m an animal, and rather a messy one, but I can only like myself as that. If I have a soul it is perpetual and not subject to my endorsement or self-hatred; the best thing it does is to love other people and use me in complicated or uncomplicated ways to express it. And if that love is a placation for guilt, does it matter?

  I went for a walk in the woods today – all these thousands of birds, some going to roost, some feeding, some being killed by hawks – why should that Psuckah that died last week mean anything, or why should I stand miserably before one blackbird, sleek on a great festoon of berries, that I took to be glutted and stupefied and then realised was blinded and bleeding?

  Oh how much we need the fish the fox the toad and the larks to give us back what men take away.

  The London years had matured and deepened him, and also saddened him. Now they were exhausted. But ahead lay new horizon and a new career.

  TWELVE

  Writing man

  I have grown up, hand on the primal bone,

  Making the poem, taking the word from the stream,

  Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone.

  DOM MORAES, ‘Autobiography’, in A Beginning (1957)

  Increasingly it was now the pen rather than the paint-brush through which Gavin was to channel the flow of his creative energy. He never had any formal education in English literature, and by his own confession he had neither seen nor read any Shakespeare, and precious little else from the standard works had crossed his path – no Mi
lton, no Pope, no Jane Austen or even Charles Dickens. But at school he had learned to write lucidly and precisely, and with his mother’s encouragement during the protracted convalescence following his serious illness in late adolescence he had become impassioned by lyric poetry, especially romantic high Victorian.

  Writing had always come naturally to him, and even during the hurly-burly of the shark-fishing days he had found time to write at least two extended short stories and begun at least two novels, of which only fragments survive. In his apprentice period as a portrait painter he had read voraciously and haphazardly, and spent long evenings copying out his favourite passages from writers as wide-ranging as Thomas Mann and Kenneth Grahame, Descartes and T.E. Lawrence. From such eclectic studies he ingested many of the fundamentals of the prose writer’s art – rhythm, narrative pace, paragraph structure, diction and dialogue.

  Later, in London, he had taken to rereading the works of Evelyn Waugh, his favourite modern prose writer and the one who influenced him most, during lonely meals at the ‘dead cow house’ (as he called the cheap Cypriot restaurant near his studio at Olympia). From Waugh he learned a number of tricks of the trade – how to handle the semi-colon, for example, particularly in building up long extended sentences made up of layers of subordinate clauses; and how to enliven dull but necessary passages by writing them in blank verse disguised as prose, the regular beat of the subliminal iambic pentameter carrying the reader through with the minimum of effort. Conversely, he was to incorporate some of his early verse in the form of prose in his later books, a notable example being his description of the wild swans on Skye in Ring of Bright Water. But it was poetry that was Gavin’s first and last love, and he became excited by prose only when it came near to the domain of poetry, more especially the kind of poetry he himself preferred – romantic, introspective, melancholy, nature mystical. He had already acquired a taste for more recent poets such as Hopkins and Yeats, and under Kathleen Raine’s tutelage he began to renew his interest in the works of contemporary poets, including William Empson, Louis MacNeice, David Gascoyne and George Barker.