All questers are partly mad, but he was a knight on a quest who could not go the whole way – so in his Island Valley of Avalon he lived as a hermit not looking for God or revelation but seeking refuge from man, escaping the fear of death in a death-like solitude. In some ways he resembled Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence was a greater man, but he had the same element of romanticism. But Lawrence achieved a serenity which Gavin didn’t have time to achieve. Some people – who naturally did not become Gavin’s friends – saw none of this. I had an Irish friend who saw through Gavin, as she thought. She just saw this little man who was full of vanity, and she looked at me in pity. But she was not an artistic person and she could not see his creative virtues – or his essential nobility.
Gavin’s background was crucial. His class underwent a great trauma after two world wars. Their customary pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing now seem repugnant to the classless urban young. Part of Gavin’s awareness process was awakening to the loss and destruction of the environment. In his life there came a moment, he told me, when he shot a bird while he was out shooting and he looked at that bird and his consciousness took in the suffering of another creature. Then one day he was out shooting in the Iraq Marshes, he told me, and he realised this was not right, and that’s when he decided to protect nature and not destroy it. From then on he loved all wild creatures and was content to observe them without killing them.
Again, there was an undercurrent of great désarroi. From being an aristocrat, brought up in the oldest British traditions – land, farming, country pursuits – he had to back away from the class into which he was born. This is because he was essentially an outsider. He was not conventional landed gentry. He did not share their mindless traditions. So he felt not only an outsider as far as the aristocratic pack was concerned but superior to them as well. And in any case he felt excluded because of his sexuality and his financial status – he couldn’t afford to recreate the aristocratic milieu into which he was born on a book or two a year, or return their lavish hospitality.
As for his sexuality – he was a very loving person but he couldn’t really love women, even though they often longed for his love. His was a troubadour love – something that has now vanished from the permissive society of today. The Apostolic Church in which he was brought up taught that sex was hellfire and homosexuality was wicked. Much of the time he had to sublimate or repress his sexuality, and though he was very sensitive, kind and generous to his golden youths, they offered no long term solution to his problems and he was often in despair. Once he told me he got so desperate that he rang up four women he knew, telling himself that the first one who was in and answered the phone he would marry; but not one of them answered the phone, so he got drunk and pondered suicide instead.
Gavin grew restless under Constance’s shrewd and intensive – and adoring – probing. ‘Please realise I’m not as good or rare a product as you think,’ he advised her. He rejected her claims to intuitive understanding of his opaque psyche. ‘Solomon asked for powers in a particular sequence,’ he told her, ‘being wise enough to know that it is the only sequence! (1) Knowledge; (2) Wisdom; (3) Understanding – knowing that the last two are not attainable without the first. It has often struck me that the female of the species seems to think it possible to jump straight to the third without the work necessary to achieve the first! Intuitive understanding can only exist sporadically and is apt to fail one at critical moments.’
At the beginning of August, at Gavin’s invitation, Kathleen Raine visited Sandaig for the first time since the death of Mij, staying at Tormor as the guest of Mary MacLeod, a good friend despite the difference in the lives they led. Kathleen had been having a hard time during the last year or two, for with the loss of the house in Paultons Square she was virtually homeless, and almost penniless too, and her gift for poetry seemed to have deserted her. ‘I am terrified of my future,’ she wrote to Gavin before her visit, ‘when I stop walking on the tightrope and look down into the abyss all around. The thread is poetry – the only true guide I have ever had. It is that or nothing for me.’ The prospect of returning to her lost Paradise and the company of the man she still loved greatly revived her spirits, and she began writing poems again, sending the handwritten drafts to Gavin on an almost daily basis for his comments. But the excitement she felt about her visit was tempered by caution, the memory of past heartbreaks. ‘I want nothing but to avoid any further disasters either for myself or you,’ she wrote shortly before her arrival, ‘and don’t want to travel hundreds of miles just in order to cause or undergo one.’
Kathleen’s visit did not get off to the best start. At supper on the first evening she confessed in passing that a few years ago she had cursed Gavin on the rowan tree that stood outside the house. Gavin was aghast when he heard this, for part of him genuinely believed she possessed occult powers. He was still upset the next morning, and when his friends Eric and Marjorie Linklater and their two young sons arrived to picnic on a sandy slope overlooking the house, Gavin came over to talk to them about it, as Marjorie Linklater recalled:
Gavin emerged from the house, and walked across the sand and up the slope to where we sat. He seemed distraught. ‘I am having a terrible time,’ he told us. ‘Kathleen Raine is here. She wants me to marry her. Of course it is out of the question. The awful thing is, she has put a curse on me.’ He pointed towards the rowan tree but we couldn’t see it. ‘There she stood,’ he said, ‘and cursed me.’ He went on to talk about the potency of such a spell. He explained that she had special powers, that she was in fact a witch. We attempted to dispel such superstitious fears but Gavin left us soon, deep in gloom. Shortly after, another figure came out of the house. None of us had met Kathleen Raine, so we had no idea who this cheerful, friendly lady could be who now approached us. She was of course none other than Kathleen. Sitting on the sand and gladly accepting a share in our picnic she chattered away with the utmost cordiality and enthusiasm for Sandaig. We might have been having tea on the lawn of an English vicarage and she the vicar’s worthy wife. No word of conflict and certainly no reference to rowan trees.
The matter of the curse was quickly forgotten, however, swept aside by a more pressing emergency that overwhelmed the little community at Sandaig on the following day. For the second time in six months Edal fell seriously ill. The illness began with a septic tooth which led rapidly to an infection of the brain. ‘In twenty-four hours,’ Gavin wrote, ‘she became a mad, savage, half-paralysed but unapproachable creature, recognising no one, as dangerous as a wounded leopard yet to me as pathetic as a child mortally sick. I can still see her crazed head weaving in search of something to attack, her useless hindquarters dragging behind her before she would collapse in a twitching rigor.’
Gavin immediately arranged to have the tooth extracted by a vet in Inverness, eighty miles away. It was not an easy journey. After no more than a mile or two the crazed otter suddenly flew at Jimmy Watt’s hands, attacking them again and again with such ferocity that he would have suffered terrible injuries if he had not been wearing thick protective gloves. At the vets’ Edal seemed to take an intolerable time to lose consciousness in the improvised anaesthetic chamber into which she had been lowered, wailing all the time like a wounded hare, a cry Gavin found so piteous that his hands trembled and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. To make matters worse, the operation proved impossible to perform. Two vets working together on the limp animal on the operating table were unable to remove the septic molar, for it seemed the roots of the tooth were planted deep in the skull and were virtually immovable. Seeing her lying there with a mouth full of blood and her fur fouled with excreta, Gavin felt there was little chance that Edal could recover.
No sooner had Edal been brought back to Sandaig than a violent quarrel broke out between Gavin and Kathleen. When she first came down to the house from Tormor there had been a reconciliation of sorts between them. ‘We will never doubt one another again,’ he told her as he walked her to the bridge ove
r the burn. ‘Never, never.’
‘Never, never,’ Kathleen had replied.
Yet almost immediately they quarrelled again, as bitterly and explosively as before. Mary MacLeod was the unwilling witness. Gavin had asked Kathleen to come for a week, she said, but Kathleen seemed to have formed the idea she would stay indefinitely, which did not please Gavin, who had other guests to look after and was in any case deeply preoccupied with Edal’s fight for life and sanity. Mary MacLeod wrote to a friend:
On Sunday night Kathleen went down to Sandaig to cook supper for Gavin and Jimmy. As they had just got back with Edal from the vets in Inverness, I felt she would be a nuisance if she went. I pleaded with her not to go down but she wouldn’t listen to me – she must help Gavin. She came back in tears – she wasn’t going to see, speak or write to Gavin ever again. He had been monstrous to her and she was going in the morning. Of course she didn’t go, expecting him to send for her. On Tuesday when I rang him to ask about Edal he said they had had a dreadful row. She blamed him for her having to leave Paultons Square and kept rubbing this in until in desperation he told her she could have Paultons Square back if it meant so much to her. Then of course she didn’t want it. He told her there wasn’t any point in them meeting again as they couldn’t meet without fighting. She stayed on hoping he would send for her and in the end he wrote her a note.
The note was blunt (and in its draft form covered in a mosaic of demented doodles). Gavin told Kathleen:
I feel that as things are in this house you would be doing the best for all of us by going on to Canna. I think we must recognise that we cannot be here together without friction and that the experiment was in fact a mistake. My own mind is much preoccupied just now and I have already said all that I can say. I am very sorry that your visit has not ended more happily, but I really do think it should end now …
Edal is still alive but the chances are less than slender. Don’t judge my frailties too ruthlessly. If I were a greater man I should have more patience with yours, but I have yours to put up with as well …
Gavin’s note was a shock for Kathleen. ‘For once she didn’t even cry,’ Mary MacLeod recorded, ‘but I was heart-sore for her. Day and night I had to listen to her side of it – then to Gavin’s when I phoned about Edal. I’m terribly sorry for them both, but Gavin should never have asked her to come up, as he knows how funny she can be.’
Eventually, after offering a prayer for Edal, Kathleen left Sandaig, never to return. But she was not utterly downcast, and from London she wrote to Mary MacLeod on 13 August: ‘I am still glad I came in spite of all, and feel that now the haunting grief of the last two years is over. There are otters again at Sandaig and the burn flows on and Sgriol still stands in its loneliness and peace, and all else seems petty and momentary in comparison. Grief in excess can be an indulgence of selfishness, as I now see, and I shall put grief from me from now on.’
Not long afterwards she wrote a farewell poem, entitled ‘Envoi’.
What has want to give plenty but knowledge of its own riches untold?
I found you wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,
And lent you, for a while, the golden kingdom I in you beheld.
Meanwhile, Gavin’s worst fears over Edal seemed realised. The poor creature now appeared wholly mad. She stumbled out into the garden and toppled over on her side, kicking and twitching as if in her death convulsions. Then she dragged herself into the sitting room, where she sat on a chair, screaming and gnashing her teeth at the least sign of movement in the room. Gavin was all for putting her out of her misery. He telephoned the London Zoo pathologist, Oliver Jones, for a second opinion; assessing the situation as best he could at a distance of six hundred miles from the patient, Jones suggested the best thing might be to shoot Edal at once. When he heard this Gavin telephoned me at Paultons Square and asked me to send his gun up to him by the fastest possible means. Shortly afterwards, somewhere in the house at Sandaig, he found a pistol and a single round of ammunition. It was at this point that he got in touch with Donald MacLennan, the young local vet – ‘local’ by West Highland standards, for he had to travel fifty miles by road and ferry from Broadford on Skye to get to Sandaig.
This was the first time MacLennan had encountered Gavin and his otters. ‘He was absolutely fantastic – not just with otters but with all animals,’ MacLennan recalled. ‘He seemed to me to have this extra sense. He spoke to them in a language unintelligible to me. He was definitely a most remarkable man. But a strange man. He could be very difficult. He was the kind of man anyone could have fallen out with very easily. And I would say he was an unhappy man. One would think from what he was doing, from the tremendous pleasure he was getting from it, that his life at Sandaig should have been wonderful. But he was not happy in himself.’
MacLennan felt there was the faintest chance that massive injections of antibiotics (2 cc of chloromycetin) over a five-day period might bring Edal round. If it failed, she would pass into a coma and quietly die. It was a chance worth taking.
It was not easy to inject such an animal, even in her pitiable condition, and the operation was fraught with great physical danger. Only by binding Edal to a chair at three points was it possible to get near her with a hypodermic, and even then she would lash her body like a wounded snake. On 12 August Gavin noted in his diary: ‘Last injection, thank God … Edal little changed.’
A few days later Gavin’s brother Eustace arrived to make a film about Sandaig and the ring of bright water (a film, alas, now lost). For the fortnight he was there Edal lay lethargic and wasting away in her room, her star role in the film taken over by her ebullient understudy, Teko, who laughed and clowned and dived and swam with irrepressible gusto in front of the camera. On the day the film was finished Gavin detected the first definite sign of improvement in Edal. When he went into her room he found her curled up on her bed in the corner with only her head protruding from the blankets, and he sensed there was something different in her appearance. As he approached her, Edal gave him a whimper of recognition and affection, and he knew that mentally at least she was now back to normal.
But her recovery was a lengthy process. When a BBC television camera team (under Alasdair Milne, future Director-General of the BBC) arrived on 12 September to shoot a short film about Gavin and his life with otters, it was again Teko who stole the show, while Edal remained confined to her quarters, still partly paralysed, and subsisting on a scanty fare of omelettes and rice. For Milne, the assignment at Sandaig was ‘unforgettable’. So it was for his cockney cameraman Slim Hewitt, whose smart city shoes proved no match for Sandaig’s bogs, and his ankles no match for Teko, who ‘relentlessly pursued him for two days’, Milne recalled, ‘nipping his ankles and chirruping with delight’.
TWENTY-THREE
Ring of Bright Water
When one finds a natural style, one is amazed and delighted, for where one expected to find an author, one discovers a man.
BLAISE PASCAL, Pensées
The same day that Alasdair Milne and his BBC crew turned up at Sandaig, Ring of Bright Water was published. Gavin’s Sandaig diary makes absolutely no mention of the fact. Indeed, he gives the impression that the publication of the book that was to transform his life was a matter of no consequence whatsoever – as, at that moment, far away in Sandaig, it may not have been.
Within a week or so of receiving the manuscript of Ring, Gavin’s publishers had begun to develop their initial thinking on how to handle it. That they had a bestseller on their hands they had no doubt. George Hardinge, the editor at Longmans originally responsible for grooming Ring for bestsellerdom, asked Mark Longman: ‘What would you like done about Ring of Bright Water? You told me you thought it wonderfully good … perfect as it stands. This looks like being a case where we ought to decide on an initial printing of fifteen or twenty thousand and really try to put Gavin on the map.’ Mark Longman agreed, and eventually put up the first print order to twenty-five thousand, and decide
d to mastermind the publication and promotion of the book himself. The picture content, it was decided, should be lavish, and in addition to Gavin’s photographs, taken over a period of years, there were thirty-seven drawings by Peter Scott and others by Michael Ayrton, Robin and John McEwen and Gavin himself.
By the last week of May Gavin was correcting the proofs and feeling pleased with the book. A fortnight later a proof copy caught the eye of Michael Powell, one of Britain’s most eminent and innovative film makers, whose films included such classics as A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes.
Michael Powell had read and admired all Gavin Maxwell’s previous books, and considered him an author of great talent. But it was not until he read Ring of Bright Water that he felt impelled to make a film based on one of Gavin’s books. The subject appealed to him at once. ‘This was the story,’ he explained to me some years later, ‘of a man who escaped to a kind of desert island in order to try and get away from himself. Impossible, I know – but that’s the point, surely. I think he really did believe he had found what you call Avalon. Of course he did. And besides this, he was a real artist.’ Powell wrote to Gavin to offer a film option on the book straight away, and shortly afterwards met him and Edal at Paultons Square. ‘He had a very bad temper,’ Powell recalled, ‘and flew off the handle at almost any question or remark I made. I didn’t mind. I liked that. As a matter of fact, I liked him. I thought, “Well, you’re going to be a bastard to work with if you’re going to be alongside me all the time.” But I’d handled difficult people before.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 37