Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Before leaving Morocco Gavin made one last excursion into the interior mountains – the snow-tipped Moyen Atlas this time – in the company of a friend, the French hotelier André Deschasseaux. From Marrakesh on 11 April he sent an enthusiastic report:

  Have just returned from a too brief, wonderful, exhausting but in general FINE excursion – 150 miles from here by road, then seventy miles by piste, and arrived with André at his tiny sawmill, looking like a match box in the mountains – Moyen Atlas, and quite different – pine forests and gigantic chasms, and a great roaring river – all much more like Colorado than Morocco. The sawmills are closed, but there is a mad almost illiterate Spaniard who acts as guardian, in the only building there is, a little wooden shack of two rooms so like a Wild West film one could hardly believe it wasn’t a scenario [sic]. In the morning we took mules and went for eleven hours – right round the other side (precipice) of the Cathedral Rock and up the gorge. Stopped in two sub-villages with the result that when we got back at night I was confronted for the first time this year with a surgery – blood poisoning, dysentery, syphilis, gonorrhea, the lot, but especially syphilis in all its stages. I did what I could and shall never know how many people I killed. One man had had clap for two years – can you imagine the state? (He had also infected his goats, apparently.) Anyway, I don’t think I have ever, anywhere, found anywhere so beautiful or so strange. A huge troop of Barbary apes inhabit a nearby cliff. When André last cut wood there they all lined up to watch, absorbed, for five hours. André fully expects the apes to start exploiting timber themselves now.

  On 18 April Gavin sailed from Casablanca for Southampton. Before he embarked he wrote one last letter from Morocco, to Jimmy Watt, giving expression to his anxieties about what he would find at Sandaig when he returned and how he would manage after so many changes. How were the otters now they had been locked up, and how did they react to Lavinia? Were Mossy and Monday really tame, and had they ever seen water? Where was he going to work, given the noise and lack of space?

  It seems to me I’ve got one hell of a lot of writing to do between now and the end of the year, and I can’t see where or how (respectively shortage of space and noise). It would be awful to have to go to London to work. Do you think I should work on the Polar Star? – or where?

  Our household seems to have magnified so many times that I wonder whether I’ll ever have a chance to talk to anybody ever again. Don’t forget you’re the GRAND VIZIER in the North … Whatever wonderful things have been gained by marriage (and they’re lots), one loses a lot, and fears to lose more – if you see what I mean – well you can imagine it.

  See you very soon – a star on the horizon.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Break-up

  There is a relation between the tongue and the harpoon. Both can inflict grievous wounds. The cut of the lance heals, the cut of the tongue rots.

  ROALD AMUNDSEN

  Early in May Gavin returned to Sandaig and was reunited with his wife of three months and with the rest of his complex and demanding household. He soon found that his anxieties about living and working in a restructured Sandaig were well-founded. It was now a far cry from the simple reclusive sanctuary that he had portrayed so lyrically in Ring of Bright Water.

  The pressure on him was greatly exacerbated by the intense shortage of space at Sandaig and the primitiveness of its amenities (there were as yet no bathroom or toilet, and the burn or the waterfall had to serve for both). The house was small, only two rooms upstairs and two rooms down, and into this had to be squeezed not only Gavin and Lavinia, but Terry Nutkins and (during the summer holidays) Lavinia’s two sons and any friends and acquaintances who might come to stay. For a short while Gavin and Lavinia were able to sleep in the relative privacy of the small, one-roomed croft across the field, which Raef Payne had been renovating over the last few years as his pied-à-terre in the Highlands. Raef had lent them the croft in his absence, and Gavin had moved in the huge mahogany double bed honeycombed with drawers he called the Admiral’s bed, which Lavinia found as hard as a sarcophagus. But when Raef came up for the summer the couple had to move back to the main house again; and though Jimmy Watt, had moved out into the wooden annexe with Edal, Edal’s old room was now occupied by the two new otters, Mossy and Monday, and an enormous deerhound called Dirk had added to the general confusion and lack of space.

  Gavin had always hated to be alone for more than a day or two, but he now lurched to the opposite extreme, and instead of unbearable solitude he was confronted with insufferable overcrowding. The tumult of Sandaig’s little community threatened not only to torpedo the pursuit of his professional career as a writer but to destabilise his personal, interior existence as well. A typical moment of Sandaig life at about that time is encapsulated in a letter I wrote to my fiancée in London during a visit:

  Outside – sea still, sky blue, sun shining, Skye looming, five boats on the shore. Inside – four otters and a five-foot-long dog asleep on the sofa, Brubeck on the gramophone, three-foot log in the grate, and me drinking one of Gavin’s half-gallon measures of Teachers whisky amidst flamingo wings and albatross skins, Arab flutes and shark harpoons, fish baskets, old boots and even older cheeses hanging from the rafters of this fantastic house. Gavin is cooking pheasant in the kitchen and has just spilt all the pheasant soup on the floor. Lavinia is holding forth at length about the Almoravides of medieval Morocco. Terry has just turned up with a friend called Herb something-or-other, a writer, with utterly bald head, one eye and black beard. Jimmy has rolled up and a huge otter has burst in with a noise like – the simile fails me! Sandaig is impossible to work in. The establishment itself takes up too much time (food, water, wood, fire, otters, supplies, repairs, developments). Gavin wastes – time, nervous energy, equipment, money. The amount of money poured in here is fantastic. Lights and heaters are left on all day – for tax reasons, Gavin confides conspiratorially – and some have been on for three weeks non-stop. Articles ruined by neglect (from Jeeps and lenses to buckets and doormats). Generosity of spirit and pocket will ruin him, but he is one of the most remarkable men I know. G. and L. look well together and I hope it works OK for them.

  When Lavinia first took up what was intended to be permanent residence at Sandaig she felt very much the new girl of the household. Above her in seniority stood Gavin, Jimmy, Terry, and even Edal and Teko – all of them old hands about the place. She was also only too aware that she was a woman trying to fit into a long-standing bachelor establishment. For their part, Terry and Jimmy were delighted to have a woman about the house, someone who could care for them as a mother would. But the demands made on her were considerable. At a purely practical level, there was a prodigious amount of housekeeping to be done. During the holiday months six or seven people slept in the house and it was rare that less than eight people sat down to dinner in the evening. Meanwhile a host of day visitors continued to pour down the hill to the tiny house – Lavinia counted twenty-four on one occasion – and all of them had to be looked after and entertained. ‘I am flat out all day long,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘Constant chores and constant clearing up behind the chaps who are in and out of the house all day long. Everything that goes on Gavin wants to relay back to me and discuss. But that side of life has been for me very happy and full.’

  ‘For the first two or three weeks all went marvellously well,’ Lavinia wrote. ‘We were extremely friendly, everyone appeared happy, myself certainly, and Gavin appeared so too, and in his most expansive and affectionate moods told me so in no mean terms. He told me several times during that time how peaceful he felt, like never before. He told me over and over that we were going to be married for a very long time and that he loved me more than he had loved any other woman and he could never have married anyone but me.’

  Inevitably, the closer Lavinia got to Gavin the more clearly she was able to see the conflicting elements of his contradictory personality:

  Gavin’s actual brainpower was a very splendid thin
g which was streets ahead of mine – one could only admire and envy. But he was a huge exaggerator and had a vivid and rapid working imagination about all things; and he was very impetuous, and so swept along by his ideas and so absorbed with the moment that he would pick up a phone or run to the nearest sympathetic ear at any time of the day or night.

  I think he was really a loner who needed the stimulus of other people – he was a great conversationalist, he loved to talk, and he was a wonderful companion. But you could talk happily for hours with him and then unwittingly say something and the fat was in the fire and he would explode – he had a very deep insecurity. So then he would start talking about betrayal. There didn’t have to be any real grounds for the treachery he suspected – with his vivid imagination he could make them up, and did – huge clouds out of nothing, and the bigger the cloud the bigger the depression.

  Sandaig life, meanwhile, bumped along in its usual disaster-ridden fashion – what Gavin called its ‘general aura of crisis’. At one time or another the kitchen caught fire; the fridge broke down and the food went rotten; the Polar Star flooded almost to bunk level; Teko somehow suffered a terrible wound in his paddock (but recovered); Dirk, the gigantic deerhound, broke a leg in a rabbit hole (and also recovered); and a band of itinerant rats, attracted by the rubbish pits that had been dug in the sand dunes to the rear of the house, invaded first the environs and then the house itself. Far worse, Gavin and Lavinia’s marriage came under such a strain that before the long summer was through it had entered a prolonged phase of crisis.

  ‘Now I know that his pendulum swings in an even wider arc than mine,’ Lavinia wrote at this time, ‘and I take this into account in both the best and worst things he says to me; and that applies in everything he does, or says about anybody, or to anybody about anything else, good and bad. For Gavin I have worried because he says he doesn’t sleep very well – and he drinks far too much – he says he can’t get through the problems of the day without it. The trouble is that with whisky inside him his mood can either be super-sentimental or super-aggressive – and Gavin WORRIES SO much more than do most of us and builds fantasies which don’t fade away with the sane light of day.’

  Gradually, as the weeks passed by and the pressures piled on to the marriage one by one, the early euphoria began to vanish like a will-o’-the-wisp. One source of pressure was Gavin’s desire to father a child. ‘One of the reasons that I hoped so much to start a baby early on,’ Lavinia wrote, ‘was that it would give him a release from a sexual life with a woman to which he was not accustomed – something to occupy me, so that he could go abroad about his business, leaving me to get on with the job of producing a cub for him. But there again, I, the Perfect Woman, had let him down by not conceiving … One day he told me quite solemnly that he had slept with me 111 times, because he had kept count! I worked this out to mean: Oh what a clever man am I – I’ve done my bit and if you haven’t conceived it’s not my fault.’

  But it was the problem of Gavin’s writing that proved the acutest source of friction. Though he was reviewing for the Observer, he had not written a word of any book since he finished Ring of Bright Water over two and a half years previously. The wealth that had been generated by his bestseller had for a while obviated his need to write for a living, and as Michael Powell had observed, Gavin had grown ‘rich and lazy’. But so prodigious had been his spending during that period of bounty that he had been forced to contract with Longmans to produce a sequel to Ring. This book – to which he was to give the title The Rocks Remain – was due to be delivered in December 1962, and as the summer wore on and the deadline drew inexorably nearer and not a word was set down on paper, Gavin grew increasingly frustrated and irritable.

  He was suffering from classic writer’s block. One reason was that he had simply got out of the habit – the regular daily routine of writing. Another was that everything he had ever wanted to say about Camusfeàrna he had already said in Ring, so that for its sequel he was left with nothing but crumbs. Yet another reason was that it was practically impossible to find the peace and seclusion in which to write at Sandaig. ‘Gavin’s office was like Piccadilly Circus,’ Terry Nutkins recalled. ‘The phone never stopped ringing. He not only had his own complex mind to deal with, but all the other pressures as well, like editors’ demands for overdue book reviews and so on.’

  But these were not the reasons which Gavin gave for his inability to write. In his view his writer’s block was entirely due to Lavinia; as marital tension mounted and scenes and rows multiplied, Gavin became increasingly convinced that the only way to break his block would be to end his marriage. Lavinia wrote to a friend in London:

  I think just as much to blame is the pressure, not from me (marriage), but from this cracky set-up which has become such a burden on his shoulders ever since Ring of Bright Water brought him so much fame and money. He simply is not capable of running around with this large gang on his shoulders. But I am frightened that marriage (me) will become the scapegoat in his mind, in which case he will retreat further and further from it, however much one part of him may want to make it succeed. I take him to be saying in all ways ‘I am finding my way back to where I was before I was married – which to me is the most comfortable and productive state for living and working.’

  After only four months the marriage was drifting dangerously towards the reef. Gavin’s emotions, Lavinia came to realise, were those of an adolescent, their full development arrested somewhere deep in his distant past. She realised, too, that he feared the give and take of an adult relationship, however elastic and unconventional, and was increasingly resentful of the demands such a relationship made on him.

  ‘With his curious adolescent emotions,’ Lavinia was to write, ‘he built me up into a sort of goddess creature, who would not frighten him or smother him or put pressure on him, or show ordinary female emotions, of which he is dead scared … and as soon as that happens, he retreats, back to the wall and even further, and begins to fear and hate and feel persecuted – and he must in some way destroy at all costs.’

  Gavin was a possessive man, Lavinia perceived, and he had grown jealous of the easy, friendly relationship she had developed with Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins, and with the young otters, Mossy and Monday. But the deterioration in their relationship was not entirely a one-way business. Lavinia was a gentle person on the whole, but she could be very strong-willed when she chose, admitting to a friend: ‘I am perfectly aware that I can be very hot-tempered and stormy if roused.’

  With everyone living in such close proximity in that tiny house, Jimmy and Terry were reluctant witnesses of the growing marital discord. ‘I liked Lavinia very much,’ Terry remembered:

  and she was certainly very good to me. Gavin desperately wanted to become involved with Lavinia but he just couldn’t cope – perhaps he just felt she encroached too much on his life. There were rows, but it was Gavin who mostly had the tantrums. There were many days when he would sink to the depths of depression and gloom for no apparent reason that I could see; and he would lock himself away in his room, come out to pick up a book and help himself to a whisky, and then go back and slam the door again. There were other days when he was a perfect gentleman, a perfectly charming, normal man, a contented sort of character, so very pleasant and polite, making jokes and reading out funny things from the papers. He had to be handled with kid gloves. You could say the wrong thing very easily.

  By June Lavinia had grown so anxious about the state of the marriage that she had confided her fears to Jimmy, and when she and Gavin went to stay at Monreith for a few days she had a long talk with the Maxwell family’s local doctor, Gavin Brown, a close friend of Gavin and Aymer, to whom she wrote later: ‘I was worrying then as to whether in fact Gavin could cope with marriage; in fiction, in his dreams, yes – but he fooled himself, and he fooled me too. He thought I was trying to change him, whereas I thought he had reached a point of wanting to add something wider to his life by sharing it and his home with an
adult and a woman … neither of which he has ever had to do in his life before. But inevitably tensions have arisen in both of us, and both of us have exploded or reacted against each other each in our own way.’

  Gavin was away from Sandaig on Lavinia’s birthday at the end of June, but did his best to try and staunch the breach. ‘Darling Mrs M.,’ he wrote, ‘I miss you and wish we could spend it together wet or fine. I’m such a bloody awkward and prickly hedgehog that sometimes I may make you forget that you are the centre of my life and I pray that you’ll always be so and always be as happy as it’s in my power to make you.’

  But by early August the crisis had reached an acute stage, and the strain was apparent even to casual visitors. When Eric and Marjorie Linklater came to lunch at about this time they were dismayed by the rigours of Lavinia’s everyday life – she even had to wash the sheets in the burn. ‘As we climbed the hill after saying goodbye,’ Marjorie Linklater recalled, ‘Eric and I turned for a last, glimpse of the house serenely bathed in the light of the westering sun. “How sad,” I said. “Wendy and the Lost Boys.’” Shortly afterwards, overwhelmed by the conflicts that raged within his marriage and within himself, Gavin suffered some kind of nervous collapse and for several days lay prostrate in bed in a profoundly withdrawn and depressive state. When he was fit enough he took himself off for a short convalescence in London and Monreith, advising Lavinia before he departed that in his opinion she should seek psychiatric help, and perhaps even undergo a course of psychoanalysis, in which he had an inalienable faith.

  While Gavin was away, Lavinia confided her innermost anxieties in a series of eloquent and anguished letters written in blood and tears to her physician-cum-confessor in London, Rosamond Bischoff, a gynaecologist and marriage counsellor: