Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Mossy and Monday had tasted freedom – the sea, the islands, the white sands and the rock pools, the whole wild world that was their natural kingdom – and they would have no more of prison. Fearful that the partly tame otters would be killed by the first human being they approached, Gavin was at first reluctant to release them, and it took three weeks to convince him that their continuing imprisonment was crueller than any death they might meet in freedom.

  So he let them go, and they took up residence under the floor of the new wing, indifferent to the human bedlam above their heads. And there, free to come and go, but reluctant to totally sever their ties with human kind, they remained.

  The liberation of Mossy and Monday restored to Camusfeàrna something that had been lost for many months. ‘Once again these were wild creatures free without fear of man and choosing to make their homes with him,’ Gavin recorded. As if to reinforce the mood, two of the wild geese returned after an absence of seven months, one of them a great gander that on the very day of his arrival came straight up to Gavin to take food from his hands.

  In this quiet mood of oneness and benediction, Gavin wrote Lavinia a letter of new-found affection and humility on the eve of their first wedding anniversary:

  Lovely Dog,

  The clock’s gone round once, and I think the most worthwhile thing I can say is THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for changing, quite suddenly, a sort of despairing grey unreality into purpose and hope again. Until after your return to London I lived in a weird twilight which, like the haywire winter, was half nightmare because I had lost my bearings and myself; spiritus mundi forgive me, and you must too, if I had produced the same state in you by my shortcomings. God knows they are many, many. The credit for new hope, and for the fact that I have suddenly found myself able to work again is all yours. You are a LOVELY DOG and no matter where the future leads I’ll go on thinking that, and wishing that life had seen fit to give you for a husband a less complicated box of tricks than myself.

  Thank God neither of us burned boats or pulled up roots in our difficulties. We are going to do our best … Bless you, my darling Lavinia, and believe me that I would be a different and a better husband to you if I could be – everything that makes one what one is at the age of forty-eight happened such a terribly long time ago.

  My love and admiration.

  Lizard

  Gavin now devoted himself single-mindedly to completing the book which he hoped was to be his financial salvation. He worked feverishly and for long hours in his study-bedroom amid a thick fug of cigarette smoke, dictating much of the narrative into a tape-recorder for his typist in London to transcribe. The result was a hasty, scruffy, agitated manuscript, part handwritten, part heavily-corrected typed transcripts, the whole spliced together with frequent resort to scissors and tape.

  In the middle of February, at the height of this frantic literary activity, I arrived at Sandaig at Gavin’s invitation, to be greeted with noisy and ecstatic bonhomie by my old otter friend Teko, now permanently confined behind the palisade of his zoo-like stockade. It was my first visit to Sandaig for nearly two years, and the place had changed greatly since the days of the haywire winter. The way down to the house from the road was no longer by foot along the narrow track that wound over the moorland, but by Jeep along an alarmingly rough and precipitous road that had been blasted out of the hillside above the shore. An entire new wing constructed of sectional wooden frames had been erected since my last visit, and this provided the occupants of the house with the luxury of a flush loo and a hot bath and shower, along with a workshop and storage lobby. Terry’s old room upstairs had been converted into a proper bedroom for Lavinia, who was also visiting, and brass-bound portholes (salvaged from the old Royal Navy battleship HMS Vanguard when she was broken up) had been let into the walls of the upstairs rooms, providing views towards the burn in one direction and out over the islands and the sea in the other. The old beachcomber furniture of Sandaig’s early years – the Dakota aeroplane seat and converted whaling barrel – had been replaced by elegant armchairs, and the tiny kitchen was now all-electric.

  But the new amenities had been acquired at a price, and the secluded, unworldly charm of the old Camusfeàrna had gone for ever. In its place sprawled an unsightly pioneer outpost – all wooden shacks, palisaded enclosures, half-sunken swimming pools, broken-down Jeeps, discarded tackle, rusting machinery, upturned boats, churned-up wheeltracks, pylons and cables, mud and mess. When I commented on the change, Gavin explained:

  In the old days at Sandaig I was very much an unknown writer. I had few commitments, and I could live a simple life up here. But no simple life is really very simple, is it? In the days when this was a primitive place to live and I was almost entirely self-supporting, the practical problems of existence – drawing water, cutting wood, cooking, foraging, beachcombing and so on – kept me busy from the moment I got up in the morning to the moment I went to bed at night. But this kind of life was out of the question as soon as Sandaig became my full-time home, with otters to be looked after and long hours of writing to be done now that I was a well-known writer and in demand. So a sort of spiralling empire-building process began, and inevitably, as soon as I got married and acquired two stepchildren, this process escalated. As a general principle, I think that the moment one ceases to be a nomad and settles in one place, one is subject to an ambitious and overwhelming desire to change the face of the place one is living in in some way.

  My visit was not entirely a social one. Gavin had decided to establish a film unit at Sandaig and make films about the Camusfeàrna story instead of writing books about it. He had already bought a camera and wanted me to give Jimmy Watt a crash course in the art of documentary film-making, so the hours of daylight were entirely devoted to shooting a short training film. Gavin and Lavinia (who had arrived at Sandaig a day or two after me) played the leading roles, Jimmy operated the camera, and walk-on parts were played by Dirk, the giant deerhound, the surviving greylag geese and the half-wild otter cubs, Mossy and Monday. The set was Camusfeàrna, the ice-rimmed ring of the burn, the shell-sand beaches, the cinemascope sunsets flaring crimson over the bay and the whitened hills of Skye. So the days passed happily in purposeful and often hilarious endeavour. The evenings were spent in good cheer with a whisky or two before the roaring fire, and the conversation and laughter flowed about the bewintered house. To me Gavin and Lavinia looked right together, and I never doubted that they would continue to do so.

  All went so well that Lavinia stayed on longer at Sandaig than the week or so she had originally intended, taking upon herself once again such care as the otter cubs chose to accept from her. Though they came to take food from her hand in the morning and before dusk, she did not know where they went after dark until one night she followed them. Gavin wrote:

  It was a season of bitter cold; the days were for the most part still and bright with winter sunshine, but the nights were arctic, and the burn was frozen right down into its tidal reaches … A little before dusk one evening Lavinia, who had been down to the burn to break the ice and draw water, heard them calling to each other at some little distance from the house. Following Monday’s small, urgent voice, she came upon them playing in a partly frozen pool, shooting under stretches of ice, and bobbing up where it ended, climbing on to it and rolling upon it, diving back and splashing as they sported together. Fearing that they would resent her intrusion, Lavinia had approached them by stealth, crawling upon all fours; only when they began to move on down the stream did she stand up and call to them, but they found in her presence no cause for any alarm. As they neared the tide she walked beside them, their heads now no more than silhouettes on a sea blanched by sunset colours, until suddenly a curlew rose before them with its rasping cry of warning, and in a panic they turned and raced back upstream and into darkness. The next night again she followed them down the burn in the dusk, and lost them in the thickening darkness as they swam out towards the islands.

  It was n
ot until 23 February that Lavinia finally left Sandaig, taking with her the completed manuscript of The Rocks Remain, which Gavin had written in less than a month. He himself came south on 3 March, leaving Jimmy Watt alone and in sole charge of the Sandaig establishment.

  Gavin was due to sail to Morocco on 9 March, and on his last evening in London he informed Lavinia out of the blue that he did not wish her to set foot at Sandaig again, except during her sons’ holidays. He said he could not work when she was there, and wished to live his own life and have his friends there when he liked. They quarrelled, Gavin cancelled his sailing, then flew to Africa on 13 March. The marriage was to all intents and purposes dead.

  Gavin was in Morocco for a month, his marriage seemingly behind him, and was based mostly at a small country inn run by his French friend André Deschasseaux and his wife at Asni, an oasis of greenery on the slopes of the High Atlas to the south of Marrakesh. Much of his time was spent in intrigue of one sort or another with officials of various kinds – the Minister of Defence, the Governor of Marrakesh, the Glaoui’s former secretary, the American Embassy and the American Cultural Mission – partly to further his researches for his book about the Lords of the Atlas, partly to find employment for his young Berber friend Ahmed, who had now returned to Morocco from Europe in circumstances as mysterious as those in which he had left it. With his marriage apparently over, Gavin was back in his element, leading a life that suited him in a land that was sympathetic to him, and driving his new Mercedes roadster (an identical replacement for the one that had been destroyed in Mallorca) at fantastic speeds on the Moroccan roads – up to 145 miles per hour at times, and averaging nearly 98 miles per hour from Marrakesh to Mogador. Though he was still writing to Lavinia as if nothing had happened between them, his letters avoided all reference to their relationship. ‘Trouble about running with hares and hunting with hounds,’ he wrote excitedly on 20 March, ‘is that one is suspect by all parties. My association with Moroccans and Margaret Pope makes the U.S. think I’m a V.A.R. spy, and my association with French and Americans makes Moroccans think I’m a reactionary colonial spy. Gawd awmighty have I stood the American Embassy attachés some drinks and things today. And Gawd, how well I know that hard marble-eyed look of distrust that comes quite suddenly and chills one just when one thinks trust is established.’

  On 5 April Jimmy Watt arrived in Marrakesh to help Gavin drive the Mercedes back to England overland. They arrived in London at Easter and left almost immediately for the north. When Lavinia brought her children up to Sandaig for the Easter holidays, Gavin reiterated his ban on her setting foot in the place, and she left, never to return. Her mother was so outraged that on 28 April she wrote to him: ‘I thought your ukase to Lavinia that she should not return to Sandaig was quite the most insulting thing I have ever heard. It is the sort of order you might give to a temporary cook, or that an Oriental Pasha might give to his mistress … Before I knew you, I had heard that you had the reputation of periodically quarrelling with both friends and neighbours. I wonder if you are inclined to make Lavinia a scapegoat for your own shortcomings?’

  A week later Gavin and Lavinia had one last violent row at Paultons Square. ‘The next morning he vanished,’ Lavinia reported, ‘and went into hiding (persecution mania – he thinks I pant round London looking for him); I then got messages from various friends whom he’d been in touch with, first to say he wanted a separation, then that he’d been to lawyers, talking about divorce, injunctions and God knows what else.’ In fact Gavin was hiding with his friends the pianist Louis Kentner and his wife, a sister of Yehudi Menuhin, who lived nearby. He had also sought help from his psychiatrist, Dr Ellis Stungo, for the death throes of his marriage left him in a state of intense stress.

  By this time I was far removed from the scene of the disaster. Travelling through Siberia as a special correspondent for the BBC, I was virtually incommunicado. But in a letter written from Sandaig on 5 May Jimmy Watt provided a brief profile of Gavin’s state of mind and point of view at this unhappy time: ‘Of Gavin, things arc not happy at the moment. He is in London somewhere. I wish he was up here where maybe I could help. I feel it is too much for Gavin and he cannot continue coping with it. Being who he is, he is more susceptible to mental upheaval than others.’

  Gavin and Lavinia had been married at this point for one year, three months and six days. During that time they had never spent more than three weeks at a stretch in each other’s company.

  Towards the end of June both sides made approaches to their lawyers. When Gavin tried to reassure his stepsons that nothing was changed between him and them, in spite of his separation from their mother, Lavinia’s father would have none of it. He wanted a total break, as he wrote to Gavin on 15 July:

  You want the best of both worlds. You are determined to rid yourself of your wife, whom you ought never to have married, as Nature didn’t intend men of your temperament for matrimony; especially when that temperament is, as in your case, tinctured with genius. The biographies of literary figures afford abundant evidence of this, and of their tendency to exasperate to frenzy the unfortunate individuals of both sexes with whom they have closely associated. You are making against your wife preposterous charges of ‘insanity’ and ‘wanton inhumanity’, which, to all who know her (which you don’t) suggests doubts of your own sanity.

  Simultaneously, you expect to maintain with her two sons a close and intimate relationship. The sooner you get into your head that such a relationship is now impossible and stop pontificating about their present or their future (which are no concern of yours whatsoever) the better. To suggest that either of the boys should go to Sandaig when you have shut the door on their mother seems to me incredible behaviour.

  And that was that. When Elias Canetti informed Kathleen Raine that Gavin’s marriage was over, she said: ‘God is not merciful but he is just.’ To an old school friend Gavin wrote bitterly (choosing Italian to render emotions that were too raw for his native tongue): ‘Siamo finito la mia moglie ed io. Che confusione, che dolore! E ormai basta, ma basta per una vita.’ (‘We are finished, my wife and I. What chaos, what pain! And that’s enough – but enough – for one life!’) Ahead there lay nothing but the anguish and bitterness of divorce.

  Looking back, there is no doubt that Lavinia had loved Gavin with great respect and devotion, in full knowledge of his complex character, and that she had done all she could to make their strange alliance a valid and lasting one. It is equally clear that Gavin, too, had loved Lavinia in his way, and had tried as best he could to adapt to the unfamiliar and alien habitat of married life. Later he was to ascribe the failure of the marriage to ‘incompatibility’. In reality, it failed not because Lavinia was who she was, or even because she was the sex she was, but because she was an adult human being – a species with which Gavin had never been able to associate at close quarters for long. ‘He never grew up,’ Lavinia was to remark years afterwards. ‘Intellectually he was like Sophocles. But emotionally he was like Peter Pan. He had no idea how to cope with the idea of being loved. It was very sad, the destruction of a very real friendship of many years’ standing. But I don’t regret it, looking back. It was a part – a jolly tough part – of life’s rich pattern, and though I was blistered and seared by it, I was able to pick myself up and go on and do things I might not otherwise have done.’

  Neither marriage nor any other permanent relationship could in the end have worked for Gavin, no matter the person and no matter their sex. For he was essentially a free spirit, and his world was the boundless, unconfined world of the distant hills and the open sea, the wild swans and the seals’ cry, the far horizons of the heart and mind. As Stanley Peters, an old friend of London days, remarked: ‘He was like an animal living in the trees quite happily and people were always trying to tempt him down and put him in a cage.’ Though he had much love to give, he feared to receive too much in return – for to be loved was for him a threatening, smothering, confining, entrapping thing, from which he inst
inctively turned as the enemy of the freedom he cherished and the adventurous quest and creative impulse that were the essence of his being. As Lavinia commented at the time: ‘In marrying he put his own noose round his own neck – and the roped wild animal fights ten times more strongly and bitterly to get free.’ So he was confined to transient and ephemeral forms of love – the love of animals, the love of the young – which by their very nature, and by the simple passage of time, were doomed to end, if not to fail.

  If the savagery of the otters had destroyed the myth of Camusfeàrna, the failure of his marriage was the first stage in the destruction of Gavin himself, and other stages were soon to follow.

  TWENTY-NINE

  A chapter of accidents

  I wish we could meet and talk over the many prisons of life – prisons of stone, prisons of passion, prisons of intellect, prisons of morality, and all the rest. All limitations, external or internal, are prisons – and life is a limitation.

  OSCAR WILDE TO R.F. CUNNINGHAM GRAHAM

  Emotionally shell-shocked after the trauma of the past year, Gavin retreated to Sandaig to lick his wounds and replan his future. His first instinct was to escape even from there. The Pan paperback edition of Ring of Bright Water was published at the end of June, and Gavin braced himself for a renewed onslaught on his peace and privacy by a growing army of fans. The press only served to inflame public curiosity. ‘THERE IS PEACE NO LONGER AT CAMUS FEARNA’ read a huge headline in the Scottish Daily Mail: ‘Because of these all-too-frequent intrusions he is thinking of leaving his home. His immediate ambition is to sail round the world in a windjammer.’ ‘OTTER MAN IS TOURIST OBJECTIVE’, proclaimed the Edinburgh Evening News: ‘Maxwell and his pets will have an even more frustrating summer this year … But life at Camusfeàrna goes on much as before. The colony of terns on the rocks near the lighthouse is now something like four hundred strong and they fill the foreground of some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world.’ No wonder fans in their thousands flocked out of the cities, Camusfeàrna-bound; and no wonder the hounded ‘otter man’ informed the News reporter he was planning to escape – this time to Tibet. ‘It’s the only place in the world I should like to go to,’ he said, adding: ‘I am by nature a restless person.’ To others Gavin announced his resolve to lose himself in the Far East somewhere, or in the Tibesti Mountains of Chad, deep in the Sahara Desert. When Scottish BBC television journalist W. Gordon Smith came to Sandaig to interview Gavin for a programme that was eventually broadcast on Christmas Day, he encountered him at his most melodramatic and conspiratorial: