Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  As if this was not enough, Gavin himself was struck down a week or two later by a return of his old wartime duodenal ulcer. So excruciating was the pain that he was almost incapable of speech, and the Glenelg doctor – a new arrival by the name of Tony Dunlop – had to give him two injections of morphia before driving him off to hospital in Inverness for tests. On the morning of 4 August the hospital specialist pronounced the results. Gavin’s condition was the result of an acute exacerbation of an ulcer of long standing. Three courses of action were possible – an immediate gastrectomy, or two months’ hospital treatment without surgery, or an operation in November, if Gavin was prepared to take the risk of waiting that long. Fearful of further abdominal surgery, and overwhelmed by pressing work commitments, Gavin chose the last of the three options.

  A few hours later, while he was still in hospital, Gavin received a phone call from London. That morning an emergency meeting of the directors of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises had been held at Paultons Square to discuss the latest deterioration in the company’s affairs. Gavin had been due to attend the meeting, but now the phone call gave him the conclusions his directors had reached without him. The news was frankly bleak. GME faced a major, perhaps terminal, crisis. The gap between income and expenditure yawned like a chasm, and unpaid debts soared heavenwards. The directors’ recommendations shocked Gavin profoundly: it seemed that all the company’s assets, including the two lighthouses, would have to be sold at once, Sandaig closed down and the otters put in a zoo.

  THIRTY-ONE

  On the rocks

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’

  The crisis had begun to break in the preceding April. ‘I was horrified when I saw the final accountants’ breakdown of the previous financial situation,’ Gavin had written to Bruno de Hamel. ‘My average earned income for the three financial years ending April ’64 had been £22,312.3.6. The only thing I could account for was the 3/6d. The mess we got into was basically due to letting other people manage expenditure – which I am not going to allow to happen again.’ Gavin had stood the truth on its head, as Peter Janson-Smith only too clearly perceived: ‘Gavin’s financial troubles were due entirely to his total inability to see reason and stop buying things for inflated prices whenever he felt like it.’ Bruno de Hamel was soon to find this out for himself the hard way.

  A veteran of Dunkirk, de Hamel was well versed in the drama of the last-ditch stand; but no rearguard action in his experience was so desperate or vexatious as Gavin Maxwell’s ill-conceived retreat from solvency.

  ‘I liked Gavin in the beginning,’ Bruno was to recall. ‘The life he was leading was exceedingly romantic, and I rather admired this. And he was a rebel – a highly articulate rebel – and I admired that, too. He was very generous of spirit, but he couldn’t afford to be generous in any other way – he was almost totally broke and I was never paid a penny for my services.’ The dire state of Gavin’s collapsing company had been attributed by the accountants to faulty internal accounting – what Gavin was to call ‘mismanagement of company affairs’. A scapegoat was required, and the head that finally rolled was that of the hapless Michael Cuddy, who ran the London office – a loyal and conscientious young man whose position had always been untenable, for he was powerless to control Gavin’s spending. ‘He was very demanding,’ Michael Cuddy recalled,

  always wanting things and thinking up new schemes and ideas that cost money. I found it very difficult. I was not part of the Sandaig set-up and I felt isolated. If I’d been a different, stronger personality I might have been able to cope with him. I tried to do what Gavin wanted but this was not necessarily what he needed for his own good. So I was fired. It was a very unpleasant, emotional meeting. Gavin was white with anger. He said the way I had run things had imperilled the company. He was extremely aggressive. It hurt me like a stab in the back. I’d counted him as one of the three close friends I’d had in my life and I loved working for him. My life had changed after I met him. He had given me a tremendous chance and I felt grateful to him and loved him as a friend. But now I felt very bitter.

  Gavin’s treatment of Michael Cuddy so outraged Raef Payne that it led him to quarrel with his old friend for the first time in years. For the moment Gavin agreed to keep Michael Cuddy on as his private secretary, while appointing Bruno de Hamel as the company’s new broom. The picture Bruno presented at the board meeting on 4 August was a depressing one, and his recommendations were painful. The company’s debts would have to be liquidated as quickly as possible, a lot of precious possessions would have to be sold, and Gavin’s spending would have to submit to the strictest company control. For Gavin, to whom the very idea of retrenchment was anathema, these words were like a match to a powder keg. Bruno de Hamel recalled:

  I think he looked on me as a magician who could do a few tricks and get him out of trouble. But as soon as I had worked out what the problem was and advised him what to do about it, he didn’t want to know. Everything stemmed from his blind refusal to face the problems of his own creation. That’s why he blamed it on everyone else – he wouldn’t face up to his own problems. He was very lofty about money – his spending was completely out of control. He’d earned a great deal of money in the years before but somehow he’d eaten his way through the lot, leaving a net profit of just £52. Agreed, Sandaig was a rather expensive, impractical place, but it wasn’t just that – it was the boats, the cars, the lighthouses, the London flats, the foreign travels (he spent a fortune on Iceland) – a great big ego trip, and a very expensive one, which the otters paid for. It was a bit of the old seigneur coming out – a folie de grandeur, really. But it was difficult to get him to see reason. We formed a finance control committee but the moment we tried to exert some control over his spending he became very perverse. He didn’t really respect our function at all. One way he showed his disdain was to refer a lot of damn silly little questions to a board meeting, so that you’d have a bunch of busy, responsible professional men – a top literary agent (Peter Janson-Smith), a senior accountant (Ron Parker), a leading barrister (Robin McEwen) and the Master in College at Eton (Raef Payne) – sitting round a table debating whether to authorise the mending of Gavin’s dishwasher or the purchase of a deep freeze instead! But the main question of balancing expenditure with income he never addressed to us at all.

  It wasn’t really a question of getting rid of the otters and closing Sandaig down. He could have kept the Sandaig enclave going, with all its special mystery and mystique. It was the empire building that broke him – that and the awful Alliata case out of the blue. All I was trying to do was point out that his affairs were in a mess but that he could get out of it if he took the proper steps. He was obviously a very successful writer, but I felt that as a writer he shouldn’t be burdened with all this. ‘It’s distracting you,’ I told him, ‘it’s taking all your time and energy. You’ll never write properly until you get out of this mess.’ But the moment you tried to help him he accused you of running his life. For a while I tried to pull him round but he wouldn’t play ball at all, and then he became really quite abusive and most unpleasant. ‘You’ve just been flirting with me!’ he said, very rudely. That took my breath away – it was quite uncalled for. So I resigned. I never saw or spoke to him again.

  Looking back, it’s obvious that Ring of Bright Water went to his head, blew his mind. He’d had a lean time up to then. He’d lost his shirt on the sharks, never earned any money with his books, and then one of them landed him up in court. So when he struck gold with Ring it was a miraculous transformation for him – and it happened to coincide with his aristocratic aspirations, to be able to cut a dash and be a bit of a lad. Riches to rags to riches and back to rags again – that was his story.

  So on 4 August Gavin left the hospital in Inverness and returned to Sandaig determined to find his own solution to his financial crisis. He felt bound
to reject Bruno de Hamel’s proposals because he realised they would have deprived him of his image, his mystique and his ménage. The proposals only made sense from a purely practical point of view. That apart, they would have destroyed him. Above all he was determined to hang on to his lighthouses, for losing them would mean the end of his cherished eider project, and at that time there was nothing in his life to replace it. Taking over the function of managing director himself, he began to take such actions as he thought necessary.

  First he set about trying to raise mortgages on the lighthouses. Then he closed down the London end of the business altogether, moving out of Paultons Square (where all but the basement had been taken over by Robin McEwen and Anthony Lincoln) into a small, rented pied-à-terre in the basement of Vladimir Daskaloff’s large house at 11 The Boltons in Kensington. Next he began to turn his attention to Sandaig, whose running costs now exceeded £7000 a year. But here his pruning was light and desultory, and his own fleet of cars and boats remained intact. To meet the cost of keeping the otters at Sandaig (approaching £20,000 a year in today’s money) he proposed launching a public appeal, and persuaded the Scientific Director of the Zoological Society of London (Dr Harrison Matthews) and the Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund (Peter Scott) to act as Trustees.

  For twelve hours a day Gavin sat at his desk – half the time devoted to trying to finish Lords of the Atlas, half to fighting the paper war against the creditors and the banks. There was no doubting his determination and his energy, but he had ignored the advice of his colleagues at his peril. By attempting to raise mortgages on the lighthouses he was opting to increase his burden of debt rather than reduce it. And the bills continued to roll in – a whole new avalanche of which even his fellow directors had been ignorant at the time of their crisis meeting. After having applied his mother’s legacy to his company’s debts he had no further private means. Next to nothing had been invested during those heady days when he had been at the peak of his affluence. His literary income, which he had once described as ‘indecently large’, had been reduced to a trickle, and though his autobiography of childhood, The House of Elrig, was published to great acclaim in October, it only slowed the tempo of his accelerating financial decline, for he was in hock to his publishers as he was to everyone else.

  It was Gavin’s tireless literary agent Peter Janson-Smith who almost single-handedly kept him afloat, now and in the years to come. Handling Gavin’s frequent tantrums and often querulous and importunate demands with unruffled patience, Peter ceaselessly sought out and secured commissions for articles, reviews, broadcasts and foreign sales of books – anything that would stem the tide of his client’s debt. In the process he became not only a business adviser to whom Gavin could always turn in times of trouble, but a good friend as well.

  The House of Elrig was published in Britain on 4 October 1965, and in America not long after. The book was a nakedly honest and compulsively readable evocation of the traumas of a sensitive, dreamy, aristocratic misfit’s childhood and adolescence, and of his deeply imprinted passion for the heather and bracken landscape of his desolate native Galloway – the antecedent of the Camusfeàrna of Ring of Bright Water.

  Gavin’s latest literary progeny was received with a united chorus of praise from the critics. ‘Never has he written more powerfully,’ declared the Daily Telegraph; ‘He evokes an almost unbearable nostalgia.’ The Daily Mail described Gavin as ‘a seducer with words, demanding an intimacy with the reader which is hard to resist’. Julian Jebb, in the Sunday Times, enlarged on the theme of ‘intimacy’ as the essential clue to Gavin’s writing as a whole: ‘His otter books enjoyed their immense popularity because of this peculiar intimacy which he can generate between the reader and himself. They had the seductiveness of an enormously long letter from a close friend. But in a sense all his literary work has been preparing for this present book. The interweaving of anecdote, self-analysis and the discoveries of poetic sensibility make this the finest piece of writing Mr Maxwell has yet produced, an intricately conceived, enthralling self-portrait.’

  The publishers were ecstatic. They had printed a first impression of twenty-five thousand copies, and sold more than half of them in the first week. By January the book was second in the bestseller list – above even The Guinness Book of Records. The House of Elrig, Longmans reminded Gavin, was ‘a very important book for your future as a writer’. But he firmly resisted their invitation to write a sequel covering the next decade or so of his life. ‘I demur for two reasons,’ he wrote to them on 25 October: ‘(a) the awful libel spectre, and (b) I was such an intolerable young man!’

  The new book stemmed, but did not reverse, the tide of debt. Somehow Gavin staggered along. The price of his freedom was servitude – and with it the fading of the vision of the ideal life and the hope for love, beauty, joy and tranquillity. Gavin’s struggle was not just against humdrum adversity, but against the death of the spirit, enslaved and oppressed by routine. In October, as a break from the monotony of his desk work, he accepted an invitation to go deer stalking, hoping the tough physical challenge might prove to be the tonic he so sorely needed. It was more than that. It was a reaffirmation, a return to his roots. ‘The days that I spent on the hill,’ he recorded, ‘gave me a feeling of complete and utter release, of a unity with nature that I had long lacked at Camusfeàrna.’ One incident especially he remembered as precious manna to his parched spirit. He was standing on the top of a mist-covered hill, visibility down to twenty yards, the only sound the wet wind tearing in great gusts at his face and sodden clothes. He wrote: ‘Suddenly, from far away, from the hidden hill-face beyond the gulf, borne thin and clear on the wind, wild and elemental, came the sound that during all the many years I have spent among the red deer of Scotland, in their aloof tempestuous territory of rock and mist, has never lost its fascination for me – the voice of the stag in rut … I stirred to that desolate music as I stirred to the whip of the wind and rain … This was my world, the cradle of my species, shared with the wild creatures; it was the only world I wanted, and I felt that I had no place at a writing desk.’

  Then he heard the same wild voice again only fifty yards away, and it set his heart hammering. Instinctively he dropped to a prone position, and borne on the wind he could smell the strange, elusive, pungent, musky, sour-sweet smell of the rutting stag. He lay with his chin pressed to the ground, teeth chattering, rifle at the ready, but his concentration was distracted by an eagle that swept low above him, driven by the wind, and when he looked for the deer again it had vanished into the murk. Gavin was left soaked and alone on the windswept hill, with the light fading and five miles to walk home in the dusk. But for a few hours he had escaped back into his real world, and he was content.

  Miraculously, when Gavin returned to the hospital in Inverness for his dreaded gastrectomy a few weeks later, the X-rays revealed that his duodenal ulcer had vanished. He went back to Sandaig momentarily deluded that the tide had turned – so much so that he felt emboldened to initiate extensive alterations to the lighthouse cottage at Isle Ornsay, so that it could more profitably accommodate twelve paying guests instead of eight as at present. Once again he called on the services of Richard Frere. It was now nearly half a year since Richard had parted company with Gavin on cool terms, and he was so taken aback to hear Gavin’s voice on the phone that he agreed to his proposition at once, without even bothering to discuss the details of the work or the contract. Why the instant capitulation, he asked himself afterwards? Had he become such an addict of island life that its call overcame all reason? Or was it Gavin himself? ‘In truth he had his good side and his bad,’ he reflected, ‘and no perceptive man could deny that there was a certain persuasive magic about Maxwell.’

  So Richard’s wild Hebridean adventures began all over again. It was winter now, and the weather was black and stormy. Again the wind howled and the sea surged, and again Richard’s dinghy sank to the bottom – twice, in fact, once with Richard on board. During this inclement tim
e Richard saw nothing of Gavin, besieged in the dark, secluded hell that had once been his paradise. But he spoke to him occasionally on the telephone, and from those distant conversations across the gale-swept water he was able to gauge the progress of his desperate rearguard action. One midnight during a violent storm, when the sea was exploding against the lighthouse rock of Eilean Sionnach and hurling white spume against its dripping tower, Gavin rang again.

  ‘It is a dreadful night, Richard,’ he said; ‘and a dreadful night for me as well.’

  He had just been speaking with one of his more predatory creditors, and the encounter had depressed him. It was not just that, though. There was a pause. Then he drew a long, melodramatic breath. ‘Now Jimmy wants to leave,’ he said, ‘and I just can’t go on.’

  Gavin had been struck at his most vulnerable point. Jimmy Watt had been at Sandaig for eight years, and had proved Gavin’s most loyal, trusted and valued friend. ‘They were – as I had first and subsequently known them – the heart and soul of Camusfeàrna,’ Richard was to record. The two of them were more like father and son, but now the time had come for Jimmy to spread his wings and make his own way in the wider world, beyond Sandaig’s isolated ambience and the dominating influence of his possessive if benign guardian. Jimmy’s decision hit Gavin hard. It was, he believed, ‘the death-knell of the old Camusfeàrna’. It would be more than that. It would mark the end of what he had come to regard as his home and family, the loss of his one true and readily available ally in a hostile world, the one constant and unchanging face to which he could return in a wandering and turbulent life. With Jimmy gone, Gavin himself would be cast adrift, anchorless, rudderless, and desperately alone upon the swirling tide.