Gavin Maxwell E-Book

Douglas Botting

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Gavin Maxwell was a romantic, self-destructive, aristocratic adventurer who worked as secret agent, shark fisherman, racing driver, poet and travel writer. His books on Iraq, Sicily and Morocco were acclaimed, but his fame as a writer rested on his bestselling story of the otters he raised and lived with in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland, Ring of Bright Water. Maxwell's private life was every bit as turbulent. His essential homosexuality was masked by the love of a number of women, for whom he was a serially unsatisfactory partner. This authorized biography is a magnificent evocation of the man, his time and the animals and places that formed such an important part of it. Never was the simple life of a nature-loving conservationist pursued by so complicated a character.

Leseprobe

DOUGLAS BOTTING

GAVIN MAXWELL

A Life

IN MEMORIAM

BESSIE DOUGLAS BOTTING (NÉE CRUSE)

1910–1990

I am going a long way

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,

Where I will heal my grievous wound.

TENNYSON, Morte d’Arthur

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationEpigraphList of PlatesMap: SandaigPreface Prologue: Encounter with a Guru PART I: THE QUEST FOR AVALON  1 The House on the Moor  2 Mowgli with a Gun  3 Breakdown  4 The Celtic Fringe   5 To the Low Arctic  6 A Call to Small Arms  7 Harpoon  8 ‘Muldoan!’  9 An Artist’s Life10 The Man of Light11 The House by the Sea12 Writing Man13 The Sicilians14 Into the Great Marshes15 Mijbil in Basra16 Mijbil in London PART II: AVALON FOUND17 The Bay of Alders18 The Death of Mij19 Writer at Work 20 The Ring and the Book21 To the High Atlas22 Avalon Besieged23 Ring of Bright Water24 The Haywire Winter PART III: AVALON LOST25 End of the Idyll26 The Habitat of Marriage27 Break-up28 Finale29 A Chapter of Accidents30 A Pattern of Islands31 On the Rocks32 Bitter Spring33 The Curse34 The Rearguard Action35 Revived Fortunes36 Fire and Ice37 The White Island38 Opting Out39 A Bright Bitter Sea40 No Coming Back41 The TunnelEpilogue AcknowledgementsBibliographySource NotesPlatesAbout the AuthorCopyright

PLATES

Unless otherwise indicated, photographs are from Gavin Maxwell Enterprises.

Gavin Maxwell with his mother, Lady Mary, in 1915

Gavin aged ten, with jackdaw pets at Elrig

Aged twelve, the unhappy schoolboy

The House of Elrig

Gavin beside his first Bentley and a ‘bag’ from a day’s shooting, Galloway, Christmas 1932

Gavin’s brothers Eustace and Aymer, 1933

Gavin on joining SOE, November 1942 (Foreign Office/SOE)

Gavin on board his lobster-boat, the Gannet, September 1944 (John Winter)

Making a basking shark fast to the Gannet, summer 1946 (HamishPelham-Burn)

The East Harbour on the Isle of Soay

Gavin reloading his harpoon gun, summer 1946 (Radio Times/Hulton)

On the bridge of the Sea Leopard, 1946

Gavin with a basking shark at the Soay factory, summer 1946 (Radio Times/Hulton)

The factory ‘boneyard’ on Soay (Radio Times/Hulton)

Peter Scott. Drawing by Gavin, 1946

Raef Payne. Drawing by Gavin, 1946

Tambimuttu. Painting by Gavin, 1949

Tambimuttu, Kathleen Raine and Gavin at their first meeting, Paultons Square, August 1949 (JaneWilliams)

Gavin racing his Bentley at Silverstone, summer 1949 (JaneWilliams)

Clement Glock working on a set at the Royal Opera House, c. 1949

The burn and the bay at Sandaig (DouglasBotting)

Sandaig as it was at the time of Gavin’s first stay in the spring of 1950

Gavin with a young gull on Gull Island, Sandaig, 1950

Salvatore Giuliano (MichaelStern)

Ma’dan boatmen in the Iraq marshes during the explorations of Gavin Maxwell and Wilfred Thesiger, winter 1956

Wilfred Thesiger in the war canoe in which he and Gavin travelled in the marshes

Gavin in the marshes with his short-lived first otter, Chahala

Mijbil asleep in the studio at Avonmore Road

Mijbil at Monreith, Galloway, summer 1956

Mij in the Sandaig burn (PhillipGlasier)

Kathleen Raine with Mij, autumn 1956

The kitchen-living-room at Sandaig (TerenceSpencer)

Jimmy Watt and greylag geese on the Sandaig Islands

Edal at the high waterfall at Camusfeàrna, 1960

Edal emulating a Modigliani nude

Gavin, summer 1960 (MagdaStirling)

The house at Sandaig, summer 1961 (DouglasBotting)

Gavin with Edal, summer 1960

Gavin at his writing desk, Sandaig, 1963 (TerenceSpencer)

Terry Nutkins with Teko

Gavin and Teko (DouglasBotting)

Teko in the surf, Sandaig Bay, 1961 (DouglasBotting)

Gavin carries a lame sheep down the hill to Sandaig, 1960 (Constance McNab)

Gavin and the Duke of Edinburgh, Sutherland, autumn 1962 (PhillipGlasier)

Camusfeàrna under snow, winter 1961–2

Gavin and Lavinia after their wedding, February 1962 (SoloSyndication)

Telouet in the Moroccan High Atlas

Gavin tending an injured climber in the High Atlas (HamishBrown)

Monday on the day of her arrival

Mossy and Monday, Sandaig, February 1962

Lavinia and Monday

Gavin and Dirk, the deerhound (ColinJones)

Douglas Botting with Edal (Jimmy Watt)

Free at last. Teko with Andrew Scot, Sandaig, October 1967

Early on the morning of 21 January 1968, the house at Sandaig still smoulders after the fire that had destroyed it the previous night (Daily Mail)

Gavin in the long room of the lighthouse cottage on Kyleakin Island (DouglasBotting)

Richard Frere and Owl

Lisa van Gruisen and fox cub

Gavin and Malla, November 1968 (DouglasBotting)

 

PREFACE

THE SEA IN THE LITTLE BAY is still tonight and a full moon casts a wan pallor over the Sound and the hills of Skye. A driftwood fire crackles in the hearth of the croft on the beach, and through the open window I can hear all the sounds and ghosts of the night – the kraak of a solitary heron stalking fish in the moonlight at the edge of the shore, a seal singing softly in the bay, the plaintive, child-like voice rising and falling like a lullaby in the dark.

It was on just such a night that I first arrived in this tiny paradise in the company of the unusual man who is the protagonist in the saga which follows. There have been many changes – natural, ecological, man-made – during the intervening years. A tall dark conifer forest now covers the once bare hills. The encircling burn, the ring of bright water, runs along a different course, and the dunes and the foreshore follow a different configuration. Sand martins no longer nest in the sandbanks above the burn, and far fewer seabirds congregate on the islands in the bay. The rowan tree – the source of so much myth and conflict in years gone by – finally died this summer, overwhelmed by the Norwegian fir planted beside it. Camusfeàrna itself is now a venue for fans and tourists who find their way through the woods to savour its peace and seek its pervasive magic; they leave votive offerings on the cairn that marks the grave of Edal the otter and on the great granite block that covers the spot where Gavin Maxwell’s ashes were laid to rest, the same spot where he wrote his classic account of life with otters at Camusfeàrna, Ring of Bright Water.

There are otters still at Camusfeàrna, descendants of the wild otters that once kept Gavin Maxwell uneasy company at the long-gone house – I saw tell-tale signs of them this afternoon, in the tumble of rocks out at Otter Island. And the place has not lost its ability to surprise and delight. The moment I stepped out of the croft this morning a brilliant rainbow sprang up between the waterfall and the mouth of the burn, and a skein of seven whooper swans in perfect V-formation came honking low beneath the exact centre of the rainbow’s arc – an effect so stunningly theatrical that I thought for a moment Gavin’s spirit had returned to Camusfeàrna especially to lay on a good show for me.

But the shadow that darkened Gavin Maxwell’s later life reaches even to the present. Plans are afoot to destroy his last retreat on Kyleakin Island, along with the wild otters and eiders that have colonised the place since his death, by laying the controversial Skye Bridge right across the middle of it. Soon the only testimony to this remarkable man’s life will be the memorial rock with its life-size bronze otter overlooking Luce Bay, near Gavin’s birthplace in his beloved Galloway.

Gavin Maxwell was to otters what Joy Adamson was to lions, Dian Fossey to gorillas, Jane Goodall to chimpanzees and Grey Owl to beavers. Ring of Bright Water was one of the twentieth century’s most popular wildlife books (top of the US bestseller lists for a year, over two million sold worldwide, and still in print), and was habitually bracketed with Thoreau’s Walden, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne and Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. The book gained its author a huge following as a guru of the wilds among a whole generation, especially in Europe and America, where he was ranked with John Burroughs, W.H. Hudson and Gerald Durrell as one of the finest nature writers of the last hundred years. The New York Herald Tribune acclaimed it as ‘one of the outstanding wildlife books of all time’, and The Times described its author as ‘a man of action who writes like a poet’. It was largely thanks to Maxwell and his book that the world began to take notice of the delightful species that was its subject, and to initiate measures to protect it from the depredations that threatened to destroy it. Today the otter is a protected species, and is making a comeback in Britain.

But never had the simple life been pursued by so complicated a character. Maxwell had come into contact with otters purely by chance, and his many schemes and adventures took him round many other bends in the river – travel, war, shark-hunting, portrait-painting, espionage, poetry and journalism. This is the first full-length biography to tell the whole story of Gavin Maxwell’s extraordinarily picaresque and ultimately tragic life. Though there have been a number of previous attempts, all fell at the first hurdle of the family and the literary estate. My own redeeming virtues seemed to be that I had known Maxwell during the last twelve years of his life – an essential advantage, it was felt, in unravelling the paradoxical and contradictory personality of this highly complex man – and had conducted a long interview with him about his life and work shortly before his death (the starting point of this present biography).

Among the many complexities in the general mix was the matter of Maxwell’s homosexuality. Readers who view modern biography as a kind of voyeurs’ bazaar may be disappointed that I have felt unable to pursue this aspect to the last drop and tittle of detail. There are various reasons. One is my personal respect for the persons involved (of whom there are relatively few). Another is a stricture laid down by Gavin Maxwell’s literary trustees that the matter should be aired only in a general way, with no reference to specifics. One accidental result of this, perhaps, has been to give Maxwell’s heterosexual involvements a disproportionate emphasis in his life. Though inveterate witch-hunters may ransack these pages for clues to identities, they will be disappointed. Friends of Gavin Maxwell who appear in this book are just that – friends, or colleagues, whether they are accountants, animal keepers, fellow expeditionaries or shark-hunters. Or for that matter biographers.

I knew Gavin well. I liked him (not everybody did), I enjoyed his company and conversation and judged him to be a truly remarkable man, a troubled spirit and genius manqué, an outstandingly gifted descriptive writer, a latter-day eccentric in the grand manner whose life was spent on a kind of knightly quest to achieve an ideal life and find an ideal Avalon. In a word, I looked on him as a friend I admired, for all his patent flaws.

This biography could not have been written without the help of a host of people who knew Gavin Maxwell at almost every stage of his life. A full list of acknowledgements is given at the end of the book, but I would like to give special thanks here to the following select little band, who helped me above and beyond the call of duty: Michael Cuddy, Anthony Dickins, Richard Frere (and his book Maxwell’s Ghost), Lavinia Hankinson, Peter Janson-Smith, Constance McNab, Terence Nutkins, Raef Payne, Kathleen Raine (and her reminiscences, poems and book The Lion’s Mouth) and Jimmy Watt. I am grateful to Time-Life Books for permission to make use of my book Wilderness Europe in the writing of passages of Chapter 20 and the Epilogue of this biography; to Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd for permission to quote extracts from God ProtectMe from My Friends © 1956, 1972 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, The House of Elrig © 1965 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, and TheTen Pains of Death © 1959 Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd; to Penguin Books Ltd for permission to reproduce extracts from Ring ofBright Water (first published by Longman Green, 1960, Penguin Books, 1974) © 1960 Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon at aVenture (first published by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952, Penguin Books, 1984) © 1952 the Estate of Gavin Maxwell, The Rocks Remain (first published by Longman Green, 1963, Penguin Books, 1974) © the Estate of Gavin Maxwell, 1963, and A Reed Shaken by the Wind (first published by Longman Green, 1957, Penguin Books, 1983) © 1957 Gavin Maxwell. I am also grateful to the Authors’ Foundation (Society of Authors) and to Andrew and Margaret Hewson (John Johnson Agency) for their valuable financial support during the extensive period in which this book was written, to Katie Rigge for translations from Italian, to Dominic Cooper for the invaluable interviews he conducted in the West Highlands, to John and Viv Burton for their unstinting encouragement and advice, and to Duff Hart-Davis for his enthusiasm about writing this biography in the first place.

DOUGLAS BOTTING

Camusfeàrna

9 October 1992

PROLOGUE

Encounter with a Guru

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

WINSTON CHURCHILL

The first time I met Gavin Maxwell – poet, painter, shark-hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out – was a shock. ‘Come round for a drink,’ he had said over the phone. ‘Say, about tea time? Take the bus up the King’s Road. Get off just before the World’s End and double back. The square is on your left, between the road and the river. Paultons Square. Number 9.’

I found the house without difficulty, a tall, narrow-fronted terrace house in a large, tree-filled square on the furthest frontier of fashionable Chelsea. There were two bell pushes by the front door: the lower one was labelled ‘G. Maxwell’, the upper one ‘K. Raine’. I pushed the lower one and waited. Nobody came, and after a minute or two I went back to the pavement and leaned over the railings to try and peer through the front window. Behind the net curtain I could make out nothing but a brightly lit glass fishtank standing waterless and fishless on the windowsill. Inside the tank I could see the outline of what I took to be a large stuffed lizard, a sort of dragon in miniature, about a foot and a half long, with a tawny coloured, scaly skin. As I stared transfixed at this Jurassic apparition I saw that it was not stuffed after all but very much alive, for suddenly a long tongue like a snake’s flickered out of its mouth, snatched at an insect that looked like a grasshopper, then just as suddenly retracted. My attention was instantly distracted from this startling reptile by a flash of iridescent wings and a frantic fluttering of brilliant electric-blue and green feathers in the upper window pane. Some kind of tropical bird, wings beating furiously like a humming bird, hovered momentarily behind the glass, then swooped away and was lost from view in the darkness of the room’s interior.

At least the house was inhabited, I decided; no one could stray for long from a menagerie as exotic as this. I went back to the door, rang the upper bell and waited again. After a minute or two the door was pulled fractionally ajar. A keen, wary face appeared cautiously from around the door, eyeing me guardedly with a shy half-smile as I stood there. Gavin Maxwell was forty-three then, in the autumn of 1957, but to me he looked far older, with a face lean and lined and wrinkled as though he had spent a lifetime in the desert. His pale blue eyes stared at me quizzically from under a mop of flaxen hair.

‘Gavin Maxwell?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. If I am late. I must have pushed the wrong bell.’

‘You’re not late,’ he answered. ‘You’re early.’ He spoke with a carefully modulated deepish tenor voice, enunciating his words positively, even authoritatively.

‘I heard the doorbell the first time,’ he went on. ‘I was just checking you out through my binoculars from the other end of the room. Come in and have a whisky. After all, it is tea time.’

He ushered me in. The sitting room ran the whole width of the house from front to back. It was clearly no ordinary sitting room. It was ornate, baroque, even eccentric. Partly this was due to the creatures that inhabited it – the dozen or so tropical tanager birds that fluttered freely around the furniture, the giant Saharan monitor lizard I had already seen skulking in its glass case by the window. Partly it was the opulence of the furnishings – the antique aquamarine tapestry hanging from one wall, the magnificent ormolu clock, the tall lampstand of clear fluted glass, the gilded mirror and luxurious velvet curtains. Partly also it was the eclectic assortment of weaponry that was dotted about the room – the chrome-nickel whaling harpoons and curved Arab daggers with jewelled hilts that hung from the walls, and the brace of expensive-looking hunting guns that stood in a corner. A portrait in oils of an attractive, long-haired blonde young woman, painted by Maxwell himself, hung above a mantelpiece. With an expression of faint sensual bemusement she stared across the room towards a life-size ancient Roman terracotta phallus on top of the bookcase opposite.

When Maxwell went out of the room to fetch water for the whisky I cast a quick eye over the titles in the bookcase. They were a random collection. Some were foreign editions of his own works – one about his shark-hunting venture, another about a Sicilian outlaw and bandit, a third about his travels in the Iraq marshes. Travel books by other authors rubbed covers with volumes on zoology and ornithology, works by Freud on psychoanalysis and Havelock Ellis on the psychology of sex, a book about Salvador Dali, a book by Salvador Dali, and various specialist works including an illustrated monograph on the anatomy of the female human pudenda and a police textbook on forensic medicine and murder in all its forms. When Maxwell came back into the room he said: ‘I had to sell most of my books when I was virtually bankrupted after my shark-hunting business failed. I lost almost everything, my inheritance, the lot. This is all that’s left.’

He sat me down, poured me half a pint of Scotch, opened the drawer of an escritoire, took out a small, ivory-handled pistol and without a word clapped it to my right temple and pulled the trigger.

‘You blinked!’ he cried, laying the pistol down. ‘You’re quite obviously not a born killer.’

The pistol, a .32 Colt semi-automatic engraved with his name, had been a gift from the Norwegian Resistance when he was in Special Forces during the war. This and the other implements of death in the room contrasted oddly with the animals that lived there.

‘I’ve always kept animals,’ Maxwell told me as he fed a live locust (specially delivered from Harrods’ pet department) to the monitor lizard. ‘Till this spring I had an otter I’d brought back from the Iraq marshes. Then it was killed by a roadmender in Scotland. I had a ring-tailed lemur as well until recently. But one day it bit me through my tibial artery and I nearly bled to death. I lost two pints of blood all over the floor before I got a tourniquet on to stop the flow.’

Maxwell, I soon discovered, was more accident-prone than any human being I had met. He was for ever being wrapped round lamp-posts, shipwrecked on reefs, attacked by wild animals, half blinded by sandstorms, struck low by diseases unknown to science, robbed by Arabs, cheated by crooks, betrayed by friends. In fact, in almost every way he was quite unlike any other person I had ever encountered. He lived alone and was an avowed neurotic. He chain-smoked and was rarely without an enormous glass of well-watered whisky in his hand. He was far fiercer than I had expected of an author whom a reviewer had described as ‘a man of action who writes like a poet’. Of medium height and wiry build, he held himself taut and erect as if squaring up to an imminent assault. His look was fierce and his speech, too, was fiercely authoritative, even aggressive, with great emphasis on amplifier words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘absolutely’, and sudden dramatic shifts from humour and laughter to anger and depressive gloom.

His conversation was original and wide-ranging and his personality highly engaging. He was clearly endowed with considerable physical and nervous energy, a keen analytical intelligence, boundless curiosity and a restless creative drive, the masterwork of which was the high drama of his own chaotic life – for he existed, as far as I could see, in a whirl of wild hopes and plans and tragic episodes largely of his own creating.

This whirl of high drama tended to involve anyone who happened to be in the vicinity. When I casually told him that an Oxford friend of mine who had joined the Foreign Office (and was later to become Governor of Hong Kong) had recently asked me if I was interested in applying for the job of private tutor to the Crown Prince of Nepal, Gavin’s instantaneous and exaggerated histrionics knew no bounds. ‘That job cannot possibly be what it seems!’ he pronounced, looking gravely alarmed. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Were you given a telephone number to ring?’ I gave him the number of an office in Whitehall. Gavin looked at it and whistled through his teeth. ‘I thought as much,’ he said. ‘Do you have the extension?’ I gave him that too. Gavin picked up the phone and dialled the number. When it answered he gave me a conspiratorial confirming wink and brusquely asked the operator for the extension. When the extension answered he slammed the phone down as if he had just received an electric shock and shouted across the room: ‘Just what I thought! If you go after that job in Kathmandu you’ll be getting into deeper water than you ever dreamed of. It’s up to you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ Only much later, when I had got the measure of Gavin’s propensity to conjure drama and danger out of thin air, did I realise that the course of my life had been shunted from one branch line to another.

Gavin was the first real writer I had ever met, and he shared my own enthusiasm for travel and wild places. It was this which had led me to contact him. In my last year at Oxford I was Chairman of the Oxford University Exploration Club, and was looking for interesting guest speakers who differed from the explorer stereotypes – the burly, booted pemmican-eaters and craggy, glacial crampon men. One Sunday in November 1957 I read in the SundayTimes a long, highly favourable review of a book called A ReedShaken by the Wind, by a writer I had not heard of before called Gavin Maxwell, about a journey through the Tigris marshes with the renowned Arabian explorer Wilfred Thesiger. ‘As the title suggests,’ the review began, ‘he is a man on a quest; and he even gives us a hint that this is a voyage d’oubli … The moving quality of the prose is the expression of a sensibility delicate and troubled, humorous and observant, with which it is a pleasure to converse and which overlays a tough and stoical core. For such disturbed personalities the marshes become a symbol …’ I read the book, was impressed by the brilliance of the narrative and intrigued by the enigmatic persona of the writer, and wrote at once inviting him to come to Oxford to lecture about his travels.

Maxwell replied by telephone. Was I, he demanded sternly, the Douglas Botting who had just returned from an expedition to Socotra (an unexplored island in the Arabian Sea)? I said I was. ‘Have you written a book about it?’ he asked. I said I had. ‘Then I’d like to have a look at it, if it’s all the same with you.’ I brought the manuscript on my first visit to Maxwell’s flat. Later he wrote me a note: ‘Let me say at once that you are a born writer in the true sense and will be wasting your time in the future doing anything else.’ So the die was cast.

Maxwell’s lecture to the University Exploration Club at St Edmund Hall was captivating and often hilarious. At dinner afterwards we were joined by my predecessor as Chairman of the Club, a rugged ex-Marine Commando whose nose had been broken in a bottle fight in a Maltese dockside bar, and who now appeared wearing a Stetson and despatch rider’s boots and a heavily plastered arm in a sling. It was clear that Maxwell warmed to this kind of company, and when my friend told him he had broken his arm in Somaliland while trying a high-speed turn on a racing camel, Maxwell leaned across to me and whispered, ‘Now that’s what I call a real explorer.’ By the time coffee came Maxwell had formed an idea. ‘Why don’t I go on a dangerous expedition and get lost,’ he suggested to me, ‘and you come out and look for me? If you find me I can write a book about the journey. But if you don’t find me you can write a book about the search.’

He was only half joking, and when I next met him he had developed the idea. We should pool our talents and organise a major expedition – through the Berber country of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, for example, or among the Nilotic tribes of the Sudd in the southern Sudan. It was clear that he saw his contact with the Exploration Club, and myself in particular, as a means of making use of our practical knowledge and expertise in mounting expeditions to far-away places for his own purposes. The success of his book on the Iraq marshes meant he was virtually bound to be commissioned to write another travel book, but he was not himself a very practical person, and was not entirely clear how to set up complicated forays of this sort on his own account. Perhaps I could help, he suggested; perhaps I could even make the film of the expedition while he wrote the book. But first, perhaps, I might like to accompany him on a less ambitious journey.

‘I’ve got a little lighthouse-keeper’s cottage by the sea up in the Scottish Highlands,’ he told me. ‘I haven’t been there for a year. Not since my otter Mijbil was killed. I couldn’t bear to go back alone. You’d enjoy it. It’s miles from anywhere and you could bring your textbooks.’ So began my association with that loveliest and most tragic of Shangri-Las – the tiny wilderness that was to become renowned throughout the world as Camusfeàrna, the Bay of Alders.

We drove up in Gavin’s vintage Bentley roadster at the start of my Easter vacation of 1958. There were no motorways then and it took two long days to reach the West Highland coast. Little by little as the miles sped by I began to learn more about the curiously dramatic personality at the wheel. He drove sensationally fast, like a racing driver, with much squealing of tyres and restless changing up and down through the gears. When I commented on this he told me he had once been an amateur racing driver – but only when he was crossed in love, he said, and only after he had downed half a bottle of Scotch before the start, ‘Otherwise I’d have been scared out of my wits!’ He told me the psychologist and writer Elias Canetti (who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature) once remonstrated with him for his reckless speeding. ‘“Givin, Givin,”’ Gavin said, gleefully mimicking Canetti’s pronounced Central European accent, ‘“do you really have to identify with a motor car in this way? I mean, when the car goes fast, do you feel fast? When it goes slow, do you feel slow? When it breaks down, do you feel broken down?” And I told him: “Yes, all those things.”’

At Scotch Corner Gavin pulled in for a fill-up of petrol and whisky. When I told him I would prefer a beer he remonstrated with me. ‘My dear Douglas, you can’t possibly drink that plebeian stuff. You must have a whisky!’ All games except chess and canasta were also plebeian in the Gavin canon, I discovered. It was not until we reached Northumberland and turned off the main road to the small coastal town of Alnwick that I discovered why.

‘I thought I’d show you my grandfather’s house,’ he explained. ‘It’s only just down the road.’

We roared up to the great gates of a medieval stone pile with curtain walls and battlements and round towers and a great keep. This was Alnwick Castle, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Northumberland.

‘I used to stay here when I was little,’ Gavin told me. ‘I didn’t like it much. I once said to my mother: “When are we going to get out of this tight place?” She was the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland. This was his castle – my grandfather’s castle, the seventh Duke’s. Now it’s my uncle’s, the ninth Duke’s.’

By and large, Gavin wore his exalted status lightly – though he could make use of it if he chose to pull rank or impress, or if an accent or a social mannerism pained him. Though he was born an aristocrat, his political leanings at the time I first met him were towards the more radical left. He was much preoccupied with furthering social reform among the Sicilian poor, and even appeared on the same public platforms as such committed left-wingers as Victor Gollancz, the socialist publisher, and Fenner Brockway, the radical Labour M.P. But he was a snob of a particular kind. He could not abide fools, and loathed the human pack and all herd-like behaviour. He was not a true loner, but he hated groups and could never have travelled on an expedition comprising more than two people.

We crossed into Scotland and stopped over in Edinburgh. Gavin had a commission from an industrial journal called Steel to do a photo-feature on a magnificent brand-new steel bridge across the Firth of Forth. But the journal’s editor had been badly misinformed. Though we went up the river one way and down the river the other we could find no such structure – it had not even been started. Rather than leave empty-handed we decided to photograph the old nineteenth-century bridge over the Forth, and spent a perilous afternoon clambering precariously over its ageing girders high above the swirling river. Not until we spotted policemen climbing after us among the girders of the bridge’s intricate tracery of ochre-red ironwork, and heard them hailing us to come down, did we descend to earth again.

At dinner in the grand old North British Hotel that evening Gavin was highly elated about this escapade, but as the meal progressed and the wine flowed his mood darkened, and when a band started playing and couples began to dance his mood grew positively black and he sat staring furiously ahead of him with his hands clenched together under his chin in a characteristic gesture of outrage. Was it the fact that men and women were dancing together that so affronted him, participating together in a collective tribal ritual such as he, a lifelong and irremediable outsider, could never join? Or was it simply the drink?

‘Douglas, one thing you must understand,’ he confessed over another double whisky, ‘I am no saint.’ He was, it seemed, a homosexual, though not entirely so, for women had featured in his life from time to time. It took me a few moments to take this in. There was clearly no question that the implications of this revelation could involve me in any way, but it was obviously crucial to an understanding of his complex and rebellious nature and the alienation which characterised his life. Though he enjoyed female company, and had loved several women in his time, his inclinations were more strongly Grecian in nature, he explained, and he was romantically in love with youth and beauty. ‘More Death in Venice than Antony andCleopatra, if you see what I mean. You may not approve. But you’ll have to accept me for what I am.’ What he was, as I gradually discovered, was a troubled and tempestuous but often hilarious terrier of a man, a flawed genius whose obvious faults of character were redeemed by a rare generosity of spirit, an undimmed utopian vision of life and nature, and a stoical courage that was undaunted even in the face of ultimate adversity.

Gavin took the slow road to Sandaig. We thundered along a narrow twisting track that wound between mountains and over moorland to the west coast and the haunts of his wartime and sharking days – Arisaig, Morar, Mallaig. On the way we stopped at the houses of old friends and relatives, ex-commandos and harpoon-gunners, taking a wee dram here and a wee dram there, till the drams put end to end must have occupied the best part of a bottle and the road seemed to grow more tortuous than ever. Fortunately it ended at Mallaig, the brash, bustling, frontier-style West Highland fishing port that had been Gavin’s sharking base in the post-war years. From here, on a wild wet morning in early April 1958, we set sail aboard the island steamer bound for the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides. I had never been this far north in Britain before, and the sights and sounds of this wild corner of Scotland were like a foreign land to me. Though Gavin had travelled these parts time and again in previous years, his enthusiasm was unabated. He was an ideal travelling companion, informed, inquisitive, even rapturous about the wild world that encircled us.

After an hour or two of butting the heavy Atlantic swell the steamer drew in beneath a great, hump-backed island called Rhum, where Gavin had hunted the basking shark a decade before. On such a storm-tossed day the impression of Rhum from the sea was daunting. Huge cliffs girt the island’s wild coast; volcanic mountains, pyramidal and black, rose straight from the sea; an extraordinary turreted Gothic edifice, an incongruous dark sandstone red in colour, stood four-square on the shore. As the ship hove-to – Rhum was still privately owned then and we were forbidden to land – a flurry of gannets hurtled around us like flying crucifixes and floating ‘rafts’ of Manx shearwaters rose and fell in the sea like flotsam. Gavin had a fund of knowledge, historical and zoological, about the island. By Rhum, and its black peaks, Norse names and oceanic birds, by this whirl of sea and weather and far and ever-changing horizons, I was spellbound, as Gavin himself had been years before. Then the ship’s siren echoed between the crags, the anchor was hauled in and the steamer pointed north-west into a heaving, rainswept sea.

We disembarked at Canna, the most westerly and most beautiful of the Small Isles. The laird of Canna, the scholar and naturalist John Lorne Campbell (an etymologist and collector of Gaelic folk lore and a dedicated lepidopterist who tagged migrating butterflies like birds), was an old friend of Gavin’s, and it was at his home, Canna House, a comfortable old mansion overlooking the harbour approaches, that we stayed during our few days on the island. It was on Canna that Gavin’s mind began to turn to the subject of his next book. During a long walk along the high cliff’s edge of grassy, rabbity Compass Hill in a blustering gale he argued the pros and cons of the various alternatives. One was a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the mad black tyrant-emperor of eighteenth-century Haiti. I thought this an interesting but rather arcane topic. The other possibility, Gavin told me between booming gusts of wind, was a book about his West Highland home at Sandaig, our ultimate destination. ‘I’ve written a little outline about it. Perhaps you’d like to read it when we get back and tell me what you think.’

The thousand-word document was not so much an outline as a sample of text. I remember it as one of the most brilliantly written evocations of place I have ever read, conjuring up in a few lines a magic world of light and sky and water, an enchanted patch of earth and the miraculous grace and freedom of the wild creatures that inhabited it. It described an unforgettable episode of natural prodigality and death Gavin had observed on a late summer evening in Sandaig Bay some five years previously. The twin sons of the local peat-digger had brought a bulky packet of letters down to Gavin’s house by the sea, and he was reading the letters in the twilit kitchen when he heard the boys shouting from the shore.

He went out into the low evening light. The boys were standing in the sea, their figures silhouetted against the pale, glassy water. ‘They were shouting and dancing and scooping up the water with their hands, and all the time as they moved there shot up from the surface around them a glittering spray of small gold and silver fish, so dense and brilliant as to blur the outline of the human torsos. It was as though the boys were central figures of a strangely lit Roman fountain, and when they bent to the surface with cupped hands a new jet of sparks flew upward where their hands submerged, and fell back in dazzling cascade.’

Gavin went down to the sea, and so dense was the mass of fugitive fish fry in the shallows – driven there by predators further out in the bay – that it was like wading in silver treacle. The scene was so extraordinary and the sense of fun so infectious that soon Gavin too was shouting and laughing and scooping and scattering new fountains of bright metallic chips. ‘We were fish-drunk, fish-crazy, fish-happy in that shining orange bubble of air and water …’

The whole passage was an ecstatic celebratory paean to place and the natural world, but I little thought that in a year or two’s time it would form part of a modern nature classic that would transform its author into a guru of the wilds for a whole generation of readers. ‘I’ve come up with two possible titles,’ Gavin told me after ‘I’d finished reading the piece. ‘One of them is based on an invocation Wilfred Thesiger taught me when we were in the Iraq marshes. Whenever the Arabian bedouin see a raven, a bird of ill-omen, in the desert, they try and avert the omen by calling out: “Raven, seek thy brother!” The other title is based on lines from a poem written by a friend of mine, the poet Kathleen Raine:

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

Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea …’

Gavin said he was inclined to use the raven image for his title; what did I think? I told him I thought it was too harsh and too black for what he had in mind. But a ring of bright water was a beautiful and evocative image. ‘It has to be Ring of Bright Water,’ I said. ‘There’s no other possibility.’ ‘All right, chum,’ Gavin grunted. ‘Anything you say, chum. Wouldn’t you say? Or wouldn’t you?’

I at last saw Sandaig late at night under a clear and brilliantly starlit Hebridean sky. From Glenelg on the Sound of Sleat a single-track road ran along a hillside to Tormor and a lone corrugated-roofed house that stood like an eyrie between the mountain and the sea – the home of Gavin’s long-standing friends Mary and John Donald MacLeod, the local road-foreman and peat-digger, a canny and thoughtful old Highlander and an authority on the English classics. From Tormor the only way down to Sandaig was on foot, a mile and a half of slipping and stumbling over peat bogs and down precipitous rocky paths. Gavin had been dreading this final stage of his return to Sandaig and all the painful reminders he would encounter there of his beloved otter, Mijbil, who had been killed somewhere along the Tormor road almost exactly a year before. In the event, he put a brave face on it. We had had a few drams at Tormor before setting off and Gavin was in uproarious good humour as we plunged into the darkness. We had not gone far when he hit on a device that successfully took his mind off darker thoughts till we were near the bottom. This was the McBotting song, a soused improvisation on the infinite Gaelic permutations of my very un-Gaelic name of Botting, intoned like human bagpipe music to the approximate tune of a Highland reel.

‘O McBotty, McBottlich, McBottock,’ he sang,

‘O BotFiddich, BotLachlan, BotLoch,

O BotTavish, BotDonald, BotGregor,

O McBotWatt, McBotIntosh, McBot …’

From time to time Gavin’s tone-deaf pibroch was cut off in mid-drone, and the sudden silence was followed by a violent thump and a forcible exhalation of breath as he plunged from one level of the hillside to a lower one without any visible step in between. Then, amid much hysterical mirth, the dirge would begin from a different and more distant part of the darkness, and recede ever more downward and seaward below me.

‘O McBotNot, McBotsIt, McBotsHisname …’

At a natural platform halfway down the view suddenly opened out, the world wanly illuminated by the gleam of a full, cut-glass moon. The darkened bulk of Skye lay to the right, and the pallid surface of an ocean bathed in moonshine seemed to stretch to the edge of vision. Apart from the murmur of a distant waterfall there was an unearthly quiet all around, and in the dead centre of this eerily phantasmagoric nightscape a distant lighthouse winked its beam every seven seconds. We carried on down. On the left the roar of the waterfall grew louder. We crossed a torrential burn on two parallel wires. Then on a flat patch of turf the outline of a house loomed against the moonlit sky – an abandoned lighthouse-keeper’s cottage, two up, two down, with no electricity, water, drainage or indeed anything at all. ‘You drink the water higher up the burn,’ Gavin explained, ‘and do big jobs lower down the burn. No toilet paper, please. Dangle from the branch of a tree and use a smooth pebble dipped in water like the Arabs do.’ As we stood before the house, staring as if mesmerised at the sea silver and shimmering beyond, Gavin turned to me and said:

‘Welcome to my Island Valley of Avalon.’

He turned the key in the door, then paused a moment.

‘Do you know Tennyson’s poem about Avalon? Well – this is where I come to heal my grievous wound. I know every dune and hollow and rock and twist and turn of the shore here like the back of my hand. Every stick and stone and fern and flower holds some memory for me. This is where my soul comes home to, Douglas. And this is where I shall leave my heart and bones.’

We went in. The flickering candlelight revealed a kind of dark wooden-panelled peasant cave festooned with all the paraphernalia of the sea – fish baskets and glass lobster floats, ropes, flippers and sou’westers, brass barometers and multifarious shells and relics cast up by the waves. Much of the furniture was improvised from fish boxes Gavin had beachcombed from the tideline. One chair had been fashioned out of a wooden whaling barrel; another was a passenger seat from a Dakota salvaged from an aeroplane junkyard somewhere. A Primus stove stood on a fish box by the window, and on a stone slab beneath the mantelpiece were inscribed the words ‘Non fatuumhucpersecutus ignem’ (It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here). After a year abandoned the house was chill and dank as a tomb. We tried to light a fire but the driftwood only spluttered and fumed in the ancient range-fire, filling the candlelit gloom of the kitchen-parlour with an eye-watering blue haze.

We spent two weeks at Sandaig. The sea was a few yards distant, and a seal in the bay watched every move we made. On the left a snow-capped mountain towered more than three thousand feet above the house. When the weather was fine we walked out to the small islands at low tide to search the rocks for the holts of the native wild otters, snuffling with our noses close to the ground to catch a whiff of fresh spraint above the spray line; or we collected stones and scallop shells covered in the strange hieroglyphics of the serpulid tube worm; or scavenged the high-tide line of the long west-facing beaches for the flotsam washed up by the prevailing wind and tide – practical everyday objects like fish boxes and hot water bottles, or on occasion the enigmatic memento of some unfathomable sea drama, such as a sail with the words ‘NOT YET’ scrawled on it, and two brooms lashed together in the form of a cross. When the weather was foul we stayed in the house in a hot paraffin-fume fug of oil lamps and pressure heaters and toiled at our respective deadlines – myself on my English studies for my impending Finals, Gavin on the manuscript of his latest book, a portrait of life in a poor Sicilian village, told largely in the inhabitants’ own words, which was published the following year under the title The Ten Pains of Death.

It became evident during my stay that I had not been invited to Sandaig simply to keep Gavin company in this lonely spot. It seemed I was also on probation in some kind of way. I suspected that Gavin was using this trip to weigh up my capabilities as a potential expeditionary on some joint venture in the future and to decide whether I was compatible company in isolated circumstances such as these. As his friend Kathleen Raine was to write later: ‘He had the gift of making us all his slaves. It came naturally to Gavin to initiate adventure, and to assign the parts to those who gladly joined him.’ I was required to converse, to joke, to amuse, above all to sing (though he was tone-deaf he had a particular fondness for Greek bouzouki music and the Portuguese fado). I had to read poetry aloud (mostly Yeats) and comment meaningfully about it. I had to tackle questions on anything from the nature of God to the relative merits of the Ferrari and Model-T Ford. I had to ferry rucksack-loads of goods over the hills and forage for wild food around the bay as if I was on a survival exercise. I had to deliver an impromptu disquisition on the likely purpose and date of an ancient Pictish broch in the vicinity. I was expected to hold my drink and my tongue, comment intelligently on his manuscript, react sympathetically to his tales of lost loves and sexual misadventures, and be accepted by his friends – from peat-diggers and deckhands to local lairds and gentry. The fine details of social etiquette were important to him. ‘You take sherry, Douglas,’ he explained one day, ‘just as you take tea. No indefinite article, you see. Don’t ask me why. But – you have a whisky or a brandy. Definitely an indefinite article job, wouldn’t you say?’ My handwriting was analysed for clues to my personality, and so was my physiognomy. ‘Do you have a temper?’ he asked me one day. ‘Do you ever fly off the handle, blow your top, run amok, raise Cain, boil over? Do you ever, dear Douglas, chew carpets or foamat the mouth? No? You have flared nostrils, you see. And flared nostrils suggest a hot temper.’

It seems that I passed the test, for on several evenings Gavin sat whisky in hand before the driftwood fire and rhapsodised on the great explorations we might undertake in some of the wildest and most far-flung corners of the planet at some indeterminate date in the future. ‘When you have finished your Finals,’ he would say, ‘you can start the planning. Africa, New Guinea, the Amazon Basin? What does it matter? A true writer can write about anywhere and anything …’

The routine of the Gavin day was invariable. A huge and very late breakfast of black pudding, white pudding, bacon, sausage, egg, tomato and potato hash was fried up over the Primus stove in the kitchen parlour. Not long afterwards the first whisky and water of the day was poured out. There was nothing else to eat until late in the evening. By then Gavin would have finished the day’s writing and read it aloud for my comments. Then, endlessly chain-smoking cigarettes he stored in the sporran he wore over his kilt, his whisky glass on the desk in front of him, he would hold forth. In the oil-lamp gloom of his pitch-pine panelled study, with the waterfall roaring in spate in the wild dark outside, he spoke with a lucidity and authority that compelled my attention.

‘One of the primary symptoms of our civilisation is a search for our mammalian roots, for no social convention can destroy their validity or necessity. That is why there are now so many more books about animal relations than human ones …’

The whisky seemed to act as a lubricant for Gavin’s mental processes and he ranged far and wide over a multiplicity of subjects, for he loved to inquire and discover almost as much as he loved to converse. Sometimes on these occasions I scribbled down the tumble of axioms, admonitions, confessions and musings about life and death, nature and art that poured out.

At times his reflections would stem from his private life, though in what context was never entirely clear, ‘I have always found,’ he would declare, ‘that what you want and cannot have you can only have when you no longer want it …’ Sometimes more extraneous activities would dominate his mind. ‘Every journey must be to some extent a journey of the spirit, a voyage of self-discovery …’ he would muse, and continue disconcertingly, ‘What every secret agent wants is power – the power of knowing that nobody knows the power that he has …’ On other occasions literary matters engaged his attention: ‘I used to write poetry, but the poems I wrote were exercises in nostalgia, and no good poetry can be written out of nostalgia alone … Perhaps explorers who want to write their own records should be sent on a course first – nothing really tough, but to include the rescue of a perilously dangling preposition, the simple bridging of a yawning caesura, above all the avoidance of verbal wind-crust …’ Once he had warmed to his theme nothing but total profundity, nothing less than God and the Universe, was good enough as a subject for his probing speculation: ‘Why can’t one admire the greatness of Christ’s teaching without having to believe that he was God?’ he would ask. ‘He never said he was.’

And so it poured out, night after night, as we picked periwinkles out of their shells with a pin, or chewed limpets and garlic on toast, or boiled up an improvised goo called ‘Maxwell’s Bean Feast’, a stomach-lining concoction which Gavin had invented in rural Sicily while researching the life and death of the notorious bandit Salvatore Giuliano. Sometimes he gossiped about friends and acquaintances: Augustus John, the ornithologist Peter Scott, Wilfred Thesiger, Kathleen Raine (‘the most beautiful woman of her generation at Cambridge’), Elias Canetti, the Sicilian social reformer Danilo Dolci, Princess Margaret and many others. But there were times when Gavin chose to reminisce about less salubrious company, and I was regaled with lurid tales from his past – brawls in Scottish dockside bars, dagger fights in backstreet Tangier rooms, live sex-shows on the Hamburg Reeperbahn, the low-life world of the outlaw and the outcast … All this, too, was part of the man’s contradictory and complex nature, for the knight errant who pursued a beatific vision of unattainable freedom and beauty also suffered from a nostalgie de la boue.

So were his violent changes of mood. For days he could remain in uproarious good humour, imbued with a keen sense of the ridiculous and a driving zest for life, and bubbling with jokes and comic fantasies and hilarious mimicries of the speech and idiosyncrasies of his friends. Then one morning he would appear frowning and dejected and ask: ‘Have you ever known despair – I mean, real despair? I have spent the whole night staring at my bedroom wall in absolute despair.’ The source of this despair he never explained. Whatever it was, I had no doubt it lay at the heart of his troubled personality, and was the mainspring of many of his consequent actions.

On my last evening at Sandaig before returning south Gavin gave a clue to the roots of his make-up. As an adult he was generally perceived to be a kind of romantic hero and cultured tough guy – an explorer, shark-hunter, man of the wilds. But as a child, he said, he had been physically delicate and socially isolated. ‘I was always ailing, always being laughed at,’ he told me. ‘I feel it has been like this all my life – being too vulnerable, too easily hurt.’ Gavin’s alienation from the mass of humankind and his compensatory passion for the wild creatures of nature was the direct consequence of an upbringing which, though privileged in terms of wealth and status, was deprived in terms of human relations and emotional life. He was born into the aristocracy and enjoyed all the perks of his caste. Yet it seemed somehow appropriate that his own private rendering of the Latin motto on the Maxwell family’s baronial coat of arms (‘Reviresco’– ‘I shall put forth leaves again’) should be ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’. For the aristocratic insider grew up to be a radical opter-out; a social renegade so shattered by his own English public-school experience that he later proposed the dismantling of the entire system of education for the young; a Guards officer who was seconded to that most arcane of undercover organisations, the wartime resistance and sabotage agency, Special Operations Executive; the grandson of a duke and the brother of a baronet whose preferred abode was a two-up, two-down lighthouse keeper’s cottage in a West Highland wilderness and whose chosen company were the poor and unsophisticated – the tuna fishermen and rural bandits of Sicily, the reed dwellers of the Tigris, the Berber mountain people of the High Atlas.

Quoting (or misquoting) his favourite book, BridesheadRevisited, Gavin bitterly spelled out his present lot. ‘I am homeless, childless, loveless, Douglas,’ he told me. ‘Time for another dram, chum.’

Next morning, we climbed up the sodden hill from Sandaig and in a vaporous kind of saturating Highland rain nosed the Bentley down the narrow track towards the high Mam Ratagan pass and the long road to distant London – and another world.

… But sing,

Dream, laugh, move on, be alone, have a choice,

have a watchful eye and a powerful voice,

wear my hat awry, fight for a poem if I like –

and perhaps even die.

Never care about fame or fortune –

or even travel to the moon!

Triumph by chance or my own merit …

Refuse to be the clinging ivy

or even the oak or the lime.

Perhaps I’ll not get far.

But I’ll get there alone.

EDMOND ROSTAND, Cyrano de Bergerac

(translated by Anthony Burgess)

PART I

THE QUEST FOR AVALON