Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Northumberland, where her grandfather had been a schoolteacher, was Kathleen’s paradise, the land of her childhood, ‘an inviolate sanctuary of imaginative solitude’ to which she always yearned to return. It turned out that Gavin’s grandfather, the Duke of Northumberland, had owned the salmon waters where Kathleen’s grandfather had fished, and her mother had sat behind Gavin’s mother at church, admiring her coils of shining hair. ‘Gavin was native of my paradise,’ she wrote. ‘It was as if he came from Eden itself.’

  That evening they met again, this time without Tambi present. They showed each other their childhood photographs, swapped reminiscences of their common northern past. ‘Above all it was in nature,’ she recalled, ‘in the wild world above the frontiers of the human, where he and I alike had found our escape and joy. I found in him what I had found in no other person, a knowledge which had always been mine: not a scientist’s knowledge of nature (though he was a naturalist of some distinction) but a knowledge by participation, the knowledge nature has of itself.’

  It was Gavin’s knowledge of nature, not his painting (which she thought conventional) or his poetry (which from her own Olympian height she deemed the work of a gifted amateur), that Kathleen believed was the source of Gavin’s genius. ‘For him, as for me, such knowledge of nature was less a branch of learning than an experience of imagination,’ she reflected. ‘This secret knowledge of nature was Gavin’s gift, as poetry was mine … As my vision of poetry stemmed from a vision of nature, so was his participation in nature a kind of poetry.’

  But this alone did not account for the extraordinary impact of Gavin’s arrival on Kathleen’s life; nor did the common bond of Northumberland; nor the joy of being in his company – ‘the best person in the world to laugh with at the happy comedy of life’. There was something else – something that made the encounter for Kathleen inevitable and transcendental. Recalling her impression of Gavin on the day of their first meeting, Kathleen wrote: ‘He was like some blind bird … its restless energy a torment to itself for want of sight. It was as if those lids that cover the eyes of nestlings covered the eyes of his spirit.’ A few days later they met again for lunch, and Kathleen saw that this time Gavin’s eyes were no longer hidden but were looking at her, holding her own eyes in a long gaze as if testing her. It was then, she was to write, she saw who he was. ‘What drew me to him was nothing bodily, but rather the radiance his presence had for me always.’ He would always be for her, as she put it, ‘the man of light’.

  It was her meeting with Gavin that enabled Kathleen to rediscover her true, childhood self. In Gavin she believed she had found her soul mate, her true love in a sense above and beyond the merely romantic or carnal – something more to do with poetry than personal fulfilment. It was as if he were part of herself, as if ‘one consciousness’ lived in them both. She had not been looking for a lover, nor could the poet in Kathleen ever satisfactorily marry, any more than the homosexual in Gavin (though she had been married in the past, and he was to marry in the future). She was prepared to sacrifice sexual desire to this higher love, abjure physical involvement, since Gavin had warned her at the outset that he could never desire her in any erotic way. ‘But it was he who sought me out, he who seemed to need me,’ Kathleen wrote later, ‘for at that time I was strong, he was weak; I was happy, he wretched; my life had achieved some sort of stability, his was in ruins.’ Kathleen felt deeply sorry for Gavin. She wanted to help and console him, and believed she possessed some sort of magical power to achieve ‘strange and beautiful miracles’ to that end. ‘I saw him as a little brother,’ she was to remember years later. ‘He was not really tough, though he tried to give that impression. He was so femininely sensitive, so vulnerable, so childlike, that I saw him as a child – the puer Aeternus, the eternal child, the vision of nature, the world in all its fullness of beauty before adolescence. Looking back, I think my attitude to Gavin was rather condescending – unduly so.’

  One of the ‘strange and beautiful miracles’ that occurred between them had to do with the poem of the Tree. A few days after her first meeting with Gavin, Kathleen had a vision, a kind of waking dream, of a may tree or a rowan (a mountain ash). The tree was covered in white blossom, a blackbird was perched among its branches, and a boy of about twelve was asleep at its foot. Tree, flower, fruit and bird, the very flow of life into and through the tree, was in the mind of the sleeper at the tree’s foot – ‘his dream raising the tree and its flowers continually into being’.

  This powerful vision was inextricably associated in Kathleen’s mind with her chance meeting with Gavin, as if his arrival and the vision of the Tree belonged to the same order of reality, outer and inner worlds miraculously coinciding, Heaven-sent. Shortly afterwards Kathleen departed for Cumberland, where she wrote, among other poems, her ‘Northumberland Sequence’ (published in her fourth collection of poems, The Year One, in 1952). The fifth part of the sequence described her vision of the Tree:

  The sleeper at the rowan’s foot

  Dreams the darkness at the root,

  Dreams the flow that ascends the vein

  And fills with world the dreamer’s brain …

  While Kathleen was away Gavin had also been writing poetry, and he sent her some of the fruits of his labour. ‘Had a long letter from Kathleen from somewhere in Cumberland,’ he wrote to a friend in November, ‘approving wildly of the opening stanza of the third part of my island saga. This for some reason enthused her no end – I can’t think why, as it was written in my head in a taxi between Leicester Square and the studio.’

  When Kathleen returned to London she showed Gavin her poem. ‘Everyone will think I copied my poem from yours,’ he said, and indeed the resemblance was extraordinary – not in the language or metre but in the sequence of images, which was virtually identical. Miles away from her, Gavin had, by some fantastic alchemy, written a poem which described her vision of the Tree, though in his there was no sleeper and the blackbird was an ousel.

  Kathleen had an explanation. The place they had both described, she believed, was one of the archetypal objects of visionary knowledge – the archetype of Eden. ‘I thought we had been greatly blessed,’ she wrote, ‘in meeting on that holy ground, by the Tree of Life.’ Together they shared the mystery, the same vision of paradise. Gavin was part of Kathleen’s Eden, its only other inhabitant. That bond, she felt, was indissoluble. Only one element of the Eden myth did she neglect to apply to them – the Fall.

  For the moment, however, all was calm. Gavin did not love Kathleen in the way she loved him – indeed, he did not really love her at all. But he had enormous respect for her intellectual accomplishments, and was happy to sit at her feet, humble and anxious to learn, like an acolyte before a master. He also seems to have genuinely believed that Kathleen had special powers, magical powers perhaps, that set her apart from other people; he told me so several times. Thus it was to Kathleen that he turned for intervention to save the life of his pet bird, a golden-breasted fruit-sucker called Psuckah (pronounced ‘sucker’), who had unaccountably fallen ill. ‘Psuckah was moribund and infinitely pathetic,’ Gavin recalled. ‘I was distraught, and having phoned every bird expert in the country and administered medicine from a fountain pen, an atavistic superstition took charge and I rang up Kathleen, told her Psuckah was dying and she must employ all her occult powers. She said she would bind a spell and he would recover quickly, very quickly – and he did, apparently miraculously, in half an hour.’

  Kathleen’s timely spell, it seems, did not end with the ailing bird’s medical recovery, but led directly to what Gavin described as the marvellous and unaccountable Metamorphosis of Psuckah. Until then the bird had behaved as one born dumb. But no longer – as Gavin recounted:

  Twenty Years of Uproar is the way I should describe it. On Friday morning, having breakfasted lightly on two worms and a grape, he took a firm stance on the easel, tried a few tuning-in notes, then sang a variety of light numbers for twenty minutes. These varied from Gil
bert and Sullivan to sentimental Victorian love songs. He then polished his beak and ate half a pear. At noon he awoke, bubbled slightly, and started again with greater feeling and volume, pausing to suck a grape every now and then when his throat got dry. On Saturday, the same breakfast, then after a little temperamental screeching, he settled down and sang in a low melodious voice for nearly forty minutes. And at intervals all day. The same yesterday and this morning – the morning immediately after breakfast is when there is the greatest flow of inspiration – the songs are really beautiful and with a great deal of form. The stance is also interesting – maximum size, as for sleep, with head on one side. He sings beautifully into the telephone, and I’ve relayed him with complete success to Kathleen, once for an uninterrupted quarter of an hour.

  Magic apart, Gavin was shrewd enough to realise that Kathleen, with her wide circle of artistic and literary friends, could help enormously to advance his own career. ‘Kathleen Raine, who has become a friend, came here to sit this morning and stayed to talk instead,’ he wrote to Raef Payne:

  She is a fascinating person – but a discouraging person. She has the same geographical kind of background as I have (Northumbrian actually) and has the same love of mountains and the sea. Depressingly, she says I shall always feel discouraged and unproductive here, and that good work (creatively) is rare in people away from their roots.

  About the poets and writers she says: ‘You have seen most of them now; there is no more to it than that, no glamour; just a lot of people bickering and arguing and trying to find new names for things, and then, with very few exceptions, either giving it up and wondering what it was all about or trying fitfully and going steadily downhill.’

  So that’s all very encouraging, isn’t it? I do seem to have met a lot of these people now, but for the most part I can’t remember t’other from which. They seem only to share one main characteristic – a defiance of convention, or rather, a disregard of mores, particularly sexual mores. Many of them seem to live in great squalor, or nebulously at someone else’s expense.

  Gavin’s reactions to the antics of the literary and artistic world were on the whole tolerant, if not exactly adulatory. Of the poet David Gascoyne he wrote: ‘I like him enormously – he comes here quite often now, sometimes to sit, but since I have scrapped his portrait he just comes and sits down and either jabbers fascinatingly or stares in front of him in dead silence.’ Of Arthur Waley, the oriental scholar and translator of Chinese classical poetry, he reported: ‘He does seem a very odd person. He arrived at dinner early, left very late, and I don’t think he opened his mouth once the whole time except to put food in it. When taxed by his hostess with this he said he had an insatiable curiosity about other people’s lives, and was never tired of listening. He lives with a woman called Beryl de Zut (which is a nice touch).’

  Roy Campbell, the South African-born poet (and occasional bullfighter), whose poetry Gavin had long admired, was cast in a very different mould. ‘Roy was a terrible brute, a freak of nature,’ Gavin told me years later. ‘He was all that is best and worst in a predator. He was like an animal himself in that he was entirely emotional and the question of reason never entered his arguments at all. But there was nothing phoney in Roy – there was something admirable in him.’ In the autumn of 1949 Gavin reported:

  The Talk of the Town at the moment is Roy Campbell, who is now becoming like one of his own bulls, and slogging people more or less indiscriminately. The day before yesterday he got into an argument with a poet called Geoffrey Grigson, and proceeded to slap his face resoundingly. Finding this had no apparent effect, he repeated the process backhand with his knuckles. This was in a pub called the George in Mortimer Street. I arrived just after the slapping, R.C. still flushed with fulfilment. Now he’s evidently found out it’s the form of expression he really wanted all his life, cuz yesterday he got in a couple of smashing forehand drives on Louis MacNeice.

  A few nights later Campbell turned up at Gavin’s studio. ‘He was very sober,’ Gavin recalled, ‘and accompanied by his wife, with whom he wants to be painted. He occupied most of the time by long and detailed descriptions of his assaults upon Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson and Louis MacNeice. Who, I wonder, will the next victim be? – NO!’

  But the most perplexing of Gavin’s poet friends was Tambimuttu. Gavin tolerated this wayward spirit with affectionate bemusement, though his patience was sometimes exhausted by his drinking, which was heavy even by Gavin’s standards, and his late hours. ‘Tambi has been hell undiluted,’ he wrote in November. ‘He came here at 2 a.m. two nights ago, stayed till 5.30 a.m. and drank an entire bottle of gin. I tried new tactics and lost my temper. An act – but it seemed to work.’ Tambi was at this time preparing to return to Ceylon, and was in a state of continuous tumult which sorely tried the patience of his most forgiving friends. ‘I’m in the middle of one of the stomach attacks which I thought I’d shaken off for good,’ Gavin wrote, ‘possibly brought on by the preparations for Tambi’s departure. Words fail me – purgatory, the beaches of Dunkirk …’

  At about this time, Gavin met Clement (short for Clemency) Glock, a slight acquaintance of Kathleen Raine’s. She was the head of the scene-painting studio at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a striking thirty-four-year-old woman with a marvellous head surmounted, like Brünhilde, by a veritable casque d’or of tumbling blond hair. Twice married – previously to the literary critic John Davenport, and currently to the music critic and Head of Music at the BBC, William Glock – Clement created waves around her wherever she went. Through his friendship with this dazzling woman, Gavin stepped into yet another, even more (for him) arcane artistic circle – the world of the London theatre and ballet. It was not a world in which he felt instinctively at home.

  At the first night of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Royal Opera House he was moved by the music and stunned by the scenery but almost prostrated with mirth by the figure of Salome herself – ‘a little dumpy figure with a huge round stomach doing a strip-tease dance’. Clement took him afterwards to a party given by the producer, Peter Brook, in the Royal Box. Gavin reported: ‘dull, but lots of champagne and small things to eat. Clement looked quite unbelievably staggering in regal dress of black and red shot satin with a ruff of Elizabethan height, looking more femininely lovely than I should have imagined possible, and making all these people in their Schiaparelli models and four-hour face preparations look very silly. Arresting is the word that springs to mind in that connection. What a woman.’

  Clement Glock was one of the few women with whom Gavin was able to form a normal, strong, emotional and sexual relationship. To what extent he loved her is difficult to say; but he certainly admired and coveted her. One night he took her to dinner at the London house of his friends Edward and Lavinia Renton. ‘I’d always liked him very much,’ Lavinia Renton recalled. ‘I found him fascinating, unusual, very amusing, very eccentric, very screwy, very much a law unto himself and most undependable – one never knew whether he’d turn up for dinner or not. This particular evening he rang up and said he was sorry, he couldn’t come to dinner because he was seeing Clement Glock that evening. So we said, why don’t you bring her? And he said, no, he couldn’t do that, she’d got a husband, William. Well, we said, Edward’s a musician and William’s a musician, so why don’t you all come? So they did. William arrived first and then a very long time later Gavin drove up in his enormous Bentley and out of it jumped Clement – bohemian, barefoot, and looking terribly dirty and unwashed. It was a very funny and peculiar evening indeed. Clement and William sat at opposite ends of the dining table hurling verbal hand-grenades at each other all through dinner, and between the two of them sat Gavin, totally pissed, sinking lower and lower in his chair in embarrassment, till his face was almost literally in the soup.’

  Around Christmas 1949 Clement went up to Monreith with Gavin to discuss with Aymer the possibility of painting some murals for the library. Some kind of romantic triangle seems to have developed, an
d Aymer swept Clement off to Paris and checked in at the Ritz for a weekend à deux with her. Gavin was mortified. Before departing for France, Aymer had telephoned him at Raynham Hall, the Norfolk home of Gavin’s friends the Marquess and Marchioness of Townshend, who had commissioned him to paint portraits of their children. Gavin wrote:

  Aymer virtually presented me with a pleasant little ultimatum – either I would have nothing more to do with this object of mutual attraction or he would have nothing more to do with me … and Clement had said that it wasn’t a question of her dropping Aymer or dropping me, but that if she had to drop either she would drop both. So hadn’t I better just swallow my nasty medicine and not make a fuss about it? I couldn’t think of very much to say – an inner voice kept crying ‘Why can’t Aymer find a Clement and an object of his own – why must it be my Clement and my object?’ I don’t know what to do. How can I be so fond of Aymer, so grateful for all he has done and does for me, and so deeply resentful in my inner heart of any intrusion by him into my private life?

  On his return from Paris, Aymer announced that he intended to marry Clement, and even broached the subject with her husband, William. ‘Everything makes nonsense to me,’ Gavin wrote on hearing the news, ‘most of all perhaps that apart from sleeping together I am expected to keep up the spoony kissing-and-petting relationship with Clement that had existed up till now. I feel even more that this morning London is an empty and desolate waste. It’s only just borne in upon me how much of my time I have been spending with Clement and how extremely fond of her I had become.’