Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  On 28 January 1950 the New Statesman published the first of Gavin’s poems to appear in print – indeed the first writing of any kind to be published under his own name, as his pre-war journalism had been unsigned. Entitled ‘Poem from a Sequence’, this was actually the ‘Rowan Tree’ poem that had so amazed Kathleen Raine by its inexplicable similarity to her own ‘Rowan Tree’ poem in her ‘Northumberland Sequence’. It had found its way into the hands of the Literary Editor of the New Statesman, Janet Adam-Smith, at a private London dinner also attended by the eminent poet and art critic Herbert Read, and by Gavin himself, shortly before Christmas 1949. Gavin reported of the occasion:

  Unfortunately I was just a little tiddly. However, no one seems to have noticed anything except a rather marked silence during the latter part of the evening … After I’d gone Kathleen handed over to Janet Adam-Smith the revised version of ‘the power that wheels the eagle’s wing’, and two days later I got a letter from her which made me feel so conceited that I can’t, no simply can’t, resist quoting it. ‘You say you are diffident, an amateur; I can only say that, as a hardened reader and chooser of poetry, I haven’t for a long time met a poem that I was so sure I liked straight away, and so sure I would like in six months’ time.’ That letter kept me buzzing the remaining couple of days I was in London.

  Janet Adam-Smith was Gavin’s crucial guide through the London literary maze. She took to him at once. ‘In appearance he struck one as so slight,’ she remembered. ‘But he had a look of breeding, a touch of hauteur in his looks and manners, the hauteur that goes with great diffidence. He was so diffident that he would walk out of any social gathering he did not feel at ease in.’

  Gavin’s literary friends applauded him warmly after the poem’s publication, and Roy Campbell, a literary editor in his own right, said that he would like to publish Gavin’s next poetic work. Emboldened by this reception, Gavin submitted a second poem, ‘The Caves of Mingulay’, which was published in the New Statesman on 15 July 1950, and several other poems, including ‘Island Poem’ and ‘The Scapegoat’, were published in the same magazine over the next couple of years. Gavin began to feel that he was being taken seriously in an unfamiliar world.

  But as he had no money, and as few people can make a living by writing poetry, his mind began to turn more and more to the sharking adventure that was now behind him. Here, he realised, was a ready-made subject for a book that was waiting to be written – a book it would be better to write now than in the dim future. He had always known he would write a book one day. ‘I had envisaged it as a projection of what I considered to be my more serious interests,’ he recalled, ‘– a learned contribution to the study of animal behaviour, perhaps; or, as that interest had led inevitably to the study of human behaviour, a novel that should amaze by its insight and penetration.’

  But the combination of chance and necessity changed all that. With the encouragement of friends like Kathleen Raine and an ex-SOE comrade, Simon Ramsay, Earl of Dalhousie, he repaired to Sandaig in the summer of 1950, and there, in the familiar surroundings of mountain and sea, he began to work out a synopsis for a book about the Soay venture. When it was finished he took it to the writer and poet John Pudney, who was a director of Evans, the only large publishing firm Gavin knew, confident that he would publish the book if anybody would. But he would not, and explained at some length why such a book would not sell. Deeply despondent, Gavin returned to Sandaig, and being virtually penniless he devoted himself to gathering shellfish and snaring rabbits for food, dreaming of what he might have done with his inheritance if he had not lost it in the shark fishery.

  The condemned synopsis, meanwhile, lay crumpled and stained in a drawer – at first a reproach, and then a challenge. The stimulus that was to push the idea a stage further was as bitter as it was unexpected. Gavin had been searching the shore below the house for some piece of flotsam that could be conveniently turned into a bread board when he spied the projecting edge of a barrel top – white, smooth and sea-worn – half-buried in the sand. He pulled it from the shingle and read the letters ‘I.S.S.F.’ – Island of Soay Shark Fisheries. ‘It had all the nostalgia of a carnet de bal tied with faded ribbon; it brought so many half-forgotten scenes so vividly to my mind that I began the book the next day.’

  Scribbling away with his fountain pen at the rickety kitchen table in the pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living-room at Sandaig, Gavin began to cover ream after ream of foolscap writing paper in a neat hand as he turned his Sea Leopard diary and his undimmed memories of Hebridean seascapes and sharking derring-do into the diamond-hard images of a superlative narrative. When he needed a change of scene or a word of encouragement or advice, he would visit his former shipmates in the neighbourhood, including his ex-harpoon-gunner, Tex Geddes, who was then living near Mallaig. ‘Gavin came to stay at my home at Glasnacardoch Lodge,’ Tex recalled. ‘Dammit, he was almost living there. He complained that he was broke, so I told him I was broke too, but his broke and my broke were two entirely different things. Well, using my typewriter and my paper and my coffee he wrote some of Harpoon at a Venture in Glasnacardoch Lodge. In fact, we wrote Harpoon. He didn’t know he could write and he found it a hell of a chore. But he got three chapters written and then he went off to London to try and get a contract for it.’

  This time Gavin was lucky. He showed his manuscript to Janet Adam-Smith, who recommended that he take it forthwith to a sympathetic publisher who ran an enterprising new publishing house of his own. ‘I went to see Rupert Hart-Davis yesterday afternoon,’ Gavin wrote to Raef Payne at the end of November 1950. ‘It was all very like a dream, and everything exactly the opposite of how I would imagine publishers behave. They have, to cut a long story short, accepted the book without demur, and are sending me tomorrow a contract – and an advance of £100. Cor – the fools! … Someone pinch me.’ Gavin knew he had committed himself to a year’s hard labour. ‘Immediately,’ he recalled, ‘I began to doubt the future of the finished work: the dread of failure that lies like a coiled worm at the heart of all who are ambitious. But when during that week I spoke to others about this fear, they said, in effect, “Don’t worry … Just write it.”’

  So Gavin settled down to write, sometimes at Sandaig, sometimes at the houses of friends, sometimes in his studio flat in London. Still unsure of his literary talent, he would enlist the nearest available friend to comment and advise. ‘He would ring me up at all hours of the day or night,’ Kathleen Raine recalled, ‘and ask me to go over and help with the latest couple of pages he’d been working on. He used to read them out to me and I’d say, Oh it’s terribly good – and it was, he had a gift. Then he’d bite his pencil and prowl up and down and say, “What shall I write next, Kathleen?”’ She was still sufficiently Tambi’s ‘great poet’, she reckoned, for her criticism to be valuable to him. But writing, she perceived, was not Gavin’s true métier – merely a means to an end. Years later she was to enlarge on this theme:

  He had a wonderful gift for vivid descriptive writing. But this was secondary to his real gift – his gift of actually living his imaginative life in action. Yes, he was literate, he could write very well, but I would never rate Gavin as primarily a writer but as primarily the man who did these things, a man of action. He was a highly imaginative, deeply sensitive person who lived his inner adventure by means of his outer adventures – that was his form of self-expression. To him the imaginative achievement was the living of it, not the writing about it. And making money was not Gavin’s line of country. Making money was quite incidental to Gavin the knight. It was the wild adventure – he was Captain Ahab after the white whale. But you can’t win against the white whale. For all the people who read him he represented their heart’s desire – they would love to have lived that life, had those adventures, sailed round Soay, hunted the great creatures of the deep as he had done. But Gavin’s first book (like all the ones that followed) wasn’t about his inner quest, it was about what he chose to make a story of, what he chose
to present to his public, the mask he presented to the world. He saw the world with an observant eye, he had the gift of mimicry, he could tell a funny anecdote and describe people and their funny ways and idiosyncrasies. But he saw all this from the outside, not the inside. The inner life was what he chose to pour out late at night after a bottle of whisky, and it was very different – not what he chose to put in his books.

  Gavin was unprepared for the sheer slog of book writing. ‘Pressure, pressure …’ he wrote to a friend in May 1951. ‘I have been working like a nigger (averaging nearly 2000 words a day) but I can’t seem to catch up with my target in chapters, and all letters lie unanswered.’ By now his work-in-progress had been tracked down by Gwenda David, a London-based talent scout for the big American publishing firm of Viking Press, and as a result Gavin had recently signed a contract for a US edition. Gwenda David soon became another of his confidantes and literary coaches, and before long was as much the mesmerised target of Gavin’s routine of midnight calls for attendance and salvation, both professional and personal, as Kathleen Raine:

  Gavin would ring me up at three or four in the morning and say, ‘If you’re not round here within half an hour I’ll kill myself.’ So I’d get up and get dressed and ring for a cab and then I’d go round to his flat and find him drunk and lonely and needing someone to talk to, and I’d sit with him and he’d talk to me over a bottle of whisky about everything under the sun till morning came. He made very great demands on people. He could be wonderful, horrid, funny, bitchy, nasty and nice – all those things. But I liked him enormously. I was fascinated by him, by his beautiful voice and those sunken, cold blue eyes, and I was attracted by the life he led – the loneliness of his life and the way he would just go off into the hills whenever he felt like it. He was a very tormented soul and he drove like a maniac. Once when he was driving madly along like a rocket I asked him whether he preferred men or women, and he thought about that for a long time and then said: ‘I’d rather not answer that.’ He’d been going out with Clement Glock before then, and now he was going out with a youth called Tomas, whom Clement had introduced to him. He was a very mixed-up man.

  By the late autumn of 1951 the text of Gavin’s shark book was written – a vivid and impulsive medley of taut physical adventure, sudden riotous fun, poetry, metaphysics, marine biology, boyish nostalgia, gaucherie and hard-learned wisdom about human life.

  Even before it was published Harpoon at a Venture was being acclaimed as one of the year’s outstanding books. ‘I don’t think I like being on the verge of fame or infamy or whatever it is,’ Gavin wrote to Raef Payne in the week before publication. ‘Yesterday I was interviewed by three newspapers, and at the end of the time my hands were trembling like leaves and thin trickles of smoke coming out of my ears. (I was asked what two novels since the war had made the most impression on me, so I said Auto da Fé and Father Goose.) Come on boys, let’s form a square and pick up sides.’

  Harpoon at a Venture was published in Britain on 26 May 1952, to universal critical acclaim. The Times hailed Gavin as ‘a man of action who writes like a poet’ – praise to which he was to cling for the rest of his writing life. Comparing it with Robinson Crusoe, Louis MacNeice wrote in the New Statesman: ‘The book is pregnant with symbols and, unlike many other pioneers, he is deeply aware of the symbolism.’

  The reviewers on the influential BBC radio programme ‘The Critics’ were unstinting in their praise of the poetry, the vivid and memorable imagery, the beauty and the horror of a magnificent adventure story written by ‘a really master writer’. But they went beyond the printed page and singled out the personality of the author behind it as well – the first, but by no means the last, hint of the cult of the personality with which Gavin’s readers were to greet this and his subsequent writings: ‘He has the zest, the courage, the uncalculating enthusiasm and generosity, above all the panache of the non-professional, the highly intelligent inexpert. He’s a youthful version of the White Knight … a highly sympathetic and attractive character in a world of glum and narrow experts, and the White Knight’s spirit is a noble and a chivalrous one. It is as an exposition of an adventure of the spirit that Harpoon at a Venture is most worth reading, most exciting. We respond to an individual who tries to beat the lot.’ Harpoon was selected as a Book Society Choice, and as the Daily Mail Book of the Month.

  In September 1952 the book was published by Viking in the United States under the abbreviated title Harpoon Venture, and foreign-language editions appeared in various European countries. The book’s reception was as rapturous abroad as it had been at home. ‘A great dream safe between the covers of this book’, wrote the New York World Telegram: ‘Not since I discovered Conrad have I felt the poetry and terror of the sea as I did in reading this.’ And in Paris the periodical Carrefour declared: ‘Voilà un écrivain.’

  Few new authors can ever have got off to a more spectacular start. In Britain the first edition of 25,000 copies quickly sold out, and the book was reprinted. But with his first royalty statement not due for another six months, there was little immediate reward in prospect for Gavin, who was as broke as ever. This struck him as an unfair anomaly, and reinforced his view of publishers as authority figures to be harried and suborned – exactly as his superior officers in the army had been. Rupert Hart-Davis was the first publisher to be on the receiving end of Gavin Maxwell’s authorial importunity, as he was wearily to recall: ‘In all my years of publishing, Gavin Maxwell was one of the most tiresome authors I ever had to deal with. He used to ring up every day, asking how many copies of Harpoon at a Venture had been sold the previous day. This I could tell him, but when he asked how much they represented in royalties, and could he call for the money in cash, it became a daily nuisance. He used to arrive in an enormous car which he had great difficulty in parking. I asked him why he used such a huge car in London and he said: “It gives me a feeling of power.”’

  There was one unexpected development following the publication of Harpoon at a Venture. Another shark hunter, P. FitzGerald O’Connor, had written a book about his own sharking venture, and in an attempt to debunk Harpoon he had conspired with Gavin’s former rival Tony Watkins to persuade some of Gavin’s old shipmates to bring an injunction against it. Gavin sued him for libel. Among the key prosecution witnesses was Tex Geddes, Gavin’s former harpoon-gunner, who recalled:

  I was on Soay when the matter came to litigation and had to come down to the Law Courts in London for the trial. Gavin’s counsel was Gerald Gardiner Q.C., who later became Lord Chancellor. O’Connor had Melford Stevenson, who became a judge. Melford Stevenson was able to bully Gavin, who was a bit more gentle than me, but I was a plain-speaking fisherman, so we had a hell of a carry-on. I told Melford Stevenson he didn’t know a thing about sharks and couldn’t even tell his arse from his elbow. I had the court in uproar. When Melford Stevenson suggested I was a liar I told him I’d take his trousers down and wallop him if he said that again in court. I’m sure Mr Justice Slade enjoyed himself enormously.

  Anyway, some letters were produced in court which proved beyond doubt that O’Connor had been involved in a conspiracy with Watkins against Gavin and his book, and Mr Justice Slade read one out which said: ‘We will have to debunk this bastard somehow.’ At this point Gavin’s mother stepped in and told Gavin she wasn’t going to have the family name dragged through the mud. So Gavin announced that he would stop the case if O’Connor wrote a letter of apology to The Times. And he did. And that’s how the case was settled.

  Abandoning his faltering career as a society portrait-painter, Gavin now set up shop as a full-time author. Almost immediately he was confronted with the problem of what to write next. He had used up the one ready-made real-life story he had in him, and he began to cast around for a new idea. He remembered a great-great-great aunt who had run away and married a ‘shady Sicilian’, and decided to set off on an exploratory foray round Sicily in search of her story. Rupert Hart-Davis was less than enthusiastic. ‘Max
well asked me if I would give him £500 as an advance against his next book. I asked him why he wanted what was in those days such a large sum, and he said that he needed to buy a Jeep to go and look for his aunt in Sicily. This seemed such a dubious assignment that I told him I couldn’t tie up so much money in it.’ Undaunted, Gavin approached the small Catholic firm of Burns & Oates, publishers to the Holy See, and persuaded them to advance the money he needed for the project. In the autumn of 1952, knowing little about Sicily and not a word of Italian, he set off in a Land Rover he had ‘borrowed’ from the Monreith farm estate, taking with him a research assistant by the name of Mark Harwood, a talented linguist.

  No record remains of Gavin’s first trip to the deeply divided and Mafia-dominated island that was to preoccupy him for more than a decade to come. What is known is that he failed to discover any trace of his wayward ancestor, but stumbled instead on an infinitely more violent and intriguing tale, centring on the dramatic life and mysterious death of the legendary secessionist leader and bandit hero Salvatore Giuliano, who had been betrayed and killed only two years previously.