Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Giuliano was a good-looking, charismatic, ruthless and violent idealist from the hill village of Montelepre in Sicily’s desperately poor north-west. He was only twenty-seven at the time of his death, but his seven-year campaign of banditry and guerrilla warfare against the carabinieri had already gained him world-wide notoriety and the veneration of the Sicilian poor, who saw him as a latter-day Robin Hood and supporter of their cause. In 1950 Giuliano was finally hunted down and shot in circumstances of great mystery; and though it was almost certainly the collusion of the police and corrupt local leaders with the all-powerful Sicilian Mafia that brought about his death, somehow it turned out that it was his trusted cousin and co-chieftain, Gaspare Pisciotta, then serving a life sentence for murder in Palermo, who was suspected of killing him.

  It was a sensational story, and contained many elements that appealed to Gavin’s taste for exotic high drama: the archetypal romantic hero who takes on the world and falls from eminence through the treachery of those he trusts – an allegory, almost, of the way Gavin saw himself and the pattern of his own life. He returned to England convinced he had found a winner, and began to prepare himself for his challenging new task – a difficult, possibly dangerous investigative assignment behind the lines, so to speak, of the feudal, closed and treacherous society of the Sicilians.

  THIRTEEN

  The Sicilians

  To wait for one who never comes,

  To lie in bed and not to sleep,

  To serve well and not to please,

  To have a horse that will not go,

  To be sick and lack the cure,

  To be a prisoner without hope,

  To lose the way when you would journey,

  To stand at a door that none will open,

  To have a friend who would betray you,

  These are the ten pains of death.

  GIOVANNI FLORIO, Second Fruits (1591)

  Through 1953 and into 1954 Gavin’s time was largely occupied in unravelling Giuliano’s extraordinary story in Sicily. Tomas accompanied him on his first trip back to the island, which was mainly spent in tracking down people connected with the story. Later, as he began to integrate himself into the local society around Giuliano’s home village of Montelepre, he began to rely heavily on the intelligence services of a bright and able young barber’s apprentice by the name of Giuseppe M., who with Gavin’s support and encouragement was to rise to become a radical political leader in Sicily’s capital city of Palermo some years later. Gavin operated on a shoe-string during these long Sicilian summers spent in investigative research. He drove a battered Land Rover, lived in a tiny tent outside the crumbling walls of the town cemetery where Giuliano lay buried, and subsisted on a diet of bread, cheese and tomatoes, and the windy concoction known as ‘Maxwell’s Bean Feast’ (a brew-up of canned baked beans, canned Italian tomatoes, Italian sausage, Parmesan cheese and garlic).

  It was desperately hot in Sicily in August 1953, and during the heat of the day there was no shade anywhere. Inside Gavin’s tent it was hellish – cramped, stifling, full of flies and ants. Outside was no better, for he was an object of fascination to a crowd of local rubbernecks who came to stare at the strange Inglese, talk to him, and smoke his English cigarettes. They would even follow him into his tent to watch him. The only place where Gavin could find shelter from the heat – and some respite from the people – was in the tomb in which Salvatore Giuliano lay at rest in a white marble sarcophagus.

  After a while Gavin moved to a more congenial site, pitching camp on a terrace overlooking the town, where there was shade beneath the olive trees and prickly pears. The people still came to stare at him, but now they brought figs and grapes as presents. Gavin could cope with these small informal groups, and with the confidential conversations with people close to the story he was writing. It was the Sicilian crowds – the alien herd of which he could never become a part – which unnerved him, especially in the streets of Castellamare del Golfo, the sirocco-dusted little waterside town some twenty miles across the plain from Montelepre, where he pitched a new camp above a Saracen fort overlooking the harbour. ‘I was the rifler of the tomb,’ he was to write. ‘I felt the vengeance of its guardians upon me.’ It was not so bad in the daytime when he could hide behind his dark glasses; but after dark, he wrote, ‘I glanced unarmoured and vulnerable from stare to stare; the curious, the hostile, and the blank’.

  Gradually, as he moved from one informant to another, Gavin began to feel confident that he had got the scattered pieces of his strange story into a coherent picture. But, just when he thought he had solved the major mysteries, he met a man who had inside information about the death of Giuliano, and realised to his dismay that the account he had laboriously pieced together was founded on sand.

  Where on earth did the truth lie, Gavin wondered? And who would reveal it to him? Perhaps the simplest thing would be to go to Palermo and put a direct question to Giuliano’s cousin Gaspare Pisciotta, who was serving a life sentence in the prison there. But even inside the prison Pisciotta was heavily guarded, and no meeting was possible without the written authority of the Italian Minister of Justice. Five months later Pisciotta was dead, poisoned by a massive dose of strychnine smuggled into his cell with his medicine – murdered to keep his mouth shut at his impending trial for the murder of Giuliano. Gavin was at an impasse. To the essential question – who killed Giuliano? – he would have to add another – who killed Pisciotta? Did an elusive high-ranking figure give the orders and lurk behind the puzzles that bedevilled the story? Gavin would have to come back to Sicily and begin all over again.

  All this was a time-consuming and tortuous business, and as the months passed by his publishers, Burns & Oates, grew more and more insistent that Gavin either deliver the book he had promised them or pay back the money they had advanced him. Early in 1954 the dispute came to a head. In desperation, Gavin decided it was time he put his literary career on a more stable footing. His first step was to acquire a literary agent, and his choice fell on Graham Watson, a partner in the leading London agency of Curtis Brown. On 15 March 1954 Watson approached Mark Longman, chairman of the publishers Longmans, Green & Co, with an urgent proposition. His author, Gavin Maxwell, wished to change publishers. If Longmans agreed to advance £1000, Maxwell would pay off Burns & Oates and place his new book at Longmans’ disposal, along with an option on all his future books.

  A few days later Gavin met Mark Longman for the first time. Longman was a discerning and accommodating publisher who was patiently building up an outstanding list of highly talented but often quirky authors, and he was used to dealing with awkward individualists like Gavin. ‘I spent the morning with him,’ Longman noted in a memo to his fellow directors, ‘and the material which he has gathered turns out to be even more interesting and exciting than I had imagined. I have no doubt at all that Maxwell will produce a thoroughly good book with a very considerable sales potential. The Giuliano book is not only extremely exciting but also interesting and important politically. I at once informed Graham Watson that we wanted to go ahead.’ So began a long and fruitful partnership that was to endure for the remainder of Gavin’s career.

  Not long afterwards, in the early summer of 1954, Gavin was introduced to Princess Margaret by a mutual friend, Robin McEwen, a talented artist as well as a brilliant lawyer and future heir to one of Scotland’s leading Catholic baronetcies, who had been his junior counsel during the O’Connor libel case. ‘She was a marvellous woman,’ one of Gavin’s closest friends recalled, ‘and very much a catch. Gavin really quite fancied her, in fact I’d go as far as to say he was almost in love with her, or so Elias Canetti claimed. But he only went out with her three times, and it was never more than an utterly formal, totally innocent romance.’ On the first occasion Gavin escorted the Princess to the theatre (Hippo Dancing, starring Robert Morley) with Robin McEwen and his fiancée Brigid. At the end of the evening they all went to Clarence House, where Princess Margaret played the piano and sang, and then
repaired to Gavin’s studio flat, where they sang ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ and other songs into the early hours. Not long afterwards Gavin went with her to a ball, and even danced with her – the first time he’d danced with anyone since his youth, and the last. Kathleen Raine was perplexed by this turn of events: ‘I told myself that this might well have been in order to please or simply impress his mother, who would have seen such a match as altogether appropriate for her son, as of course in respect of birth it could have been.’ But Kathleen need not have worried. One night Gavin took the Princess to a little Sicilian restaurant in Kensington Church Street called Chez Ciccio, and afterwards he took her back to Buckingham Palace, where he said goodbye to her and never saw her again.

  Gavin returned to his manuscript; by 15 July he had written all but three chapters, and in August he returned to Sicily to enquire into the murder of Gaspare Pisciotta. Gradually, as his eyes were opened to the widespread iniquities and injustices of Sicilian society, he began to penetrate the obfuscation and half-truths, the binding code of silence – omertà – surrounding his subject. During the third week of his stay Gavin perceived a sudden mysterious change in the situation. Typescripts of police documents came into his hands, along with records of confessions, cross-examinations and conversations between prisoners. Most importantly, his contacts began to talk freely about the deaths of Giuliano and Pisciotta – and it seemed none of them believed the latter was responsible for the former’s death. All this new material meant he would have to rewrite his manuscript, though paradoxically the essence of the story – its moral – remained the same. ‘It remains a tale of treachery and betrayal,’ he wrote, ‘the tale of a few young men who were pampered, deceived, and finally murdered, for political ends that their education had not fitted them to understand.’

  Gavin wrote in his diary: ‘Tomorrow I am leaving the island. I do not feel that I am leaving a race of criminals, but that as a stranger I have understood a very little the reactions of a bitterly ill-used people who resort to violence in the face of age-old injustice; that as a stranger, too, I shall not quickly forget the surviving dignity and generosity of friends whom I am proud to have made.’

  He could hazard the name of Giuliano’s murderer, he reckoned. He had been obsessed with the problem for a long time, lived with it, dreamed of it, woken with it. But it was no longer important. ‘What is important,’ Gavin wrote, ‘is that Giuliano lived the myth contained in his epitaph, that his “proud inspiring phantoms” were great enough to destroy him. To many in Sicily he will remain the King asleep in the mountains.’

  In September 1954 Gavin finally finished the book. Its American publishers, Harper & Row, were reported as ‘getting behind it in a big way’.

  Even as he was putting the finishing touches to his biography of Giuliano, Gavin was urgently casting about for ideas for his next book, and in September he came across an article in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was a Fellow, which excited his interest greatly. Entitled ‘The Marshmen of Southern Iraq’, it was written by Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great old-style explorers, famous for his pioneering camel journeys across the Empty Quarter of Southern Arabia, one of the world’s most formidable deserts. For the last five years Thesiger had spent a few months of each year exploring the hitherto unexplored marshlands and lagoons of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Southern Iraq – a wild, watery wasteland inhabited by a primitive and little-studied people known as the Marsh Arabs, or Ma’dan.

  ‘The Ma’dan,’ wrote Thesiger,

  have acquired an evil name. The aristocratic tribes despise them for their dubious lineage, and willingly impute to them every sort of perfidy and wickedness, while the townsmen fear them, shun them and readily believe all that they hear against them. Among the British, too, their reputation is bad, a legacy from the First World War when from the shelter of the marshes they murdered and looted both sides indiscriminately as opportunity offered … Hard and primitive, their way of life has endured for centuries, but in the next few years the marshes will be drained and the marshmen as I have known them will disappear to be merged into the stereotype pattern of the modern world – more comfortable, perhaps, but certainly less free and less picturesque. Like many others, I regret the forces which are inexorably suburbanising the untamed places and turning tribesmen into corner boys.

  Here, Gavin realised, was exactly what he had been searching for – a hidden, almost unknown and as yet unspoilt world, peopled by a lost and forgotten tribe about whom no one had ever written a book before. To penetrate the frontiers of such a land, and to live and function among such a people on his own account was beyond his personal capability – he lacked the knowledge and the resources, above all the language. But if he could persuade Thesiger to take him on his next expedition into the marshes, then the gates of that treacherous and comfortless paradise would be open to him. He wrote to Thesiger, who was staying at his mother’s house in Chelsea, and arranged to meet him for lunch at the Guards Club in a few days’ time. It was to prove a fruitful encounter between two highly unusual and basically eccentric men, neither of whom were ever entirely at home among the metropolitan conventions of polite European society.

  Gavin knew of Wilfred Thesiger as the last of the great Arabian travellers in the classic style. Born in Addis Ababa, son of the British Minister in Abyssinia, he had been brought up by an Ethiopian foster-mother and came to feel himself in many ways more ‘native’ than ‘European’. At Oxford he was a boxer and explorer, making a remarkable journey through the wild Danakil country of Abyssinia while still an undergraduate. In the Second World War he won a DSO in the SAS and Sudan Defence Force and after the war made an historic double crossing of the great Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia by camel and on foot. Since then he had explored most of the remoter parts of the Near and Middle East, and there were few men alive who knew more about the tribal Arabs. All this he accomplished not for honours or career advancement, still less for money; he did it because he loved it, and loved the tribal peoples amongst whom he travelled.

  Thesiger was a year older than Gavin, and a good few inches taller. His appearance at their first meeting was every bit as lean and autocratic and rugged-looking as Gavin had expected. What he had not bargained for was Thesiger’s sartorial disguise – the bowler hat, the hard white collar and Eton tie, the shiny patent-leather shoes and tightly rolled umbrella – the armour and emblems of a City stockbroker or establishment functionary that belied the ex-guerrilla fighter and wilderness traveller within.

  Thesiger was sympathetic to Gavin’s ambition to travel in the marshes, but dubious about whether he was physically resilient enough to put up with all the discomforts such travel entailed. ‘You seem to have led a fairly rough life,’ he warned Gavin, ‘but this would be a bit different from anything you’ve had before.’ He would have to sleep on the bare ground, because there was not a mattress of any sort to be found anywhere in the marshes; he would have to endure the onslaught of armies of fleas, which drove even the Marsh Arabs half crazy; and he would be confronted with a vast multitude of diseases, nearly all of them infectious.

  When Gavin professed indifference to hardship and an absolute determination to go to the marshes, Thesiger tried one more tack. A great deal of every day would be spent sitting cross-legged in the bottom of a canoe, and most of every evening sitting cross-legged in a marshman’s hut. ‘Can you sit cross-legged?’ he asked. Gavin couldn’t, but assured Thesiger he would try.

  Thesiger recalled of that first meeting:

  I realised that he had never really travelled in his life – at least not what I’d call travelling. He’d done his shark fishing, but that wasn’t really travelling. And he’d been round Sicily, but that wasn’t really travelling either. He was very proud of showing me a review which said he was ‘a man of action who wrote like a poet’ – but to call him a traveller was nonsense in my definition of the term. I also realised that Gavin couldn’t get on in the marshes by himself. He cou
ldn’t speak Arabic, and even if he found an Arab in Basra who spoke English and could interpret for him, such a person would be totally out of sympathy with the Marsh Arabs and would have looked on them as animals. So as he was determined to go I said, OK, you can come along.

  Everything was arranged – or so it seemed. But Gavin was unable to obtain the necessary visas from the Iraqi government, including the all-important permit to visit tribal areas, and eventually Thesiger had to leave without him. Gavin was left twiddling his thumbs in London, with no clear idea of what to do or where to go. In this aimless void he distracted himself with a new toy – a second-hand, supercharged 3-litre Grand Prix Maserati of pre-war vintage, converted from a single-seater racer into a two-seater roadster a few years previously, and one of the fastest road cars in the world. This terrifying monster could get up to 150 miles per hour, though rarely for long and seldom without breaking some vital and expensive component in the process.

  To keep this exotic folly on the road Gavin urgently needed to raise funds of some kind, and at the end of November 1954 he thrashed out a deal with Graham Watson and Longmans Green, whereby Longmans would buy options on his next two books and advance £350 against a third, a novel – a new departure in Gavin’s literary career. ‘He did a draft of a novel some years ago,’ Longmans reported, ‘but has not submitted it anywhere and wants to rewrite it. It is a true situation in which all those concerned are now dead, so the author says.’ Longmans were also persuaded by Gavin’s arguments that, even though his Giuliano book had only just gone off to the printers, there was a second, spin-off book to be written about Sicily to take the place of the abortive Iraq project, and they agreed to advance £1000 for a book about the violent and bloody tonnaras, the so-called ‘chambers of death’, the labyrinth of nets in which the Sicilian fishermen, in crews of up to fifty, trapped and killed the tonna, the great tunny fish of the Mediterranean, during their seasonal migration.