Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Next came a nameless bush baby, as acrobatic as the unlamented lemur but far less homicidal. Alas, this wide-eyed creature soon proved to be a crashing bore. His habits were (as Gavin put it) ‘solitary and embarrassing’, and being largely nocturnal he would nightly shatter the sleeping jungle of Chelsea – and Gavin’s dreams – with blood-curdling shrieks. The bush baby, too, was soon moved on. By the time Mrs Lamm arrived on the scene an altogether more docile menagerie had taken over No. 9.

  There was Prodnose, for instance, a Brazilian hangnest, and Kali, Gavin’s mynah bird, who used to wolf whistle and make the most revolting noises, like an old man coughing and spitting, in imitation of his former owner, a retired and not very healthy zoo keeper. Kali soon learned to copy Mrs Lamm’s laugh, and when she was dusting or making the bed he would land on her back – ‘like a large bag of flour dropping on me’ – and chatter and laugh away demonically. Kali also had a remarkable musical talent which was only discovered when he was boarded out with Gavin’s old school friend Anthony Dickins, a concert pianist, during one of Gavin’s absences abroad. Dickins recalled:

  When it came to my studio and heard me playing classical music all day, it was at first simply an attentive listener. Then it felt emboldened to try a little itself – a few squawks and shrieks and grunts, totally unrelated to anything I had played. It soon gained confidence, however, and by the second week was making the most eerie and startling attempts to accompany me whenever I played the piano. Scales, arpeggios and trills were its special favourites and soon it was squawking and shrieking in upward and downward glissandos from basso profundo to sopranissimo with delirious joy. Kali’s virtuoso performances bore no relationship at all in tone, register, rhythm, volume or sequence to what I had been playing, but the enthusiasm was fantastic. I would say that Kali was an accomplished and highly original ‘modernistic’ composer, far in advance of Peter Maxwell Davies or Humphrey Searle.

  Then there was Violet, Mrs Lamm’s favourite among the thirteen brilliant tropical birds – the iridescent South American tanagers – that fluttered at liberty about the ground-floor sitting-room, feeding from fruit suspended from branches and glittering like jewels in the light of the concealed spotlights about the room. Two tortoises and Rawni, the taciturn and usually motionless Saharan lizard, made up the complement of pets in the early days.

  The lizard was a delicate creature, requiring such a high ambient temperature that Gavin had to train three electric fires on it even in summer – much to the discomfiture of the lodger in the room above, a barrister by the name of Anthony Lincoln. In its natural habitat the lizard was bathed in morning dew which kept its skin from cracking in the Saharan sun, and when Gavin moved up to Sandaig he asked Anthony Lincoln if he could get up at dawn to sprinkle water on his pet’s back. ‘OK,’ said the barrister. ‘And what do I feed it on?’ ‘Oh, locusts,’ Gavin told him. ‘And where on earth do I find those?’ ‘Oh, Harrods.’ Sometimes Mrs Lamm would be asked to feed the lizard with live locusts that were kept in a tin, and as often as not they escaped, whizzing around the room, she complained, ‘like aeroplanes’. Much larger creatures were to come and go at No. 9 in due course. Mrs Lamm fed and tidied up after them all, irrespective of their shape, size, species, genus or proclivities.

  Mrs Lamm could never be sure what she would find when she went into the house. Once she came across a whole deer’s head – antlers, fur, eyes and all – boiling away in her largest saucepan. ‘My goodness, I thought, I suppose that’s how they cook up at Sandaig. I knew they did do things up there in the quickest possible way. For instance, one day I was lighting the fire in the Bird Room when the Major walked in. Seeing I was having a little difficulty in getting it to go, he said: “We usually sling a gallon of paraffin on when we’re at Sandaig if it won’t start.”’

  One day she went into the dining room and was confronted by Gavin’s mother. ‘My son says you’re the best charlady he’s ever had,’ said Lady Mary. ‘The best housekeeper, Mother,’ Gavin corrected her.

  ‘The Major was very fond of his mother,’ remembered Mrs Lamm. ‘He often had her to tea at No. 9 when he was there. He used to ask me to make sure the silver was looking nice because his mother was coming to tea. She loved the crispy noodles that came from the Good Earth Chinese Restaurant in the King’s Road.’

  But the curious ménage at No. 9 was not really where Gavin’s heart was, Mrs Lamm realised. ‘He loved all things of nature, birds, animals and flowers. That’s why he loved Scotland so much, I’m sure. He felt free and happy to live with nature in all its aspects; and that was the only time he was really happy. He wasn’t a misery when he was in London – far from it. I actually heard him singing, once. A short sharp Scottish dirge, I suppose. It proved one thing to me at any rate – he couldn’t sing. His enthusiasm for some things was childlike at times, specially if he had got a bargain at the Hammersmith Market or Portobello Road. I was very fond of him and looked upon him as a son and cared for him as best I could. I cooked quite a lot of things for him, but I can never ever remember cooking sausages.’

  In the period after Gavin’s move to Paultons Square his preoccupations were many and varied and often he seemed to be doing a great many things at once. The period between the autumn of 1957 and the spring of 1959 was chaotic and incoherent, and characterised by two distinct aims – the ever-urgent need to earn a living as an author, and the no less desperate striving for some still centre of peace and security in his personal life. He had no money to speak of and no one and nothing that he wished to love or be loved by. He changed literary agents at this critical juncture, abandoning Graham Watson for Peter Janson-Smith, who had recently left Curtis Brown to set up on his own. Graham Watson was not entirely sorry to see Gavin go, for though he admired his ‘blazing talent’ he didn’t much care for him as a man, particularly his ‘endless importunate demands for money’ to cope with his expensive tastes. ‘The telephone would ring in my office,’ Watson was to write in his autobiography: ‘“Gavin here. I’m in a garage near Inverness. My supercharger has blown. It’s going to cost £150 to repair. I need the cash before my cheque bounces. See if Mark will provide. I’m coming down by sleeper and we’ll meet for lunch tomorrow.” I would duly report at the luncheon rendezvous to find the impoverished Gavin driving up in a Daimler, temporarily hired to replace his Alvis.’

  In October 1957 Gavin’s book about the Iraq marshes, A Reed Shaken by the Wind, was published in Britain. Not long afterwards it came out in America (under the title People of the Reeds) and later in a number of foreign-language editions. The reviews were enthusiastic and did much to advance Gavin’s literary reputation. Harold Nicolson wrote in the Observer: ‘Mr Maxwell must possess strong nerves and a romantic soul. He has a gift of visual memory and a gift of language. It is a delight when books of travel are written as well as this.’ Cyril Connolly, reviewing the book in the Sunday Times (the review which first prompted me to contact Gavin in late November 1957), saw the author as ‘a man on a quest’ and described his journey with Thesiger as ‘a voyage d’oubli, a modern version of big-game hunting in Africa, in which roughing it is part of the cure’. In Connolly’s opinion, Reed was ‘one of the best travel books in years’, and he praised ‘the moving quality of his prose which is the expression of a sensibility delicate and troubled, humorous and observant’, and predicted that one day Gavin would ‘like Achilles shed his present hair-shirt for some act of creative assertion’. The UK hardback sales were modestly encouraging, but the book was mainly a succès d’estime, winning the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature and eventually establishing itself as a modern travel classic – and a brilliant exercise in literary cinephotography.

  Gavin now began to cast about for new ideas. He had already received publishers’ advances for three books still under contract – a novel, the book about tuna-fishing in Sicily, and Otter Nonsense. But the money had long ago been spent, and it was most unlikely that the books would ever be written. Gavin found lif
e as precarious as any other freelance author, for he had no source of income other than what his mother and his elder brother cared to dispense to him. Though he was a writer of proven ability, he had not yet found a regular public. His publishers nurtured him to an admirable degree, humouring him, cajoling him, guiding him, accommodating his repeated requests for loans and advances against advances, for Gavin had star quality as well as literary potential. This was why they put up with him, for he was far and away the most difficult author in their stable.

  There was one thing Longmans could not help Gavin with, however, and that was an idea. Now and for the rest of his working life he was constantly hunting about for the next idea, fretting about what to write next, tormented with the thought that nothing would turn up and he would never write another book again. Abandoning the book about the tonnara, he now proposed in its place a book based on the lives – the sociological case histories – of the fishermen and other inhabitants of Castellammare del Golfo whom he had come to know while working on the tuna project. He had already received from his friend and assistant Giuseppe M. the raw material of many of the case histories. These were based on long, intensely intimate interviews with a variety of Giuseppe’s neighbours, the poor and the desperate of western Sicily. Longmans agreed in principle to the idea of the book. This marked the start of his next published work, The Ten Pains of Death, which was to preoccupy him throughout most of 1958.

  But though Sicily was at the top of his working agenda, Gavin’s mind was never far from his much-mourned otter and the peace and loveliness of his Sandaig refuge. As the traumatic year following the otter’s death drew to its end, he began to realise that Mij, and what Mij meant to him, required a more substantial memorial than the lightweight bauble of Otter Nonsense. Sandaig and his life at the sea’s edge, he saw, was not merely the background to an otter’s antics, but the integral component of a much bigger and infinitely more urgent story about himself and what he stood for and cherished above all things.

  He was therefore immediately receptive to an idea put forward at a meeting attended by George (later Lord) Hardinge, Mark Longman and Peter Janson-Smith – though not by Gavin himself – early in the new year of 1958. Gavin had been looking for a big advance for a new book about an expedition to Assam or Siam, a venture which his publishers regarded as both vague and expensive. A cheaper, more feasible, and possibly more profitable alternative, suggested by Hardinge, might be for Gavin to write a book about the remote corner of the Scottish West Highland coast where he lived and the part played by the otter in his life there.

  Mark Longman was greatly in favour of the proposal, firstly because it would not entail spending a large part of the advance on travel, and secondly because in his view Gavin could make an excellent job of it. ‘If anybody can make a proper portrait of a remote part of Scotland, he can,’ Longman told a colleague, ‘and it is the sort of book that could sell really well.’ A few days later Gavin wrote a short essay indicating the way in which he intended to treat the subject and giving some idea of its scope. This essay – the famous silver-herring-fry scene – fired Longman’s enthusiasm still further, and on 4 March 1958 Gavin signed a contract for a book about Sandaig, as yet untitled, for a total advance of £1250. He would write the story – the vision – of Sandaig; the otter would be a part of that vision, the free spirit, the star creature among all the many wild creatures that inhabited that Paradise. A world bestseller was in the making. Out of the puny ashes of Otter Nonsense would arise the vibrant and shining phoenix of Ring of Bright Water, the book that would transform Gavin Maxwell’s life – and the lives of otters, too, in Britain and around the world.

  In April, almost a year to the day since the death of Mij, Gavin returned to Sandaig in the Bentley saloon he had bought on the strength of his latest book advance. I went with him. I have described already the discussion we had on Compass Hill, Canna, about the embryonic Sandaig book. The visit did bring keenly home to him how empty the place seemed without Mij. ‘He had filled the landscape so completely,’ he was to write, ‘had made so much his own every square yard of the ring of bright water I loved, that it seemed, after he had gone from it, hollow and insufficient.’ From that moment he determined to find a replacement otter as soon as possible, so that there would always be an otter at Sandaig for as long as the house was his. Together that spring we explored the boulder-strewn littoral of Otter Island, one of the chain of tiny islands in Sandaig Bay where otters had bred in past years, crawling about on our hands and knees in our search for tell-tale otter spraint (droppings) and signs of inhabited otter holts in the warren of low little caves and tunnels amongst the rocks; but there seemed to be no evidence of otters in the Sandaig area, and for the moment Gavin abandoned the idea of finding Mij’s successor so close to home.

  Most of the time he was at Sandaig Gavin was working on The Ten Pains of Death, and in the early summer he returned to Castellammare, to collect more autobiographies of the destitute and oppressed inhabitants of that poverty-stricken little town and tales of the violent and medieval society in which they lived and loved and died. At midsummer he was back at Sandaig, working still on his gallery of Sicilian lives, and he remained there till the end of the year. By then he had obtained able assistance in translating the raw Sicilian of his source material from Pat Fulwell, who had recently graduated in Italian from Oxford.

  He had also made repeated efforts to find another otter, and had even built a large glass water tank in the garden at Paultons Square and acquired the services of an otter-keeper in expectation of an otter’s imminent arrival. The otter-keeper, Jimmy Watt, was a remarkable young man who was just leaving school. He had considerable practical gifts and personal qualities, an instinctive natural feeling for animals, and an unquenchable love of boats and the sea and the wild places of the Scottish Highlands. Jimmy was destined to play a large part in the story of Sandaig, and to become like a son to Gavin and, eventually, his heir. For the moment, however, he was otterless, for all Gavin’s efforts to acquire an otter through the summer and early autumn of 1958 proved fruitless. In Iraq the Crown Prince’s chief game warden, Robert Angorly, had obtained a succession of young otter cubs from the Marsh Arabs on Gavin’s behalf, but all except one had died within a few days of arrival in Basra, and plans to despatch the sole surviving otter by air to London were brutally interrupted by the Iraqi Revolution, the murder of the king and the imprisonment of Angorly himself. Attempts to acquire an Indian clawless otter through a dealer and a Malay otter from an English zoo were just as abortive.

  Yet Sandaig was not all frustration and literary grind. At the end of September Gavin wrote to me:

  This has been, so far, a very remarkable stay at Sandaig, outstanding among all I can remember, except for the year I had the otter up here. For six weeks the sun shone every day and it was gloriously technicoloured. During that time I was mentally in your place of filming, and I had many very felicitous ideas, which I should, for a small consideration, be prepared coyly to disclose to you. The addition of a second and very much larger dinghy extended our range vastly, and such things as going by boat to Glenelg or down to Knoydart became a matter of everyday occurrence. I even started enquiries about buying the Gannet back, which has been located in some fishing village on the west coast of Skye. But they wanted three times the amount I paid for her fifteen years ago. No doubt her association with me contributed – like a french letter once used by Napoleon.

  A few weeks later, the repercussions Gavin had feared might arise from the publication of the Italian edition of his first Sicilian book, God Protect Me from My Friends, finally materialised. The book had been published in Italy in 1957 under the title Dagli amici mi guardi iddio – the exact Sicilian equivalent of the English title – and had been serialised on the front page of the prestigious Italian national newspaper Il Tempo. The first Gavin heard of impending trouble was at the beginning of March 1958. On 5 March the Daily Express carried the story:

  AUTHOR FRIEND OF
PRINCESS SUED FOR LIBEL

  Author Gavin Maxwell, adventure-loving friend and escort of Princess Margaret, is being sued for libel by Italy’s Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. Sicilian-born Bernardo Mattarella claims he was libelled in Maxwell’s book ‘God Protect Me from My Friends’, the story of Sicilian bandit Giuliano. He alleged that Maxwell wrote that Matarella had contact with British and American special operations in Sicily before the Allied invasion; that he quoted Left Wing newspaper reports that he was a member of the Mafia, the secret society which ran Western Sicily; and that Matarella’s name occurred frequently in the trial of Giuliano’s band.

  Mr Maxwell said last night: ‘I will defend the action.’

  Mr Maxwell, 43-year-old ex-Guards officer, is a cousin of the Duke of Northumberland. Besides being an author, he is a poet, painter, shark-hunter, lecturer and part-time hermit.

  Longmans immediately set out to assess the situation and implement a damage-limitation exercise. When Gavin’s defence lawyer returned from Milan he advised them that the case – a criminal libel action – was being brought purely as a result of an internal political squabble. Mattarella, a native of Castellammare del Golfo, simply wished to clear his name before the forthcoming elections in Italy. That he actually was a member of the Mafia, as Gavin had alleged, there seemed no doubt – plenty of information from various private sources confirmed this. It followed that it was almost certainly the Mafia that had pushed Mattarella into bringing the case to court. Since the Mafia was a secret society, Mattarella could not allow open accusations that he was a member to go unchallenged. The situation was complicated by the fact that Gavin’s Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, was one of Italy’s leading Communists, and only too happy to stir up bad publicity for someone like Mattarella. He had decided to fight the case in a big way, engaging Piero Terni, a leading Italian barrister, for his own defence and the most eminent lawyer in Italy, Professor Cesare Degli Occhi, a Member of Parliament, for Gavin’s. The case would come up in October, and Gavin was advised not to attend for fear that the Mafia might bypass the legal process and exact their own kind of summary justice. In any case, Gavin knew enough of the horrors of Italian prisons not to risk setting foot on Italian soil if he could possibly help it. Piero Terni was sure there was nothing to worry about. It was most unlikely, he claimed, that the case would go against the defendants.