There were other creatures, waifs and strays, that came and went at Sandaig that summer – a Slavonian grebe that mistakenly landed by Edal’s pool and could not clear the fences to take off again; an injured herring gull; a water rail found unaccountably squatting in the hearth of a house in Glenelg; and more memorably a wildcat kitten that Gavin found swimming in the sea off the islands and kept for one traumatic week in his bedroom. During that week the wildcat – ‘an image of primordial ferocity’ – systematically destroyed Gavin’s room and much of its contents, while Gavin himself, with some reluctance, was obliged to shoot a turnstone, a shag, a curlew and an oyster catcher in order to feed the creature. The ordeal was only ended when the beast was taken away in the charge of a wildcat lover from the south called Willie Kingham with a penchant for insuperable challenges.
Gavin meanwhile laboured away at his manuscript in his study-bedroom, sustained by a diet of whisky and black pudding. Every evening he read aloud what he had written that day and asked for my comments. One day, when the weather was bad and I was confined indoors, Gavin sat me down with a glass of whisky and brought me the whole of what he had written so far of Ring of Bright Water, which was then about three-quarters finished. ‘I’d be glad of your comments, chum,’ he said. ‘But take your time. No hurry. What I’d like is a considered opinion.’
The manuscript was contained in four or five foolscap barristers’ case books (by the end there were six). For the most part it was written in a beautiful flowing hand, with remarkably few corrections, using a fountain pen filled with sepia-brown ink. This same ink (‘Ink?’ commented Jimmy Watt. ‘That’s blood!’) seems to have brought the book to the verge of disaster. Gavin was well into Chapter Eight (in volume four of the manuscript) and was describing Mij’s encounter with a dog in the streets of London – ‘their eyes rolled sideways with what appeared to me to be a wild surmise’ – when it seems that Edal clambered on to his desk and knocked over the ink bottle, spilling the contents over the first two volumes as well as over the one in which Gavin was writing; the otter then paddled in the pool of spilt ink and walked across the open page of the manuscript, leaving sepia-brown footprints from bottom left to top right of the page.
That accident apart, the manuscript was immaculate. Only occasionally did the fine handwriting lapse into untidiness, usually when Gavin was writing out of doors by the waterfall. On such occasions his handwriting became small, cramped and rushed-looking, and drops of water from the waterfall (and very likely from Edal) splashed on the paper and made the ink run. In only one section of the narrative did the events of the story itself seem to have affected Gavin’s hand. This was in the chapter describing the death of Mij, which he seems to have written with great haste and urgency under considerable emotional pressure in a small, slanting, tightly controlled, racing hand.
Otherwise the manuscript was astonishingly free of corrections, almost like a fair copy, and for long passages Gavin had evidently written exactly as he thought, with no break or hesitation in the transmission of thoughts and images from brain to hand. One or two sections of manuscript had clearly been copied out from other documents. The herring-fry sequence was one such – it was almost word for word the same as the typewritten sample he had showed me on the Isle of Canna some fifteen months before. The description of the wild swans on Soay was another – a copy of one of Gavin’s early poems, transcribed as prose.
So, while the summer rain streamed down upon Camusfeàrna and its little world, I sat in the pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living-room, and began to read – ‘I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living-room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa …’
I was fatally hooked. The magic incantation beguiled me as it was later to beguile a million other readers. I read on while the rain eased and the sun broke through the mists and the outdoors called. Outside were the same mist-hung mountains and the same greylag geese sweeping past the window that now were conjured up on the pages in front of me. What I was reading was not simply an animal story or an autobiographical adventure or even an escapist dream, but an impassioned, utopian celebration of freedom and the wonder and oneness of life, written not by a scientific naturalist but by a nature mystic and romantic poet. It was exquisite; a masterpiece of its kind, a classic in a very small, select genre. All day I read, till Gavin emerged from his study with the day’s latest sepia-brown offering of idyll and adventure.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What do you think? Is it awful?’
I considered the occasion important enough to bring all my heavy, recently graduated Eng. Lit. critical apparatus to bear. It was, I told him, beautifully written, often passionate, always enchanting, frequently comical, a wonderful read. ‘But,’ I added, ‘it is deeply flawed.’
It was not one book but two, I went on. Or at best one book split into two distinct and separate parts – the first half a wonderful evocation of Camusfeàrna and the Robinson Crusoe life there, the second half a diverting entertainment about the joys and tribulations of living with pet otters.
‘What I suggest,’ I told him, ‘is that you rewrite the entire manuscript and integrate the two halves to form a single unified text.’
Gavin, who had been scribbling away for three months, stared at me blankly.
‘OK, chum,’ he shrugged. ‘Time for another dram.’
Wisely, he ignored my advice.
Gavin was not totally desk-bound. Sometimes he would sally forth along the sea’s edge to explore the caves and the islands and the beachcombing potential of the high-tide line; and sometimes he would put out to sea. On one such excursion we had put out in the dinghy in the still of the summer evening to cast darrow lines for mackerel, and were drifting well out in the Sound in the direction of Knoydart, when we had a visitor. Swimming slowly and making little more than one knot through the water, it appeared from behind and entered the extreme right-hand edge of my field of view, overhauling us barely an inch or two below the surface of the sea and no more than a foot away from the side of the dinghy. The new arrival was the length of a London bus.
This was the first time I had ever seen a basking shark. The colossal grey-brown bulk and uncannily silent, irresistibly buoyant passage of the creature barely an arm’s length away froze me to my seat. I hardly dared breathe or turn my head. Only my eyeballs moved; they watched the tip of the shark’s nose slide forward above the surface, followed more than a boat’s length later by the black, plastic-looking, triangular dorsal fin, standing a good two feet out of the water. The great fish slid silently forward, taking with it several fathoms of darrow lines, mere gossamer on such a vast and leathery back, until the tip of the flickering tail – describing arcs and parabolas and figures-of-eight like a skater on ice – drew level with where I sat.
It was the tail that I feared most. Simple mathematics told me that this giant fish, some thirty feet long and weighing perhaps five or six tons, could with a single lash of its seven-foot, half-ton tail easily capsize a boat a quarter of its length and a fraction of its weight. I was well aware that basking sharks are not carnivorous animals and graze only on plankton; but in the moment of sudden, unexpected close contact with great animals, reason deserts even the most hard-headed human being.
The shark’s tail slid along the clinker-built hull of the dinghy with a delicate caress, then flicked away and was drawn in the wake of the dorsal fin towards the open sea, before changing direction and approaching us again. Now I had a clear view of the creature’s vast mouth, held open to feed on a surface stratum of plankton. Staring into that spongey vortex, peering down that seemingly bottomless black throat, I experienced a curious sense of vertigo, as Jonah must have done before he was drawn into the belly of the Leviathan. Then, as the dorsal fin drew alongside, the shark dived. There was a slow stirring of its tapering afterquarters, a leisurely flick of the tail, and the fin slid under the water like a submarine’s conning tower. I peered down into the clear green ocean and watched our visitor sink soun
dlessly and recede into the gloom of the deep water. For a second or two its monstrous outline seemed to pulse on the furthest limit of visibility, and then it vanished in the darkness, leaving us alone on a long, oily Atlantic swell dotted with resting gulls.
For Gavin the encounter was like a confrontation with his past. For me it raised an uncomfortable conundrum. Only the day before I had read in the manuscript of Ring of Bright Water a passage about the hunter of leviathan and ‘the most brutal and agonising death in his armoury, the harpoon buried deep in the living flesh’. Might not the reader of Ring of Bright Water, I asked him, be confused when he or she discovered that the man who loved otters and all the other wild creatures of Camusfeàrna was the very same man who for four years had hunted the great fish, inflicting on it that ‘most brutal and agonising death’? Gavin gave this question some thought, bringing up the darrow line hand over hand as he did so.
It was an understandable paradox, he said, but there were various things to be said. In the first place, a cartilaginous fish like the basking shark, which has a minute brain in relation to its huge body, didn’t feel pain in anything like the degree felt by a highly evolved mammal like the whale, which has a much more developed nervous system. This doesn’t condone his killing the basking shark, but it did diminish the brutality of the act, as some people might see it.
The second point was this. He had never pretended that he hadn’t hunted various kinds of animals and birds at some time in his life. ‘I was born a predator,’ he said. ‘I think you were too, but I was conditioned to be one by my upbringing much more than you were. I have shot game, wildfowl, wild boar, deer and other creatures. I did this because that was what people of my class and generation did, and because as a weakly boy I wanted to prove myself. But I learned to be a crack shot and to kill cleanly and not to wound or maim. And I shot within the rules. I shot rabbits for food, for example, and I shot deer because they had to be culled for the sake of the herds. Another point is this: people grow and change. Today, in the main, I don’t like killing animals. I’m not ashamed of the fact that I hunted basking sharks for a living some years ago, but I wouldn’t do it now. But I would still maintain that the love and respect I’ve always had for animals, even in my shooting and killing days, has never excluded my right to kill them whenever I have been forced to exist in a predatory role within the ecology. But some forms of hunting I have never condoned. And though I may once have harpooned the shark that has just this minute dived beneath this boat, I would oppose to my dying day the hunting and trapping of the other creature you referred to – I mean the otter.’
So the summer passed. Little by little the evenings began to shorten and the days to grow cooler with approaching autumn. The sand martins left the banks of the burn to return to Africa, and there were no more basking shark to be seen in the Sound. That last golden summer had flowered and faded before Gavin reached the end of Ring of Bright Water. Finally, on 16 October 1959, he came to the closing paragraph. It was, had he realised it, his farewell to Sandaig as he had known it, and to himself as he had been. Neither would ever be the same again. For soon Avalon would be destroyed by the very book he had just completed and all that it brought in its train.
‘It is October,’ Gavin wrote,
and I have been for six unbroken months at Camusfeàrna. The stags are roaring on the slopes of Skye across the Sound, and yesterday the wild swans passed flying southwards low over a lead-grey sea. The ring of tide-wrack round the bay is piled with fallen leaves borne down the burn, and before a chill wind they are blown racing and scurrying up the sands. The summer, with its wild roses and smooth blue seas lapping white island beaches, is over; the flower of the heather is dead and the scarlet rowan berries fallen. Beyond are the brief twilit days of winter, when the waterfall will thunder white over flat rocks whose surface was too hot to bear under summer suns, and the cold, salt-wet wind will rattle the windows and moan in the chimney. This year I shall not be there to see and hear these things; home is for me as yet a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick new wounds and plan fresh journeys to farther horizons. Yet while there is time there is certainty of return.
TWENTY-ONE
To the High Atlas
Oh that I were
Where I would be,
Then would I be
Where I am not;
But where I am
There I must be,
And where I would be
I can not.
NURSERY RHYME
In September 1959, shortly before Gavin finished Ring of Bright Water, his second Sicilian book, The Ten Pains of Death, was published in Britain. The work had never endeared itself to his publishers and their initial reaction to the manuscript had been downbeat. The critics saw the book differently. The Book Society judged it ‘the most haunting book of 1959’. William Golding, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, gave the book a dazzling review. John Connell in the London Evening Standard pronounced Gavin Maxwell to be ‘one of the most remarkable and original of the post-war generation of writers’. His study of the poor and suffering of Sicily was sensitive, humane and written with intense compassion, he wrote, and with love and understanding untinged with sentimentality. ‘Its deeper merits make it impossible to ignore or forget the book.’
Inevitably Gavin’s book was bracketed with the Sicilian social worker and anti-Mafia campaigner Danilo Dolci’s account of the island’s poverty, To Feed the Hungry, which was published at about the same time. ‘Dolci is a reformer who writes,’ Wayland Young pointed out in the Observer; ‘Gavin Maxwell is a writer whose skill and conscience turn the reader’s mind to reform.’ Other critics compared Gavin’s work with an earlier expose of poverty and degradation in Italy, Morris West’s bestseller about the slums of Naples, Children of the Sun. Morris West himself wrote in The Tablet in Australia:
The facts of The Ten Pains of Death are, for me at least, beyond controversy. They are too brutal for fiction, too patent for disproof. Mr Maxwell’s presentation has the authentic flavour of a tape-recording made on the spot by a trained observer and a skilled commentator. No one who has felt in his own body or soul any of the daily crucifixions of poverty can doubt the truth of the account or the integrity of the narrator. The book is built of a series of vivid portraits and landscapes set down as nearly as possible in the idiom and dialect of rural Sicily. The sum of them is a Goya-esque canvas at once a caricature of human dignity and a condemnation of the conditions which have produced it. Such books as Maxwell’s do us all a service. They affirm the unity of the human family. They affirm the right of the strong and the enlightened to speak loudly and clearly for the silent, the ignorant and the dispossessed.
Gavin was a man moved both by fear of and compassion for the human race. In Ten Pains he was able to give his compassion free rein. In that sense it is the best book he ever wrote, for in his life in general he was unable to express the compassion he felt. As a work of sociological revelation and moral outrage Ten Pains ranks with Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez, George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Gavin himself always took particular pride in Ten Pains, and a few years later he told Life magazine: ‘It is the only good book I have written and it was not written by me. I received so much help with this book that in fact I only wrote seven of the biographies. Those that I collected myself were mostly about old people who had lost all their teeth and were virtually unable to speak.’
Despite the book’s critical success, it sold only modestly, though it remained in print for a decade. As Morris West had predicted: ‘There are few tangible rewards for the writer whose works expose the major miseries of mankind … As an honest scribe he will expect no more, being convinced that the truth has a life of its own which may lie apparently barren for a hundred years until it strikes root in the heart of man.’
The Ten Pains of Death presented a damning picture of
the Catholic Church in Sicily and an unforgiving criticism of some of the provincial clergy. The Church emerged as an overt organ of political manipulation; and in combination Church and State were portrayed as either utterly indifferent to the fate of the poor or as exploiters of them, employing ugly techniques of terror and torture to keep them in their oppressed condition of conformity, so that even sexual activity – in a society where sex was almost the only liberation from the horrors of daily reality – was subject to ferocious religious and social sanctions. Gavin had been a non-believer since his late adolescence, and years of living among the poor and oppressed of feudal Sicily had done nothing to improve his opinion of the clergy. But he had not set out to write an anti-clerical book, nor had he chosen the subjects of the autobiographies for their anti-clericism. Of the thirteen autobiographies, four were from ardent Catholics, including a priest and a nun. The rest were from a cross-section of the population of Castellammare, who knew little of religion beyond its external forms.
But Gavin’s criticism of the Catholic Church in Sicily – and by implication of Catholicism in general – upset some of his readers, including a few of his own friends and acquaintances. Marjorie Linklater was one, and after reading the book she wrote to Gavin, defending the Faith and those that served it. This led to a correspondence – conducted on Gavin’s side from among the souks and kasbahs of Mohammedan North Africa – from which emerged his first and only formal statement as to his religious beliefs, or lack of them. From the Hôtel Royale in Rabat, Morocco he wrote on 20 January 1960 to defend himself against Marjorie Linklater’s praise of his book as a whole and her criticism of the religious standpoint contained in it:
Gavin Maxwell Page 33
