Powell’s concept of the film of Ring of Bright Water was a far cry from the family-entertainment film that was eventually made some years later. The book could either be treated as a kind of fairy tale, a nature idyll, Powell felt, or as a novel centring on the relationship between the man, the boy and the otter. He chose the latter concept. ‘It would have to be highly personal,’ he told me shortly before his death. ‘The problem was how to handle it. It was a fascinating thing to try and work out the simplest way to do it. Eventually I decided the only way to deal with the relationship between the man and the boy would be to tell it from the boy’s point of view. I was fascinated by it – I saw it as a real novel, but a very lyrical one, almost a “Prospero and Ariel” story. For me the otter would have been of less interest – simply something rich and strange as in The Tempest.’
Powell was working at Shepperton Studios, just outside London, at that time, and wanted to make Ring of Bright Water with British Lion, a small group that included the prolific British film producers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. He was sure that if the company would put up half the money he could find the rest. Powell himself wrote a fifteen-page treatment with which to try and raise money, and commissioned Gavin’s friend Eric Linklater to write an outline script (which did not satisfy him, though it contained some good ideas). By now he had decided the film should be shot on location at the ring of bright water itself; and in retrospect he felt the film star Laurence Harvey might have made a good stab at playing Gavin on screen. Gavin himself had misgivings about the Michael Powell version from the outset. He was anxious to ensure that if the story was to be told from the point of view of Jimmy Watt, the boy’s part should be played by Jimmy himself, and wrote to Marjorie Linklater asking her to urge Eric to bring Michael Powell round to this way of thinking: ‘I know it’s no use Powell wanting to introduce strange children as the otter’s owners. The only person (other than myself) who can control Edal and with whom she’ll behave naturally is the boy Jimmy Watt who looks after her always; and I’m convinced the only way to make a satisfactory film will be to star him. If Eric will be on my side about this all will be well.’
Then came trouble. This was a period of slump in the British film industry, and Powell had a reputation for extravagance. He had not bothered to explain to his partners the ideas he had for Ring of Bright Water, and they, seeing it as ‘just one of Micky’s ideas for a nature film’, were not prepared to go on with it. Nor, it seems, was Gavin. The reason he gave me for opposing the Michael Powell version was his fear that Powell would introduce the sadistic element he had found so shocking in his recent Peeping Tom, and perhaps inflict cruelty on the otters, if only to get his shots. But probably the real reason was that he had got wind of Powell’s ideas for the story-line, and recoiled in horror from the prospect of his private life and relationships being explored by a famous and uncompromising director of fictional films. ‘A pity,’ Michael Powell commented, ‘because I understood and liked Gavin very much, and it would have made a moving and interesting story.’
Powell met Gavin one last time a few months later, when he spent a night at Sandaig trying to persuade him to change his mind about the film. He arrived uninvited just as darkness was falling one mid-November evening, with an old friend and colleague from the cinema world, Bill Paton, the two of them crouching under an empty 3½-cwt plastic otter-pool that was being ferried from Kyle on top of a small motorboat. At the house the visitors found a coal fire burning in the living-room grate and Gavin cleaning mussels in the sink.
‘There’s moules marinières for dinner. Did you bring whisky?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’re welcome.’
Powell found Gavin ‘an attractive, passionate and lonely and gifted man’ who had ‘infinite patience for animals and children; none for men and women’. Over dinner, with Edal playing marbles in her room above their heads and Teko whistling in his hutch outside, Powell learned that Gavin had no patience for his proposed film of Ring of Bright Water either. He recalled: ‘As I listened to Gavin, my heart sank. Out came the excuses: the otters were getting unmanageable, Jimmy didn’t want to be a film star, the estate didn’t want the film made, and would injunct us if we made it … I could see that it was serious, and that he had worked himself into a state about it.’
After dinner Powell went to look at Edal, who was to be the animal star of his proposed film. He noted in his journal:
Gavin came up and opened the door, and she ran up and kissed him ecstatically, and stared at me, purring, turning at intervals for another bout of kissing. She looked just as wonderful as I remembered her. Occasionally she uttered a high-pitched growl in my direction. But that could mean anything. She seemed quite tame to me, although Gavin swore she was dangerous. Gavin would swear to anything to keep his privacy. We went on arguing and talking till one o’clock in the morning.
At eight the next morning Gavin woke his guests by banging on the wooden ceiling of the room below with a walking stick, and when Powell and Paton came down they had to make their own breakfasts. ‘It was becoming more and more clear that we were most unwelcome guests,’ Powell recalled. ‘I signalled to Bill and we packed up and got out, leaving Gavin most of the whisky. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen. We took the rough road up the burn.
‘“What way now?” asked Bill, who had uttered perhaps twenty-two words during the entire visit.
‘“South,” I said.’
Powell never met Gavin again.
‘Gavin Maxwell was keen enough to work for a salary on the film before the book was published,’ he told me years later, ‘but its enormous success since then, only equalled by Born Free, had made him rich and lazy!’ To Gavin’s relief, but to the intense regret of Michael Powell and his many admirers in the film world, the Powell film of Ring of Bright Water was never made. ‘I told Walt Disney that the rights were available,’ he recalled, ‘and he took over the option from me.’
With two months to go before publication Ring showed every indication of becoming a spectacular success. James Fisher gave it an excellent pre-publication review in The Bookman, the journal of the British book trade, calling it ‘a small masterpiece by a strong writer of simple fine English’ and predicting that ‘all who read it will see life from a different angle and in different colours’. The Book Society made it their Non-Fiction Choice of the Month. The Daily Mail published a serialisation of the book which attracted great interest. By the beginning of August the Longmans publicity machine was gearing up for publication with prospectuses, showcards and booksellers’ displays all over Britain. From Sandaig Gavin reported that the biggest bookstore in Glasgow ‘had placed an order for more copies of this book than they had done for any other except Winston Churchill’s Memoirs’.
It was in the midst of all this excitement that Edal, one of the stars of the show, had fallen dangerously ill. Perhaps as a result of the strain of Edal’s fight against death, Gavin grew increasingly impatient and short-tempered with the book and film people in London. When the publicity department at Longman’s made a nonsense of the otter graphics Gavin complained bitterly about ‘such disasters as upside-down otters suspended in mid-air like Baroque cherubs and a standing otter with claws like a giant panda with reptilian eyes’. He didn’t even know the publication date, he complained, signing off with a parting shot: ‘You chose the better part, to work in a publishing house rather than to write in the workhouse!’
By the time Ring of Bright Water was published on 12 September 1960 Gavin was richer and more famous than he had ever been in his life, and it was clear that in the ensuing months he would grow richer and more famous still. The reviews were almost universally ecstatic on both sides of the Atlantic. The Sunday Times’ doyen reviewer, Raymond Mortimer, wrote: ‘Besides imagination, sharpness of eye and profound feeling for nature, he has a rare command of language.’ It was poetry, the Americans declared, the most beautiful tribute to nature in the English language since W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions.
‘I must recommend it with all my might,’ wrote Gerald Durrell in the New York Times. ‘Buy it if you have to hock your watch,’ exclaimed the Chicago Tribune.
Ring of Bright Water struck a chord deep in the soul not only of the reviewers, but of a large swathe of the public. It was a book of its time, if not of all time, and met a yearning in the heart of urbanised, industrialised man, creating not readers but fans, who could retreat into its world. Predating the revolutionary changes of the sixties, it appealed to many trapped in the old post-war system, who seized on it as depicting an alternative ideal way of life and an escape option. The universal appeal for the rebellious young, the caged clerk and the captive housewife was the idea of Gavin – the wilderness man, the wild animals’ friend, the strider of horizons, burster of cages, symbol of liberty. Ring of Bright Water was one of those works that roused a perception of a different way of life and blazed a trail for the alternative life-style movement and for the conservation and whole-earth movements that followed in the sixties. This in turn served to confirm the validity of Gavin’s vision – the desire for personal freedom, for a renunciation of the values of urban life and of materialism for its own sake; the longing to relate more closely to the natural world and its wild places and wild creatures and to live a life that was somehow more meaningful and closer to the needs of the spirit and of the heart of man. Gavin had stated his message clearly enough at the very front of the book. Discussing what he believed Camusfeàrna stood for, he wrote:
These places are symbols. Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.
In the first month after publication Gavin reported: ‘I am getting a steady fan mail, which is encouraging, but there’s no hope of answering them.’ Before long the flow had become a torrent. Eventually Gavin calculated that the total number of fan letters generated by Ring of Bright Water reached fourteen thousand.
Some of these letters were from relatives and friends. Elias Canetti’s wife, Vera, wrote to tell Gavin that Kathleen Raine had been much upset by the section in the book that dealt with the death of Mij and advised him that she would need consoling. ‘Your book is the love story of the century!!’ Vera Canetti wrote. ‘Miss Raine is in the next room … You will be kind, Gavin, and write to her … PLEASE PLEASE!’ But the vast majority of letters were of course from total strangers. These letters, many of them moving and heartfelt, ranged from far and wide – from Colombia to Australia and the USSR, from Norway to the southernmost tip of Africa. They came from readers of all ages, occupations and levels of society – from an ailing child of five to an eighty-five-year-old Boer War veteran, from a US Air Force Colonel and a British submarine captain, from scientists, diplomats, teachers, farmers, clerks, housewives and factory workers, from lonely women and idealistic youths, from schoolgirls in Bechuanaland who preferred Ring to Lolita, from a Russian woman who kept an otter in a Leningrad flat. Many of the letters expressed a profound yearning and nostalgia for a paradise from which they felt barred. An old lady in Salem, Oregon wrote: ‘For the multitude of us who cannot – or will not – pursue the desires of the secret heart, it is a delight to be admitted to your world, not only because it is one which I will never know, but because I see my own world in a fresh dimension … Through the pages of your book, I feel nostalgia for the shore I never saw and the creatures that I will never know.’
From a commuter in California: ‘As one of the many who live and work in the large city, I find myself hungering more and more for the peace and contentment of hills and trees and ocean. As you say, if one is really living, one needs the reassurance that comes from contact with the earth and nature, as it was before the advent of freeways … Life is certainly no dream, but one needs a dream to live. Thank you for giving my life-dream a name – Camusfeàrna.’
From a Scots-born woman in Massachusetts: ‘Your Ring of Bright Water is the only book in my lifetime I have kept beside my bed. I pick it up for a little while before I fall asleep so I can return to Camusfeàrna and pick the primroses beside your waterfall.’
A woman at University College, Dublin, wrote: ‘I can only compare the book to a breath of warm fresh air blowing through the dark stale channels of an age of false values. It is like a world above the world that lifts up the heart and sets the mind free in the harsh confinement of the city. I keep one copy at home beside my bed and another in the drawer of my office desk.’
A woman in Somerset went even further, and kept the book by her at all times: ‘It has been my constant companion. I carry it with me always and it has never failed to comfort me. I think the first and last paragraphs are the most beautiful and moving words I have ever read.’
A few readers saw in Ring the expression of a deeper underlying spirituality. A woman in Kingston-upon-Thames wrote: ‘I really think this is in some sort an expression of the love of God. It seems to me important, like a spring of water in a dry place. The twentieth century seems to me a very dry place.’
An elderly Hungarian refugee living in Liechtenstein also saw in the book an affirmation of true values and wrote to a friend: ‘I am absolutely fascinated by this author. Gavin creates an atmosphere which I consider unique. Our allies in the USA say “TIME IS MONEY”, trying to label TIME with the highest value at their disposal. That TIME is ever so much more than MONEY they cannot grasp. In this book a man has time, and makes use of it, and lives his life and manages to return to the values of life. And he achieves this not through Aristotelian or other logical philosophy, or through Rousseau-shepherdism-sentimentality! Nothing faked about this author! He should be happy, though I do not think he is.’
To every reader who wrote to him Gavin was eventually able to send a reply. To some he sent a follow-up Christmas card. This was the first time in his professional life that he had had a public, and he was determined to nurture it. But he was completely taken by surprise by the response to the book. He was destined to become a prophet of the wilds to a whole generation – a public image he did not seek and could neither sustain nor enjoy. Years later he gave what he thought were the reasons for the book’s mass popularity:
I do think the urge to live a life away from the mass of humanity probably accounts for the phenomenal popularity of Ring of Bright Water. I’ve had fan letters from readers in every continent and most of the literate countries of the world and they all express the same sentiment – this was the life they wanted to lead. Some wanted to live in this kind of environment, some wanted to have this kind of relationship with animals, some wanted both. But hardly any of them seemed to understand what such a life is really like. For example, all these letters ascribed to me a degree of understanding and a degree of knowledge which I haven’t got. An enormous number of them appeared to think that I could walk up to a tiger, put my hand in its mouth, and not get bitten, which is simply not true.
But really the dream of a simple life is a dream of life without responsibility. I think that the vast majority of people believe it to be possible, but I have never found it possible, except for brief periods. The stumbling block for me has always been animals. Now in the days before I ever had any otters at all I used to go to Sandaig for up to two months under very, very primitive conditions and I enjoyed it enormously. I had no responsibility. I had no telephone. I was really opting out of responsibility – reliving my nostalgia for my childhood, which was a time when I had no responsibility.
Meanwhile the sales soared. By the end of the third week Ring was into its third printing, bringing the hardback total in the UK to fifty thousan
d, and paper was being made for a fourth printing of twenty thousand more copies. By November the printers were reporting that they had run off so many copies that the type was wearing out and would only stand another twenty thousand copies before they would have to cast a new type. The largest bookshop in Scotland reported that Ring of Bright Water was ‘our best seller of all time’. In America, where it was the Book of the Month and Reader’s Digest selection, hardback sales reached sixty-five thousand after only a few weeks. A year after publication hardback sales in Britain topped 120,000 and in America the book had been in the top ten bestseller list for forty-three consecutive weeks. Probably only Born Free, Joy Adamson’s story of Elsa the lioness, and the unexpurgated paperback edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover outsold Ring of Bright Water in its year of publication. Eventually sales of English-language editions were to exceed a million copies, and apart from the Bible and Winston Churchill’s war memoirs the book became the English-speaking world’s biggest bestseller since the Second World War. ‘Frankly, I was amazed at the success of Ring of Bright Water,’ Gavin told Life magazine. ‘I feel the success was an accident. Maybe it was the singleness of approach to a simple and quite genuine subject.’
And the money rolled in. In the first six months the book earned Gavin around £15,000, the equivalent of about £160,000 in today’s terms. In the following six months it earned roughly the same again.
Gavin was now not only rich but famous. To the press he was a celebrity – a bestselling author and former escort of Princess Margaret. To the public he was something else. In so far as he had had a public image before Ring was published it was that of the classic British travelling and adventuring eccentric of Harpoon at a Venture and A Reed Shaken by the Wind, or the committed investigative reporter of God Protect Me from My Friends and The Ten Pains of Death. Now, as a member of a small but distinctive group of Utopian nature writers, wild men of the woods, visionary recluses, nature mystics and Franciscan animal lovers, he had a new image – an image that was never to leave him, no matter what he did or wrote in the future. Ring of Bright Water had its distant origins in Gavin’s childhood reading of the wildlife books of Ernest Thompson Seton; as a celebration of place it was to rank with Henry Thoreau’s Walden and Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne; and Gavin himself was to be bracketed with John Burroughs, W.H. Hudson and Gerald Durrell as one of the finest nature writers of the last hundred years – a romantic saga writer who wrote with a poet’s gift for language, a painter’s eye for the visual world, and a natural historian’s precise and intimate observation of the natural world in all its forms. As Grey Owl was associated in the popular mind with beavers, Joy and George Adamson with lions, and (later) Dian Fossey with gorillas, so Gavin Maxwell became inextricably associated with Mij, Edal and Teko; now and for evermore he would be Gavin Maxwell the otter man.
Gavin Maxwell Page 38
