During this nightmare time, Gavin wrote to Constance McNab, giving expression to his feeling of lostness and despair:
Here it is hot and dusty and everything takes a long time to do … I am burnt up, used up, not knowing where my loyalties lie: I am a reed shaken by a wind (or a tree shaken by a tempest?). I have lost a symbol and I cannot find another – or perhaps don’t want to. My life during the past two months has been a bateau ivre with the gamut of all emotion, despair predominating over incessant work; sleepless nights and apparently efficient days. Some day, if we are ever in the right mood, I’ll tell you about it, but it will be only words, because it’s incommunicable.
With the letter he enclosed the draft of a poem he had just written which would, he said, ‘explain a lot’. The poem was entitled ‘Tiz’n Test’, after the high, windswept pass of that name that crosses over the High Atlas, and referred to an episode during Gavin’s travels the previous winter and to its aftermath in this present winter. It spoke of the solace of human love in the deep dark of a bleak and lonely wasteland, and of the bitter nihilism of subsequent betrayal. The poem was clearly addressed to Ahmed, and written in the depths of despair. The imagery, drawn from the wild world of Tiz’n Test, is striking.
The darkness and the storm,
Wind-scream, clang of iron,
The shuddering walls,
Crash of falling stone,
Your warm and living flesh against my own …
Sunrise and a ruined inn,
Far off a jackal’s cry;
Dawn, and the world’s age
A vulture in the sky.
Sleeping, insentient, you became the giver
Of a brief borrowed world –
Snowthaw and the blood-red river,
Windsurge of bird;
Became the archetypal lover
Knowing a forgotten world.
These your betrayal takes away for ever:
World without sin,
Desert and mountain we explored together;
Where has it led, that road that neither
Knew? Only the broken inn?
Not all of Gavin’s poetry was expressed in verse form. In their imagery and intensity of emotion, some passages in his book The Rocks Remain, in which he was to express his anguished experiences in Morocco during the Haywire Winter, are really poems too. Such passages are not statements of pure documentary fact; but nor are they mere inventions; rather they are extrapolations that start from a basis in fact and from that basis build a structure of thought and emotion that states a poetic truth rather than a documentary one. There is no clearer example of Gavin’s prose-poetry – his narrative of extrapolation – than the incident at the salt-marsh at Rabat. Late one evening, while staying at Margaret Pope’s flat, Gavin went out for a walk in the salt-marsh at the edge of the city. After an hour or two he returned to the flat. He did not talk about his walk and after a little while he went to bed. Later, in The Rocks Remain, he developed this straightforward and relatively brief excursion into a haunting and disturbing narrative – a poetic extrapolation that enabled him to come much nearer to the ‘real’ truth (about his state of mind) than the literal truth could have done:
One night I wandered on a salt-marsh; I left the streets of the city in which I was living because without solitude I could not resolve the tangle of my thoughts. When I set out the moon was bright. Before me rose ghostly flocks of flamingos; they wheeled pale but colourless in the moonlight, and alighted always ahead of me, so that their numbers became illimitable and all-enveloping. After a long time the moon was hidden by a cloud and I could no longer follow their flight. The only possible paths were the now unlit causeways, running always at right angles to each other, and I had lost my bearings. In utter darkness I came upon a shack. A figure little darker than the sky was somehow beside me and drew me into the warm darkness of the shelter. A bellows fanned a charcoal brazier, a bearded face thus lit by firelight glanced at me without apparent curiosity. ‘Min fdl’k,’ he said. ‘Min fdl’k’ (make yourself at home), and leaving the brazier he spread a blanket on the floor. I drank mint tea and then slept; in the cold hour of the dawn I was aware that small children came and laid more coverings upon me. No one asked me any questions …
Gavin’s hastily scribbled notes recording his unhappy domicile in the medina of Marrakesh, some of which were later published in shortened form in The Rocks Remain, include some of his finest, most savagely observed and emotionally disturbed and disturbing travel writing. He stares with unhooded eyes into the very heart of horror, the suffering and degradation of the Third World poor, a mirror image of his own private, privileged hell. Here he comes close to the vision of true, naked reality, uncluttered by romanticism, Christian optimism, or any other brand of wishful thinking. Gavin Maxwell’s medina is Joseph Conrad’s Congo jungle of the Heart of Darkness; it is the dying words of the mad, ailing Kurtz – ‘The horror! The horror!’ Gavin’s Marrakesh home and the backstreets that envelop it are an exotic version of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, holding for him a similar abyss, a similar void, a similar terror of the unknown. ‘The essential advantage for a poet,’ Eliot had written, ‘is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.’ Gavin’s prose description of the nightmare of Marrakesh as he perceived it during the late winter of 1961 is essentially poetic. The imagery, alternating between pity and horror, emptiness and fear, is the clearly focused, uncompromising imagery of the poet deranged, of the front-line soldier after close-quarter carnage, of the condemned to death and the dying. On previous visits Morocco had seemed to him an inordinately beautiful and wondrous land. Images of glory, however, are few now. Instead he sees: ‘Two hooded figures squat in the dust of the alley outside my door slitting the throats of chickens over a small drain; there is a terrible commotion from the dying wings as the knife cuts through each neck. The dust soaks up the blood slowly, cats paw at it petulantly and lick their toes. One evening at the close of Ramadan …’
Gavin’s world in the medina was inhabited predominantly, if not exclusively, by an army of beggars, whose cries filled both his waking and his sleeping hours, reaching their height towards sundown, when the siren sounded the end of the day’s fast. He did not have to stir far to see them. They were beneath his window and outside his door.
Not even in sleep was he spared the horror of the suffering he saw all around him. ‘One night,’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘I woke from a dream to hear the blind beggar’s invocation from the street outside, and my own voice saying, “Give me back my eyes.” But to whomever these words were addressed, they were no more heard than the beggar’s, who asked for so little while I asked for so much. I put an Arab shawl round my shoulders and fumbled my way blindly down the stairs and found the beggar and gave him more, probably, than he had ever received in his life.’
At dawn he would wake, or half-wake, from the tension of his dreams, slip his feet out of bed and remain sitting there for a long time, with his eyes resting unfocused upon some ancient obscene scrawl or a crevice in the crumbling plaster of his cell. Recalling his depressive state, he wrote: ‘An Arab friend said to me: “You must go – otherwise you never will. People can die like this, without reason; they turn inward and they are against themselves.”’
As the haywire winter dragged on, Gavin’s depression deepened. Only his physical removal from the scene could save him from continuing decline. Buried deep in the high mud-walled maze of the medina, Gavin was like a man ensnared. In the daytime the narrow view of the sky above was simply a blue blank; but at night he could snatch a glimpse of wider bounds, of infinity and eternity together, the rectangle of brilliant stars hanging above the clamorous city like a studded belt of diamonds on dark velvet; and here and there he could catch an enfiladed view of a more attainable freedom – the snow-covered mountains of the High Atlas caught in the last rays of the sun as it sank towards the Atlantic,
the flights of white egrets homing in over the palms and minarets from the open country beyond the city walls. ‘Far to the south were the bright deserts where I longed to be,’ he wrote, ‘the deserts of shimmering castellated mirage and bounding gazelle, the flowering deserts where from waterless stone jol grew the miracle of mauve blossom upon pale thorn.’
Gavin’s occasional forays away from his confining cell in the medina did little to ease his distress, for they took him as often as not into a realm of farce and chaos. Sometimes they led him westward to Rabat and the restless haven of Margaret Pope’s apartment, seething as ever with the ebb and flow of African ambassadors and revolutionaries. ‘He used to come with his horrible animals,’ Margaret Pope recalled, ‘gigantic lizards and things from the desert. He tied them to my lampstands and tried to feed them flies – dead ones at first, then live ones. Once a lizard bit him, right through the quick of his fingernail, when he tried to force its mouth open to feed a live fly to it. So I took the thing to the kitchen and I was going to cut its head off but Gavin wouldn’t let me. “You don’t know anything about animals,” I scolded him. “You’re just emotionally involved with them.”’
In Margaret Pope’s flat Gavin found some distraction in the occupational therapy afforded by the domestic chores to which he and the politicians were assigned – sewing buttons, mending gloves, and other millinery diversions. For a few weeks he took part in a radio programme called ‘Answers to your Questions’ which was broadcast on Margaret Pope’s English-speaking service of Moroccan Radio. Listeners’ questions ranged from space travel to speleology, and the answers were provided by experts from UNESCO in Paris and the Science Division of OECD in London. To present these answers in a manner suitable for popular broadcasting, Margaret Pope conceived the idea of casting Gavin in the role of ‘Professor Svenski’ – ‘a miraculous combination of Bronowski, Russell, Huxley, and all the great specialised scientists of the decade’. Speaking with a stateless middle-European accent of the kind he had perfected in SOE during the war, Gavin solemnly held forth on every learned subject under the sun. Only when it was felt that to continue the deception would risk exposure was Gavin’s role in the programme discontinued; listeners were told that Professor Svenski had left for Indonesia, while Gavin himself returned to his lonely rented room in Marrakesh.
From time to time there were other distractions. Much to the gratification of his highly developed sense of drama, he was caught up in the excitement of the street demonstrations that followed the death of the King of Morocco, Mohammed V in February 1961 – first in Casablanca and then in Marrakesh, where an armed guard was placed at the door to his quarters in the medina. Once, at the instigation of his official mentor in Morocco, His Excellency Moulay Ahmed el Alaoui, the mercurial Minister of Information, Tourism and Fine Arts, a one-eyed cousin of the late King and intimate of the heir apparent, he accompanied a party of fifty Berber beaters and two English sportsmen, grands chasseurs with a special permit to shoot the rare moufflon, the giant wild mountain sheep of the Atlas, on a hunting expedition in the foothills of the southern mountains, where he despatched a running boar with his only shot at three hundred yards.
Gavin’s Moroccan notebook contains brief, cryptic references to other incidents and encounters in Morocco during that distracted winter:
The tire aux pigeons
Lady Steele Maitland – Marquise – visit – blank
The duck shoot at Larache
Murder of Ghoulé
The angry bull at Sodom and Gomorrah
Visit by stately negro at night to explain cause
and so on. Since no fuller account was forthcoming later, these episodes must remain for ever enigmatic spoors in the sand.
Soon it would be time for me to leave Sandaig. The spring was coming, the geese were flying back from the south, the sun had reappeared over the hills. Soon the elvers from the Sargasso Sea would swarm up the burn and the sand martins from Africa would nest again in their holes in the bank. If my ears had been more sensitive, or better attuned, I would have heard, above the ceaseless murmur of the falls, the secret bustle of spring, the uncoiling of fern and circulation of sap, the chrysalids stirring and the earth alive.
One March day I stepped out of the dim gloom of the house into a landscape startlingly changed. The sun blazed down, the air was warm, the trees were loud with birdsong, the motionless sea stretched away to the horizon, glittering and blue. I followed Teko on his morning’s lolloping course towards the islands and their tiny shell-sand coves and on a sudden impulse ran down the beach, following the line of the otter’s footprints across the sand, and leapt into the sea. The water closed over my head like a block of ice. Emerging, I cried out, a primitive shout of triumph and glee, and heard the clamour of the startled gulls on the bird islands and my own voice echo back to me from among the rocks.
That night I rolled myself in a blanket in the sand dunes and lay for a long time listening to the strange, wild cries of the night, staring up at the bright white disc of the full moon in the starlit sky and out across the still, moonlit void of the North Atlantic. I had sunk fragile little roots among these hills and islands. I fell asleep among the dunes at the edge of the great ocean as free as any human being could ever be. Though I did not know it then, I would never be so close to Avalon again.
In Morocco, Gavin realised that the only solution for his helpless condition, for the inertia and depression that held him prisoner, was to leave the country altogether and go home. But time and again he postponed his departure, unable to break away, unable to burst through the barrier which confined him, the nature of which he could not understand. ‘I would try sometimes to think of Camusfeàrna in March sunshine, of the waterfall and the budding birches, of primroses among dead bracken, of the soft mountain distances and blue sea, but always the image would dissolve before it was complete. Before it was strong enough to draw me from where I was.’
Finally Gavin wrote home suggesting that Jimmy Watt should come out to Morocco to help him with his return journey. Jimmy arrived in the last week of March, and the hypnotic spell was broken. But the unpredictable twists and turns of the Haywire Winter persisted to the very end, for Gavin’s exit from Morocco was both farcical and triumphal, a source of hilarity that belied the tortured months that had gone before. He had booked a passage home on a freighter from Casablanca, but the day he and Jimmy were due to deliver the Land Rover at the docks turned out to be the day that Marshal Tito, the President of Yugoslavia, was to begin a state visit to the city. The road to the port – the processional route – was sealed off by army and police roadblocks and decorated with flags and bunting and lined with great crowds of spectators, including tribesmen trucked down from the hills. All traffic had been diverted and there was not a single vehicle on the broad, mile-long avenue when Gavin drove up to the police point that barred further progress.
As it happened, Moulay Ahmed had furnished him with a number of highly official documents to facilitate his travels around the country, including a government laissez-passer and a police coupe-file which allowed him, to all intents and purposes, to ignore any police order or regulation that got in his way. Presenting these papers to the officer in charge, Gavin was astonished to be waved through the roadblock. Ahead lay the empty avenue and a great, expectant crowd lining both sides as far as the eye could see. The Land Rover was evidently the first vehicle that had passed along this route all day, and as Gavin swept along it the crowd pressed forward. Some, taking him for an outrider, clapped and raised a ragged cheer. Others, the Berber tribesmen from the hills, mistook Gavin, if not for Tito, then at least for one of his entourage. They burst out drumming and dancing, they sang and swayed to the rhythm of their age-old tribal dances. Thus honoured and acclaimed, Gavin and Jimmy passed through the serried ranks of Arab well-wishers and Berber mountain-men, their faces fixed in discreet smiles, their arms raised nonchalantly in a gesture halfway between a wave and a salute, till they safely reached their journey’s end
.
The next day they shipped the Land Rover on board a small freighter full of oranges and tortoises and headed home across the Bay of Biscay. Ahead of Gavin lay another year at Camusfeàrna and a new life as a famous author; behind him the Haywire Winter withered and died on the Maghreb shore. ‘I have buried the rest of it in the compost heap of my subconscious,’ he was to write later, ‘and now it only returns to me in the poignancy of dreams, urgent and febrile, in which are implicit the sense of some task unfinished, some goal unattained – sometimes I have thought it was death.’
On 11 April 1961 Gavin arrived back in Britain. From Sandaig I sent him a letter reassuring him that the otters were well and happy, and warning him about the smoke that sometimes emerged from behind the panelling in the kitchen-parlour. From the pathologist at London Zoo I received a letter: ‘I was delighted to hear that Edal is now almost normal again. The recovery of this animal is a fantastic success story. I think you should all be extremely proud of the way that you have saved her life.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 41
