Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Sometimes, if there was a lull in the conversation, or his mind wandered momentarily, or (late at night) the whisky began to do the talking for him, Gavin would come out with some startling non sequitur that gave vent to a passing obsession or momentarily engaged another level of his personality. In the middle of a discussion about the philosophy of escapism, for example, he would suddenly exclaim: ‘There ought to be a law against the joining up of sausages!’ After propounding the theory that opting to live on a tiny island, where one was surrounded by water, was really a subconscious return to the security of the womb, where one was surrounded by the amniotic fluid, he instantly lurched, disconcertingly and without apparent reason, into a ribald ditty dredged up from his boyhood memory:

  This is Ann of Barking Creek

  Who had her monthlies twice a week;

  Said Maude of Woking,

  ‘How provoking –

  Not much poking, so to speak!’

  Sometimes he would resort to horseplay and clowning to lighten a long session of earnest discussion. On one occasion he began to squirm on the sofa, wrestling with his right leg. ‘Oh, opters-out can do lots of amazing things,’ he jested. ‘I can bite my toenails, for example, which most people can’t do at my age! I’ll do it for you now if you like! Normally speaking, I only do it when I’m very, very worked up – I bite my toenails continuously! A very bad habit!’

  The ceaseless distractions of daily life on Kyleakin Island caused many interruptions, and the weather and the state of the sea were a constant preoccupation, so Gavin was always leaping up to peer out through the picture window at the straits below. One such occasion produced a bizarre consequence. Gavin had spotted a small boat struggling through rough seas to bring fresh supplies to the island. Fixing it through his telescope, he gave a running commentary as the boat drew near. ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll keel – he’ll keep the sea broadside,’ he muttered. ‘There’s not much he can do – he’s got the sea on his quarter wherever he goes.’ In the silence that ensued a curious sentence – a variation on the famous statement uttered by Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen as he held his telescope to his blind eye: ‘Signal? I see no signal’ – came into my head: ‘Fruit bats? I see no fruit bats!’ This was an odd enough sentence to dream up, but what made it even odder was that a few seconds later Gavin – still peering through his telescope – repeated, loudly and formally, the very same sentence: ‘Fruit bats? I see no fruit bats!’ I asked him why he had said it, but he replied he had no idea. When I told him that I had thought it seconds before he said it, he was not at all surprised. ‘Happens all the time. All the time.’ And it seemed that indeed it did. At about this time Richard Frere, too, noticed a strong increase in what he called ‘telepathic empathy’ as far as Gavin was concerned – ‘a weird gift of being able to pick up a signal consisting of crude emotion from another person’.

  Eventually the interview was completed, the batteries of my tape recorder failing as Gavin ended his final soliloquy, his voice slowly fading into a long, electronic silence, as if he himself were receding far into the dark. It was the first interview he had ever given that covered the whole span of his life and a wide spectrum of his thoughts. It was also the last long interview he ever gave. His views were trenchant and perceptive, and help to explain in part how, in his fifty-fifth year, and famous around the world for his idyll of nature in Ring of Bright Water, he came to rest at last on a desert rock in the middle of a tidal rip on the edge of the great ocean.

  ‘I’m not sure that I am a typical opter-out at all,’ he began:

  But it is true, as you know, that I’ve always wanted to live on an island, an oasis apart from the rest of the human race. In that sense, I was an opter-out long before the present trend, and even though I am only a part-time opter-out, I do have some experience of opting out as a way of life, and I understand the forces that push one into it and occasionally pull one back from it.

  I believe one of the basic factors about an opter-out is that he refuses to subscribe to the rule of any kind of authority. More than that, he feels himself to be superior to the generality of human beings. Somewhere at heart he feels that he is stronger, larger, more powerful than other people. He feels that the kind of life they are living is not good enough for him, so he protests against it – he’s going to try and enlarge his own life. And then, like every other living creature, he finds that the extent to which he can enlarge his life is strictly limited, and the first time he touches the confines and finds he can’t go any further, the first time he feels the cold of the winter wind, he tries to come back in. But very often he’s not allowed back in, or only very tentatively. This makes his position very dubious – is he strong enough to go on being an opter-out, or is he strong enough to admit his weakness to the people he’s left and say ‘I want to be welcomed back in’?

  For most opters-out this is a life-long struggle. For me I’d say it’s been a life-long struggle for a long, long time. The mere fact of leaving one’s home, leaving one’s environment, of travelling widely and being away for months or even longer periods, means your friends are no longer your friends in the same way when you come back. Every time one is away and out of touch it becomes more and more difficult to make contact again, so eventually one’s friends, one’s home world, fade away. I suppose Ulysses was the archetypal opter-out and when he returned home after years of wandering the only living thing from his past that recognised and welcomed him was his dog.

  In my view the main reason people opt out is to find a niche in life. By that I mean a milieu in which the opter-out finds a sufficient feeling of security to function as a human being. This might be a place with no people at all. The niche doesn’t have to be a place where you are alone – it could be a place with twenty people, or a hundred, though not, I think, a thousand – but it must contain the essentials for human existence. And the essentials for human existence stem from aggression, because we are an aggressive species, in the same way most other species are. We have territorial demands, for example; we have the need to assert our presence, to do this, achieve that … Any community or niche in which you fit yourself, whether it is somewhere populated, like Gauguin’s Tahiti or James Hilton’s fictitious Shangri-La, or somewhere without human beings where you are merely aggressing against other species, must have this outlet for aggression, this is absolutely essential. I think you must have a sexual life as well but I don’t think in the human species there is a necessity to integrate yourself with other members of your species. After all, one of the main reasons for opting out is to put more space between yourself and the mass of human beings. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the great popularity of castaway stories like The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe. The fact that these two stories had such enormous popular success surely demonstrates that this is a basic desire in people. It is certainly one of my main reasons for opting out. Here on Kyleakin I’ve given myself half a mile of deep water between me and the nearest human being.

  And I’m not the only one. There’s been a great influx of English people into the West Highlands this year trying to find a cottage that is at least a quarter of a mile away from anyone else. The demand is becoming fantastic – though of course there is next to nothing to be had because all the land is owned by the big landlords, who will not sell or even let so much as a byre. People have got this feeling that they must find something that has no contact with other human beings. In my view, they are suffering from what I would call an induced hysteria, which is the consequence of intense overcrowding in mass communities. Not long ago an experiment was carried out on rats which produced much the same result. The rats were subject to intense overcrowding under laboratory conditions and this induced hysteria in the rats and eventually produced a race of delinquent rats – deviant rats, homosexual rats, rats that were homicidal towards each other – or perhaps ‘raticidal’ would be a better word. I know that I would personally fall victim to this same hysteria if I had to live in the big c
ity for long and this is one of my reasons for opting out.

  Recently there was even an article in the Daily Telegraph which argued that by the year 2000 the modern State would have to provide special territories – reservations, if you like – for people who wanted to opt out of a civilisation that was characterised by a massive population explosion, increased urbanisation, an advanced technological life-style and a leisure revolution; and the paper proposed that in Britain the West Highlands and northern Scotland should be set aside for such people. Well, I think this is an extraordinary contradiction in terms. You can’t have reservations for opters-out. An opter-out does not accept authority. If he’s asked to live in a reserve then he’s accepting authority. Besides, this scheme sounds a little like the provisions Tsar Nicholas made for his opters-out in Russia, don’t you think? He sent them all to lovely little holiday homes in the salt mines in Siberia, did he not? And you, Douglas Botting, are the only person I have met in my life who has lived in both places – Siberia and the West Highlands – and you must admit there are certain factors in common!

  The dream of opting out is like nostalgia for one’s childhood – a time when one had no responsibility. But I think anyone who has a dream of this kind is doomed to failure and doomed to great unhappiness and doomed to change their life completely. If it’s an urge – a determination – and not a dream then I think perhaps it can work. But it would not be an ideal life – there are great disadvantages. The people who saw in my book Ring of Bright Water an ideal life – a paradise – were extracting the message they wanted to extract, even though I did imply in that book that there were great difficulties in living this sort of life.

  The great difficulties posed by everyday life at Sandaig – the logistical and transport problems, the accidents and emergencies, the soaring costs of even the most elementary items – have been described in detail already. Though the White Island was a more sophisticated establishment, the problems caused by its isolation and exposure to the elements were if anything more severe than those at Sandaig. The problems of small island life were not eased by Gavin’s total lack of aptitude in practical matters or by his partial lameness in one foot, which made it difficult for him to get about as he used to, especially on an island as rugged and treacherous underfoot as Kyleakin. Gavin may have found a niche and a feeling of security, but it was hardly a place where he could function as a human being without a tremendous amount of help from others. It was clear to me, as it must have been to Gavin himself, that he could not have survived on the White Island for more than a day or two without the active and continuous support of Andrew Scot and Richard Frere. As Kathleen Raine commented to Richard after her first visit to the island: ‘I only wish you may succeed where so many have failed in keeping his life within workable limits for him. The search for freedom involves him in such constricting complications!’

  In the diary I kept of my visit the entry for the last day of October – Hallowe’en – provides a profile of an average day on Kyleakin Island:

  It is appreciably colder. The first really heavy snow of winter has fallen on the Cuillin and the high mountains beyond Kyle. Roads are blocked and gales are beating the coast. The wind is easterly, bitter and fierce. It knocks down the TV aerial that was erected only yesterday and after Andrew puts off to Kyleakin in the dinghy it gets up to Force 9 or so and Gavin has to ring the Post Office in Kyleakin and leave a message warning Andrew not to attempt the return crossing till the wind dies down a bit. Andrew phones back to warn Gavin that the diesel generator that provides the electricity and pumps up the water is about to run out of fuel but Gavin can’t understand his instructions about how to fill it. ‘I don’t even know how to switch it on or off,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t understand machinery and I don’t like it.’ The firewood is wet. Gavin has squitters, his sister rings to say that his eldest aunt, aged ninety-six, has just died, and then Teko is found throwing a fit and is thought to have pneumonia. Gavin rings the vet but he is out. He tries to ring him again at 11 but now the radio phone seems out of order. The way the wind is it will be difficult for the vet to visit tomorrow anyway; and it looks as though Andrew will have to stay the night over in Kyleakin. Meanwhile the kitchen piles up ankle deep in dirty plates, the wind roars and the sea surges. It is a constant battle to keep the whole thing running smoothly. At 12 we have the first whisky of the day and Gavin informs me that – to crown it all – the island is haunted. Loud metallic clangs and low-pitched mutterings in some strange tongue can be heard at dead of night – Richard Frere had heard them clearly, apparently, and so had Mary MacLeod from Tormor, and many lighthouse-keepers in the past.

  Not until my last evening on the island did Gavin’s mood, which had been remarkably sunny and buoyant throughout my visit, begin to darken. Undoubtedly the whisky, which he imbibed in heroic measures, was partly to blame; but it seemed as though he was undergoing something more profound than a simple shift of mood. Progressively he became argumentative, then aggressive, then positively paranoid. Hitherto I had admired enormously the courage and resilience with which he had weathered the terrible blows that had been dealt him in the last few years. But that last evening I realised that they – or something – had taken their toll. Time and again he reverted to the theme of betrayal, treachery and desertion. Even his friends, myself included, were part of an imagined web of treachery that he claimed was being woven behind his back by all and sundry.

  The next morning, before I left the island to catch the train from Kyle, I took photographs of Gavin as he nursed his sickly otter cub, Malla. Both looked desperately frail, and Gavin seemed to move painfully and with difficulty as he crouched down beside the baby animal to feed it milk from a spoon. At that moment, as I stepped through the door for the last time and made my way down to the waiting dinghy, I feared for them both.

  I was never to see either of them again.

  THIRTY-NINE

  A bright bitter sea

  Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

  JOHN LENNON

  On 2 December 1968 Raven Seek Thy Brother was published. The book was billed as the true successor to Ring of Bright Water, but its story was a very different one, and so was its mood, laden with doom and melancholy, as many reviewers pointed out.

  The reviews were mixed, the critics mostly bemused by the long catalogue of disasters that had beset Gavin during the last five years, the introspective, confessional tone of the writing, the erratic life it described, and the deeply troubled, darkly mystical nature of the author, ‘more at ease among ghosts and animals than the human race’. Some condemned the book’s vein of bitterness and self-pity, others praised it as ‘a celebration of courage and compassion’ (Daily Telegraph), one saw it as ‘a study of the psychology of living with the weight of the past’ (Times Educational Supplement). The New York Times ascribed Gavin’s troubles to ‘neglect or oversight or arrogance’ and deemed Kathleen’s curse, which was described in the book, ‘an excuse, not a reason’. In the light of this dark and brooding final volume of the Camusfeàrna trilogy, Ring of Bright Water was reappraised as ‘the author’s own desperate flight from the shadows of the mind’. In the Chicago Herald-Tribune, Alan Pryce-Jones noted: ‘His talent is a disturbing one: the gift of happiness eludes him, and though the furies never quite catch up with him, for much of the time they are in hot pursuit.’

  The underlying thesis of Raven was that Kathleen Raine’s curse had been the cause of the long series of setbacks Gavin had suffered during the years covered by the book (1963–68). Though the book did not say as much, there was implicit in its conclusion a question: after the fire which had burned down Gavin’s house and killed his otter, was the curse finally spent – and if not, where would it end? That she should have been cast in the role of a witch in Gavin’s book was a terrible blow for Kathleen. ‘I was both hurt and angry,’ she wrote later, ‘that after all my only place in any book of Gavin’s was not as a friend who had loved and helped him onc
e but as the woman who had laid a curse on him.’ Gavin, for his part, was no less aggrieved that anyone should have laid a curse on him at all, whether it really was the cause of all his suffering or not. Some months were to pass before their mutual grievances were aired in a final stormy confrontation.

  Advance orders for the book were promising. The first print run of twenty-five thousand was bought up by the bookshops before publication and another substantial printing had to be put in hand. The book trade put Raven in the top twenty bestselling Christmas books, alongside John Updike’s Couples, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and the latest Agatha Christie. ‘We can therefore be assured of a good income during the coming year,’ Peter Janson-Smith wrote to Richard Frere, ‘and I may be able to get big advances for the next book.’

  On the day following publication Gavin made one of his rare forays to London. Several important items of business drew him to the metropolis. There were book signings and radio interviews in connection with the new book. There was lunch with his publisher, Mark Longman, to discuss his ideas for his next book – the story of the Kyleakin zoo park and eider colony and other West Highland adventures. And there was the preview of the film of Ring of Bright Water at a dubbing studio in Soho Square.

  As well as directing the film, Jack Couffer also co-wrote the screenplay with Bill Travers. The leading roles were played by Bill Travers and his wife Virginia McKenna, ardent animal protectionists who had scored a big box-office hit with their film of Joy Adamson’s bestselling book Born Free. The film version of Ring took the basic idea of Gavin’s book and totally transformed it into family entertainment. The biggest change was in the persona of Gavin himself, who became a disillusioned insurance agent called Graham Merril. A local West Highland lady doctor was added as love interest, and the cottage at Sandaig was transformed into a single-roomed croft near Oban, far to the south of Sandaig. Though the landscape was relatively lowland, Wolfgang Suschitsky’s camerawork was superbly evocative of the magic of the West Coast. The otter scenes, too, were authentic and poignantly reminiscent of the months I had spent looking after Teko in years gone by – so much so that it brought tears to my eyes to watch ‘Mij’ (played by a clawed Canadian otter) run free along the beach and swim with joyful abandon in the burn. The script was thin but the actors were sympathetic and seemed to enjoy their scenes with the otter, who was clearly the star of the show, everywhere snuffling and grunting his way into mischief.