Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  From this fateful meeting a friendship emerged through a shared love of poetry, and of Northumberland, where they had both spent time as children. It was never an easy friendship, and romantically one-sided. Raine fell for Maxwell in a big way, but Maxwell could never return her feelings. And like children, Maxwell and Raine quarrelled periodically, patched things up, quarrelled again. And at the time of that first meeting, Maxwell did indeed need Raine – to help him break into the literary establishment and get published, and later to look after his first otter, Mij.

  Maxwell began to write poetry, and a couple of his poems, through Raine’s influence (or at least, introduction) were published in the New Statesman magazine in 1950. In the summer of 1950 Maxwell travelled up to Sandaig and with his comrade Tex Geddes as sounding board wrote the first three chapters of what was to become his first published book. Tex was to write: ‘[Gavin] complained that he was broke, so I told him I was broke too, but his broke and my broke were two entirely different things.’ Maxwell returned to London, signed a publishing contract with Rupert Hart-Davis, and over the next year and a half worked at his book. The result of his labours, Harpoon at a Venture, was published in 1952 and the first print run quickly sold out. Like many of his subsequent books, Harpoon at a Venture was also published in the United States. It is still in print today. The critics applauded the book, the reviewer of The Times proclaiming Maxwell to be ‘a man of action who writes like a poet’. Applause is all very well, but it doesn’t always bring with it money, and Harpoon at a Venture wasn’t about to restore Maxwell’s spent fortune.

  In the autumn of 1952, Maxwell borrowed a Land Rover from Monreith and drove down to Sicily in search of material for a second book. He found his subject in the story of Salvatore Giuliano, a Robin Hood figure who had fought for a separatist Sicilian state during the 1940s and been murdered in mysterious circumstances by persons unknown. Maxwell returned to Britain, got himself a literary agent (Graham Watson of Curtis Brown), a new publisher (Longmans), and spent much of the next two years moving between Sicily and London researching the life of Giuliano and working on the manuscript of God Protect Me from My Friends. (Maxwell was to return to Sicily in 1955 to work on a second book about the island, The Ten Pains of Death – an account of the lives of the Sicilian poor.)

  In January 1956, Maxwell accompanied the great wilderness explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, to the marshes of Southern Iraq. He spent two months travelling in that watery wilderness between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, crumpled up cross-legged in a canoe with Thesiger, and it was there that he was given a five-month-old otter, Mijbil. Maxwell returned to his studio flat in London with the otter and notes enough to produce his next book, A Reed Shaken by the Wind, which Thesiger judged ‘a brilliant piece of verbal photography’. And I think with A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Gavin Maxwell hit his stride.

  A small flat in a big city is no place for an otter, and as Mij matured he became more unwieldy and strong. He also had a habit of biting visitors to Maxwell’s flat. Maxwell took Mij up to Sandaig with him for the summer and asked Raine to look after Mij there for a time while he went abroad again.

  Maxwell returned from abroad and was angry (or perhaps embarrassed – for he had arrived with a friend) to find Raine hadn’t vacated the house before his arrival. They had arranged that prior to his return she would spend that night with the family who lived at Tormor, the house up the hill beside the Glenelg road. Maxwell and Raine quarrelled again. In Raine’s retelling of the incident in The Lion’s Mouth, she was being rejected by the man she was in love with and became overwrought. She went out into a gale to climb the rough path to Tormor and the hurt ran so deep that she laid her hands on the trunk of the rowan tree and cried, ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now.’

  The details of that night, and the phrasing of the curse, differ slightly in the telling. Maxwell’s version in Raven Seek Thy Brother is a little more sensational. Raine’s has to be the truer of the two. Or does it?

  Just as I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m not so sure I believe in curses. And perhaps neither did Raine, or Maxwell. We all do and say things in hot anger which, with hindsight, we regret, and don’t anyway necessarily mean. Raine forever regretted the curse. Whether she believed in her power to blight a life, I cannot say. She was at the time a practising Catholic, intrigued by dreams and their interpretation, by visions, by spiritualism and mysticism. She was a student of the mystic poet and visionary William Blake, and she herself was a poet, with a poet’s sensibility and all that goes with that calling.

  Looking over their story as I do, from on high and with hindsight and misted facts, Maxwell’s flight towards the sun was not far off reaching its zenith anyway. And like Icarus, after melting one’s wings off, all that is left is a naturally swift plummet to the sea. Maxwell was careless in many ways – careless of his health, of his businesses, in his treatment of others. And he was a troubled man. Kathleen’s curse – when some years later he found out about it – gave him someone (and something suitably exotic) to blame for all the calamities that befell him afterwards.

  Raine and Maxwell patched up their differences and continued their uneasy friendship, fighting and forgiving – an abusive marriage of the psyche. Raine continued to look after Mij during Maxwell’s periods away. But Mij’s demand for constant attendance and attention, without which his energies would turn to the destruction of his surroundings, called for a full-time otter keeper, and to this end Maxwell put out feelers.

  In April 1957 Raine travelled to Sandaig with Mij. Mij wandered and was killed by the Glenelg villager Maxwell subsequently wrote of as ‘Big Angus’. Whether Mij was killed because all otters were considered vermin back then, or whether the Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli – ‘Maxwell’s Otter’ – was killed due to a local man’s antipathy towards its owner, remains moot to this day. Kathleen Raine told Douglas Botting, Maxwell’s biographer:

  Mij would have gone eventually, given his propensity for straying, but it was I who was the instrument for evil in Gavin’s life. Yet I had meant so intensely to be only the instrument for good. This is something that bewildered and embittered me for many years.

  Wilfred Thesiger had other concerns, which he later expressed to Botting:

  [Gavin] had no hand in getting [Mij] and frankly I found it rather odd when he named [the species] after himself – if it was going to be named after anybody it should have been named after me. Gavin owed everything to his trip with me in the marshes. The marshes gave him the otter, the otter gave him Ring of Bright Water, and without that he would never have been heard of again.

  After Mij’s death, Maxwell took over the lease of Raine’s Paultons Square house in Chelsea and kept a series of exotic pets: a ring-tailed lemur, a bush baby, a mynah bird, a flock of tanagers . . . but none had the charm or character of Mij, and none of them stayed for long. Raine continued to rent a top-floor flat in the house, but most of her time now was spent in Cambridge, where she had taken up a research fellowship at Girton College to work on a book about William Blake. She eventually moved (some might say she was pushed) out of the house altogether.

  In 1957 Maxwell sacked his literary agent. Graham Watson, it seems, had an unfortunate habit of pointing out obstacles and hindrances when Maxwell suggested book ideas and money-making schemes. The possible sale of a film treatment of Harpoon at a Venture Maxwell had written hadn’t been pursued with much vigour. Maxwell decided that Watson wasn’t making enough money for him from his books. Watson, for his part, in Book Society, found Maxwell

  a somewhat demanding author. He needed money in substantial amounts and he didn’t much mind from whence it came . . . The telephone would ring . . . ‘Gavin here. I’m in a garage near Inverness. My super-charger has blown. It’s going to cost £150 to repair. I need the cash before my cheque bounces. See if Mark [Longman – Maxwell’s publisher] will provide. I’m coming down by sleeper and we’ll meet for lunch tomorrow.’ I would duly report at the luncheon ren
dezvous to find the impoverished Gavin driving up in a Daimler, temporarily hired to replace his Alvis. Life with Gavin was life on a roller-coaster.

  Meanwhile Maxwell had met Peter Janson-Smith, an employee of Watson’s literary agency who was setting up on his own as an agent and who had a positive, can-do approach to business. Janson-Smith became Maxwell’s literary agent and it was he, together with Maxwell’s publisher and editor, who encouraged Maxwell to write Ring of Bright Water.

  By 1959, Maxwell had written four books and was fed up. His work had been praised in the press (Harpoon at a Venture had been the Daily Mail Book of the Month, A Reed Shaken by the Wind had won the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and almost all had carried Book Society recommendations) but it hadn’t brought him the wealth he’d hoped for. And as you may have surmised by now, Maxwell was a spendthrift – however much money he had, it was never enough. Lack of money slowed him down and thwarted his dreams, and he resented it, he who’d been born to it.

  A book about Sandaig and the pet otter that had brought his West Highland home and himself so alive seemed to all concerned to be just the thing, and in the spring of 1959 Maxwell withdrew to Sandaig to write it. He took with him Jimmy Watt – a school-leaver he had recently employed. Jimmy, Maxwell had determined, would look after Sandaig during Maxwell’s absences, and a Scottish otter cub that he would take from the wild once they arrived.

  Fate intervened.

  Not long after settling in at Sandaig, sitting over a whisky in the Lochalsh Hotel in Kyle with Raef Payne, who’d journeyed north for a holiday, Maxwell spied a man and a woman by the Skye ferry slipway taking an otter for a walk. He rushed out of the hotel, accosted the couple with stories of Mij and his search for a replacement otter, and a few weeks later Edal (a female, a future starlet) took up residence at Sandaig.

  Ring of Bright Water, published the following year, brought Maxwell what he desired – a global readership and an embarrassment of riches. And he deserved it. He was good, believe me; one of the best. And he was funny, and clever.5

  When you don’t have much money (and Maxwell, for all his flash, after the failure of Soay Shark Fisheries had little), life is simple because you have few options and therefore very little choice. Money in large amounts brings with it (besides substantial tax demands) opportunities. It brings temptation and freedoms undreamt of, but it can’t by itself bring contentment, nor can it, as the song goes, buy love. Success makes life complicated. And Maxwell’s life was complicated enough as it was.

  When Maxwell sat down to write the book which was to make his name, did he knowingly create a mythical version of himself: ‘Gavin Maxwell, reclusive otter man’? I don’t believe he did. It looks to me like he wrote the truth, more or less, as remembered. The manuscript of Ring of Bright Water – Maxwell’s sepia-ink calligraphy fills several battered blue notebooks – is too fluently written to be artful. There are very few emendations or rewritten passages. Much of it was written sitting by the waterfall at Sandaig, and there is much joy in that book. The myth, I think, was placed upon him by his readers and the media, another case of typecasting. If we can pigeonhole someone, put him in a cage and label him, we think we’ve got a handle on him. We know what he is and what it is he deals in. But our moods change continually. We’ve daytime and night-time selves, idle times and feeling-sorry-for-ourselves times, bouts of achievement and bouts of lying on the sofa gazing passively into the goggle-box. We’ve sexually efflorescent times and periods when our romantic life is as barren as a megabarchan sand dune marching across the emptiest quarter of the Empty Quarter. We’ve good days and bad. We are all many selves. If we live long we pass through at least three generations and our morals and casuistries, our consciousness and our interests, our tastes and our motivations will change often during our journeying. How to judge?

  The stack of Sunday newspapers by the door of my room grew taller. Sandy informed me of the Five Winter Rule: ‘If you can stick that many up here, you’ll become a local. You never know, you might even stay forever.’

  A warm ocean current, the North Atlantic Drift, flows up the west coast of Britain and keeps the western sea a few degrees above that of the east. West-coast weather is wet and windy; east-coast weather drier but colder. On the island frost was rare. All through December and January there was snow on the mountaintops, like a sprinkling of sugar, but none on the island or in the two villages. Driving to Inverness one January morning I came to a line stretching right across the land, clearly dividing it in two. To the west – the island, Hebridean, side – rain fell on moorland and bare mountainside; and to the east – snow. I stopped the car to wonder, then drove under a rainbow onto a road carpeted in white.

  The constantly changing weather is an integral part of life up there. You are always aware of it. A benign and picturesque morning might be followed by a depressingly dreich week. The salt-laden sea air rusts metal zips in jackets and trousers. Everything rusts, or turns green – even if it isn’t made of metal, even if it isn’t left out in the rain. Sometimes it felt as if we were merely subjects ruled by the monarchical weather, which rolled regally on and by, capricious, bipolar, and emotionally draining. Like the little girl in the children’s book – when the Highlands are good, they are very, very good; but when they are bad they are horrid. And though we followed the weather – watched the reports on the TV and tuned into radio bulletins; and though we dressed in expectation of rain – sea-booted and waterproofed denizens everywhere – we rarely discussed it. In good company, ‘bad’ weather becomes an irrelevance.

  I’d been on the island some months before it struck me that I never saw anyone carrying an umbrella. It seemed odd in a place with so much rain. I bought one and the first chance I got (the very next day) I opened it out and held it aloft on a walk to the shops. Before I’d reached the end of the bridge a wind came blasting down the loch at forty miles an hour and blew my sweat-shop manufactured umbrella inside out. I flapped about by the side of the road for a short while, flailing around in the wind and driving rain, but I understood. The same goes for broad-brimmed hats.

  To begin with I worked around the weather, but soon learnt that you have to just keep going. Council workmen carry on strimming the verges through rainstorms, diggers and tractors still roll, roofers and builders carry on hammering, fishermen stay out among flinging, foaming waves. And it can be exhilarating out there in Weather – wild and raw; energising and enervating all at the same time. I said as much to Sandy one day.

  ‘Makes you feel alive, maybe,’ he said. ‘Not much fun being out there in a blizzard though, or setting off to Kyle in fine weather and having to plough back to Kyleakin through icy-cold horizontal rain, raindrops sharp as needles flying into your eyes.’

  I remember battling my way up one of the Cuillins in a rainstorm and the rain and the wind so loud, knocking me around, finding ways to douse me between the fibres of my ‘waterproof’ clothing; a pair of ravens rising in the air like kites to play and sail higher into the heavens. I bellowed into the tempest and it bellowed back, far louder, far madder, its voice higher and bleaker than my own. I remember standing under the Skye Bridge watching squalls come blasting down from the Minch in the north, the wind screaming, buffeting solid objects and rushing swishing through the grass and reeds and the dying bracken and fireweed. West Highland wind stops you in your tracks. The wind frequently forces the closure of the Skye Bridge to lorries and vans. The wind shunts parked cars (one of them mine!) several feet to the right. The wind blows cold and warm and fierce, and screams. The wind is without morals or scruples, qualms or remorse. People die up there every year. Climbers get caught out and get blown off a hill or down a ravine. In January 2005 a hurricane ripped through the Hebrides, wrecking and flattening and tearing to tatters. Fish-farm floats five-foot square were torn from their moorings, boats were blown out to sea and caravans flipped upside down. On South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, a 125 mph wind killed three generations of one family when the
car in which they were travelling was blown off the road and into the sea. Every village still misses a son, a father, a grandfather who headed out to sea and never came back. Death, up there, is only a wrong foot away.

  Rain would fall for days without pause before I’d awaken one morning aware that something had changed: the banging on the Velux had stopped, the wind had blown itself out; it was over. The sun had come and the world outside glistened. Voices travelled across from Kyleakin. Kids rode their bikes, kicked a football about the green, played shinty and loitered about on the beach, sneaking cigarettes. Grown-ups littered benches outside the pubs, elderly tourists sipped tea on collapsible chairs in the car park. I’d cast off in my dinghy to clear my head of the fug, out on clear waters beneath a blazing sun, puttering above fat-fingered starfish, porcupine-needled sea urchins and bone-coloured barnacles. Over there by the skerries, the flap-flap-glide of a shearwater; and here come the kittiwakes, out of an empty blue sky. They hover overhead, follow the boat for a while, look down at me, look up and wheel away towards the Crowlin Isles. I cut the engine. Apart from the rumble of a waterfall and the bubbling call of a curlew, there is nothing. Utter silence and nobody. It is strong medicine. Night falls and a cobweb of stars hangs overhead, where for days there has been only murk and rags of dishwater cloud.

  I received a steady trickle of polite, bland letters from literary agents informing me that my Travels book wasn’t something they felt they could sell to a publisher (any publisher, anywhere in the known universe?) just now, that the market was flat just now, that they weren’t taking on new clients just now, that they wished me good luck with my writing, with future projects I might be foolish enough to embark on, etcetera, etcetera, etc. Literary taste is subjective, I said to myself. Ask six friends to read the same book and they’ll give you six differing opinions of it. Ever fallen in love with a book and wanted your best friends to love it too, only to find that they hate it? What’s treasure to one man is to another just junk that should have been chucked in the bin years ago. (Why does Sandy come to mind when I write that?)