The curse of the wild woman
Andro Linklater
GAVIN MAXWELL: A LIFE by,Douglas Botting HarperCollins, 122.50, pp. 525 At the crux of Gavin Maxwell's life occurred a moment of drama so wild and fateful that it was better fitted for a Donizetti opera than for unadorned reality. On a stormy night, with the sound of a burn in torrent on one side and the thun- der of waves on the other a curse was laid on him by a woman who loved him neither well nor wisely but with an intensity that still blazes through page after page of her poetry. Driven out of his cottage in the West Highlands after a furious quarrel with him, she had returned in the darkness and, grasping a rowan tree which grew within sight of the building, cried out to the spirit of the tree, 'Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now'.
At the time Maxwell was enjoying one of the few periods of fulfilled contentment that he was to know in his self-tormented life. In Mij, an Iraqi otter given to him by Wilfred Thesiger, he had found a creature which he could love absolutely, and in the cottage at Sandaig he had discovered the haven of peace which, as this excellent biography shows, he searched for all his life. He lived another 13 years after the curse, and into them were packed every kind of misfortune to which mankind is heir.
Whether one believes in any causal rela- tionship between those words spoken in anguish and subsequent events is immateri- al. Kathleen Raine, who uttered them, did so at the time, and they haunt her beautiful work, The Lion's Mouth. Referring to her blameless part in Mij's death, she is quoted here as saying in bewilderment:
I was the instrument for evil in Gavin's life. Yet I had meant so intensely to be only the instrument for good.
Still more to the point, Maxwell believed in the power of her words, although he did not learn about them until some years later. As it happened, my parents visited him the day after Kathleen Raine told him what she had done, and the contrast between his dark foreboding and her care- free mood following her confession was developed into a story which at first seemed quite amusing. In the years that followed, however, it took on a bleaker hue.
Her revelation came in the summer of 1960, weeks before the publication of Ring of Bright Water, his love story about Mij, which was to bring fame and wealth beyond any ambition. As Douglas Botting brings out with delicate skill in the first immacu- late half of his book, the odds against that vain, aristocratic, near schizoid fantasist achieving any such success were enormous.
His father was killed in 1914, the year of his birth, and his mother, a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, had brought him up so smothered in love that until he was eight he always slept in her bedroom, and often in her bed, and was scarcely allowed to meet any children outside his own family circle. What he enjoyed at Elrig, the family home in Galloway, was the company of wild animals, first as pets, later as prey — in his teens he slaughtered a prodigious quantity of game — and finally at some deep level as companions. This might seem explanation enough for his apartness, but Botting argues convincingly that a severe illness in adolescence had the further effect of freezing his development, so that
emotionally he progressed no further and remained stuck at the age of 16, forever an adolescent in his attitude to the adult world, his sexual relations, and his interests and enthusiasms.
This extravagantly immature streak, both exhilarating and exasperating to those who knew him, helped to make him an out- standing weapons instructor with the Special Operations Executive in the war,. and to guide his choice of shark-fishing off the Western Isles as a way of earning his living in peacetime. The failure of this impossible enterprise nevertheless gave him the material for his first book, Har- poon at a Venture, and with it the discovery of his true vocation. His oeuvre consists of just 11 books, but they contain some of the most lyrical writing about the natural world to be found in the language. Like a model gazing into the lens of a camera, he found in the blankness of a sheet of paper an ide- alising, non-judgmental reflection of him- self. The opening sentence of Ring of Bright Water conveys its seductive narcissism per- fectly: I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen living room with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa.
Unfortunately, Botting gives little sense of Maxwell's quality as a writer other than by citing such tributes as the Times' description of him as 'a man of action who writes like a poet'. He is, however, masterly in delineating Maxwell's haphazard homo- sexuality, his compensatory resort to fanta- sy and derring-do, and the magnetic attraction his half-hidden wildness exer- cised upon Kathleen Raine's imagination.
The author is an old friend of Maxwell who saw much of what he describes, and he has chosen to make little of their quarrel, perhaps to spare the survivor's feelings. Artistically, I think, this mars what is other- wise an enthralling biography. From the moment he learned of the curse, catastro- phes overshadowed Maxwell's life, but instead of forming a pattern, Botting's account of them balloons to a sad and shapeless catalogue — the insanity which struck his otters, their murderous attacks on their keepers, the wreck of Maxwell's boat, the destruction of his car, the bitter break-up of his marriage, and his own crip- pling injury. Before his death from cancer in 1969, Sandaig itself, his haven of peace, had been destroyed by fire. The pattern might only make sense superstitiously but it was one which Maxwell instinctively under- stood.
His mind was only partly civilised, and his genius lay in the untamed part. It was savage and untrustworthy, but from it emerged the beauty not only of his own prose but indirectly his lover's poetry, and perhaps one day the opera which their doomed affair demands.
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