Sharks, Otters and Fast Cars

Some books arrive out of the blue and virtually save one’s life, and Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell was one such book for me. I was lying in my hospital bed after an unscheduled operation, and had implored my sister-in-law to bring me a novel by Trollope, as nothing had cheered me so much during a previous illness as The Small House at Allington. I had rarely felt more in need of cheering up.

She arrived with the news that she had ransacked two airport bookshops for Trollope to no avail, but produced instead a fat biography of Gavin Maxwell. Other than that he was the author of Ring of Bright Water, I knew little about him and at that point frankly cared less. Privately dismayed, I tried hard to sound grateful. I had exhausted all other reading matter, however, and wasn’t feeling up to seeing more visitors, so there was nothing else for it. I took a deep breath and dived in, and from the first page I was utterly, hopelessly hooked. The stifling hospital ward seemed to evaporate, I lost all track of time, my cantankerous mood lifted, and I could hardly bear to be dragged back to reality. I was enthralled – by Gavin Maxwell, by his otters and by the extraordinary world he created. Douglas Botting first encountered the subject of his future biography – ‘poet, painter, shark - hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out’ – while himself a student at Oxford, scouting around for interesting speakers for the Oxford University Exploration Club, of which he was chairman. He had just read Maxwell’s account of his journey through the Tigris marshes of southern Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger (a journey incidentally on which Maxwell  acquired his first otter, an encounter that would change his life) and he was sufficiently impressed by the brilliance of the writing and intrigued by the character of the author to write immediately with an invitation to speak. Thus began an acquaintance which deepened into lasting friendship and mutual respect (tinged with exasperation), but which never clouded the biographer’s judgement about his subject nor blinded him to Maxwell’s impossible character and evident failings. Their first meeting set the tone: the young student arrived at Maxwell’s Chelsea digs at tea-time to be confronted by a giant Saharan monitor lizard, fed on locusts procured from Harrods’ pet department, and a dozen or so iridescent tropical birds all fluttering freely round an eccentrically furnished sitting-room hung with exotic weaponry – whaling harpoons, jewelled Arab daggers, expensive hunting guns. Maxwell skulked at the back of the room armed with a pair of binoculars which he’d used to check out his guest before letting him in for a stiff glass of whisky. His subsequent lecture at Oxford was brilliant and often hilarious, and the company of other travellers led to the hatching of wild schemes for expeditions to faraway places. Perhaps fortunately, they got no further than the planning stage, for Maxwell was pathologically accident - prone: ‘He was forever being wrapped around lamp-posts, shipwrecked on reefs, attacked by wild animals, half-blinded by sandstorms, struck low by diseases unknown to science, robbed by Arabs, cheated by crooks, betrayed by friends.’ Maxwell was born into the aristocracy (his uncle was the Duke of Northumberland), and his cloistered childhood at Elrig in the Scottish Lowlands contributed to an unusually complicated and contradictory character. He had an extraordinary affinity with nature and a love of wild things, yet relished hunting and shooting, especially in his youth; he was essentially a loner, but revelled in conversation and was among the most energetic and extravagant of hosts; he could be wildly snobbish and was not averse to pulling rank, yet much preferred the company of the poor and humble to that of the rich; he was often on the edge of bankruptcy yet was insanely profligate with what money he had – and he earned a great deal from his writing. Above all, this generous, troubled, gifted man was a romantic, an adventurer, a latter-day eccentric in the grand manner – indeed everything he did he did in the grand manner, including making enemies of erstwhile friends. Which leads me to the extraordinary story of the curse under the rowan tree, a story that has entered popular mythology. Though homosexual, Maxwell was very attractive to women, and the poet Kathleen Raine – much given to dabbling in the occult – fell irretrievably in love with him on first meeting, a passion which Maxwell found himself unable to reciprocate. An uneasy compromise was reached, but the friendship was fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. They finally came to a head in a flaming row one stormy night at Sandaig, his isolated home on the west coast of Scotland. Afterwards Kathleen Raine stumbled through the gale to the wind-blasted rowan tree overlooking the house, laid her hands on the trunk and cried, ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now!’ Very shortly after this the furies seemed to descend upon him, dealing him a series of crushing blows that would have felled a less defiant spirit. The first of these was the death of his beloved otter Mijbil, the emotional centre of his life and one of the most entrancing animals I have ever read about. The story of Mijbil and his relocation from the southern Iraqi marshes to Chelsea and subsequently Sandaig (which Maxwell christened Camusfeàrna in his books) makes for hilarious reading. Imagine the plane journey from hell, add a briefcase stuffed with old newspapers and fish, one rampant otter, a cast of terrified passengers furnished with unhelpful props such as plates of curry, tack on a diversion to Amsterdam, and you will begin to get the picture: the actual horror of it all has to be read to be believed. Maxwell nearly had a nervous breakdown but Mijbil survived the ordeal with enviable aplomb and took an immediate shine to London, where he trotted happily along the pavements on a lead, paying frequent visits to Harrods, chewing Maxwell’s house slowly to pieces and notching up a new sub-species (Lu t rogale perspicillata maxwelli ) to add to the immortality he was to gain through the published page. His first journey to Scotland prov i d e d another welcome diversion: a first-class sleeper couchette to trash, complete with comfortable (non-trashable) basin in which to curl up when all energy was spent, and an enticing-looking communication cord which he was only pre vented from tugging (there by bringing the express train screeching to a halt) by Maxwell tickling his ribs in the nick of time. It was at Sandaig that Maxwell found interludes of peace and happiness and the deep communion with nature that is enshrined in some of his best and most famous writings. But his restless personality, his extravagant lifestyle (live eels we re dispatched weekly from London for the otters) and his penchant for fast cars meant that he had to keep writing, and there f o re to keep travelling. His books about Iraq, Sicily and Mo rocco re veal a wonderfully curious mind, a dogged pursuit of the truth, and a deep sympathy with the underdog – a compelling combination that fuelled his growing fame and fortune. Pity his agent and editor, though, as you read of the lengths to which they went to extract these books from him and get them into a publishable state – the word ‘long-suffering’ plumbs new depths of inadequacy. It was Ring of Bright Water and its sequels about Camusfeàrna that touched the deepest chord, though their success inevitably imperiled the place Maxwell cherished. Thousands descended on his remote fastness, binoculars and cameras bristling for a sight of the author and his otters. Cavalier, extravagant and bloody-minded to the last, Maxwell saw most of them off and clung to his idiosyncratic lifestyle. But a litany of disasters, including an ill-judged marriage and a fire that destroyed Camusfeàrna, took their toll and even he, survivor extraordinaire, could not beat the cancer that took its inexorable hold. He died as he had lived, still fighting his many daemons, and I finished the story of his life with a sense of real loss.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Ariane Bankes 2004