It is autumn and I am making a pilgrimage by sea to a literary gravestone. On my left rise the primeval, groined, and gullied mountains of Skye; on my right is the wild coast of Knoydart, one of the least populated regions of western Scotland. The colors of the land in this season are heart-stoppingly beautiful. Bracken and birch paint the hills gold, ochre, and saddle-brown; the heather is purple as a winter dusk. Light falls differently in this part of the world, where the air is free of particulate matter. It sweeps fast over the knotted ridges of the mountains in dramatic, cloud-shadowed patterns: Sunlight arrows through the heavens like a silver shaft, picking out a single inlet and scattering its water with diamonds.
I am here in search of one particular cove that lies by a chain of tiny islands to the east of the Sound of Sleat, this stretch of sea, which is now flat as a mirror but can roil like an angry dragon. We drop anchor and launch a small dinghy, which we paddle to shore. The water is so clear that I can see tiny crabs on the sea floor, along with many different kinds of pebble—black mica, white and rose-banded quartz—rain-blue mussels, and whelks as big as my hand. We step ashore into absolute quiet, except for the syncopated shush of the waves.
This is Sandaig Bay, perhaps, after Walden Pond, the most famous retreat of any writer who sought to shun the busy haunts of men and seek solace alone in nature. This is where Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969) lived in a cottage and wrote Ring of Bright Water (1959), a book about finding freedom by living with a pet otter: an otter whose mischievous, irrepressible joy in its environment captivated millions of readers.
As we scramble up the beach, the full panorama of the view Maxwell enjoyed becomes apparent. The south-facing bay is like a theater stage, with the whole Sound of Sleat for its audience and the mountains of Knoydart and Skye as its wings. All his life, Maxwell was drawn to drama: fast cars, rough terrain, and narrow squeaks. His writing has a precise physical alertness that excites attention, as in the very first line of Ring of Bright Water:
Alas, Maxwell’s cottage no longer exists: It burned down in 1968, killing Edal, one of the otters he loved. But the “ring of bright water,” which consists of sea on one side and a freshwater stream that leaps downhill through a series of waterfalls on the other, remains. And there are two small memorial stones, one to Maxwell and one commemorating Edal, both of which are covered in shells and pebbles wayfarers have gathered from the shore.
Maxwell still attracts visitors. Yet, beyond his association with otters, he is not well known. His 10 other books of political writing, travelogue, and memoir are neglected. This past year, the centenary of his birth, offered an opportunity to remember a fascinating character whose life was galvanized by contradiction.
Maxwell was born into both privilege and loss. He was an aristocrat, a grandson of the duke of Northumberland, and could trace his lineage back to William the Conqueror. (He was also distantly related to Lord Byron.) He grew up on a rambling baronial estate at Monreith in the Scottish lowlands and was able to fulfill the dream of many children: to roam at liberty among hundreds of acres of land filled with birds, animals, and plants that he could collect as specimens—live or dead.
However, his officer father was killed in 1914 in one of the early battles of World War I. Gavin’s birth occurred three months before this tragedy, and the shadow of his father’s uniform hanging in the hall likely contributed to Maxwell’s need to excel at conventionally masculine pursuits: He was a crack shot and a rugged outdoorsman. Meanwhile, his mother’s cosseting and determination that her children should be raised in the moral segregation of her strict Catholic Apostolic faith fostered a strain of solitude and sensitivity that made him instinctively withdraw from the demands of urban life.
Aged 16, Maxwell developed a rare hemorrhagic condition, and his adulthood was dogged by stomach ulcers and other sudden health crises that, he later theorized, were the product of mental torment. Nonetheless, during World War II, he became a major in the Scots Guards, serving in the Special Operations Executive, a secret service that trained operatives who would conduct risky resistance and sabotage operations in occupied Europe. Maxwell, as an expert in small-arms and practical fieldcraft, found his perfect role teaching a grueling course of rock-climbing, silent killing, weapons training, night exercises, and boat work at a remote location in the West Highlands.
After the war, with a Romantic impulsiveness that was both his charm and his downfall, Maxwell bought the small Scottish island of Soay and founded a fishery catching basking sharks, valuable for their oil. The thrill and difficulty of the hunt excited him: A basking shark can be as large and heavy as a London bus. But the logistics of capitalizing and running a business with multiple employees, seasonal catch, fleet maintenance, and distribution problems were beyond him. He had jumped in, feet first, without the cool financial appraisal that business demands.
This was to be the hallmark of many future Maxwell enterprises. The shark-hunting years, however, gave him the subject of his first book, Harpoon at a Venture (1952), which launched a varied and successful literary career, establishing him, the Times proclaimed, as “a man of action who writes like a poet.”
This Scottish Hemingway tried his hand at travel writing and political exposé. His evocative account of traveling among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, A Reed Shaken by the Wind (1959), is a minor classic, while his investigations into the Sicilian Mafia, exposed in God Protect Me From My Friends (1956), left many loose ends (including lawsuits that emptied the author’s pockets) but proved beyond doubt Maxwell’s courage and resilience in pursuing a story.
His sojourn in Iraq brought Maxwell his first baby otter, Mijbil, who became the hero of Ring of Bright Water. Smuggled onto a plane in Basra, the playful Mij, with a face like a teddy bear and a habit of turning on taps, proved to be a kind of otter new to Western natural history; he was classified as lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli. When Maxwell walked him in a harness on the streets of London, confused Cockneys wondered if he was a seal, a beaver, or a walrus.
The cottage at Sandaig, which Maxwell rented from a local landowner, gave Mijbil the chance to roam and to romp in the sea and waterfall, fulfilling the desire—which, Maxwell writes, is common to all otters—for water and other objects to be ever in motion. Alas, Mijbil’s inevitable need for exploration brought him to grief. Otters were still widely regarded as vermin in this period, to be exterminated as predators on local fish stocks. Mijbil, having strayed into a local village, was killed by a road-mender. Maxwell reported that he mourned more than he could have done for a human companion. Mij “belonged to the only race ever likely to bear my name.” He was Maxwell’s surrogate child, but also his child-self, a self that could remain always at liberty and ease in the landscape, free of the demands of society, publishers, and creditors.
Ring of Bright Water, with Maxwell’s memoir of early life The House of Elrig (1965), is his masterpiece. His writing is sharp, funny, and attuned to the colors, textures, and sounds of nature with the precision of a marksman and the poign-ancy of a lover. Like his contemporaries Laurie Lee and Gerald Durrell, Maxwell ushered in a new way of writing about the natural world that was both Romantic in its core belief that man has lost the roots of his physical happiness in the city and reflective of a new urgency in the post-atomic age to consider how to heal humans’ relationship with their own, and other, species. Maxwell wrote of the vital importance “that even for our own sakes we should not move further into a wholly man-made world whose total unsuitability for mankind as a sane species is becoming clearer and clearer.”
His work was immensely successful in transforming public opinion about otters; they became a protected species in 1978 and have returned even to many of the urban rivers of Britain. But the irony of Maxwell’s bestselling status was that sight-seers besieged his idyll. He had tried to camouflage Sandaig Bay under the name Camusfeárna (bay of alders), but the secret soon slipped out, and trippers eager to experience wild isolation found themselves in a queue to knock on Maxwell’s door.
I was privileged on my own pilgrimage to meet Jimmy Watt, who came to work for Maxwell as a teenager and who experienced firsthand the pleasures and rigors of life at Sandaig. He still lives amid the stunning scenery of this remote area. His memories of Maxwell were vivid. He described him as a very funny man who “had fits of giggles that lasted all afternoon” and who collected typographical errors from the New Yorker (e.g., “a heavy yellow frog descended on London”) to hang in the bathroom.
Days in the cottage could be magical. One of the best was when a local boat arrived to deliver coal under a sky rendered fluorescent green by the aurora borealis. “It was lit up like a big top,” Watt told me, “the sacks silhouetted against a livid sea.” But the developments and deliveries needed to house and feed the two African otters who succeeded Mijbil, alongside a houseful of humans, were extortionately expensive and transformed the cottage into a complex of pens, sheds, artificial pools, pipes, and wires. Even the live eels used to feed the otters had to be brought up by train from Manze’s eelpie shop in London, confined in biscuit tins. Watt remembered handling them with Brillo pads.
The ménage—idyllic to outsiders—was chaotic, always on the edge of insolvency, and fundamentally unsustainable. Had the cottage not burned down in 1968, it would likely have run aground financially, much as Maxwell’s other schemes—to breed eider ducks for their feathers and to convert remote Scottish lighthouse keeper cottages to holiday rentals for the rich—did.
If you want to feel Maxwell’s presence now, the easiest place to encounter him is in the lighthouse keeper cottages on Eilean Bán, a small island now situated beneath the bridge connecting Skye with the Scottish mainland. This was Maxwell’s last home, and his residence has been preserved as a small museum to his memory. In the elegant long living room that he made by knocking down the wall separating two cottages, you can see Maxwell’s aristocratic taste for luxury combined with a more spartan love of sea-battered simplicity and solitude. Here is his wartime pistol, but also his delicate collection of ladies’ fans; here are harpoon spears and a silver cigarette case; here are glass cases in the Victorian manner containing stuffed birds (a reminder of the hundreds that Maxwell shot in his youth), but also windows and a telescope that commands a view of the sea, where—if you are lucky—you can glimpse live eagles, porpoises, and otters and glory in them as they pass.
On the wall is a self-portrait of Maxwell as a very young man: angular, serious, introspective. Although he would have hated the roar of traffic on the Skye bridge, his place here is fitting, poised between island and mainland. For Gavin Maxwell could never be fixed. His genius, and his curse, was to be forever negotiating, between the life of the toff and the hobo, the literary lion and the recluse, the need for others and the liberty to tend only to one otter—a being that was all affectionate play, insistent will, and perpetual fluidity.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.
