‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely. And ‘go on till you come to the end; and then stop.’ (Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)
The chapters of Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell are prefaced by apt quotations that supplement the text and cast an oblique light on Gavin’s character. Here is a selection; they form a miniature Commonplace Book.
I went into the woods. They’re the safest place. I understand animals. Human beings are dangerous. (Vietnam veteran, 1985)
I’m going where the water’s deep
And wrecks have sunk before,
And there I’ll lay me down and sleep
And be reviled no more.
(I’ve Had Enough of Right and Wrong, Gavin Maxwell, 1931)
To the Low Arctic
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou calls;
The freshness, the freedom, the fairness –
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.
(The Spell of the Yukon, Robert Service)
Who is the happy warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
(The Character of the Happy Warrior, William Wordsworth)
Dear God be good to me;
The sea is so wide
And my boat is so small
(Breton fisherman’s prayer)
The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.
(The Gates of Damascus, James Elroy Flecker)
I put no end to
The life that led me,
The friends to lend to,
The bard who bled me.
Every bad penny
Finds its own robber,
My beds were many
And my cheques rubber.
(‘Song’ in Poems, Dom Moraes)
The power that wheels the eagle’s wing
And darts the silver herring shoal
Strikes from my rock a mountain spring
That has no knowledge of its goal
But only of its will to sing.
(Poem from a Sequence, Gavin Maxwell, 1951)
To be only my original self – to be the thing that is the strongest urge in my depth – that is to lay all that down and laugh at it and walk on a mountain alone – really alone in a wild place. And not want to meet a soul. And that is really true and it is the urge and the flame and it needs no fanning.
(Necessary Secrets; The Journals of Elizabeth Smart, 1991)
I have grown up, hand on the primal bone,
Making the poem, taking the word from the stream,
Fighting the sand for speech, fighting the stone.
(‘Auotobiography’ in A Beginning, Dom Moraes, 1957)
To wait for one who never comes,
To lie in bed and not to sleep,
To serve well and not to please
To have a horse that will not go,
To be sick and lack true cure,
To be a prisoner without hope,
To lose the way when you would journey,
To stand at a door that none will open,
To have a friend who would betray you,
These are the ten pains of death.
(Second Fruits, Giovanni Floris, 1591)
Does not take root like the badger, Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.
(An Otter, Ted Hughes)
I think I could turn and live with animals …
I stand and look at them long and long,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God …
(Song of Myself, Walt Whitman)
And others – others go further still and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness.
(Howards End, EM Forster)
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
(An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope)
(to be continued, sometime)