Travels with My Otter

A reader, John Tuffin, recommended Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell when there was an ottery post in August.

My gratitude for his tip was not unqualified as it is a doorstop of a book. Frankly I doubted GM merited almost six hundred pages and the book stayed on the kitchen table in the “to read” pile, pending transfer upstairs to the “biographies, unread”, shelf. Subsequently a friend gave me GM’s childhood memoir, The House of Elrig, and more than ever I felt I knew enough about the author. Today I apologise unreservedly to John Tuffin. Botting’s biography is not so much magisterial as magical.

I dreaded a long-winded account of his childhood; covered so well by Maxwell himself in Elrig. Botting sails through his family, childhood, education and war service (WW II, Scots Guards, instructor with SOE) in the first hundred pages. Good man, Botting, but that only leaves twenty-four years of Maxwell’s life. It transpires there is plenty of material and he writes a brilliant psychodrama describing Gavin’s complicated life and relationships. He hints it will end badly but I am at the end of 1960. Ring of Bright Water has just been published; at last Gavin is rich and famous; he has only nine years to live; I am on page 326 with another  254 ahead.

After the expensive failure of his shark hunting business (Harpoon at a Venture), Maxwell has turned to travel writing first in Sicily and then making a memorable expedition to live with the Marsh Arabs under the wing of Wilfred Thesiger. Many of the best travel books are written by men, always men, with limited linguistic and organisational ability. I am thinking for example of Eric Newby (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), Redmond O’Hanlon (Into the Heart of Borneo), Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar) and Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods). It’s a genre invented by Jerome K Jerome (Three Men in a Boat).

Maxwell might have called his book about the Marsh Arabs “Two Men in a Boat” but wisely went for the elegiac A Reed Shaken by the Wind. It is taken from St Matthew’s Gospel. His books are not overtly funny but he is usually ill-prepared, needs a translator and lives in considerable discomfort. He did not hit it off with Thesiger really – they were too alike. Thesiger found the otter Maxwell brought back from Iraq and was more than miffed when the species was called Lutrogale Perspicillata maxwelli. Both were devoid of a sense of humour and difficult men.

Princess Margaret took a shine to Maxwell. He took her to Chez Ciccio, a Sicilian restaurant in Kensington Church Street. “ … afterwards he took her back to Buckingham Palace, where he said goodbye to her and never saw her again” (Gavin Maxwell A Life, Douglas Botting). Other friendships with the slightly famous are as summarily dismissed, making for a better book focusing in close-up on Maxwell. I am enjoying it very much but with foreboding about what lies ahead.