When Gavin Maxwell took possession of his remote country home on the west coast of Scotland in 1949, he got the furniture from the sea. Camusfeàrna, or the Bay of Alders, as Maxwell calls it, is an old, abandoned cottage that used to be the home of the keeper of the neighboring lighthouse. Overlooking the Isle of Skye, the house that was offered to Maxwell as a country home by a former fellow student can only be reached by sea or down a steep hill from the mainland, the nearest road being a long way away.
It is this circumstance that attracted Maxwell and for which he puts up with a lot: when he arrives, the cottage is empty and makes a neglected impression. There is no running water, no electric light, let alone furniture, but “ten years of living in Camusfeàrna,” writes Maxwell right at the beginning, “have taught me that you only have to be patient long enough to be practically on one of the beaches every imaginable household item turns up”. Sooner or later the sea releases what man has disposed of before: rubbish and furniture, fishing baskets and nets, dead animals, rubbish.
The descriptions alone show that “A Ring of Bright Water” is not aimed at depicting an unbroken idyll. It is true that Maxwell poetizes the landscape. You will not find the name Camusfeàrna on any map; it is Maxwell’s invention. In truth, the place was called Sandaig. But the beauty and the merciless cycle of nature, the constant hunting and being hunted, the apparently unmotivated violence are two sides of the same coin.
The memoirs of the adventurer and eccentric Maxwell appeared in 1960 in the English original and in 1964 in a German translation for the first time. While hardly anyone in Germany took notice of it, the book became a bestseller in English-speaking countries and, as the British writer Robert Macfarlane explains in his afterword to the new German-language edition, is still considered a milestone in nature writing. The fascination of this rich book is also due to the person of the author: Gavin Maxwell came from the Scottish nobility, loved whiskey and fast cars. A gay snob, restless, suffering from bipolar disorder. Money is never mentioned in “A Ring of Bright Water”. He didn’t lack that, but he did lack support. Immediately after the war, his large-scale project to industrially extract and export shark oil failed. Then Camusfeàrna.
However, the cottage served Maxwell more as a temporary retreat from the hustle and bustle of London city life than as the center of his life. However, the fiction of a loner living in unity with the wind, the light and the seasons is skilfully produced in a literary manner. It speaks of the longing for an organic connection with flora and fauna. In the first part of “A Ring of Bright Water” Maxwell tells of his arrival, of becoming acquainted with everyday circumstances, with the neighbors and animals.
Gavin Maxwell: A ring of bright water. Translated from English by Iris Hansen and Teja Schwaner. Blessing, Munich 2021. 336 pages, 24 euros.
Maxwell’s strengths, self-reflection without self-pity and a stoic sense of humor really shine in the second part, which is dedicated to the otters: in early 1956, shortly after the death of his longtime canine companion Jonnie, Maxwell traveled to Iraq with the researcher and travel writer Wilfred Thesiger. Towards the end of the two-month tour, Thesiger Maxwell sent a sack to the British Consulate General – “at that moment,” writes Maxwell. “when I opened the sack, a phase of life began for me that is still not over and probably will not end, at least not before I die”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”Mijbil” he names the little otter that is in the sack and that later after a thorough zoological study of the genus Lutrogale perspicillata maxwellishort: Maxwell’s otter, will be slammed.
The story of how Maxwell finally brought this animal to Camusfeàrna by plane and train against all odds is as comical as it is touching how Maxwell tells the developing relationship between himself, the unpredictable Mijbil and the Scottish environment. Maxwell doesn’t hide the fact that he has an anthropomorphizing view of his otters (a lady otter named Edal will later come to him by winding paths). The animals, like alcohol and other escapades, are a substitute; Filling material for the inner emptiness that Maxwell feels. But Maxwell’s relationship with the wild animals he surrounds himself with is by no means hierarchical; Rather, it speaks of amazement, willingness to understand and appreciation.
Camusfeàrna burned down in 1968; a year later Gavin Maxwell died of lung cancer. Maxwell’s gravestone and that of his otter, Edal, now stand where his cottage once stood. Maxwell’s readers continue to make pilgrimages to the inaccessible place to this day. This is where reality outsmarts fiction. If a writer dreamed up such an ending, it would be kitsch.