Ring of Bright Water

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The first time I read Ring of Bright Water must have been the 1980s. I can’t have been more than an early teenager, as evidenced by the faint impression of algebra indented in the book’s front cover, which I must have leant on during homework. It’s in tatters now, the glue of the binding falling away like dandruff from the spine.

Can we ever truly know anyone, even oneself? Especially at second hand. I wrote something about this in Island of Dreams,An artistic temperament... Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell’s biographer, opines that Maxwell was bipolar. But Maxwell also drank a lot – which might explain those expansive evenings. I’m not sure Maxwell was an alcoholic, but drink was in his life (as it was in many more people’s lives in those less puritanical, post-war years). Hangovers make you crotchety, drink makes you contradictory. Also, by the time (and probably before) the house at Sandaig burnt down and he moved to the island, Maxwell was dying. Though he didn’t know it, the cancer that was to kill him was already eating away at him. When you’re facing an early death (Maxwell was only 55 when he went, in September 1969) or you’re in a lot of pain, there’s a lot of anger to deal with. And status and fame put pressures on people, and he was an outsider, in a world that was very tightly-wrapped. Kathleen Raine met Gavin Maxwell in 1949 and was initially unimpressed by this would-be portrait painter, struggling to recover from a recent nervous breakdown. Divorced and living apart from her two children as she strove against the odds to carve out a career as a woman poet in London, Raine’s deeply felt creative vision was finally beginning to bear fruit. Earlier that year, she had published her third poetry collection, The Pythoness, and she was also cultivating a blossoming academic career as a William Blake expert. An intense spiritual passion for the natural world informed her work, and it was through this love of nature–as well as their shared childhood memories of Northumberland–that Raine and Maxwell came to connect. Within weeks of meeting, both were astonished to realise that they had separately written the same poem: bearing witness to near-identical visions of a mysterious rowan. [3]

What's more, it was a story about how one man lived in a remote cottage, in the West Highlands of Scotland, with an otter he had tamed: Women and the Natural World: Historical Perspectives on Nature, Climate and Environmental Change, WESWWHN Annual Conference UPDATE

Ring of Bright Water". Variety. Los Angeles. 31 December 1968. Archived from the original on 25 July 2018. Having completed the full read, of an actual in my hands book, I read this slowly. And - I was surprised to realize how much of the book is actually about the flora and fauna of the places the author was in - Iraq (which is where Mij came from) and Scotland (where his no-roads-lead-to-it house was).

I'm not sure whether it's due to the editing but I got the sense there's an awful lot left out. We get peaks and suggestions. His relationship (and subsequent fall out) with Kathleen Raine, his homosexuality, his mental health issues, his relationship with almost anyone else. Barely mentioned. Aside from Jimmy Watt (and later Terry Nutkins) we get a few names bandied around but it's really a one man show. Maxwell wasn’t to know this, yet his curiosity and observation of nature was enough for him to spot the dissonance that occurs between an ancient, unyielding Atlantic coastline and the profligate activity of spring plants. He sums this up by saying: I can understand why it was so famous and well received in the 60s, presenting an idyllic Eden. Man at one with nature, isolated and free. Except it's all myth. He later makes it clear that he embellished or at least presented a somewhat rosy version of the reality and the subsequent two books highlight the reality of a remote life surrounded by wild animals.

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It seems to me, that the path to any enlightened view of our dependence on wildlife can be achieved by one’s immersion in it and that simplifying all the complications and confusions of everyday modern life is necessary before that can happen. The challenge for most these days is finding a time and place to escape and somewhere there is still a reasonable abundance of wildlife left, to lift us from our self-imposed urban weariness. Hailed a masterpiece when it was first published, the story of Gavin Maxwell’s life with otters on the remote west coast of Scotland remains one of the most lyrical, moving descriptions of a man’s relationship with the natural world. I saw the movie “Ring of Bright Water” when I was a kid. (No, I am NOT saying how long ago that was.) I enjoyed it – after all, what kid wouldn't like a story about a playful otter! But, I didn't love it – probably because of the ending. Maxwell had two otters, Mij and Edal, in succession. Edal was adopted by a family while they were in Kenya, and Edal became too much and so landed in Maxwell's world. In the narrative there are many more animals of all sorts that he takes in to study and safeguard. He's a man in love with nature and creatures.