A Strange Little Book

The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell, Longmans, 1965 (out of print)

In recent months I have been looking to broaden my reading horizons and uncover lost treasure, so I have tried to keep to a self-imposed reading rule of at least one book as mentioned in ‘Slightly Foxed’, the lovely readers’ quarterly.

The first on my list of exploration was ‘The House of Elrig’, the autobiographical account of the early life of Gavin Maxwell.

Gavin Maxwell falls into a special category of the Previously Famous. Looking back into any decade you are likely to uncover writers whose fame has not lasted. Do you remember the storm of controversy and excitement caused by ‘Riders’ byJilly Cooper? Yet she hardly gets a mention now. A particularly well-thumbed copy was in circulation among the adolescent males of South East Essex – and it wasn’t the plot we were interested in. I also recall piles upon piles of Alistair MacLean novels in my grandfather’s house, and little has come of all that writing other than a tame adaptation of ‘The Guns of Navarone’.

So it is with Gavin Maxwell. He was a leader in what I can only label as ‘wildlife stories’, which were an escape for those who wished to have boyish adventures and yet had to stay home and learn how to do quadratic equations. His most important book in this style was ‘Ring of Bright Water’, about a smooth-coated otter that Maxwell repatriated from an adventure in Iraq. It was made into a feature film in 1969, the year that Maxwell died.

‘The House of Elrig’ is dated, but in a pleasant and nostalgic way. Maxwell was born into privilege (his uncle was the Duke of Northumberland) but also difficulty (his father was killed in the First World War when Gavin was three months old). He spent his childhood in a series of smaller English Public Schools, from which he dreamed of escape.

Escape was, of course, back to the family home at Elrig in Scotland. He dreamed of returning for Enid-Blyton-like escapades outdoors, doing what 1930s children liked to do: stealing birds’ eggs, adopting pet owls, eating sandwich picnics, and learning how to shoot.

It is precisely this chronicling of a childhood, which seems so odd to us now, which gives the book its charm. I knew very little about how the children of the wealthy grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. Maxwell details all the eccentricities, characters and foibles of a time before the darkness of the Second World War descended. It is, in fact, lashings of ginger beer and shooting rabbits.

I will not give the game away, but will say that ‘The House of Elrig’ was a pre-cursor to a very colourful and sadly short life. Maxwell did not live to old age, and left no children other than a rather strange adoption of the late Terry Nutkins, he of BBC Wildlife fame.

A strange little book indeed.

Life by Keith Richards, with James Fox; Phoenix Books, 2010

As the years have passed with increasing speed, there is little fresh to say about Keith Richards. He has surpassed his status as fair game for the British tabloids and survived, and in the new century has emerged with considerable grace. His autobiography was published five years ago, and it has taken that long for me to get around to reading it.

It is a well written book. It is obvious which passages were written by Keith himself, and which have the added gloss of James Fox. Fox is skilful in that he does not impose his own style on the book but allows the language and unique viewpoint of Keith to shine through. He must have faced a major challenge for some of the sections, especially those that deal so well with the important relationships of Keith’s life. Each one, with the possible exception of the writing about Anita Pallenberg, is spot on.

It is not light reading, and in paperback comes in at six hundred pages. There is much for Keith to say.

Some crucial insights relate to his early life. Like many musicians he was influenced by family, and his grandfather Gus seems to have played an important part in his early development. His mother’s family are described as free spirited and open minded, which may have been an advantage to young Keith when growing up in the stifling mid-1950s in the London suburbs.

I would like to know whether the sensitivity that Keith shows when writing about former relationships is his doing or the effect of having a collaborator. I would like to think that it is Keith who is kind to the majority of the significant number of women in his life. He certainly describes several (including an early admirer in pre-Stones Kent called Haleema, and Ronnie Spector) with warmth and generosity. He is less gentle when describing the breakdown of his long relationship with Anita Pallenberg, at a time when drugs were consuming both of them. He is equally brutal earlier when he describes the downfall of Brian Jones.

A large chunk of this book is dedicated to another great love of Keith Richards. He analyses his relationship with drugs, and in particular heroin, with clarity and frankness. He gives little snippets of survival techniques, and as a reformed character and long-time survivor he is in a good position to warn others of the dangers.

Keith writes with pride about the major successes of his life, including his son Marlon. As a seven year old the son accompanied the father on tour in the USA and acted as a gentle go-between when Keith was slow to respond to the demands of turning up on stage.

Keith’s many friendships give an insight into his generous spirit. He is loved and respected in one of the tougher neighbourhoods of Jamaica. He lost a great friend when Gram Parsons got his drugs wrong at the start of the seventies. He had strong bonds with Etta James and the saxophonist Bobby Keys. Johnny Depp and Tom Waits are close friends. Perhaps most charmingly of all, he has developed a late friendship with Paul McCartney, which began when they both retreated to Parrot Cay in the early noughties.

One friendship looms over all others. Most of the success of the Stones comes from the Jagger / Richards writing partnership. More than fifty years have passed, and what was once a firm friendship soured, seemed over forever, and started to reform as they both approached old age. At the end of his book, Richards writes with warmth about his old friend.

I am glad Keith made it so far and was able to remember everything. His book is a jigsaw of wonderful insights into the madness of the Rolling Stones. Keith has revealed himself and done himself many favours in the process.

And he didn’t really snort his father, but explains how the misunderstanding came about.

where my heart used to beat

where my heart used to beat, Sebastian Faulks, Hutchinson Books

I continue to be surprised by the fiction that Sebastian Faulks creates. After ‘Birdsong’, it would have been easy to never write another thing, such was the success of that book. It is a delight to his readers that he continues to produce beautifully crafted books of such depth. His latest novel, ‘where my heart used to beat’ (the lower case of the title is intentional), is an exceptional book. Faulks’ alchemy is the reality of the characters that he creates. You close the last page knowing them so well.

In this novel are the familiar themes: the indescribable suffering of the two world wars, the damaged minds of those involved, and a sensitive treatment of love and desire. There are many similarities between this book and ‘Human Traces’, which went into such detail about the workings of the mind. One of the author’s recurrent ideas is that our society deals with insanity in such a dysfunctional way, and how a slight shift in perceptions can show how cruel and lacking in understanding we can all be. He returns to the idea that ancient civilisations valued people who ‘heard voices’, whilst in the West we lock them up.

It is a very male book. The two main characters are Robert Hendricks, a veteran of Anzio, and Alexander Pereira, a survivor of the trenches. It is unapologetically male, as the suffering in battle was largely male. It is over-critical to suggest that the female characters are under-developed or two dimensional, because this is not their story. There were no women at Anzio and Verdun, and their experience was to pick up the shattered remnants when it was over. Each writers plays to his or her strength, and I would not expect Faulks to become Vera Brittain.

The author’s choice of timing is interesting. Much of the narrative is from 1980, the last point in the Twentieth Century when it is credible to include characters who experienced the First World War. Faulks is more aware than everyone else that the deaths of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham have closed the door forever on the Great War, and has framed his story in a time when it was not unusual to meet old soldiers. It was a world in which many of us grew up, and hardly appreciated. It is interesting to read this novel in a time when little by little those who experienced the Second World War are quietly vanishing. Will the media cherish the memory of those at Anzio in the same way as they did with those who experienced the terror of The Somme?

That said, it doesn’t all happen in 1980. Faulks is so skillful when dealing with recollection and flashback that the story sails through the Twentieth Century. A theme that runs through ‘where my heart used to beat’ is that the century itself was diseased and broken, just like the wreckage left of some of the men who had to live through it. Perhaps his opinion that the Twentieth Century was a complete disaster will be shared by many more of us when we have greater perspective. Stop to think for a minute about The Somme, The Death Camps, the Gulags, Chinese Brutality, Atom Bombs, assassinations of peacemakers, AIDS and famine; and you realise that Sebastian Faulks is right.

This book is not all doom. The love story hidden inside is every bit as touching as Stephen and Isabelle in ‘Birdsong’. It took my breath away.

Faulks will never surpass ‘Birdsong’. He will, however, write different books that touch the reader as deeply. This book is one of them.