A poem I wrote called ‘Carthage’ was suggested by a few lines in my Baedeker, but more time was spent on a several-page sequence called ‘Toni Moreno’. He was a character in one of the Majorcan folk songs I had translated, and I turned him into a mixture of Adonis and Don Juan who was unable to draw back from his fate.
On Saturday nights the Tarrs and myself went to a hotel at the port and watched the spectacle of the Soller folklore group Brot de Taronger (Branch of Oranges). Maria and Catalina, the star dancers, did a thrilling Maenadic version of the Jota Mallorquina, arms out full length as if in ecstasy, and long skirts swirling just high enough to show white stockings and give a glimpse of their cotton drawers.
The tunes had some Moorish or perhaps Jewish influence, and I learned the words to their songs so as to translate them into English, terms I wasn’t sure about being explained in Spanish by Andreu or Gaspar Nadal, the directors of the group.
John, a man of many parts, sat at a piano by the bar after the performance and hammered out tunes from Tosca or La Bohème, as well as traditional English songs. Instead of sand falling through a glass to keep account of time we had bottles of wine or brandy, which often saw us still there at two in the morning, though with only a few hundred yards between us and the house.
We became friendly with an itinerant middle-aged scholar who came to Soller to work on a book about Nietzsche and ‘The Will to Power’. John, in a bullish mood, would drag him down in ferocious argument on the ethics of such a project, and of what he thought of Nietzsche in general, at which I sat on the sidelines till boredom drove me away.
An amiable streak in both men let them forget their controversies on Shrove Tuesday Eve, and the four of us went by tram to see the fiesta-like goings-on in the town. We found seats in a crowded café, and I danced with one or two of the pretty local girls, atlotas in the island language, otherwise I sat at the table smoking and drinking, and writing a poem sent unrevised in a letter to Ruth the following day:
Quasi-philosophical and literary discussions, of the sort heated by wine, took place between John, the Nietzsche scholar and myself. Their range was as wide as civilization seemed to be long, and could have gone on for ever without resolving anything. Occasionally losing them in the tentacles of convoluted speculation, I fell back behind the palisade of my own basic tenets, which convinced me that creativity and intellect need not go together, that talk was one thing and writing another, and that Art promised to be more effective when unencumbered by theoretical baggage.
Parallel to the pursuit of a voice peculiar to myself, which blind faith told me must be sought, was the more compatible approach, and this suggested that the longer I went on, the more certain was an aesthetic system to show in my work, if it was necessary that one should be there at all. Continual striving and practice was the only way forwards, during which any originality of structure or content would build itself in more effectively than by conscious artifice.
A string of fine days seemed to indicate that winter was over, and during an afternoon of balmy and inspiring breezes I wrote ‘Mr Raynor’, about a teacher at my old school who used to sit on his high stool and, rather than give attention to the rowdy uneducable twelve-year-olds before him, look out of the window and across the road at buxom young women serving in a draper’s shop. The story was set off by a line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’, which kept going through my mind: ‘Timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste.’
I thought it obvious that such so-called ‘Nottingham stories’ lacked nothing of the standard and interest for publication, and when ‘Mr Raynor’ was rejected I merely assumed it was a matter of the roulette dice not dropping into the right place to produce its modest jackpot. The engines of hope were fully churning, and it seemed that the future could not be anything but better than the present, of which in any case, even with the anxiety that came of living from hand to mouth, I had little to complain about.
At the end of March I met a young woman medical student staying at a nearby hotel and, after a few days of unremitting pursuit, she came with me on the ship to spend a weekend in Ibiza. She told me that she in fact preferred making love with women, and on replying so did I, we ended up in bed, dolphins leaping around the ship on our return. The affair inspired a few poems, but came to an end when she left for England.
Several wireless telegraph messages in code were taken down in my notebook from the shortwave band of a radio rented by the Tarrs. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been picked up as a spy in fascist Spain, or anywhere else for that matter, especially since the house was within half a mile of a naval base. When we heard on the radio that Stalin had died John’s face turned rather pale.
In the same notebook, after comments on Proust, E. M. Forster, and the three-volume autobiography of Arthur Koestler I was reading, is the remark that ‘D. H. Lawrence only possessed real genius between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. Before twenty-five he was an adolescent, and after thirty he was a crank.’
A high state of morbid romanticism fitted in well with my inflated sense of purpose, the pink blossom of a peach tree sending a different shade of sunlight through the window of my room. All I wanted to do, after writing, was get drunk now and again, and go to bed with a woman. Life was better than for a long time, perhaps than at any other time. After a cakes and champagne breakfast on the terrace I would enjoy a swim beyond the harbour, or go with fishermen along the coast, where the sea was often exhilaratingly rough under the cliffs. I took a boat out rowing when I could, and the Greek painter Varda, who lived at the port, tried teaching me to sail. The moustache grown before leaving for France was shaved off, as if to give my face an appearance in keeping with a much altered state of mind. Letters to Ruth were shorter, often typed instead of handwritten.
Elizabeth Trocchi came from Paris with her two children and took a flat in the town. Some issues of Merlin, edited by her husband Alex, contained interesting work by Christopher Logue, Samuel Beckett and others, so I sent him some revised and much improved Nottingham stories. When they were turned down I posted them to New Story, Botteghe Oscure, Nimbus and the BBC, but they had no luck at those places either.
I was generally reluctant to show my work, even to friends, but did from time to time, perhaps out of vanity, though the unwillingness must have been bound up with the hope that if I waited long enough I would be able to show it to them in print or, better still, they would see the stories or poems themselves without any prompting from me.