The exception to this was when, on hearing that Robert Graves lived in Deya, just along the coast, I wrote to him and enclosed some of my work, to which he replied: ‘Thank you for showing me these poems. There is something basically good about them but (department of brutal frankness) you have not worked hard enough to get them to the point of simplicity which they demand. Carthage comes closest.’ He ended the letter by asking me to call one Sunday for tea.
Hiring a bicycle for a few pesetas, I pedalled along the mountain road — pushed my way up much of it — and after the col, with its view of the Balearic Sea from nearly a thousand feet, freewheeled the remaining distance to Deya. The house was easy to find, a plain grey structure by an elbow of the road just before the village. A curtain of fine steel mesh to keep out insects overhung the open back door, green shoots already showing on the grapevine, and several broken toys strewn around the porch.
On my calling out, the scrape of a chair sounded from inside, and the curtain parted to show Graves, wearing sandals, blue jeans, and a brown open-necked shirt, scissors in one hand and a large glass jug in the other. He looked as if he might have seen me somewhere and forgotten in whose house, while I stepped back to make the difference in our heights less obvious. Informed of my name, he invited me to follow him into the garden to pick lemons for lemonade.
He was a big, well-built man in his late fifties, with grizzled hair, full lips, and a nose that looked as if it had been much knocked about in boxing — which he later confirmed. Talking about my poems, he said some were good, in that at least I ended them well, whereas so many poets got off to a fair start but fizzled out halfway through. I was to recall in later years, when young writers began coming to see me, how generous Robert had always been in his appraisals of beginners, never discouraging anyone, on the sound principle that no matter how inept they might be at the moment it was always possible they would become better in the future and write something of value.
He poured two glasses of lemonade, and sat at a large oak table to continue signing a limited edition of his poems, setting out the sheets to dry as questions and answers passed between us at the relaxed rate of a Sunday afternoon. ‘When you have a large family,’ he said, ‘you’ve no option but to work hard.’ He was writing The Greek Myths for Penguin, of 1,100 pages, as well as an even longer book called The Nazarene Gospel Restored.
I found his remarks about my poems encouraging, but told him that so far only two had been published, to which he replied that it didn’t matter, as long as one kept on writing. We discussed the various ways in which Ulysses and his son Telemachus were said to have died, the theme of one of my poems.
Outside again, he asked where I had been brought up. ‘I’ve never been there,’ he responded, ‘but when we were poor, just after the Great War, a Nottingham factory owner sent me a cheque for a hundred pounds. It was just before Christmas, and I tipped the postman with my last shilling for the letter. Another time, my travel warrant was made out to Nottingham by mistake when I was to go before a reassessment board for my pension, and I was so ill by the time I reached my real destination that the pension was kept on. So I have a soft spot for the place. I’m sure it’s an interesting town, if ever you write a novel.’
Walking along the road, he wanted confirmation of the ‘Nottingham good-night’ of courting couples, then queried what university I had been to. On telling him I left school early he said: ‘So did I, to go to the War.’ He wondered how I managed to live as a poet, and mention of my RAF pension led him to talk about T.E. Lawrence, recalling that in the 1920s Lawrence had generously given him a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he had been able to sell for three hundred pounds, on which it was possible to live for a year in those days.
His wife Beryl came back from the beach with the children, and the table was cleared for tea. Graves riffled through a heap of papers on the window sill, then held out an engraving and asked her who in the room the face resembled. The upshot was that it looked like me, being a portrait of Ludowicke Muggleton, an eighteenth-century journeyman-preacher, son of a farrier from London, and author of The Divine Looking Glass.
‘I knew you reminded me of someone, as soon as I saw you.’ Graves was pleased at having solved the puzzle, and after tea we chatted over a few glasses of Spanish brandy, which helped as I took the hairpin bends back to Soller with more speed than wisdom.
By the end of May, wanting to get off the island and see other parts of Spain, I played with the notion of settling in Malaga. Apart from being more southerly, and unknown territory, it was close to Gibraltar, where I’d heard that the air force or the navy occasionally employed ex-service civilians in work to do with wireless operating. The pull of trying for a job, however, with all its attractions though possible uncertainties as well, weakened as the lackadaisical days and weeks went by. I was in any case diverted by the plan of writing a travel book about Majorca based on various articles and essays, which meant prolonging my stay to obtain further material.
In June I left the Villa Catalina for a house on the outskirts of the town, in which I could live rent free. A Dutch woman, Jup van Dreil, was looking after the place for a man from Holland who had bought it for his wife but, because she didn’t much like it, they rarely came to the valley. A generous and gregarious woman, Jup had lived in the Dutch East Indies with her husband during the ’30s, and in the war had been imprisoned by the Germans.
The house was called Casa Jolana, and my room being just below the eaves was more than hot at times, but I continued working on the final draft of The Deserters, which had now grown to over 400 pages.
A nineteen-year-old painter, Jim Donovan, was also staying in the house, and at the beginning of August, after stopping overnight in Palma to see a bullfight, we went by train to Inca, a town in the middle of the island. Few words said, we set out to walk the twenty kilometres north through rain-soaked woods to the monastery of Lluch, 3,000 feet above sea level. Guardias Civiles sat on the tops of passing buses with loaded rifles, as if in bandit country, and gave the hard stare at our suspicious plodding along the winding road. In the monastery we shared a large communal cell for the night with women and children, for the cost of about sixpence. Next day we walked thirty kilometres back to Soller, the only way in those days to see the wildest scenery of the island.
The height of summer was carefree, probably more so than I admitted to Ruth. Requests in my letters for us to resume life together were little more than a manifestation of the mercurial side of my temperament, but no less sincere for all that. The rate of such despatches, from the frontline of my endeavours to become a published writer had, however, diminished since the time in France. During eight months in Majorca nearly seventy detailed much, but not all, of my day-to-day existence, and though many came in return we had for a while gone our separate ways.
Mike Edmonds, an itinerant Australian, sometimes stayed at the Casa Jolana. A writer and journalist, he had travelled the Continent for years, at one time owning a restaurant in Paris, and making the acquaintance of such celebrities as Rita Hayworth, Hemingway and Picasso. A passionate aficionado of the bullring and all things Spanish, he took me around the brothels of Palma where, for not too many pesetas, one could spend a short time with an attractive girl. His tall dark aspect, and rapid Andaluz accent, enabled him to pass himself off as Spanish, at least in Majorca.
The final copy of The Deserters was bound into a large foolscap volume at the local stationer’s, and my hopes for it were not only based on its physical weight. A cursory rereading led me to believe in the possibility of making my fortune at last, or at least a hundred pounds, the magical upper limit of money beyond which it was hard to let my imagination go free.