The Pillars of Hercules

Her little girl goggled at us and used a small square of cloth to imitate her mother’s clothes-folding.

I bought gas for the car—four thousand pesetas to fill the tank, about $35 for this tinky-winky Renault 5, another revelation about the high cost of living in Spain. But generally speaking in the Mediterranean a liter of gas cost twice as much as a liter of table wine.

The next morning, my last in Sóller, I woke once again to the sound of the waves sloshing against the beach, regretting that I had to leave.

In my two days of hiking I had walked almost to Deyá. Today I drove there on the narrow winding coast road, and early on, came upon the sight of a head-on collision (no one hurt but a car and a truck badly damaged). I was cautioned by the consternation of the young man standing by his smashed jeep, his face dark with anxiety; the busy movements of the truck driver who had rammed him on the sharp bend in the road. A tunnel was being dug through the mountains. The shout No Tunnel! was scrawled all over this part of the island. I agreed. There was a train. There was a road. There were already too many cars in Mallorca.

The village of Deyá was for so many years the home of the poet Robert Graves that the villagers passed a resolution and in 1969 made Graves “an adopted son,” the only one in the long history of the village. He had come there in 1929 on a hunch and lived there for more than half his life.

It is hard for me to work up any interest in a writer’s birthplace, and I hate pilgrimages to writers’ tombstones, but I do enjoy seeing where they lived and worked; writers’ houses fascinate me. And writers often choose magnificent landscapes to live in, whether they have money or not. Henry Miller settled in Big Sur and lived in a cabin long before Big Sur became a coveted piece of real estate; D. H. Lawrence was in pre-chic Taos, Hemingway was in Key West for the fishing, and moved on to Cuba for much the same reason. Robert Louis Stevenson was an early visitor to California and Hawaii and at last a pioneer in Samoa.

In the literary history of the Mediterranean, many places became famous and fashionable long after foreign writers discovered them and wrote about them. Very often the writers were residents. Usually it was a case of putting a fishing village on the map, and that ended when the tiny port was turned into an expensive resort. This is pretty much the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald glorifying the Riviera, of Norman Douglas in Capri (South Wind), Lawrence Durrell in Corfu (Prospero’s Cell) and Cyprus (Bitter Lemons) and of Somerset Maugham in Cap Ferrat. There are scores of other examples—people in Greece looking for Zorba or the Magus, literary pilgrims in Alexandria looking for Justine. The reductio ad absurdum of this, and probably the worst thing that can happen, is for the writer’s paradise to turn into hell while he or she is still living there—the hell of traffic and hotels, visitors and literary pilgrims. The writer may have unintentionally caused this to happen, by raving about the place.

In her typical gnomic way, saying that it was “Paradise—if you can stand it!” Gertrude Stein suggested that Robert Graves try Mallorca. And so having left his wife and children he went there, with his lover, the impossible Laura Riding. Graves found this idyllic island in 1929 which, in the course of his lifetime, almost sank under the weight of package tourists. Yet Deyá was still a somewhat remote and pretty village, high on sea cliffs, surrounded by the lovely Teix Mountains. He went there because it was cheap and off the beaten track. It also seemed a happy blend of two landscapes he loved—North Wales and Corfu. He was determined not to leave. He wrote in “The Next Time,”

And when we passengers are given two hours,

When once more the wheels fail at Somewhere—Nowhere,

To climb out, stretch our legs and pick wild flowers—

Suppose that this time I elect to stay there?

I easily found Graves’s house. It was named Canelluñ and, made of local stone, it occupied a lofty position on a ledge outside of the village. It was a dignified house on a steep slope, crags behind it, and the rocky shore far below it. There was an unexpectedly luxurious hotel in the center of Deyá, La Residencia, the sort of hotel I had been avoiding, since this was supposed to be a breezy trip. My idea was to press on; it was an enormously long coastline, and I was trying to avoid being corrupted and detained by luxury and lotus-eating.