The Pillars of Hercules

Graves had bought Canelluñ in 1934 with his profits from I, Claudius and had lived there for many years with Laura Riding, who like so many other mistresses in literature began as his muse and ended as a nag. It has been said that one of the reasons this powerful novel of the decline of Caesardom is so convincing is because Graves “used it as a vehicle for expressing the dark side of his feelings for Laura Riding.” He saw her character in the wicked and manipulative poisoner Livia. Laura was known in the village as “a bossy eccentric who wore strange clothes.” After some years and some suffering Graves tossed her out and took up with another White Goddess.

An interviewer once asked Graves a boring question about his living in Deyá.

“Has living in Deyá, isolated from what you call the mechanarchic civilization, led you to what you call handicraft in your poetry?”

This produced an interesting answer from Graves. “I once lived here for six years without moving out—in nineteen thirty to thirty-six,” he replied. “Didn’t even go to Barcelona. Apart from that I’ve always made a point of traveling. One’s got to go out, because one can’t live wholly in oneself or wholly in the traditional past. One’s got to be aware of how nasty urban life is.”

By keeping his head down, he had tried to get through the Spanish Civil War. He had fought in the First World War (and written a book about his disillusionment in his precocious—he was thirty-three—autobiography Goodbye to All That). Franco kept threatening to invade Mallorca, and when the time came, and the island grew dangerous, Graves fled.

The village of Deyá is lovely. How to account for the fact that it remained so long after other parts of the island had fallen to the crassest of developers? Perhaps it was as the woman in Sóller had said to me, “no level places”—that and the narrow roads. If a place was inaccessible it had a chance of keeping its identity and remaining untainted.

“Deyá had little to recommend it except the Graves magic,” Anthony Burgess wrote dissentingly in his autobiography, speaking of a period when he had lived in the village. He went on, “A literal magic, apparently, since the hills were said to be full of iron of a highly magnetic type, which drew at the metal deposits of the brain and made people mad. Graves himself was said to go around sputtering exorcisms while waving an olive branch.”

The Mallorcans I spoke to in the north of the island all knew of Graves, they knew the village and the house. They knew everything except Graves’s poetry. That was the way of the world. The man’s reputation was good enough for them, and it inspired their respect. A celebrated writer who lives in a small town or a village has an odd time of it. It is amusing when the local philistines disparage the writer in the neighborhood, but it is downright hilarious when the writer is strenuously championed by the local illiterates. Graves lived among olive-squashing peasants and fruiterers and shepherds, as well as prosperous retirees and aristocrats. He shocked some, but his love for the island and for the village in particular impressed them to the point where most of the locals were his well-wishers.

Graves’s son and daughter still lived at the house, I was told. I decided not to ring the bell—for fear of intruding but also for fear of being turned away, rebuffed for invading their privacy. Apart from curiosity I had no profound reason for poking my nose in. I was simply interested in what his desk looked like, the room, the books, the pictures; it gave some idea of the writer’s mind.

I looked too disreputable for La Residencia; I had a cup of coffee in the village and spent the day walking around the steep lanes, admiring the fruit trees and the tidy houses. The village had great dignity and enormous physical beauty. It was a place, I decided, I would gladly return to.

Even in Deyá, in casual conversation I did not find anyone who knew Graves’s poetry. But no matter. The question that was in my mind was about Franco, and in particular his hold on Mallorca. Because the Spaniards are so polite generally and reserved it was a long time before I could steel myself to ask. Also, asking about a dictator who had been in power so long was also a way of asking people about themselves, a question like “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

Anyway, in Deyá, I popped the question. The man I asked was of that generation, in his early seventies, a thoughtful person out walking his dog. I had caught him unawares, while we were discussing the route to Valdemosa. Then he considered my Franco question.

“In that time”—he seemed to be avoiding saying the Franco’s name—“we could not do certain things. We could not say certain things. Some things we could not think.”

“So there was political repression?”