Life Without Armour (26 page)

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:

Coloured lanterns hang like moments

That will not fall in a lifetime,

Rainbows in a pre-Lent room

And full moons lighting up

The split of a saxophone and a honkey-tonk

Piano beating out the rudiments of doom.

Nubility like low-power beacons

Waiting to be danced out of the corners,

And blue flames in cups

Charmed upon the tables

By the trumpets in a paradise flare:

And confetti like a worn out smile

Winks in a woman's hair.

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.

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.