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 wa
s 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.
At the same time as sending the book to Heinemann, never a believer in penny packets, I posted ‘Big John and the Stars’ to the BBC. This was a children’s story set in a prosperous kingdom of the Valley of Gold, a sort of Utopia much like Soller, which lacked only stars in the sky to make it perfect. The king promises his daughter in marriage to any man who can remedy this, while those who try but fail will be put to death. A blacksmith known as Big John accepts the challenge and, after many tribulations, succeeds.
A copy of the story ‘Saturday Night’, sent to my brother Brian, now a corporal on National Service with the army, came back with the comment that in his opinion ‘When you have the waiter fetch an order of eight pints, three glasses, two gins and oranges, one rum, a whisky, and three packets of Woodbines from the bar, it is wrong, because he wouldn’t be able to get all that on one tray’ – as indeed he wouldn’t.
Jim Donovan went back to London, and Mike Edmonds departed for Malaga, leaving all twelve rooms of the house for myself and Jup. My weight was down again, but more from debauchery than misery, which seemed much improvement. Having begun an affair, and wanting more privacy, I rented a room in a furnished house belonging to the friendly Nadal brothers. Every day Maria and Catalina, the folklore dancers who worked as waitresses at the Bar Nadal, came to make the large double bed, which had the graven image of a crucified man on the wall behind.
Working at a small table under the window, with a view of neighbouring house tops, I began writing about my childhood, contrasting the anguish and shortages of home life in the 1930s with the haven of the Burtons’ cottage, and recalling the idiosyncrasies of my blacksmith grandfather, about whom I hadn’t thought since his death in 1946. With the name of Brian Seaton for the main character, I tried to give the narrative an aspect of fiction, my imagination creating the life of his mother and father from the time before their marriage.
The story was satisfying to write, material seeming to come as much from my subconscious as from what was actually known about such people. In 50,000 words I took Brian to the age of thirteen, when the cottage, called The Nook, was bulldozed for redevelopment. After the handwritten draft was typed and put away I sat down to a steady rewriting of The Green Hills of Malaya, turning that also, as much as I was able, into fiction. I would break off from my work to eat a lunch of bread and salami, then open a bottle of wine and wait for the afternoon visit of my mistress, if she had been able to get away from her husband.
Her name was Pauline, and we had fallen in love on meeting at a table outside a café in the plaza one morning after she had done her shopping. For a while she was reluctant to come to bed, though eventually gave in, and our intense affair began. She was in her thirties, as handsome and beautiful as a Russian princess, and her husband had brought his family to Europe for a year so that he could write the Great American Novel undisturbed. They lived in a rented villa on the outskirts of the town, and I was friendly enough to read ‘Big John and the Stars’ to their seven-year-old daughter. Pauline would leave her playing in the garden, or the husband might have taken her by tram to the beach, and find some reason to come into town and be with me.
Bartolomeu Ferra, the postmaster, wrote articles for Ecos de Soller, the weekly newspaper of the town run off in a back room at the stationer’s. We met in the Bar Palacio one afternoon so that he could interview me, the piece appearing shortly before my departure for Malaga in late September. My name, in half-inch black letters, was spread across the page, part of a series called THOSE WHO VISIT us, in which I was said to be ‘un propogandista de Mallorca’ – after explaining my reasons for living on the island, and telling him that my journalism had always given a good impression of Soller.
Bartolomeu went on to describe me as a young bohemian with the soul of a child, but a person also who was full of experience and candour. I had no university degree, he wrote, only my pen and my talent, as well as an extensive knowledge gained from living in many countries of the Far East where I had worked as a wireless telegraphist. He also said that I occasionally made notes in an exercise book with my left hand, and stuffed black tobacco into a large curved pipe with the other. As a journalist and writer of fiction I had contributed to numerous magazines, as well as being such a friend of the Muses that success was sure to come in the hard fight to establish a position in the world of letters.
It wasn’t a matter of my believing or not. In one way I would have been happy to know that all he said was perfectly true, but the greater part of me discounted such eulogisms. The only person to know whether or not I was any good as a writer was myself, and a permanently underlying optimism allowed me to think so at times of rejection, such as when someone at Heinemann’s informed me that they were unable to make an offer for The Deserters, though would like to see Man Without a Home, which had been mentioned in a covering note. I posted a letter immediately to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, asking her to send it from there.
My life had reached a balance between work and pleasure which was hardly to be achieved again. The affair with Pauline was in full and delectable spate and, as if to give even more time for it, my typewriter broke down and had to be left a week in Palma for repair.
I packed a picnic basket and walked ten kilometres to Deya with Elizabeth Trocchi, who wanted to meet Robert Graves. He was his usual gracious self and, inviting us to go for a swim, lent me a pair of – necessarily baggy – trunks. We descended the winding track 600 feet down between the olive trees to the beach, and after tea at the house later, walked the same way back to Soller.
Whenever I called at Elizabeth’s flat her four-year-old daughter Margo would run up and put her arms around my neck crying: ‘Daddy!’, so I was glad when Alex came at the end of September
to see his family. He also wanted to have an issue of Merlin printed in Palma, since it was cheaper there than in Paris. Tall, thin and untidy, he had eyes which could change quickly from fanatical to vulnerable, or from dead to flashing a kind of uncertain fire. He spent one evening trying to contact people who might supply him with hash, but it seemed not to exist in a small town like Soller.
Over brandy in the plaza one night he told me he had earned 75,000 francs writing a pornographic novel for the Olympia Press series. By the end of our session he was merry enough to start advising me how to write, at which, being equally drunk, I could only reply that he didn’t know what he was talking about. We went on with our carouse until, about midnight, he got up and tottered across the square intending to tear down a poster of General Franco. Not wanting him given over to any rough treatment from the Guardias Civiles, I diverted him from this, and made sure he went home safe to bed. On leaving for Paris a few weeks later he neglected to pay the 7,000 pesetas printing bill for Merlin, and whether he ever did settle it, I don’t know.
When the two novels came back from Heinemann they were sent out again straight away. Hope, like energy, rose and fell, then lifted once more, much as we were taught at Radio School that the electromotive force of an alternating current goes through the positive and negative phases of an oscillatory circuit – in other words, something like my spirit, up and down in its various swings, whenever I sent work out and it was returned as unsuitable. Flipping the Holy Scriptures in my room one day while waiting for Pauline, my finger pressed on a verse from chapter nine of the First Book of Samuel, much like my mother’s old system, if system it could be called, though I was sure she still used it, an image which flashed to mind and stayed there strongly for a moment, as when she closed her eyes and, holding a pin, pricked the page of a racing paper to choose a horse on which to place sixpence or a shilling at the local bookie’s: ‘And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent it into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.’
Life Without Armour Page 20