William Graves - Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves

Contents

In Memory of Henry MacDonald Prain, El Capitn

William Graves is Robert Gravess son and Literary Executor. He still lives in Dey, but earns a living as a geologist consulting to the oil industry.

He is married with two children.

No, here they never plant the sweet olive

As some do (bedding slips in a prepared trench),

But graft it on the club of Hercules

The savage, inexpugnable oleaster

Whose roots and bole bunching from limestone crannies

Sprout impudent shoots born only to be lopped

Spring after Spring.

From The Oleaster by Robert Graves

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father the poet Robert Graves had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war.

Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years.

Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his Muses, and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

When my father, Robert Graves, poet and author, died in 1985, I was astonished to find that he had named me executor of his Will. We had been at loggerheads during the last five years before a slow but remorseless illness had taken him down into the darkness of final senility, so I regarded myself as the least likely of my siblings to have been chosen for the task. Indeed, I had never even considered it. At school I had taken up science, and went on to earn a living as a geologist as a reaction to Fathers fame and to my English teachers ill-founded expectations of me. My astonishment gave way to shock when I realized that, since he had specified no one else, I also became his de facto literary executor.

Sorting out the Will and setting up the arrangements for the royalties from Fathers copyrights to be paid to my mother, brothers and sisters was fairly simple. Getting ready to be the literary executor of one of the great writers of the twentieth century was not. Fortunately, I had a reasonable amount of free time between jobs consulting to my oil company clients, and I set about rereading Fathers books, essays, short stories, and even his poems. I acquired first editions of his books, and of those to which he had contributed; I also bought any books written about him. I gradually built up a working library. Soon, with the help of his literary agent, I was confidently deciding what should and should not be published.

I reread his best-selling autobiography, Goodbye to All That, which he published in 1929 when he was thirty-four, and I studied the biographies and books about his life and works. I read the published selections of his letters and then, with complete fascination, those he had written to me and which I had kept. In doing so I found myself trying to unravel our relationship, which had started so wonderfully and had ended so unsatisfactorily. He was forty-five when I was born, and fifty when he returned with his young family to resume his life in Dey, a small mountain village in Majorca. As a child, Fathers early ordeals on the Somme, described in Goodbye to All That, had meant to me as little as the tarnished medals in a brass tobacco tin at the back of the chest of drawers in my bedroom at Canelln, the house I grew up in. Now, as I read his war poems for the first time, those terrible days came sharply into focus. His years with Laura Riding, the American poet, had always seemed less remote to me. I knew little about her, other than that she had built Canelln, but signs of her former presence were everywhere in the house. Reading about her in Fathers unpublished diaries, I began to feel that I knew her well. Indeed, Fathers behaviour towards me was becoming clearer and my emotions less confused. I found myself quizzing the old men and women of the village on how they felt about him. They told me things about the Dey of my childhood that I did not know or had forgotten, and I relived scenes long past.

I realized that among my memories were valuable clues, perhaps not even apparent to me, to the understanding of the later part of Fathers remarkable life. Slowly the idea of this book evolved: partly as personal catharsis, and partly as a contribution to those interested in the environment in which Father moved and worked. Throughout the following chapters I have described what I remember about our family and the village during my childhood, my youth and early years of marriage. Where possible I have cross-checked facts, although certain memories are bound to have fractured in the kaleidoscope of time. The main narrative covers the years from 1946 to 1970.

Writing this story, and attempting to make it readable, has made me appreciate the brilliance of Fathers craftsmanship. Indeed, he has helped me throughout with his grammar, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, a book he originally wrote for my half-sister Jenny, after she had asked him for tips on how to write. It has made me realize that my most important task, as his literary executor, is to ensure both his prose and his poetry is read and enjoyed by generations to come. Sadly, it has also made me realize that, although my roots really are in Dey, that enchanted Dey, which was also Fathers, no longer exists.

Producing this manuscript was rather like moulding a sculpture out of clay. I began with a block, a chronological account of all I remembered, and then slowly beat and kneaded it into shape, scraping out chunks, moving bits around, and filling in where needed.

The earliest version was savaged by an editor friend, and I was pushed to the verge of despair. I rewrote it twice more before I finally found it a home.

Among those who have helped, encouraged and advised me, I wish to thank Beryl Graves, Sofia Graves, Philip Graves, Catherine Dalton, Frank Delaney, Deborah Baker, Joanna Golds-worthy, Stella Irwin, Dunstan Ward, my editor Tony Whittome, and above all, my fathers assistant Kenneth Gay. My thanks also to the oil companies on whose oil rigs most of this was written; to Enrique Foster Gittes for the use of his fathers 1940s painting of Dey; to the Robert Graves Copyright Trust for allowing me to quote from his letters and poems; and, of course, a special thanks to my wife Elena who may now want to read the outcome of the five-year gestation she has endured.

Finally, my apologies to those I may have inadvertently hurt through my narrative. Mistakes, of course, are my own.

WG

In the text, abbreviations at the foot of quoted letters stand for the following names:

JR James Reeves

CG Cicely Gittes

RG Robert Graves

WG William Graves

SJ Selwyn Jepson

RF Ruth Fainlight

AL Aemilia Larauen

KG Kenneth Gay

BG Beryl Graves

OUR SMALL AEROPLANE approached the massive grey mountains that broke out of the blue sea below.

Look! there! there! Father roared excitedly beside me, jabbing his big, slightly ink-stained forefinger with its ragged flat nail at the window and narrowly missing my nose. Look, William, see those white rocks? Theres the beach. Well go for a swim tomorrow! He turned around in his seat to make sure Mother had seen. Look, Beryl, there it is; thats Dey.