2014
is, as everyone must be aware by now, the anniversary of the start of the First
World War, and so it seemed fitting that when I was in Mallorca early this
month I made a pilgrimage to the home of Robert Graves. Robert von Ranke Graves
(1895–1985)
was one of the First World War Poets, who included, for the men, Graves’s
friend Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen. Amongst the women First World War
Poets were Vera Brittain, Rose Macaulay and Charlotte Mew.
Graves
separated from his wife and moved to Mallorca with his lover, American poet
Laura Riding (1901–1991), in 1929. They built a house, which they called Ca n’Alluny, in the mountain village of Deià on the north west coast, at that time a fishing
village. It’s an artist’s dream home, and indeed the area had earlier attracted
other artists including Chopin and George Sand.
Graves’s house is in a beautiful setting, high above the
Mediterranean with views down to the glinting ocean. In the olive groves goats
graze on tender shoots from olive branches thrown over the fence by the farmer.
Here and there tendrils of smoke rise from tended fires in the orchards and the
valley is filled with the fragrance of wood smoke. The air is still and it is
very quiet except for the incessant, clopping tinkle of the bells around the
goats’ necks, and the occasional chink of hammer on stone made by men working
on a wall lower down the valley.
An artist's dream home
As if that isn’t enough tranquil beauty for a poet to gaze upon,
the house is surrounded by a stunning garden, laid out as it was during
Graves’s lifetime. There are lemon and orange trees, palms, monkey puzzles, almond
trees, rosemary, lemon grass. There’s a patio to eat on in the summer evenings.
There’s a grotto (closed to visitors for safety reasons) and paths to meander
along. You can see Graves himself pottering about amongst these glories on the
introductory film shown at the start of the visit.
All this perfection is rounded off by the house itself, which is
furnished as it was when Graves was living there in the 1940s, after an exile
of ten years during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Graves returned
to Deià in 1946 with his new partner, Beryl Pritchard (1915–2003), Laura Riding
having left him in 1939.
The
house is pretty, light and airy and filled with paintings and works of art made
by friends, as well as plenty of examples of that most magical item of
furniture, the bookcase. There’s a cosy dining room and kitchen and no doubt
the bedrooms were all pretty too (one is on display; the others were where the excellent
exhibition is now). There’s also a room with a printing press where Graves
published some of his own novels under the Seizin Press imprint.
But
the heart of the house is Graves’s study (Riding also had a room of her own
when she lived there). There’s a sense of a house built around writing: everything
is arranged to facilitate the work. This is hardly surprising, since the house
was built to Graves’s specification. He even took a hand in the construction.
Light and airy interior
Graves
was also possessed of that other element of the poetic idyll: a wife, or as he preferred
to call it, a muse. After his return to Deià, Beryl
acted as both muse, inspiring Graves’s love poetry, and housekeeper. She catered
for numerous visitors, looked after their four children, cooked, cared for the
garden, and tolerated her husband’s emotional entanglements with a series of
other muses, all young women, many of whom became her friends. She cared for
Graves during his final years and his tragic descent into Alzheimer’s; he died
in Ca n’Alluny and is buried in the local church.
Beryl had studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at what was to become St
Anne’s College, Oxford and was a socialist. She read widely in English, Spanish
and Russian and after Graves’s death she co-edited, with Dunstan Ward, an annotated,
three volume edition of her husband’s work.
Oranges and olives
The
house is a muse in itself, a place of tranquillity but also of passion –
Graves’s love life was a complicated one! Which is more important for the writer:
peace or turmoil? Graves declared for turmoil, but thanks to Beryl he also got
peace. Perhaps the two are equally important. At any rate, Ca n’Alluny is a house full of life and poetry, a
generous house with inspiration built into its foundations. It was a privilege
to visit it, and to round off the visit sitting outside with the gardener
drinking hierbas, an aniseedy, herby liqueur,
and eating oranges plucked off an eighty-year-old tree, a tree planted in 1933
when Robert Graves was living at Ca n’Alluny.
La
Casa de Robert Graves website – http://www.lacasaderobertgraves.com/index_eng.php
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