A Poet's Blessing In 1976, The Young Australian Poet Larry Buttrose Journeyed To Mallorca To Meet His Literary Idol, Robert Graves, One Of The Century's Most Famous English Poets, And The Author Of Many Renowned Prose Works. Graves Went To Mallorca On T

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 17, 1998

LARRY BUTTROSE, Larry Buttrose is the author of The King NeptuneDay & Night Club and Cafe Royale: Tales of Love and Travel, both published byHarperCollins. Later this year HarperCollins will also publish his novel TheMaze of the Muse, loosely based on

In 1976, the young Australian poet LARRY BUTTROSE journeyed to Mallorca to meet his literary idol, Robert Graves, one of the century's most famous English poets, and the author of many renowned prose works. Graves went to Mallorca on the recommendation of his friend Gertrude Stein ("Paradise, if you can take it") and lived most of his life in the tiny village of Deya. He died there in 1985. Last year Larry Buttrose returned to the village, where he met Graves's widow and visted his grave.

I WAS introduced to Robert Graves at tea by Martin, a British ex-pat I had met the day I arrived in the village.

Martin was reciting the list of regulars at his daily tea party - Colin Wilson, R. D. Laing, a miscellany of Huxleys and, of course, Robert Graves - when he stopped abruptly and went to the glass-panelled front door, where an old man stood. He was dressed in a white suit, black Spanish-style hat and a blue striped vest with silver buttons. The nose was bent, lips full but ascetic, eyes blue, wide and clear.

"I think it will rain," the man said, peering up at the cloud-swathed Teix, the mountain which overshadows the village. "Do you think it will rain?" he asked with genuine concern.

"I don't know, Robert," Martin said gently. "Do come in." Over tea and scones, Graves spoke at length of the weather, or what it had been like the day before, what might eventuate later today, predictions for tomorrow. His voice was quite high and teasingly quick, and the words came tumbling out, almost colliding in the rush.

Seated beside him, I felt there was a fitting poignancy to it: a poet, a great poet, approaching the end of his life, obsessed with the weather over tea.

We took our leave from Martin and walked out to Graves's house, about half a mile beyond the village on the Soller road.

As we strolled along, I couldn't help but marvel at my good fortune. After all, I had written utterly out of the blue from my home in Adelaide to the address given in the foreword to The White Goddess, his "historical grammar of myth" - Canellun, Deya, Mallorca, Spain. I was amazed to receive a reply at all, doubly so when it said a meeting could be arranged. I quit my job, flew to Rome, hitchhiked through southern France to Spain, sleeping out by the side of the road, subsisting on bread and cheese and little else, and reached Barcelona and the ferry to Mallorca. And now here I was, walking and chatting with him.

The clouds blew away from the Teix, and the afternoon sun was strong. As we toiled up a rise past olive groves, I heard the tinkle of goat bells and the strident buzz of cicadas. Suddenly Graves bounded playfully ahead of me. He regarded it a great joke that he could so easily outpace this young visitor.

"How old are you?" he called back.

"Twenty-three," I said. "How old are you?"

"Eighty!" he declared, and laughed again.

The house was built in the local style, double-storey sandstone with green shutters. Gardens flourished around it, and a cool neatness within.

I met his wife, Beryl, who still possessed the same dark intelligent beauty I had seen in photographs of her youth. She directed us into the living room, and Graves sat in an armchair. He asked if I was a poet, and before I could answer he nodded and smiled. Then he pointed to a book on a shelf, and I brought it to him. It was his own Five Pens in Hand. He pointed out a passage with a craggy forefinger, and I read out:

"Shelley: `Voice is too shrill'. Wordsworth: `He disowned and betrayed his Muse.' Pound: `Cloacal ranting, snoot-cocking, pseudo-professorial jargon.' Dylan Thomas: `He gave his radio audiences what they wanted.' Auden: `The prescribed style of the '50s - compounded of all the personal styles available.' "

Finishing, I looked up at him, at the smile of a mischievous child playing on his lips. His eyes were cloudless skies. The forefinger left the book, and pointed to his own forehead, with its wisps of white hair on end.

"Poets these days," he said, "not much knowledge." The finger fell.

I wanted to defend Shelley and his voice, argue for Auden, but Graves had passed on from poetry now. I saw his eyes fixed on the high escarpment where once more clouds jostled. The range was dark as the slopes of Harlech he once had climbed. He might be up there now, I thought, a young man alone up where the vapours swirled.

Beryl brought in tea on a tray, and left us. Graves's eyes remained fixed on the window. Then apparently tuning back in, he looked at me quizzically, seeing me properly for the first time as it were, his eyes inquiring why I had come here. Until that moment I did not realise I had an answer, but one came forth. "I came to request your poet's blessing," I said.

I actually had only the vaguest notion of what that might mean, but his reaction was a stare which scrutinised me utterly - my youth, self-doubt, my unease, my all too obvious naivety. I held my breath. But then he nodded. "You have it," he said.

I returned to Mallorca 21 years later, almost to the day.

The bus edged out of the sprawl of the capital, Palma, crossed a sun-baked plain and began ascending an escarpment of wooded halls, limestone bluffs and boulder gorges. But for the closed-in windows I might have smelt the tang of pine. The first of the olive terraces appeared. Spring-pruned since the time of the Moors, the trunks were gnarled and fat as baobabs.

Just past Valldemossa the bus breasted the top of the range and the blue Mediterranean opened out majestically below. The mountainside was very steep, slopes falling almost sheer into the sea. The houses of the rich could be spied between trees, perched on thecliff's edge with garden, deck and pool. I might have been within spitting distance of Christopher Skase.

Round another bend, the unmistakable shape of Deia (as it is now spelt) appeared, an olive-terraced hill in the curving arm of the Teix, with pines running all the way up the limestone ramparts of its summit. We rounded a hairpin bend, and with a grinding back of gears climbed the main street and halted.

Needless to say, much had changed. The street was neatly paved and the stone buildings looked heritagised. Cafes and tourists had increased manyfold. But I found a room at the same pension I had stayed in two decades before, the Villa Verde. The pension-keeper was still there, too, and the white room she gave me had huge pine roof beams, a carved wooden bedstead, a porcelain jug and wash-stand in the corner,and a window with a view of the Teix.

I had come solely with the intention of visiting Robert's grave, but via an acquaintance made over the days that followed, I obtained the telephone number for Beryl, and decided to ring. She answered, and I explained that I had met her very briefly 20 years before, when I had come to see Robert. I wondered if it would be possible to call by. She suggested I drop in that afternoon.

I bought a fruit flan at the village bakery and set out in warm afternoon sun for the walk out to Canellun. After a few minutes I saw its stone walls and green shutters up ahead. I opened the iron gate and stepped inside the garden, and walked up to the back door, which I remembered gave entry to the kitchen. I knocked, and two small dogs rushed up barking. Behind them was Beryl, in her eighties now, a little bent over but smiling broadly, eyes bright beneath thick, steel-grey hair.

She lived alone now in Canellun, her home for 50 years. When she and Robert first came here they had to fetch wood to chop for heating. They had no car, and the bus went into Palma only once a day. Light bulbs dimmed and expired late at night when the village's littlehydro turbine closed up its sluice gate.

Over tea and the flan, Beryl mentioned she had been working with a collaborator, putting together Robert's Complete Poems, and showed me the first volume of it, a handsome edition. "There will be two more. I have galleys for the second, and the third will have some poems previously uncollected."

I mentioned a strange story I had heard, that a paragraph had been misplaced in one of the early editions of The White Goddess in the '50s, and somehow no-one had ever noticed. She confirmed this and showed me the passage, sayingit would be corrected in anedition being published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of publication. "T. S. Eliot at Faber accepted the original manuscript, you know, after it had been rejected by other publishers. Even The Greek Myths was rejected at first, by an American publisher. But then Penguin picked it up, and it's been in print ever since."

She took me into Robert's writing room. It was at the far end of the house, quite a small room, but with no hint of clutter. It felt like it had indeed seen a lifetime of writing, so many hundreds of thousands of words, millions of them, all written by hand at his broad plank-wood table. His substantial wood and wicker chair looked like it hadn't been sat in since he last did.

On the table was a pencil case the size of a shoe box with "ROBERT" printed in block letters. I noticed a beautiful bone-inlaid spice drawer. "Robert got that down in Palma," Beryl said. "He was always prowling the antique shops." I scanned the whitewashed walls. There was a horseshoe nailed up, a bronze sundial, a bull's head woven in wickerwork, and a richly coloured silk batik, designed by an old friend, a New Zealander called Len Lye.

I looked along shelves of books, some of them his own first editions, others by his long-time collaborator, the American poet Laura Riding. A well-thumbed Golden Bough sat on the top shelf.

Beryl asked about my first visit, and I told her how I had received the poet's blessing from Robert. He himself had received a blessing from Swinburne, she said, as he was wheeled in his pram on Wimbledon Common.

She asked how my blessing had gone, and I said I hadn't exactly had an easy time as a poet, or as a writer in general.

"Oh, that's just how it is for writers," she laughed gently, going on to mention difficult times she and Robert had experienced, even well into his career.

Taking my leave, I hesitated. "I want to place some flowers on Robert's grave . . . Could you suggest what kind of flower he might like?"

"Oh, any flower will do," she said. "Robert didn't care about things like that very much. You know, before he died people asked where he wanted to be buried - the Deia churchyard or Westminster Abbey. And he said, I don't care, once I'm dead what does it matter? He was always like that.

"He is buried in the churchyard, of course - but funnily enough he's also in Westminster, in Poets Corner with the War Poets, because when they did the War Poets hewas still living, but they wantedhim to be part of it - so he is there too."

Then we shook hands and I walked back down to the gate, just as I had done 21 years before, feeling not a little like a ghost in my own shoes.

I visited the churchyard in the gathering dusk. It was at the very peak of the hill of Deia, commanding a view of the sea on one side, the range of the Teix on the other. The stone wall enclosed cypress pines and banks of white oleander. A herbed summer breeze rustled the leaves. At first I could see no sign of a headstone. Then finally I saw it - a simple concrete gravestone set into the earth. The inscription was finger-written in running writing, reading:

Robert Graves. Poeta. 24-7-1895 - 7-12-85. EMP.

Around it grew flowering succulents, and bushes of rosemary, lavender and sage. I was moved by the single word: Poeta. So he had joined that wandering band of English poets, Shelley and Keats in their ranks, whose resting place was not an island flagged a nation, but a plot of earth they loved.

There were a few other people wandering about in the cemetery, tourists poking among the shrubs. I wondered whether they were looking for Robert too, but they walked right past him, cameras clicking at the views down to the sea. Their infant children trod on him. Ah, I thought, yes, that is your reward for a life devoted to the Muse; a bootie to the head.

"Goodbye Robert," I said, scattering sprigs of rosemary on his gravestone, for remembrance.

THIS VAST AND SOMBRE BLUE

Now that all the ocean is arrayed before me

In a great rumpled bedquilt of indigo,

And all the fish and molluscs doze

Within its folds another night

As the great watery heart of the world

Beats with that slow, assured beat

Of a lap-swimmer alone under moonlight;

Now I shall take up the telephone And dial a village somewhere in India,

And across all this vast and sombre blue,

Miracle of miracles, expire my love to you.

© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald

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