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Some places are visited. Others are inhabited. And a very few become part of the person who arrives there. For Robert Graves, Mallorca was one of those places.
When the English poet and writer arrived on the island in 1929, he was not simply looking for beautiful Mediterranean scenery. He was leaving something behind. Graves belonged to a generation profoundly wounded by the First World War. He had fought on the Western Front, had been seriously injured and had witnessed the destruction of friends and an entire generation. The experience remained with him long after the war had ended.
By 1929, he had also reached a moment of personal and intellectual rupture with England. His autobiography, Good-bye to All That, published that same year, was exactly what its title suggested: a farewell. Then came Mallorca.
Graves and the poet Laura Riding left England in October 1929. During their journey they visited Gertrude Stein in France, and it was Stein who suggested Mallorca as a place where they might live. They travelled to Palma and from there discovered Deià. The village was very different from the internationally known place it would later become. Stone houses climbed between the mountains and the Mediterranean; terraces of olive trees covered the slopes; the sea appeared below the cliffs. Something in that landscape spoke to Graves. He stayed. Eventually, among the olive terraces outside Deià, he built Ca n'Alluny -the Far House. Mallorca had ceased to be a destination. It was becoming home.
The importance of Mallorca in Graves's life cannot be measured simply by counting the years he spent there. The island gave him something more valuable: distance. Distance from England. Distance from convention. Distance, perhaps, from some of the ghosts he had carried since the trenches. And in that relative isolation, Graves wrote. It was in Mallorca that he produced I, Claudius, published in 1934, the historical novel that would eventually become his most internationally famous work.
But Graves never regarded himself primarily as a novelist. He considered himself a poet. Poetry was at the centre of his understanding of life, mythology, love and creativity. Deià offered him a place in which that private intellectual universe could exist. And slowly, the foreign writer began observing the people around him.
There are many ways for a foreigner to write about another culture. One is to remain outside it. Another is to exoticise it. But there is a third possibility: to stay long enough to begin understanding the silences. Graves stayed. He listened to stories, observed customs, learnt about local rivalries, friendships, prejudices, honour, humour and the complicated mechanisms through which small communities function. He even became remarkably knowledgeable about village gossip.
Mallorca gradually entered his literature not as an exotic Mediterranean postcard but as an inhabited world. Academic research into Graves's Mallorcan stories has identified precisely this process: their characters, social relationships, language, cultural practices and settings grew from his observation of Palma and Deià and from his own experiences on the island. And that brings us to a Robert Graves rather different from the author of I, Claudius.
Breus històries mallorquines brings together eighteen stories connected with Graves's Mallorcan world. Written and published between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, they belong to a completely different literary scale from the Roman palaces and imperial intrigues for which Graves became famous. Here there are no emperors. There are neighbours. A bicycle can become the centre of a story. So can a theatrical performance, a question of education, an infidelity, a misunderstanding or one of those apparently insignificant incidents that can occupy an entire village.
Some of the stories originally appeared in publications such as The New Yorker. The eighteen pieces now gathered in Catalan include the eleven stories Graves himself grouped as Mallorcan Short Stories, together with seven other Mallorcan tales later collected by his daughter Lucia Graves. And perhaps their apparent smallness is precisely their charm. They are little windows.
Reading these stories today, it is tempting to think of them as a kind of literary costumbrisme written by an outsider. Graves watches. He notices gestures. He listens to the peculiar logic behind everyday behaviour. His Mallorcans can be cautious, stubborn, suspicious of novelty, proud, extraordinarily practical and wonderfully ironic. But Graves's gaze is interesting because he occupies an unusual position. He is neither entirely inside nor entirely outside. He retains the foreigner's ability to notice things that locals may consider completely ordinary, while possessing the familiarity of someone who has lived among them long enough to understand that what appears strange from outside often makes perfect sense from within. That tension gives these stories much of their humour. He sees Mallorca with foreign eyes, but no longer with the eyes of a tourist.
The recent Catalan edition, Breus històries mallorquines, translated and contextualised by Nofre Moyà, makes this lesser-known Graves accessible through precisely this everyday world.
History, however, interrupted Graves's Mallorcan life. The Spanish Civil War forced him to leave the island in 1936. For years, Mallorca became something he could remember but not inhabit. And absence revealed something important. He missed it. His first substantial writing about Mallorca and its people, The Place for a Holiday, published in 1948, was permeated by the longing he had felt for his Mallorcan home during those years of exile. The text would later evolve into Why I Live in Mallorca and become central to Mallorca Observed.
In 1946, Graves finally returned to Deià, this time with Beryl and their family. The foreigner came home.
There is something particularly moving about belonging to a place in which one was not born. Birth gives us an origin. Belonging is something different. It can be built slowly through years of ordinary life: knowing the roads, recognising voices, understanding jokes, watching children grow older, sharing celebrations, remembering people who have died. Perhaps Graves never ceased to be el foraster entirely. But after decades in Deià, the distinction had become almost irrelevant.
The village had entered his writing. Its people had become his neighbours. Its landscape had become the geography of his imagination. And its stories had become some of his stories.
Robert Graves died in 1985. He could have been commemorated in many places. His literary career had been international; his books belonged to readers throughout the world. But Graves was buried in the cemetery at Deià. His grave is remarkably simple. There is no monumental tomb celebrating the internationally famous author of I, Claudius, The White Goddess and more than a thousand poems. His grave was made using humble Mallorcan lime mortar. And upon it were scratched simply his name, his dates and one word: Robert Graves, Poeta. Nothing more was necessary.
Perhaps that modest grave above the Mediterranean explains his relationship with Mallorca better than any literary biography could. He arrived as a foreigner searching for distance. He found a village. He built a house. He wrote books. He listened to stories. He left and longed to return. He returned and stayed. And eventually he asked that the island should keep him. The author of Roman emperors, Greek gods, ancient myths and great historical narratives also understood that literature can be found in much smaller things: a stolen bicycle, a piece of village gossip, a neighbour's eccentricity, a conversation overheard, a story told over a table.
That is the Robert Graves we discover in Breus històries mallorquines. Not Graves the classical scholar. Not Graves the celebrated novelist. Not even Graves the English poet. But simply Robert of Deià: a foraster who stayed long enough to discover that sometimes the place where we were born and the place where we belong are not necessarily the same.
And perhaps that is what Mallorca ultimately gave him. Not an escape from home, but another meaning of the word home.
More information: La Casa de Robert Graves
sun, sea, mountains, spring-water,
Robert Graves
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