|
Robert Graves in Deia
|
|
|
Robert Graves
lived in Deia from after the end of World War II until his death in 1985. This was his second stay; during the first - in the 1930s - he shared his house at the edge of the village with
Laura Riding
, an American poet and dabbler in the mystical. Riding came to England in 1926 and, after she became Graves's secretary and literary collaborator, the two of them had an affair. The tumultuous course of their relationship created sufficient furore for them to decide to leave England and they supposedly chose Mallorca on the advice of Gertrude Stein. Graves and Riding were forced to leave Mallorca in 1936 at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, and back in England Laura ditched Graves, who subsequently took up with a mutual friend,
Beryl Hodge
. Graves returned to Mallorca in 1946, Beryl joined him and they were married in Palma in 1950. But they didn't live happily ever after; Graves had a predilection for young women, claiming the need for female muses to inspire his poetic vision; outwardly Beryl accepted this waywardness, but without much enthusiasm. Furthermore, while Graves' novels -
Goodbye to All That
;
I, Claudius
;
Claudius the God
- became increasingly well known and profitable, his romantic poetry - of which he was particularly proud - fell out of fashion, and his last anthology,
Poems 1965-1968
, was widely snubbed. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
|
Spain,
|