The White Goddess: An Encounter by Simon Gough – review

The familiar title comes from the book about poetic myth by Robert Graves, the "Grand-uncle" of the author ("Great is for steamships and railway lines, don't you think? Grand is for fathers and uncles, and Russian dukes, of course!"), around whom this fictionalised – but only slightly – memoir revolves.

Gough first met Graves, his great uncle, aged 11, when he visited the writer of I, Claudius and Goodbye to All That in his adopted home of Deià, Mallorca. It was a bleak period for Gough (his actor parents were divorcing), but he found such happiness in this bohemian demi-paradise of mountains and Mediterranean Sea that he devised a private, mystical sacrificial rite in order to return.

When he did, aged 18 and on his way to university in Madrid, he found Graves under the influence of an "extraordinary" muse, Margot Callas, who was possessed by the "Triple Goddess" and proved an inspiration for poems such as Symptoms of Love. Young Gough fell under her spell too, but kept his passion secret from his great uncle. Under the pressure of Graves's demands, the love triangle unravels unexpectedly, leaving the author in a situation beset by divided loyalties and lies.

Impassioned, with all the intensive drama a youthful affair entails, this "autobifantasy" (as Gough calls it) is as much about a love of a place – the freedom and beauty of Deià contrasts with the brutality of Franco's Madrid – as of a person. In fact, some of the finest parts of the book are not about Callas but the touching portrait of Graves and his wife Beryl; a tender, observant record both of their relationship and their real selves in their later years.