Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Because it lacked the formal constraints of both poetry and drama, and therefore freed him to give full vent to his feelings, Lorca turned first to prose, and in a series of nearly forty meditations entitled, variously, “Emotional States,” “Altarpieces,” and “Mystical Writings,” he tried to fathom the jumble of sensations that gripped him in adolescence. He wrote compulsively about sex, women, God, sorrow, love, and the bittersweet loss of his childhood innocence. He proclaimed his scorn for the Catholic Church and its suppression of human instinct. He described his contempt for the Old Testament God and his corresponding love for Jesus, with whom he clearly identified. “When will my carnal Calvary end?” he pleaded. His soul-searching accounts built on his youthful readings of works as disparate as the Bible, Saint Teresa’s Life, Unamuno’s essays, Hindu philosophy, the poems of Saint John of the Cross, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (which he read in a Spanish translation from the Persian original), and Wilde’s De Profundis.

  Like the Spanish mystics and his modernista idols, Lorca yearned to reconcile his erotic and spiritual selves. Sex was a demon that prevented his pure self—“my spirit, which is me”—from prospering. “From on high, my spirit contemplates my body’s actions, and I become two during the great sacrifice of semen.” He convinced himself that he was in love with women. But it was the idea of woman he loved, not flesh and blood women themselves. By day he indulged in unrequited crushes on his pretty young Granadan neighbors, to whom he occasionally read his work. By night he imagined himself being kissed by a woman in white, with “lips that burn,” her bare legs girded by turquoise snakes, her breasts so large they drowned him.

  Intrigued by homoeroticism, he drafted a fictive dialogue between Sappho and Plato in which he explored the ancient Greek notion that all kinds of love are permissible. About his own sexuality, he was both naive and ambivalent. Although he craved carnal experience, it repulsed him. He spoke wistfully of his desire “to be a flower … and to enjoy the reproductive act in a spiritual way.” He vacillated between a passive wish to remain celibate and an aggressive need to flaunt his virility. “An exotic and distant virgin and a muscular and powerful man dance together inside me,” he confessed in a prose text on Pierrot, a favorite modernist emblem of poetic fantasy, a figure Lorca claimed he resembled “most of the time.” As he aged, he would often return to the image of Pierrot, the mournful clown whose contradictory nature both reflected and revealed the dichotomies in his own personality.

  In page after page of ornate schoolboy script, Lorca dramatized his plight. At nineteen, he complained of being old. Viewed from a distance of only twelve years and as many miles, his vega boyhood came to signify a lost paradise, a transcendent era when the world, as he remembered it, had been good and whole. In “My Village,”, a sentimental attempt at an autobiography, he recalled the “quiet, fragrant little village” of Fuente Vaqueros, where he had been born and where he hoped to die. “Its streets, its people, its customs, its poetry, and its evil are the scaffolding where my childhood ideas once took shape and then melted in the crucible of puberty.”

  “My Village” includes a lengthy account of the final illness, death, and funeral of one of Lorca’s closest boyhood friends, a fifty-five-year-old man known as Compadre Pastor, or “Shepherd Godfather.” During Compadre Pastor’s burial, Federico, then seven, had glimpsed his friend’s body in its casket. Recalling the scene twelve years later, Lorca described the dead man’s rigid form, his folded hands, the silk handkerchief that hid his decaying face. The episode proved to Lorca that death was neither a liberation, nor a transition to some new phase of existence, but the complete physical annihilation of life. Unamuno had reached the same conclusion in The Tragic Sense of Life, a work whose blunt admission of doubt helped fuel Lorca’s growing agnosticism.

  Neither he nor Unamuno romanticized death. But Lorca did romanticize his friendship with Compadre Pastor. The dead man, a former shepherd, epitomized everything Lorca had lost at puberty: virtue, harmony with nature, the unconditional love of his parents and friends. Compadre Pastor was an “angel come down from heaven,” a hero, a saint. At night, the young Federico used to sit in his lap and listen to Compadre Pastor tell stories, until the boy fell asleep and was carried to his mother, “who pressed me against her bosom and covered me with kisses.” “My poor Compadre Pastor,” Lorca reminisced. “You were the one who made me love Nature. You were the one who shed light on my heart.”

  Vicenta Lorca nurtured her son’s dreams of a writing career. Some years later, in a confidential letter, she suggested to him that the “things” he had written in adolescence were “beautiful” and ought to be more widely known. “If all this is a secret, well and good. But if not, tell me and no one else. Write a little note and I’ll keep it to myself and not show it to anyone.”

  His father was more practical. “Good God!” the landowner sputtered when told that his oldest son intended to become a writer. “Imagine trying to earn a living writing poetry!” He warned Lorca to expect failure. Don Federico’s own uncle Baldomero, a gifted but unsuccessful poet and minstrel, had ended his days roaming the vega in poverty, dependent for survival on family charity. “You’re just going to turn into another Baldomero!” Don Federico accused his son.

  “If only I could!” Lorca said.

  Determined to prove himself, Lorca published his first work in February 1917, four months after sallying forth “toward the good of literature.” A vignette of the nineteenth-century Granadan poet José Zorrilla, the piece appeared in a special edition of the Granada Arts Center bulletin, published on the centenary of Zorrilla’s birth. In contrast to the more conventional essays submitted by others, Lorca contributed a short, highly romantic dialogue entitled “Symbolic Fantasy,” in which a variety of elements—among them a bell, a river, and the spirit of Zorrilla himself—pay homage to the city of Granada.

  A few months later, in early summer, Lorca embarked on another of Professor Berrueta’s Andalusian tours. In Baeza, he overcame his earlier reserve and confessed to Antonio Machado his love of poetry and music. The poet thought Lorca like “a young olive tree.” Machado admired the teenager’s piano playing, and took mental note of their encounter. Later in the evening Lorca and his fellow travelers went for a moonlit stroll through town. Seized by the poetry of the setting, Federico dramatically “baptized” the group with imaginary, “moon-filled water” from a dry fountain in the cathedral square. His companions marveled at his ability to turn an ordinary occasion into a moment of pure lyricism.

  While in Baeza, Lorca renewed his acquaintance with a young man named Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, whom he had met the previous year during his first visit to the town. The two had subsequently struck up a correspondence. Thin and dark-haired, with delicate features and a pensive smile, Martínez Fuset aspired to a writing career and for a time labored on a novel he intended to dedicate to Lorca. He was certain that no one understood or loved him. “I want a friendship, one friendship, yours alone,” he told Federico. Despite this bold assertion, Martínez Fuset claimed to be in love with a girl named Lina, while Lorca carried on about a variety of young women. Together the two struggled to make sense of the female sex. Martínez Fuset once urged Federico to visit him in Baeza so that, among other things, they could talk about “woman. She is lovely because we spiritualize her … But she is inherently dirty, her elements are lustful and black, and her menstrual periods diminish her in my eyes. Nevertheless, I revere women, I love them.”

  Neither man had any genuine understanding of the female sex. Both had grown up in a largely segregated society, separated from girls in school and at church, taught to assume gender-specific roles, told to prize virginity, and left to speculate about the physical and emotional realities of women’s lives. Lorca’s few friendships with young women were confined largely to long walks and conversations about art. In late 1916 he became infatuated with a young neighbor in Granada named Amelia, who shared his interest in poetry and reportedly read him “her dramas
and stories.” But nothing came of their friendship.

  By the summer of 1917, he had abandoned his quest for Amelia and taken up a new love, a pretty blonde named María Luisa Egea González, who enjoyed playing duets with Lorca on the piano in his parents’ living room. Her very name inspired him. “And I, like the saints / love only María,” he declared. Martínez Fuset teased Lorca about his prowess as a “Don Juan!” and urged him to renounce his “schoolboy scruples,” to love María “without timidity, without that monastic reserve that impedes and diverts you.” But María Luisa ignored what overtures Lorca was able to muster, and he despaired. He longed to retreat from puberty, to crawl back in time to the sanctity and safety of childhood. “Let the goblet of my semen / spill over and empty completely,” he wrote in an early poem.

  I want to be like a child

  rosy and silent,

  who, in the ermine thighs

  of his loving mother,

  can listen to a star

  speaking with God.

  In July 1917, Lorca set out on the fourth, and last, of his cultural expeditions with Domínguez Berrueta. This time the group toured Castile, with a brief visit to Madrid and a prolonged stay in the city of Burgos, where they spent three hours every day writing up their notes in libraries and archives. Lorca polished his observations with an eye toward publication. He and fellow student Luis Mariscal each published several articles in rival Burgos dailies. Lorca’s first effort, an elliptical description of a visit to a local convent, appeared on August 3. An accompanying note informed readers that the article was adapted from a book “under preparation, Long Romantic Walks through Old Spain, with a prologue by Señor Berrueta.”

  The group’s itinerary in Burgos included an overnight stay in the remote monastery of Silos, south of the city. Lorca spent the night in a white room with a single bed, a table, and a crucifix. As he lay in bed in the dark, he heard dogs barking. Their howls filled him with “intense fear,” and he felt the presence of death. By morning his terror had passed, and he was able to enjoy the “tragically solemn theatricality” of High Mass and the beauty of the monks’ Gregorian chant.

  After Mass he spoke to the organist, a monk who had spent most of his life in the monastery. To his astonishment, Lorca learned that the man, an able musician, had never heard of Beethoven. Impulsively, Federico sat down at the organ and played a passage from the Allegretto of the composer’s Seventh Symphony, a movement Lorca regarded as a “work of superhuman grief.” During his performance, a second monk came quietly into the organ loft and hid his face beneath his hands. Deeply moved, he begged Lorca to keep playing. Shaken by this unexpected confrontation between plainsong and romanticism, between the spirit and the flesh, Lorca’s memory failed him. Later, when the second monk had regained his composure, he cautioned Federico against a life in music. “It is lust itself,” the man warned. Lorca found the remark both intriguing and sad. But the encounter merely reinforced his devotion to art.

  Nearly a month into their Castilian tour, three of the students on Berrueta’s trip returned home to Granada. Lorca remained alone in Burgos with his professor during August. He was the only student whose father was able to afford the additional month’s expense. His parents were pleased with the progress Lorca had shown during his travels. “Father says for you to get three or four more newspapers like the one you sent, because your uncles are eager to have copies,” his mother wrote after receiving one of Lorca’s published articles. She asked if he had a good hat and enough warm clothing for the city’s cool climate. She missed him intensely.

  In Burgos, Lorca continued to write. He published two articles in August, the first a descriptive account of a Castilian inn—part of his forthcoming book on “Old Spain”—and the second a reflective essay entitled “Rules in Music,” in which he examined a number of issues that would continue to engage him for years: the rules of creative expression, the role of the critic, the profound unity of the various arts, and the relationship between an artist and his public. Rules, Lorca argued, are created chiefly for the mediocre. While it is important to learn rules at the outset of one’s career, ultimately an artist must discard them, because art springs from the soul, not from some preexisting code. “How are you going to lock one person’s heart inside a prison belonging to somebody else?” He cited the example of his idols—Beethoven, Wagner, Darío—men who had broken the rules and triumphed because of it. By implication he counted himself among them.

  He was certain of his power and promise as an artist. More so than his three previous expeditions with Professor Berrueta, his tour of Castile in 1917 confirmed Lorca’s determination to write. During the trip he saw his name in print not once but several times, an intoxicating experience for any beginner. While in Burgos he enjoyed the undivided attention of his teacher, and he basked in his parents’ praise. He emerged from his monthlong visit newly persuaded of his extraordinary talent, and keen to publish his first book. Some years later he told a friend that whenever he thought of Burgos, tears overcame him. “For the cathedral’s gray towers of air and silver showed me the narrow door through which I had to pass in order to know myself and to know my soul… My heart will never again be so alive, so full of pain and eternal grace.”

  The pain he referred to stemmed in part from another infatuation. In Burgos, Lorca evidently fell in love with a girl whose cool response so crushed him that at the end of August he fled the city, and in a melodramatic display of emotion went directly home to Granada. He refused to stop in Madrid, where his friend José Fernandez-Montesinos had been expecting him. Montesinos responded calmly to Lorca’s histrionics. “I suppose all this is a consequence of your emotional state,” he wrote. “Your hasty departure portends an unhappy outcome, and if that’s the case, I sympathize with you.”

  At home, Lorca’s friends were equally solicitous. “Are you grieving, sad?” Lorenzo Martínez Fuset asked. “Then come to my fountain and refuge.” Lorca resolved instead to heed Beethoven’s example and transform his grief into art.

  By the time Lorca rejoined his family late in the summer, his parents had moved into a new home in the center of Granada, a roomy apartment overlooking one of the city’s most fashionable promenades, the Acera del Casino. Cheerfully decorated with flowered wallpaper and slipcovered furniture, the apartment remained the family’s primary residence for the next decade.

  Lorca settled into his new surroundings and began work almost immediately on a novel, “Friar Antonio (Strange Poem),” about a “romantic” man whose sexual torment impels him to enter a monastery. In the wake of his recent visits to Castilian convents and monasteries, Lorca was drawn to the idea of monkhood. Initially he saw it as a refuge from both society and the anguish of sexual desire, and for a time he apparently considered it for himself, to such an extent that he studied San Juan Clímaco’s The Spiritual Ladder, a treatise outlining the route to perfect monkhood. But in the end Lorca loved the world too much to renounce it, and he came to view monasticism as an unhealthy subversion of carnal instinct.

  He completed fifty pages of “Friar Antonio,” then abandoned the novel. Narrative was not his medium. By the summer of 1917 he had begun to experiment with both poetry and drama, frequently in combination with one another or with prose. By mixing genres he sought to tap deeper wells of creativity. Increasingly, he thought of himself as a poet. He wrote his first poem a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday. Within a year his output was so prolific that a friend referred to him in a book dedication as “the poet” underlined twice. “I am a poet and cannot help it,” Lorca told his family and friends. Even his handwriting changed. As if liberated by verse, it grew looser, more careless than the large, curling script he had cultivated in prose.

  From the start, he conceived of poetry as music. When he read his poems to others, he drew his hands through the air, stretching and modulating individual lines of verse, playing “with a word as if it were an accordion,” a friend remembered. He did not commit himself to a rigorous st
udy of metrics, but instead picked up the “mysteries of prosody” from conversations with his Rinconcillo friend José Montesinos, a scholar of literature. Lorca was timid about showing his poems to Montesinos and generally reluctant to publish his verse—not so much because he feared public disapproval but because he believed that poetry was first and foremost an oral art. When even close friends asked him for copies of his poems, he often turned them down.

  He believed that “poetry” and “melancholy” belonged to the same “kingdom.” He said he could not conceive “of any kind of poetry but lyric.” Thematically, his first poems were indistinguishable from his prose. Throughout 1917 and 1918, Lorca’s verse dwelt on his ongoing, increasingly desperate search for love. Consumed by desire, he spoke of his “tragic weddings / without bride or altar.” He asked pointedly why “the roses that smell of woman / wither at my slow sob?” His poems suggest that by early 1918 Lorca was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Sometime that spring Lorenzo Martínez Fuset complained that Lorca had become as “sensualized” as a mindless animal, and he begged him to cease his “amorous ravings.”

  In late April 1918, a month short of his twentieth birthday, Federico wrote, “The spring of my life, / perhaps the last one …” The following month he again referred obliquely to suicide: “My life / wants to sink in the channel’s / sweet song.” He felt old beyond his years. His plump face was becoming more angular, and he had dark whiskers. He sensed life slipping inexorably through his grasp. “What a huge sorrow / it is to be young, but not to be!” he exclaimed.